Apple today introduced a new USD 899 configuration of the 17-inch iMac designed specifically for education customers featuring a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, a built-in iSight video camera, and iLife '06. The 17-inch iMac for education is available immediately and will replace the eMac, Apple's last CRT based computer.

"The Linux kernel continues to evolve, incorporating new technologies and gaining in reliability, scalability, and performance. One of the most important features of the 2.6 kernel is a scheduler implemented by Ingo Molnar. This scheduler is dynamic, supports load-balancing, and operates in constant time -- O(1). This article explores these attributes of the Linux 2.6 scheduler, and more."

Through lots of hard work by Manuel Bouyer full Xen3 support is now available in NetBSD. Xen3 DomU support has been functional in NetBSD since the end of March, but this added functionality now makes it possible to run a controlling or privileged Xen3 domain under NetBSD as well. Please see Manuel's email to the port-xen mailinglist as well as the NetBSD/xen website for further details.

Sophos has published new research into the past six months of cyber crime. The Sophos Security Threat Management Report Update reveals that while there has been a vast drop in new viruses and worms, this has been over-compensated by increases in other types of malware, as cyber criminals turn their attention to stealing information and money. Most interestingly, new Trojans now outweigh viruses and worms by 4:1, compared to 2:1 in the first half of 2005. In addition, the continued dominance of Windows-based threats has prompted Sophos to suggest that many home users should consider switching to Apple Macs, to shield themselves from the malware onslaught.

An anti-piracy check for Microsoft Windows is causing problems for some users who are being told their copies of operating system XP are not genuine. The tool, called Windows Genuine Advantage, is aimed at cracking down on millions of illegal copies of Windows XP in circulation. Update: Microsoft isn't the only one phoning home without consent: Apple does it too since 10.4.7. The goal is a little less disturbing (to check whether Widgets are up-to-date); however, it cannot be turned off.

Apple recently added two new retail configurations to its MacBook line of consumer notebooks, both of which are now available at most of the company's stores. A new 2.0GHz white MacBook configuration packs an additional 512MB of RAM and 20GB of extra hard disk space, for a total of 1GB of RAM (via two 512MB SODIMMs) and 80GB of storage. The new model retails for USD 1449, or USD 150 more than the 2.0GHz white MacBook with 512MB of RAM and a 60GB hard disk. Both configurations included Apple's SuperDrive optical disc drive. Meanwhile, Apple has also introduced a new configuration of its black 2.0GHz MacBook, dubbed the 'MacBook Ultimate'.

"This article describes how you can monitor your Postfix mailserver with the tools Mailgraph and pflogsumm. Mailgraph creates daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly graphs of sent, received, bounced, and rejected emails and also of spam and viruses, if SpamAssassin and ClamAV are integrated into Postfix. These graphs can be accessed with a browser, whereas pflogsumm ('Postfix Log Entry Summarizer') can be used to send reports of Postfix activity per email."

When developping in a large team, you have to make convention about the use of tab in source code. This article suggests a better solution: rather than saying that a tab character (a 'hard tab') will move the cursor until the cursor's position is a multiple of N characters, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells. This has a nice side effect, since proportional fonts can now be used.

Good as well as bad news for Microsoft on the legal front. Their good news is that a judge has rejected Go Computing's claim that Microsoft used dirty tricks to keep it out of the operating system market. However, their bad news is that an EU committee ruled on Monday that Microsoft failed to comply with a landmark antitrust decision, paving the way for fines of up to 2 million euros a day, a source familiar with the situation said.

The PC-BSD team has released a first beta of PC-BSD 1.2. From the changelog: "updated ports to current as of 6-26-06; added DBSD Network/User Toolset into Control Panel; convert PC-BSD tools to Control Panel modules;" and much more.

Last week Trolltech announced the release of a technology preview of Qt 4.2, the upcoming version of the cross-platform toolkit scheduled for the 4th quarter of 2006. This release features a new framework for handling canvas items (Graphics View) and improved support for desktop integration, including dbus bindings, Glib eventloop support, switchable button order and a Clearlooks-like style.

A few days ago we reported on the release of Cairo 1.2.0-- as it turns out, this also happens to be the first stable Cairo release with support for BeOS. Haiku's app_server uses a different 2D graphics library, Anti-Grain Geometry. Also, Haiku now has a driver for NE2000 compatible network cards. This means developers can now test the networking stack with QEMU, which emulates an NE2000 compatible card.

BlogBeebe, who has reviewed the Nokia 770 before, now reviews the 2006 version of the 770 OS. "I was not happy to find out I'd paid my USD 360 to become a captive beta tester. I find there's still a lot that needs to be cleaned up, enhanced, or just plain deleted. I suppose, over time, it will continue to advance and improve, and I'll upgrade (more carefully, after the Beta 2006 fiasco) as the enhancements emerge. But for personal as well as professional use I'm going to think long and hard before recommending Nokia."

"They said it at LinuxWorld in Toronto a few months ago. They've buzzed it at analysts, and now the press is saying it to the public. Novell says this is the year of the Linux desktop, and I'm familiar with evidence showing gains in popularity for Linux. Yet, I disagree that this is the year. Nothing is happening this year to make it, specifically, the year of the Linux desktop and I'm going to hypothesize what could change that."