Probably the same time we get the new Slashdot feature to automatically remove any FaceBook stories from the front page.
Oh wait, that's like NOT clicking the link and reading the comments.

On a more serious note, when did relevant "new" discussions come back to /.?

Not sure how accurate it is(after all it is pcworld), and it does seem to only mention these are for the Nook and Nook Color, but its at least _something_, and I would argue it is not a stretch to imagine these, or similar, being applied to the other companies which ship/sell products that run Android..

Microsoft Alleges Android Patent Infringement by Nook eReader
(Patent numbers included for further research).

Seems to me to be pretty obvious UI/usability "enhancements", but you know what they say about hindsight.

<rant>
I understand why the USPO grants superfluous software patents, but that system sorely needs an overhauling. They either need to do away with software patents all together(probably the wrong solution), charge based on patent application(even better, the number of patent applications submitted), set a new, lower limit for the lifetime of software patents, or revisit the screening/reviewing process(which we know is against their best interest).
</rant>

Kinda like the Max Powers way. Wrong, but faster.

We are using a combination of Cacti and mon to monitor about 200 devices, both network gear and PC servers. Cacti is used to graph performance data(bandwidth, cpu, mem, temp) and maps for the visually inclined, while mon is used to do the actual service monitoring and alerting.

I won't comment on Cacti, since it has been mentioned here already, though iI will say that you CAN change the default behavior of "sample averaging" by increasing the size of the RRD database. There are discussions on the Cacti forum/wiki that cover this topic.

Mon on the other hand, I didn't see mentioned at all, so here's my blurb on that. The core of mon is a scheduler written in perl, which handles running monitor tests(also perl or any script/program that can exit with a 1/0) and then alerting(also perl, or other languages, and can do more than just sending mail or paging) when necessary, based on the configuration for that service. Like most open source projects, it is extremely flexible, if you have the initial time investment to set up your tests and dependencies correctly, but once this is done, the tests/alerts can be reused, or further modified. There are quite a few monitor tests and alert scripts already included, along with some handy tools for interaction through a web browser(via moncgi), generating dependency trees, generating reports, and more. Theres also a perl module, Mon::Client, that provides an API for interacting with the mon scheduler. The downside, besides configuring it with a text file(m4 can be helpful here), is there hasn't been any activity since 2007(according to the CVS repo on sourceforge).

Probably not the solution for an extremely large number of hosts, though resource-wise, it could handle it, but maybe someone else might be able to benefit from it. If you need very specific tests(number of BGP routes, verifying NH on routes, customer redundancy) and smart alert logic, it's worth looking at.