Patrick E. Bennett, Jr., Computer Consultant ... computing support for small business

Samsung may begin building televisions with the Android operating system built in, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. Yoon Boo Keun, head of Samsung's TV business line, reportedly said the company is reviewing whether to use Android, an OS more commonly found in various smartphones, in a new line of TV sets. Samsung is working on an operating system that can be used for both mobile phones and television, Yoon apparently revealed. The Korean electronics could be stepping into a confusing market -- it has its own Bada mobile phone OS and also makes Android smartphones.

While the cloud appears to be the ultimate jailbreaker, it is prudent to remember that a freed device is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the phone becomes a truer handheld computer, fully enabled to exceed native carrier and device restrictions. On the other hand, the phone becomes a miniature computer prone to mega security problems. "For most enterprises and consumers today, mobile and cloud security are viewed in a pretty straightforward way -- don't assume there is any," said Russ Dietz, CTO of SafeNet.

When you're a fan of Linux, any blog post entitled "27 Good Reasons to Love Linux" is going to be impossible to resist. No wonder, then, that a recent post with just that title has created endless fodder for conversation in the Linux blogosphere of late. Among the reasons listed in said post were the usual arguments in favor of Linux's attractive price and superior security, of course. In addition, however, the list refers to the ease of installing new software, the compatibility with older hardware, and Linux's environmental friendliness, among other virtues.

During Apple's media announcement last week, CEO Steve Jobs said two critically important things about Apple TV, the first of which was this: Apple TV owners love their Apple TVs. "They absolutely love them -- and use them a lot," he stressed. I'm one of these Apple TV lovers, and I have been for the last three-plus years. My old 40 GB Apple TV is simple, elegant and just works. For non-Apple TV lovers, the product is an HDTV bridge device that lets you buy or rent movies and TV shows, watch podcasts, view photos, and listen to music -- all through the big-screen TV.

The entire future of a company or industry can hinge on one little deal. The $50,000 IBM paid to license Windows was the foundation for Microsoft and the technology industry for the last couple of decades. Apple's licensing contract with Portal Player to create the iPod was nearly as big -- and certainly huge for that company. The sale of 3Par could also be one of those pivotal deals, as huge firms like HP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Dell, VMware, Cisco and EMC position themselves around the new "cloud" opportunity.

Consumer Watchdog, a privacy advocacy group, is running a 15-second spot on a 540-square foot digital display in Times Square to promote a longer video the group made highlighting what it perceives to be Google's intrusions on privacy. Both the 15-second spot and the longer video feature a ghoulish caricature of Eric Schmidt driving an ice cream truck, offering "free ice cream" to children. All the while, he is taking their personal information, conducting full body scans -- and in the final, longer version of the video, scaring them with secrets he has gathered about their parents.

Facebook has reportedly shut off access to its friend search feature for subscribers to Apple's newly introduced Ping social music service. The social networking apparently giant did this by denying Ping access to its application programming interfaces, AllThingsD reported. Talks between Apple and Facebook to give Ping subscribers the ability to search for Facebook friends also using Ping reportedly broke down before Apple's service was launched Wednesday. The two are said to be holding talks again.

For a growing number of businesses, maintaining fail-safe website availability is a matter of business-critical importance, and not just for the e-commerce industry. Certainly for the e-tail trade, website downtime equates to lost business, but beyond the online sales realm, Web availability is paramount for organizations of all sorts and sizes. As demand for SaaS, or hosted, applications grows and the move to cloud computing gains momentum, always-on Web availability has literally become a do-or-die proposition for the vast majority of organizations.

Like it not, we live in the Information Age. As such, we're almost always researching something. Which means we're almost always looking for some place to stash our research where we can find it again. Papers will give you that place on the iPad. Papers is a vertical app targeted at scientific and academic researchers, but it can be valuable to anyone doing any kind of research. It's especially valuable to researchers working across Apple platforms, since Mekentosj makes versions for not only the iPad, but also for the iPhone, iPod touch and Macs.

Toshiba has announced its own entrant into the tablet market with the Folio 100, which will run on the Android 2.2 operating system. Sporting a screen just over 10 inches, the device will be larger than other early competitors to Apple's iPad tablet computer, such as the Dell Streak. The Folio will debut in late October in Europe as a standalone device with WiFi capability. Depending on individual market conditions in European countries, said Toshiba, it will retail for prices that cluster around $500, give or take.

Microsoft has released the code for its latest mobile operating system to manufacturers. That means U.S. consumers should be able to purchase smartphones running Windows Phone 7 during the upcoming holiday shopping season, while European consumers could have those new devices in their hands as early as next month. The question now is how many consumers actually will want a new Windows-based smartphone, given the buzz already being generated by Apple's iPhone 4, as well as the latest batch of devices running Google's Android operating system? The answer might surprise you.

Apple put a charge in its iPod line Wednesday, but it remains a holdout in the "all you can ear" music subscription market. Apple revamped its flagship player, the iPod touch, so it's now essentially an iPhone without the phone. It also brought buttons back to the iPod shuffle and a touchscreen to the iPod nano. In addition, while the company remained true to its a la carte mode of delivering music, it is dipping its toes into social networking with the new Ping service it added to the latest version of its music software, iTunes 10.

Samsung has unveiled its much-discussed Galaxy Tab Android-powered tablet at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Germany. The device runs Android 2.2, has a seven-inch display, and focuses on connectivity and entertainment. It also enables video conferencing and can be used as a mobile phone. "This is a true alternative to the iPad and is vastly more capable," Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. "It showcases what Android devices can do and is a strong counterpoint to the built-in limitations of the iPad."

"What is the use of a book, without pictures or conversations?" That's the question Alice asks at the beginning of Lewis Carroll's classic adventure. Perhaps Mr. Carroll knew more than he realized. 3D Movies. Multitouch screens. iPads. Everywhere you look, consumers increasingly demand more of an "experience" when engaging with their content, be it a book, a movie or their computers. This change in expectations has put pressure on the print world to deliver a similar experience in that medium.

You can't win them all, as the saying goes, and that apparently includes Linux fans. To wit: Despite the best hopes of many of us in the community, the man suing Sony over the removal of the "other OS" feature from its PS3 has apparently lost his case. The bad news is that the man won't get the money he had requested to compensate for an upgrade to his newly crippled PS3; the good news is that he reportedly wasn't forced to pay Sony's legal bill to boot. Linux bloggers were none too pleased with the news.

Apple on Wednesday made a host of announcements focused around music and entertainment. These included a revamped version of its Apple TV device, iTunes 10, a refreshed iPod family and new versions of its iOS mobile operating system. Overall, the announcements came as relatively little surprise, as most major points conformed with speculation and rumors that had arisen on the Web over the past few weeks. Although Apple CEO Steve Jobs drew cheers from the audience repeatedly as he made the announcements on stage, Cupertino may still face a long struggle ahead.

HP on Wednesday announced a restricted beta release of webOS 2.0, the operating system it acquired when it purchased Palm earlier this year. This is open to developers belonging to Palm's Early Access program. The beta adds several new features, and apps built with it will be released to all carriers that offer Palm devices, Palm spokesperson Alex Hunter told TechNewsWorld. Hunter added that webOS 2.0 will be available by the end of the year and "will be the most significant update we've done since launch."

The number of businesses moving toward virtualization is growing constantly, and together they will lead to an important change in the face of IT, according to to VMware President and CEO Paul Maritz. Speaking at his company's VMworld expo on Tuesday, Maritz told his audience that the focus will change from hardware efficiency to operational efficiency, that a new infrastructure will evolve, and that IT must figure out how this infrastructure will be consumed and paid for, among other things.

Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source vs. proprietary software. "In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant," Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm. Tim O'Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that "Architecture trumps licensing any time."

In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed. That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It's just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.