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.

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."

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.

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.

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."

Corporate America is playing a cruel joke on Linux desktop. Businesses benefit from free Linux, improving their bottom line on the shoulders of Linux -- all the while ignoring (and damaging I think) the Linux desktop. Linux servers toil in back rooms bringing big bucks to companies smart enough to use them. What do these companies install on their employees' desktops? Windows, of course! It is no small irony that some (if not most) of Linux's biggest beneficiaries are Linux desktop's worst sponsors.

So widely acknowledged are the security advantages of Linux that on those rare occasions when a bug is found, it tends to makes quite a splash. Such, in fact, is just what happened recently when news broke of the Linux kernel bug that -- it turns out -- had been around since 2004. A fix was actually supplied back then by SUSE maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, apparently; for some unknown reason, however, it never got incorporated into the Linux kernel. That, fortunately, has now been corrected. Nevertheless, even the most ardent Linux supporter can only wonder what happened to delay the fix this long.

Say what you will about Microsoft's products, but there's no denying the company's entertainment value. Where else, after all, could a Linux fan find reason to laugh, cry, scream and commit various violent acts, all neatly wrapped up in one little package? That, indeed, is a fair approximation of the emotions that ran through Linux Girl's mind when she read about Redmond's latest attempt to ingratiate itself with the FOSS community.

Another day, another new smartphone coming to market. In this case, it is Dell's Aero, a device retailing for $99 with a two-year contract with AT&T. Features include a 5 MP camera, a 3.5-inch display, and Flash Lite support for streaming audio and video content. It also has WiFi connectivity, giving users access to AT&T's 20,000 hotspots, as well as Bluetooth and GPS. It runs on Android. There the story would usually end -- a value-priced phone with some high-end touches -- save for this: It is Android 1.5, which came out in April 2009.

Today, if you're in need of a task manager application, you're looking at a category filled -- perhaps even overfilled -- with options. If you carry a smartphone, you probably have a to-do list app in your pocket already. Gone are the days when Linux users had to panic over finding a suitable clone for Microsoft Outlook like Evolution. Web-based services like Google provide calendars and to-do lists that sync with multiple computers and smartphones. That said, I prefer a desktop to-do app that is easily transported to my multiple computers.

The founders of Lustre software technology company Whamcloud opened for business in June with a lot of potential and years of experience working with high-performance computing. What they lacked from their first day was any signed contracts. Whamcloud Cofounder and CEO Brent Gorda still is waiting to sign the dotted line with his company's first customer. Given the popularity of the open source Lustre project, he is sure that will only take a bit longer to achieve.

"Oracles are dumb," the great John Milton once wrote, and though it may not be the meaning he intended, that's a fair description of the prevailing sentiment in the Linux blogosphere these days. It's a single Oracle being referred to today, of course -- Oracle Corporation, that is, owner of Sun, jealous protector of Java and Solaris, and just possibly the most widely despised company in the FOSS arena of late, excepting of course Microsoft. Is it any surprise? It surely must have expected at least a little Linuxy wrath.

Well it's been an eventful few weeks here in the Linux blogosphere, what with all the various scandals that have erupted recently over Digg and Ubuntu's off-and-on romance with Dell, to name just two. Then there was Debian's birthday on Monday! Happy 17th, Debian! By far the hottest topic in recent days, however, was news that Canonical has begun tracking Ubuntu installations. It's true! The new "canonical-census" package apparently sends an "I am alive" ping to Canonical each day as a way to help the company track the users of OEM Ubuntu installations.

Google will launch a Chrome OS tablet on the Verizon network Nov. 26, know to retailers as "Black Friday," according to the Download Squad. The device is being built by HTC, a company that's made several Android devices in the past. If true, the move will fulfill Google's announcement earlier this year that it would launch Chrome OS tablets in time for the holiday season. However, it's not yet clear how Chrome OS tablets will coexist with those running the Android operating system, which is also offered by Google.

The world of open source software has ample choices for editing and manipulating audio and video media files. But when you just want put your feet up and relax, fewer really ideal options are available. One solid choice is the Gxine is a media player. The VLC Media Player is a cross-platform media player that runs on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BeOS, BSD, Solaris, QNX and PocketPC. One of its coolest features is the built-in streaming server. VLC Media Player streams in unicast and multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network. You will not find this combination in most other media apps.

Just a day after Oracle filed suit against Google for its use of Java in Android, the FOSS community received another blow at the hands of the tech giant in the form of news that it plans to kill the OpenSolaris project. "This is a terrible sendoff for countless hours of work -- for quality software which will now ship as an Oracle product that we (the original authors) can no longer obtain on an unrestricted basis," wrote OpenSolaris contributor Steven Stallion in a blog post. "This is truly a perversion of the open source spirit."

It's not often that wildfires spread from other parts of the blogosphere into the main Linuxy downtown, protected as it is by all the surrounding free and open lands. In the past week or so, however, that protection wasn't enough. A fire broke out on AlterNet the Thursday before last -- that's part of the blogosphere's progressive territories, just east of Huffington -- and within a day it was blazing out of control here in the land of Linux as well. The cause of the conflagration? An undercover expose of Digg that's enough to make even the cheeriest Facebook fan swear off social media altogether.

Oracle on Thursday filed suit against Google for patent and copyright infringement in the latter's development of the Android operating system. Google "knowingly, directly and repeatedly infringed Oracle's Java-related intellectual property," according to the suite, which "seeks appropriate remedies for their infringement," Oracle spokesperson Karen Tillman said. It's not clear whether the lawsuit will force Google to stop development work on Android and Chrome, or whether it will impact the Android Market.

As expected, sales of mobile devices are up considerably from last year, showing an increase of nearly 14 percent worldwide over the second quarter of 2009. That's according to a report released by Gartner, and the results fall closely in line with other reports out from firms such as Forrester Research and iSuppli. However, the margins that manufacturers are making on sales of those phones fell more than expected, according to Carolina Milanesi, vice president with Gartner and author of the report.

Server virtualization technologies for Linux have advanced at a rapid pace of innovation with VMware and Citrix initially leading the way. They are now being joined by significant strategic investments by Red Hat. Unfortunately, the storage side of the equation has lagged behind. Several trends, such as the explosion of unstructured data and the emergence of cloud computing, have shined a spotlight on the gap and woken many to the realization that it is holding the industry back from achieving a fully virtualized data center.