Linux Insider

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."