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

RyuuzakiTetsuya writes "Destructoid is reporting that the 3.42 firmware has been released for the PlayStation 3, and it has fixed the USB vulnerability that allows the PSJailbreak exploit to work." Sony's brief announcement of the update refers only to "additional security features," though the EU blog post acknowledges that a vulnerability was addressed. PS3-Hacks.com confirms that the patch is effective against the various jailbreak tools, and they point out a different tool for bypassing the update. Sony told the BBC, "... as we always have, we will continue to take necessary actions to both hardware and software to protect the intellectual content provided on the PlayStation 3."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

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.

Phoronix: "Yep, it's only been three years since AMD became public with pushing out NDA-free GPU documentation and register specifications, open-source code for the xf86-video-ati and Mesa drivers, and employed a small set of developers to contribute towards their open-source Linux stack."

In the beginning, there were a few different distributions. From a handful came hundreds. We are currently living with several hundreds. Many say that this is a bad thing. Many claim that the myriad offerings confuse people. Many claim that these distributions are often redundant. What's the deal? I have often talked about the lack of innovation in many distributions. The fact that people respin someone else's stuff and call it their own is somewhat unavoidable. It's going to happen. That aside, plurality is good.

kkleiner writes "The latest in a line of 'modsnakes' from Carnegie Mellon's Biorobotics Lab, Uncle Sam can move in a variety of different ways, including rolling, wiggling, and side-winding. It can also wrap itself around a pole and climb vertically, and even scale a tree. You have to watch this thing in action. There is something incredibly life-like and eerie about the way it scales the tree outdoors and then looks around with its camera 'eye.' Projects like Uncle Sam show how life-mimicking machines could revolutionize robotics in the near future."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Intel Software Network: "There are plenty of interesting application, notably you can do lots of outside-in scenarios with you access your home computers from a cellphone anywhere in the world"

Trailrunner7 writes "The United States has a responsibility to take a leadership role in securing the Internet against both internal and external attackers, a duty that the federal government takes very seriously, the country's top military cybersecurity official said Tuesday. However, Gen. Keith Alexander, director of the National Security Agency and commander of the US Cyber Command, provided virtually nothing in the way of details of how the government intends to accomplish this rather daunting task. 'We made the Internet and it seems to me that we ought to be the first folks to get out there and protect it,' Alexander said. 'The challenge before us is large and daunting. But we have an obligation to meet it head-on.' It's unlikely that any of Alexander's comments Tuesday will do much to quiet the criticisms of the Obama administration's security efforts thus far. Speaking mostly in generalities, Alexander emphasized the administration's commitment to the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, a plan developed by the Bush administration and recently partially de-classified by Obama administration officials."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Planet: "Both Linux and FreeBSD are built on strong networking stacks, and both make first-rate firewalls and routers. Many commercial products are based on these. Eric Geier rounds up four firewall/router projects for our perusal."

Dell drops out after HP offers a whopping $2.4 billion for the enterprise and cloud storage technology player.

Organizations in Asia are not as ready to go open source for key business applications, experts in the region say. Over in the United Kingdom and United States, it is a different story with inclination growing, a survey has shown. An Accenture study of 300 large public- and private-sector organizations in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S. found that over one-third of respondents plan to migrate mission-critical software to open source within a year. The findings, released last month, also indicated that cost is no longer viewed as the key benefit of open source deployment. Instead, quality, reliability and better bug fixing are top drivers.

The Acer Aspire AS7745G-6214 comes with a quad-core processor and a Blu-ray drive, but it doesn't pamper you like other media centers do.

The Acer TimelineX AS5820T-5951 features a Core i3 processor and 7 hours of battery life—pretty sweet for a $700 laptop.

The latest Samsung smartphone is another great choice for Verizon Wireless customers.

The Toshiba Libretto W105 is no threat to any existing computing device, thanks its full plate of flaws.

Essentially a browser-based version of Flipboard, this new application culls stories posted to Twitter into a newspaper-like interface, but infrequent updates keep it from reaching its potential.

Netgear's WMS105 wireless management is a good, affordable way to manage up to five Netgear access points, and it's easy enough to use that anyone who has set up a home wireless router can probably handle it.

The Samsung Rugby II SGH-A847 is an excellent voice phone for AT&T that one-ups Nextel with 3G speeds and push-to-talk capabilities.

If you've got five to sixteen Netgear access points in your network, Netgear's ProSafe 16 AP is ideal for management.

The Pandigital Novel functions as a basic e-book reader for the exceedingly patient, but it's no bargain tablet computer, by any stretch of the imagination.