While browsing through dealextreme.com, a popular online shop for electronic products here in Asia, I was really surprised to see several iPad-like tablet computers that are sold for as low as $99 (US). Another surprising thing is that they are all powered by Android.

For years, researchers have touted graphene as the magic material for the next generation of high-speed electronics, but so far it hasn't proved practical. Now a new way of making nanoscale strips of carbon--the building block of graphene--could kick-start a shift toward superfast graphene components.

Wind River Linux Secure, a secure embedded Linux, is in evaluation by the National Information Assurance Partnership (NIAP) to be certified to Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4+ (EAL4+), conforming to the General Purpose Operating System Protection Profile. Upon certification completion to Common Criteria EAL4+, Wind River Linux Secure is expected to be the first commercial embedded Linux operating system accepted by NIAP.

Today's commercial-grade programming languages - C++ and Java, in particular - are way too complex and not adequately suited for today's computing environments, Google distinguished engineer Rob Pike argued in a talk at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. Pike made his case against such "industrial programming languages" during his keynote at the conference in Portland, Oregon.

Blogger Kevin Bowling takes a look at the never-ending stream of benchmarks from Phoronix, with various Linux distros pitted against each other and even different operating systems, and he wonders, are they bullshit? . Case in point, this Debian vs FreeBSD benchmark that was submitted to OSNews yesterday.

Just after 3 weeks of the binary compatible vp8 decoder release, the FFMpeg team still impressing us but this time with a new benchmark of their own vp8 decoder. The new ffvp8 decoder written independently using pre-existent FFMpeg code-base is now the fastest vp8 decoder with margins going more than 30% faster than Google's official codec specially on 64bit machines.

"As a long-time fan of GeoWorks Ensemble (now Breadbox Ensemble), a DOS based graphical user interface and office suite popular in the 80s, I've run it under a variety of operating systems and emulators over the years. You see, Ensemble requires an underlying operating system to provide a DOS compatible file system, not unlike early versions of Windows that required DOS. With the release of eComStation 2.0 I thought I'd revisit the challenge of getting Breadbox Ensemble running under OS/2 again but to add a further twist, since I didn't want to do this on a dedicated machine, I chose to see if I could get things running under VirtualBox."

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5. Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. Version 8.1 of PC-BSD is available for download from mirrors, as well as via torrent.

The Eee Pad, announced at Computex recently, was to be Asus' first foray into the tablet market, running Windows 7 and coming in both a 10 inch and 12 inch versions. The latests rumors, according to German site NetbookNews.de, state the Asus may be dropping Windows 7 in favor of a custom version of Android. With HP dropping their Windows tablet project some months back, and now Asus backing out of their plans, is there any hope for Windows to take hold in the tablet market?

Yesterday, Jolicloud released the much anticipated final version of Jolicloud OS 1.0, a web-based operating system built with netbooks in mind. The new release has been rebuilt from the ground up using Google's Chromium OS codebase in place of Mozilla's Prism backend. We got a chance to test the latest version of Jolicloud on Dell Mini 9 netbook, and were thoroughly impressed with what the OS has to offer. Here's what we found.

Long time fans of openSUSE Linux and its commercial big brother, Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, will find a lot to like in this latest update.

The free open-source disk encryption software Truecrypt reached version 7.0. Among the new features are hardware-accelerated AES, support for devices that use sector sizes other than 512 bytes, ability to configure a volume to be automatically mounted whenever its host device gets connected to the computer, favorites organizer, and more. Downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available here.

We've been expecting HP to make an official announcement on its rumored webOS tablet since their acquisition of Palm, but have come up with nothing yet. Crave is reporting that we may at least finally have a name for the device after the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted HP a trademark last week. The name? The HP PalmPad. While not entirely original, it's a nice nod to the company which is making the device possible and is at least more descriptive than say the Streak or the (what the hell is a) JooJoo.

Microsoft confirmed the existence of a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows. The new zero-day vulnerability is easily exploitable via USB storage devices, network shares or remote WebDAV shares. All that is required for exploitation is for the contents of the USB device to be viewed in Windows Explorer. Specially crafted shortcut (.lnk) files are allowed to execute code when the shortcut's icon is loaded to the GUI. An exploit targeting this vulnerability is currently in limited use and additional exploits are very likely in the coming weeks.