Chrome OS is a curious thing. It does away with many of the paradigms we’ve become accustomed to over the years of computing. It will have users storing data in the cloud, and will offer a user interface based solely around the web browser. Google has also said they intend to have a reference platform for manufacturers to base their own hardware on. This is said to include very small SSDs for chache and operating system files only. This makes some recent comments from Samsung all the more interesting.

Samsung’s Australian head of IT Phil Newton, said that the company would be launching a Chrome OS netbook. Some specs were discussed as well. The machine would apparently have a 10.1 inch screen, 2GB of RAM, a 64GB SSD, and a 1.5 GHz Snapdragon CPU. We’re baffled why a Chrome OS netbook would need 64GB of hard drive space. This just doesn’t seem to jive with what Google has said. Could it be that Samsung intends to make modifications to Chrome OS?

Looking to shed a few lingering holiday pounds? The Withings Wi-Fi scale might be just what you're looking for. To help keep you accountable, Withings on Thursday announced it has teamed up with the Google Health service, making it a piece of cake (mmm, cake) to maintain and and update an online health profile in real time.

"It's exciting to be one of the early hardware devices to integrate with the Google Health service," said Cedric Hutchings, Withings General Manager. "Keeping your doctors and caregivers informed on all aspects of your health is important in maintaining a consistent health plan, so being part of Google Health's effort to make this possible is thrilling."

Google's Health service hasn't received a ton of media attention, and in case you're not familiar with it, you're able to organize your health info all in one place, including your medical records from doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies. You can then share this profile with your doctor.

As for the scale itself, it measures weight, lean and fat mass, and calculates your body mass index (BMI) and uploads that info to a secure webpage. It also comes with Twitter integration which, when enabled, will tweet your weight and how far you have to go to reach your goal.

Google has announced that Google Docs users can now upload any kind of file they like to the cloud.

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Google Lets You Upload Any File to Google Docs

The barrage of new product announcements that inevitably precede CES is now underway, and the latest comes from A/V equipment manufacturer Sherwood. Actually, two product announcements: the RD-7505N A/V receiver, and the iNet-2.0 media tabletop.

Starting with the former, the RD-7505N is touted as being "one of the first to accommodate the new HDMI 1.4 3D standard," coming equipped with three inputs with repeater and a single HDMI output. The 7.1 receiver cranks out 110W per channel and decodes both Dolby TruHD and DTS HD. It's also fully UPNP and DLNA compliant. And as a result of Sherwood's partnership with Verismo Networks, the receiver supports broadband access with direct access (through Verismo's VuNow module) to Hulu, YouTube, Internet radio including SHOUTcast, movie downloads from CinemaNow, streaming video, and more.

Moving on to the tabletop, the iNet 2.0 digital media player combines an Internet radio, iPod/iPhone dock, and an 8-inch digital photo frame into a single unit.

"The iNet 2.0 is a very cool high-tech device. With its large display and alarm function, it's the ultimate connected alarm clock," said Jeffrey Hipps, Sherwood's Sr. VP for Marketing and Product Development. "Whether you're listening to streaming music or playback from your iPod of phone, it's the perfect desktop companion, and it's great for starting and ending your day with music."

The iNet supports both wired and wireless Internet connections.

Both products will ship in May 2010, with the RD-7505N priced at $500 and the iNet 2.0 carrying an MSRP of $300.

Image Credit: Sherwood

Microsoft's revamped and rebranded search decision engine has been doing so well that you hate to see something like this happen. But in the evening hours last night, Bing fell flat on its face for about 30 minutes, during which time users were either unable to get to the site, or received incomplete results pages to queries.

"The cause of the outage was a configuration change during some internal testing that had unfortunate and unintended consequences," Satya Nadella, Senior Vice President, Online Service Division, wrote on the official Bing Team blog. "As soon as the issue was detected, the change was rolled back, which caused the site to return to normal behavior. Unfortunately the detection and rollback took about half an hour, and during that time uses were unable to use bing.com."

Nadella went on to say that they're running a post mortem to find out what improvements need to be made to their software and processes so this doesn't happen again.

Image Credit: TechCrunch

A rising number of data flubs has caused some to question whether the benefits of cloud computing truly outweigh the risks, but is that really a fair assessment? The eggheads at Kroll Ontrack don't think so, who point out that the recent spike in data losses with corporate enterprises is simply the result of human error.

"While advanced storage options such as virtualization and cloud computing offer corporations storage optimization, human processes are still at the root of these solutions, instructing the technology as to how to perform," said Phil Bridge, managing director at Kroll Ontrack UK. "The complextity of these systems often requires a steep learning curve. With reported IT spending at a low, human error is increasingly common."

According to Kroll Ontrack, some of the biggest mistakes attributed to the human element include pulling the wrong drive while trying to pull a failed disk in a RAID array, accidentally deleting a business-critical database and restoring it with a corrupt or incomplete backup, attempting to force failed drives back online when rebuilding a bad array, accidentally deleting files, volumes, virtual machines, or a SAN LUN with no backup in place, and reformatting the wrong SAN LUN during a server migration.

Purchasing storage space in addition to the 1GB free space included with every Picasa Web Albums account just got cheaper, and dramatically at that. Google has slashed the price of additional storage space by eight times: “twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price.” Paid storage plans now start at $5 a year for 20GB and go all the way up to $4,096 per year for 16TB space, which is enough to store 8 million full resolution photos.

With that much storage on offer, it just sounds like the cloud storage solution that NASA has been waiting for to store its satellite imagery. “While the cost of hard drive storage has continued to drop in these two years, we've also been working hard to improve our infrastructure to reduce your costs even further. Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable,” Google engineer Elvin Lee wrote in a post on the official Google Photos Blog.

After sitting in beta for six months, Panda today announced its Cloud Antivirus is now ready for prime time and is available as a free download for all consumers.

"Since the beta release of Panda Cloud Antivirus in April, we have been judiciously testing our cloud-based protection model, making upgrades in security and performance, and listening to our user community," said Juan Santana, CEO of Panda Security. "With Panda Cloud Antivirus 1.0, we've really changed the game, providing our users the most powerful and lightweight free protection available on the market today."

There's been a few improvements from when we first glimpsed the beta back in April, such as a polished interface, better performance thanks in large part to cache optimizations and memory management schemes, a Collective Intelligence Monitor which keeps a list of malware from the community updated in real time, and new support forums.

You can grab the free download here (and if you're a fan of the banjo, be sure to check out the video in that same link).

A series of images have shown up online that purport to explain how the mysterious Microsoft Courier interface works. They consist of some professional looking diagrams and illustrations of the Courier device from the previously leaked videos.

The docs indicate that the unit will have multitouch gestures for actions like opening apps, and zooming. There’s a pen as well. It has two buttons, an eraser, and a twist mechanism to access different functions. Courier’s “home screen” is called the Smart Agenda. It displays email, weather, to-do lists, and any active items in the journal. Almost any content the device can access can be “clipped”, and stored in the journal.

There are also numerous references to “the cloud” in these images. They say that any part of your journal can be shared with the cloud. People can instantly comment on these portions via a web browser. Speaking of browsers, the courier has one, and it actually looks nice. Pages are organized like a stack of note cards to flip through.

While this may be vaporware, it is very attractive vaporware. Let’s hope it actually exists.

IBM is hoping its latest war cry can somehow pierce the din that Windows 7 seems to be generating. In September, the company struck a partnership with Canonical, the UK-based sponsor of Ubuntu, which resulted in the launch of an Ubuntu-based desktop bundle in Africa.

The cloud- and Ubuntu-based software package, which is part of IBM’s Smart Work Initiative, will soon be debuting in the States. The Ubuntu-based desktop package includes IBM’s free Lotus Symphony productivity suite and Lotus Notes, which is a business email and collaboration solution.

The IBM Client for Smart Work will only arrive in the U.S. in 2010 despite IBM positioning it to rival Windows 7 – on the brink of launch - in the enterprise market. It will be available both as a run-of-the-mill desktop and as a virtualized desktop.

"If a company is a 'Windows shop,' at some point it will need to evaluate the significant costs of migrating its base to Microsoft's next desktop," said Bob Picciano, General Manager, IBM Lotus Software. IBM and chums are clearly targeting those businesses that are not too keen on Windows 7.