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Google is updating the Android Market, from where smartphone and tablet users can buy new applications. It will be unveiled in two weeks, according to a blog entry on the Android website.

The updated Android Market includes improved "merchandising of applications streamline the browse-to-purchase experience, and make it easier for developers to distribute their applications."

The improvements will make it easier for users to discover and find applications. There are new categories as well: Widgets and Live Wallpapers. There will also be new categories for popular apps and games

Like PCs, operating systems in smartphones in some cases become irrelevant. A lot of OS upgrades are provided over-the-air by wireless carriers, or users can manully upgrade the OS through distributions -- or ROMs -- that can be found on sites like Cyanogen or XDA-Developers. 

Many have asked: will Ubuntu be on tablets? Well, Ubuntu is *already on* tablets.

Kno will soon ship the its $899 Kno dual-screen folding tablet, which is based on Ubuntu Linux. The device targeted at the education market as a textbook replacement. You can preorder today, and the device will reach you in under 10 days.

The tablet has two 14.1-inch screens that fold up like a book. Kno says students spend thousands of dollars on textbooks, and could save dough if using the tablet instead to read electronic textbooks.

A specialized touch interface has been built by Kno for the tablet, which also has stylus input.

Google's Chrome OS has seen the light of the day, but the question remains: will it find widespread adoption? It's just a browser, a Web, and a few widgets. Everything's on the Web, and the lifeline of computing would be a 3G network, Wi-Fi or any means to get to the Internet. The OS is essentially a watered down version of Linux, and can boot up in a matter of seconds.

It sounds familiar to Sun's network computer concept, with thin clients doing their computing over networks. The concept failed. Google is reinventing the concept and has a big challenge ahead: for the OS to succeed, the company will have to change the way people think.

Microsoft's Windows turned 25 last month, but the origins of the operating system pre-date to MS-DOS.

MS-DOS may have been exiled with Windows, but working with the DOS prompt through CMD reminds me of the annoying, but good old days of working in Shell.

But save your nerves, there is a better option: FreeDOS. It's still alive and doing well, so check it out.

Linux Foundation has announced the release of LSB 4.1, which simply put, helps brings support for a single application among multiple versions of Linux. Each distribution has its quirks, so this should help bring cross-compatibility and reduce the cost of software development.

The final version of Linux Standard Base 4.1 will be released in August. It is backed by major Linux distro vendors including Canonical, Novell, Oracle, Red Flag, Red Hat and Linpus.

Google earlier this week officially announced that its Linux-based netbook operating system, Chrome OS,  was going into beta. The OS is primarily driven on the cloud/Web -- the way Google envisions computing in the future with Google Docs and the Chrome browser -- and has the Chromium browser backend.

It's perhaps an early vision of what things may look like going on, but one experiment around that form of computing has already failed. The concept of Sun's network computer, a thin client, relied on the network for computing, but it failed.