Tim Conneally

Microsoft announced today that Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V will be able to run CentOS, the popular free Linux distribution for Web servers.

CentOS is one of the top three most popular Linux distributions for Web servers, and could account for as much as 9% of the Web whose host OS information is available, according to a 2010 study.

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Amid a string of platform announcements at TechEd 2011 in Atlanta on Monday, Microsoft revealed a little more information about the enterprise-friendly aspects of the Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" update expected to launch later this year.

Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7 in the exact opposite way it had launched previous versions of Windows Mobile. In other words, Windows Phone 7 launched with consumer features that were never present on Windows Mobile, such as integration with Xbox Live and Zune, and is adding enterprise features incrementally.

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There has been a lot of talk of a "standing desk" movement in the media in the last six months, people who are getting rid of their chairs and doing all their work while standing up. For people who spend all their time in front of a computer (i.e. most of the tech industry) this topic has garnered quite a bit of interest of late.

Men who spent more than 23 hours a week sitting, according to one widely circulated report, have a 64% greater risk of dying from heart disease than those who reported sitting less than 11 hours a week.

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BitTorrent has released the first beta of Project Chrysalis, the next generation redesign of BitTorrent's Mainline filesharing client.

About six months ago, BitTorrent announced it was doing an experiment with the Mainline BitTorrent client that would be "more than a radical aesthetic and UI overhaul, more than cool new features," but "a new beginning."

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Just a few hours after Google announced the first "Chromebooks" (and the fact that all Google I/O attendees will be receiving one within a few weeks,) we got to go hands on with Samsung's Chromebook Series 5.

With a 12.1" screen size and a weight of 3.3 pounds, there's no debating that Google is going for the notebook form factor with its Chromebook design. Even though they intend to be connected to the net at all times, these are by no means netbooks.

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In the Wednesday keynote at Google I/O in San Francisco, Google disclosed some information about the Chrome Web Store that should be of key importance to web application developers and those measuring the profitability of development in that area.

The total audience of Chrome users is more than 160 million, and in the first three months of the Chrome Web store's existence, 17 million applications were installed. This may not seem like much at first, but the store was only available in the United States, and only to users of the most up-to-date version of Chrome.

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Enterprise security and firewall company Palo Alto Networks on Wednesday released the results of an eight-month study of more than 1,200 organizations and 2 million users that observed more than 28 exabytes of data passing through corporate networks. Among the results of the study, Palo Alto found that applications using SSL (secure sockets layer) in some way represented 23% of all corporate bandwidth, and dynamic/port hopping applications represented a further 16% of all bandwidth.

In total, social networking within the corporate firewall has increased 500% in one year's time.

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For the last three years, Google has given away pretty desirable free gifts to attendees of the Google I/O developer conference, and this year is no exception. The more than 5,000 attendees this year received a limited edition 10.1" Samsung Galaxy Tab.

This is the same device that Samsung unveiled last month at the CTIA conference, but left untouchable under plexiglass shields. Now, a handful of people have access to the device before it is released on June 8th and that includes Betanews.

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At the Android Keynote on the first day of Google I/O 2011, Google announced the next version of Android called Ice Cream Sandwich will unify tablets, phones, and Google TV devices under a single version of the operating system. Yet a new facet to Android was introduced today that may turn out to be the most left-field announcement of the conference: Android for embedded devices and home automation.

Android founder Andy Rubin summed up the operating system's progress in the following way at a press conference Tuesday morning: Android started with phones, then grew to tablets, and now it should grow to everything.

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Similar to the e-book section of the Android Market which was unveiled last February, Google today launched Android Market Movies (U.S. Only) which lets users rent movies in their Web browser, and consume in their browser or on their Android devices. Rentals stay in the user's queue for 30 days and once opened, they can be viewed for 24 hours.

Google says "thousands of movies" can be rented starting at $1.99 today which can be viewed on the various Android devices, or even in Youtube in the user's browser. An update to the Motorola XOOM today will give users a new Movies application that is compatible with the new rental market, and Android 2.2+ devices will get the update "in the coming weeks."

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We don't typically review games here at Betanews, but a new game called Siege Hero that was released for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch today sparked a pang of nostalgia in Tim Conneally, so we said he could write a quick review.

When we were children, my older brother and I were lucky enough to receive a game called Crossbows and Catapults as a gift. The premise of the game was simple: knock down your opponent's building block castle using rubber-band powered siege weaponry and red and blue "battle caroms" (essentially junior-sized plastic poker chips).

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The eighth generation of console video gaming is approaching. At the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) next month, Nintendo is expected to unveil the successor to the Wii, the company's now five-year old console that popularized motion-based controls.

In China, however, the generations of mainstream video game consoles have been disrupted by cultural regulations placed on the video game retailing in the late 90's. As a result, when Americans and Europeans were buying up consoles such as Xbox 360 and Wii in the tens of millions, they weren't even being sold in China.

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Researchers from Queen's University in Ontario Canada this week unveiled a prototype of their "paperphone," a smartphone that has a flexible e-paper display instead of an LCD/TFT touchscreen.

The prototype consists of a 3.7" electrophoretic E Ink display rigged up with 2" bi-directional bend sensors so that the user interface can respond when the screen is bent. The machine was built with E Ink's Broadsheet AM300 prototyping kit, Gumstix processor and Arduino microcontroller. All of the sensor recognition takes place in a connected laptop running Cycling 74's Max 5 programming environment.

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Trying to cut down on paper waste, Seattle yesterday launched the United States' first yellow pages opt-out website. The city's biggest commercial phone book distributor, Dex One, filed for a restraining order against the city the same day.

Commercial "yellow pages" phone books are almost totally irrelevant to anyone with a search engine at their fingertips, yet they are still made and distributed on a massive scale.

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This week, social media marketing company mBlast released a free Web-based tool called mPact Free that lets users search for the most influential people in the media by subject matter.

MBlast is offering the solution as an alternative to social media "scoring" services like Klout, which rank people according to the amount of influence they have over the public, thereby singling out the most desirable people for marketing companies to target. The belief is that a company can establish a positive relationship with a particular "influencer" in hopes that that person will organically spread the word about the company's products or services.

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