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First Apple built personal computers, then portable media players, and now the company is manufacturing cell phones. Apple also has its own branded set-top box — Apple TV — and its iTunes store is one of the biggest e-commerce marketplaces for music and videos in the world. What’s next for Apple? What product categories might the company in Cupertino leap into? Car navigation? Video games? Or perhaps something a little closer to home, like an e-book reader or a tablet? Are there any technology sectors that Apple could really up-end?

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RealNetworks’ Rhapsody thinks it knows how to end Apple’s dominance of the online music distribution scene: remove the digital locks on its songs; make key deals with A-list names in media, wireless providers and social networks; and let consumers preview entire songs, not just 30-second snippets. Rhapsody, a leader in subscription-based online music, on Monday announced a “Music Without Limits” digital download strategy that its executives hope will put a scare in Apple’s iTunes.

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Though their IT needs are fundamentally the same as larger organizations, small and medium-sized business owners may feel particularly challenged when it comes to rolling out a new operating system. The increasing complexity of IT system architectures combined with a relative shortfall of resources — capital, IT expertise, etc. — can make implementing a new or upgraded OS an anxiety-ridden experience. “SMBs have many of the same challenges as enterprises,” said Jeff Carlat, director of ESS software at HP.

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Rest at ease: Physicists say fears over a powerful atom smasher leading to the end of the Earth are completely unfounded. A group of critics of the Large Hadron Collider — a machine built 330 feet underground in Europe — filed a lawsuit to try to stop its initialization. They worried the collider’s operation could create black holes that would swallow up the planet. These worries, scientists say, border on absurdity.
The government agrees, too: Just last week, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to stop the lawsuit.

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The next chapter in the never-ending saga that has become the Eee PC, just might be the replacement of the Eee PC 901 with the so-called 904 and 905 models. According to the DigiTimes the 8.9-inch, Atom-power 901 will be replaced with 904 and 905, which will have the same 8.9-inch display, but use the chassis from the 1000, the 10-inch version. This would mean users get the larger keyboard found on the 1000 and 1000h but hopefully at a price closer to that of the 901. BlogEee has pictures in case you are curious.

While many users will be put off by the incremental growth of the Eee PC from the original 701 to the 10-inch product that we see with the 1000, this is certainly one of the ways Asus is trying to compete with more affordable offerings, like the MSI Wind (which comes in a 10-inch model) and the Acer Aspire One. Neither the 1000h or Wind are available in the US yet, but Laptop Mag has managed to score review units of each and even face them off against one another.

In another interesting turn of events, Linux Loop is reporting that Asus and Debian are working together on a project. There is nothing firm yet but a post on the Debian mailing list suggests that the two organizations are working together. There is already a DebianEeePC project, so it could just be building this out, not outright replacing Xandros, but anything could happen at this point. Ubuntu is based on Debian so this could open up a number of doors in the future, though it would definitely be a mistake to read too far into news like this given how early the talks seem to be.

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