And yet another week has flown by. Nothing particularly exciting happened this week, but we did have some interesting conversations about old software, some phone news, Microsoft revealed the pricing information for Windows 7, and we talked about netbook customer satisfaction.

MS-DOS is an old piece of work, a long line of operating systems dating back to the early '80s. First a stand-alone operating system, it would later work as a base for Windows, and starting with Windows 95, it became integrated with Windows and was no longer developed as a stand-alone operating system. To fill the gap the end of MS-DOS left behind, the FreeDOS project was started. Today, FreeDOS turned 15.

With the Palm Pre out the door, the wait is for the software development kit for the PRe to hit the streets. The Mojo SDK is open for limited testing, but apparently, someone decided to leak the download link, and thanks to the web, the SDK can now be downloaded all over the place.

Contiki 2.3 has just been released. Contiki is an operating system for networked embedded systems that provides low-power IP networking even for the smallest of systems, and includes the world's smallest IPv6 stack. Among other things the 2.3 release includes a new IPv6 routing architecture, a set of new shell commands, and a Twitter client.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8 for FreeBSD. "Bordeaux 1.8 has had many changes on the back end, our build process has been totally rewritten, packaging has been totally rewritten. This release adds Microsoft Office 97, Adobe Photoshop 6 & 7 and Image Ready 3.0 and 7.0 support. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks. This complete rewrite gives Bordeaux a much more clean and portable codebase, making new improvements much easier to provide. We already have some exciting things in the works for the next release." Bordeaux 1.8 now runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac.

The ASUS Eee Keyboard, which we drooled over before, has officially been announced - it will be released August 2009. "Asus has confirmed that its Eee keyboard, originally shown at CES, will be arriving in August. The company's marketing executive, John Swatton, revealed the news while launching a bevy of new laptops." Me? Want.

ICANN, the non-profit corporation which oversees the backbone of the internet, has a new CEO in the person of Rod Beckstrom, former director of US National Cybersecurity Center. He takes over ICANN in a rather tumultuous time, and during a press conference, he put forth some of his ideas on how ICANN should work. Basic gist: the internet works fine, so there's little need for change.

I guess the tragic death of Michael Jackson put the internet on hold or something, as the amount of news we can find has come to a grinding halt. I did find something interesting, though: HP has made several of its classic calculator models available as iPhone applications or as Windows applications. I'm personally not particularly versed in the world of mathematics (other than statistics), but I do know the love many geeks have for their calculators.

Today, the second version of i3 has been released. It supports floating windows now, which is convenient for many popups, toolbar windows, etc. i3 aims to be an improved tiling window manager, mainly inspired by wmii. Similarily to other tiling window managers, the goal is to increase productivity by not having overlapping windows. In contrast to wmii, i3 was designed to work well with Xinerama and particular attention has been given to producing clean, readable, and hackable code. See the website for goals, downloads and documentation or go directly to the userguide for a quick introduction.

Well, that's a bit of a surprise. Palm posted its quarterly financial results today, and as it turns out, the company is actually doing better than expected. Losses were lower than expected, sales were higher than expected, so from whatever way you look at it, the future is looking a little brighter. The quarter ended May 31, so sales of the Pre are not part of this one yet.

"The magnetic hard disk's tenure as a critical part of the storage technology mosaic is entering its sixth decade, and it shows no sign of ending any time soon. However, certain limitations imposed by rotating media have been coming to the fore lately, and SSDs, which can in theory resolve all these problems, have long been hailed as the eventual successor technology for mass storage. If UK-based startup Dataslide has its way, though, magnetic recording media will get at least one last hurrah, in the form of a new technology called Hard Rectangular Drive."

If the title didn't cause you to spit up your morning/afternoon drink of preference, perhaps this will: the mouse is specially designed to reduce noise pollution by 22.5 dB so that the precious ears of your fellow office workers or the kids running about your house won't be disturbed. Protect your eardrums from the menace to society (the mouse, of course) for only $30 US.

"With Oracle set to acquire Sun and gain stewardship over Java, there are many in the tech world with an opinion on how the database giant should handle its new relationship with the programming language. One of those opinions is being voiced by Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, who is calling on Oracle to keep Java open. During a conference call yesterday to discuss Red Hat's first-quarter fiscal 2010 results, Whitehurst also took aim at Oracle's operating system business."

After a long wait, Microsoft has finally unveiled the pricing information for the next Windows release, Windows 7, which will arrive at the shops on October 22. Interestingly enough, Europe will get full retail copies for upgrade pricing because of the whole Windows 7 E thing not being tested when it comes to upgrades.