The guys and girls behind the NetBSD project have released version 5.0 of their BSD operating system. NetBSD is a highly-portable operating system, the second open-source BSD implementation (after 386BSD). Naturally, version 5.0 comes packed with a whole boatload of improvements.

When the news got out that Windows 7 would get a "Classic"-like virtual environment for running Windows XP applications that would otherwise not run on Windows 7, we hoped it would mark the beginning of Microsoft moving backwards compatibility into a VM. This would then allow them to cut major cruft out of the operating system. However, with more and more information trickling out about Windows XP Mode, it becomes more and more clear this new feature has little to do with cutting backwards compatibility (as I already said when we covered this subject during our latest podcast). Update: Paul Thurrot states you can install other operating systems into Windows XP Mode's virtual machine as well. This is a great selling point for us enthusiasts.

Acer has stated that it has lowered its expectations for netbook sales for this year. Instead of selling between 12-15 million netbooks, the company now believes it will ship 10-12 million netbooks.

US media giant Time Warner has said it anticipates spinning off one or more parts of AOL as advertising sales decline at the internet business. The announcement came after Time Warner posted stronger-than-expected profits and reaffirmed its full-year forecast. Net profits for the first quarter came in at USD 661m (GBP 448.8m), a fall of 14% from the USD 771m reported a year earlier. Revenue at the company, which owns Time magazine and the CNN and HBO television networks, fell by 7% to USD 6.9bn.

Microsoft released the second service pack for Office 2007, with ODF and PDF support. "Now all Office users will have the option to load and save OpenDocument files, with today's distribution of Service Pack 2 of Office 2007. In something of a surprise -- contrary to what many at Microsoft led us to believe -- upon installing SP2 on our test systems, we immediately located an option for saving files in ODF by default. That means you don't have to "Save As" and export to ODF if you don't ever want to use Microsoft's OOXML or Office 2003 "compatibility mode;" you can at least try to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint as substitutes for OpenOffice."

The Symbian Foundation is working to ensure that it provides the shortest path for mobile developers not only to develop applications, but to go from application development to making money on the applications they build. To that end, the foundation will launch an "application inventory" where developers will not be charged a fee or percentage to distribute their applications via the foundation's channel.

According to NeoWin, the second service pack for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has gone gold, or RTM in Microsoft Land. "Microsoft has finally finished and compiled the RTM version of Windows Vista SP2 and Windows Server 2008. The full version string being 6.0.6006.18005, which company officials have confirmed is the final RTM version of SP2."

A number of significant opportunities for performance improvements seem to be just over the horizon for Linux systems. OSNews regular lemur2 submitted an overview of the most important potential performance improvements to us.

The Open Innovation Network has found a few of Microsoft's patents in dealing with the past TomTom/FAT case a bit fishy and have therefore submitted them for review of prior-art to the Linux community at large.

"GNU Screen is a powerful terminal multiplexer that makes it easy for users to manage multiple sessions at the command line. It provides rudimentary window management capabilities in text-based environments and enables users to detach a session and resume it later. The tool has long held a position of distinction among the most popular terminal utilities for system administrators. Although Screen is very powerful, it is also difficult to configure. Most users aren't even aware of its more advanced features and few take advantage of its full potential. In an effort to make Screen more accessible to the masses, the Ubuntu developers have assembled a nice collection of embellishments that make the program easier to configure and use. These improvements are delivered in the screen-profiles package, which was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04."

Fedora 11 Preview Release has been announced with a large number of new features, even more so than previous general releases. This includes Presto (delta RPM updates reducing bandwidth usage over 80% typically), automatic font and mime installer via PackageKit, Nouveau as the default driver for Nvidia cards (3D support is not mature and disabled however), simplified Anaconda text mode installation and minimal installation support, automatic Bug Reporting tool, native access to Microsoft Exchange using OpenChange, Firefox 3.1 and ThunderBird 3.0, Windows Cross Compiler (MinGW and a comprehensive set of cross compiled libraries), Ext4 as the default filesystem, experimental support for the next generation Btrfs filesystem, improved I18N with the switch to IBus input system by default, much improved Kernel Mode Support, many virtualization and security improvements, RPM 4.7, GNOME 2.26, KDE 4.2, Xfce 4.6, Linux Kernel 2.6.29, Python 2.6. GCC 4.4 and several other changes.

More banal banter of the binary kind; Oracle buys Sun, Yahoo pulls the plug on Geocities, the Acer Revo nettop and much-offtopicness as we discuss the recently announced Windows 7 "Classic" XP mode.

Engadget pointed out that USBfever has already begun selling USB 3.0 cables a year ahead of schedule. "Interestingly, the cable's feature list says, 'it is 10 times faster than USB 2.0.' Sure, as long as it's hooked up to a USB 3.0 SuperSpeed host which it won't be until 2010." That seems a bit low-- luring in the uneducated and those who don't read before they buy.

BeRTOS is a real time operating system suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs. It's free and open source, licensed under the GPLv2.