While we're on the subject of netbooks today, I ran across a story by Ars Technica's Erica Sadun, who writes for Ars' Infinite Loop (Apple) section. She poses that Apple already sells a netbook: the iPod Touch and the iPhone. I've heard many people make this claim before (including Steve Jobs himself), but I find it very hard to see the iPod Touch and the iPhone as netbooks.

At the end of 2008, the OSNews team made a short list of the tech-related things they would like to see in 2009. On my list was the hope that we'd see more competition in the netbook market, which is now dominated by Intel's Atom platform, resulting in manufacturers all releasing essentially the same machine, but with a different badge and case colour. Where are Intel's competitors? We know AMD is on its way, we know that the Chinese are producing some noteworthy chips, and that the ARM chip is jumping up and down screaming for attention - but where is Via's Nano platform? Shouldn't it be here already?

In a blog post on the Windows 7 Team blog, it was announced that the 2.5 million unit limit of the Windows 7 Beta will be lifted for two weeks. Whether or not the limit is reached, those wishing to get the beta will be able to do so until January 24th.

You may have thought Mozilla could not open up beyond its current state, but you may be wrong: Aza Raskin, Mozilla Labs' UX Lead and Sebastiaan de With, a freelance icon designer, have completely opened up the process of designing a new logo for Mozilla Ubiquity. The second round of conceptual exploration has just started, and the popular vote is very welcome on the blog or in the comments. What's your favorite concept, and why?

Versin 0.17 of the Linux filesystem btrfs has been released. The main news on this release is that it has been included in the Linus' tree. The changes include support of transparent compression, seed devices, improved block sharing while moving extents, improved block allocation and many bug fixes and performance improvements. Also, the disk format is not expected to change unless a critical bug is found.

Microsoft has released the Windows 7 SDK beta. "The Windows SDK for Windows 7 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1: BETA provides the documentation, samples, header files, libraries, and tools (including C++ compilers) that you need to develop applications to run on Windows 7 BETA and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. To build and run .NET Framework applications, you must have the corresponding version of the .NET Framework installed. This SDK is compatible with Visual Studio 2008, including Visual Studio Express Editions, which are available free of charge." Note that the SDK will most definitely change before Windows 7 goes final.

While Sun continues to push OpenSolaris as an alternative to Linux and *BSD, hobbyists around the net are making their own spin-offs from the Unix flavour. Linux Format looks at some of the most notable, including MilaX, Belenix and Nexenta.

People who work for for-profit companies, especially large ones, are always a bit uninteresting to interview, with media training and marketing instructions taking out all the sharp edges. CNet interviewed Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and they got some very interesting quotes from the love-him-or-hate-him CEO.

Arstechnica reports that Mono, an open source implementation of .NET runtime, is bringing Microsoft's development technologies to some unexpected places, including the iPhone, Android, and the Wii.

More and more information regarding Palm's new webOS platform and the accompanying Pre phone is surfacing from the floors of CES, thanks to the hard work of our colleagues at Ars Technica. Jon Stokes has been poking and prodding Matt Crowley, Product Line Manager for the Pre at Palm, and got a lot of interesting information about the hardware. They also have a detailed article on the webOS SDK, with information about the Palm equivalent of the App Store.

As promised, Microsoft has released the beta to Windows 7 to the general public a few hours ago. Don't get your hopes up yet, though, as Microsoft's servers are completely hammered right now - which isn't too hard to imagine, seeing the 2.5 million download limit Microsoft imposed. This probably led to everyone rushing to Microsoft's servers to get their hands on the beta, clogging the servers (2.5m times a 3GB image file, do the math). You will have to be patient, and hope for the best if you want the beta and its product key. The beta will expire August 1st, 2009.

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is filled to the brim with product announcements and new useful (and useless) gadgets, but some stand out more than others. One item that topped the headlines the past few days is Palm's announcement of its brand new operating system.

A recent YouTube video by Sun's Fishworks Lab's Brendan Gregg proves that vibrations (including shouting) will cause hard drives' latency to spike. But then, he only shouted at it angrily. Who's to say that perhaps blasting Mozart in your server room will cause the latency to drop? Perhaps telling each hard drive that he or she is special may even make their capacities grow!

Palm announced today the Palm Pre, the company's next generation Linux-based web tech-enabled operating system. It has a fast CPU, Wifi, Bluetooth with A2DP support, removable battery, 3.1" touchscreen 480x320 LCD, gesture-enabled UI at the bottom half of the phone's body, 3 MP camera with LED flash, multi-touch, accelerometer, slide-out keyboard, GPS, EVDO, and an impressive, fresh UI. Sprint will be the first carrier to sell the smartphone, at the first half of 2009. ArsTechnica has a nice write-up too.