BeRTOS is a real time operating system (RTOS) suitable for embedded platforms. It runs on many microprocessors and microcontrollers, ranging from 8-bit to 32-bit CPUs and even PCs. New features include: Major kernel refactoring, several new peripheral drivers, new PID controller algorithm, new configuration infrastructure, new testing harness, new logging infrastructure, and a first experimental embedded filesystem (BattFs).

Linux Devices writes about Intel's Moblin effort. Moblin is a environment for netbooks. Originally based on Ubuntu, Moblin recently switched to Fedora citing RPM and a completely Free and open source base as among the benefits. As Linux based netbooks continue to grow rapidly, efforts like Moblin are interesting to watch.

In true uber-hype fashion, the RED Company announced today a series of cameras and imaging sensors that will revolutionize the movie (and still image) industry. Some commenters online jokingly said that this is where all the Roswell UFO reverse-engineering went into. RED announced sensors ranging from 10.1x5.35mm (2/3") size all the way to 186x56mm, and resolutions from 3k/120fps to 28k/25fps (that's 261 megapixels). If you have trouble visualizing that size, here's an image that might help. To add to all this, the RED Epic now supports stereoscopic (3D) capturing.

Canonical Ltd., commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, says it's porting Ubuntu to the ARM RISC processor architecture. Ubuntu on ARM will target netbooks and other emerging device categories requiring a "rich, always-connected, mobile computing experience, without compromising battery life." The ARM version of Ubuntu, due next April, initially will support the ARMv7 RISC architecture, including SoCs (system-on-chip processors) based on ARM Ltd's Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9 cores.

McColo Corp, an internet service provider that has been confirmed to be the provider of choice to a rogue's gallery of unsavory clients, has been cut off by its backbone providers, cutting the world's total volume of spam by as much as 75%. Sadly, these people will undoubtedly be able to find other service eventually. But enjoy the respite while it lasts.

Not too long ago, Intel unleashed Nehalem, or Core i7, upon the world. The new Core i7 chips are not just new processors; they also introduce an entirely new platform, and this combination produces some impressive performance figures, according to Ars Technica. "The new performance gap between Nehalem and pretty much everything else of comparable cost is the result of upgrades to both the CPUs core architecture and the platform on which the multicore chip now runs." Respected in-depth review sites AnandTech and Tom's Hardware agree with Ars' findings.

Yesterday, a story made its rounds across the internet. It was picked up by many large news websites, and I'm sure it will be quoted by people until eternity. It was published by a large website, looked all fancy, it had multiple pages - it looked like it was really something. However, anyone with even the remotest bit of knowledge knows that the article was a collection of complete and utter bogus.

Industry analysts differ on the importance of shipping Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system before the 2009 holidays, but agree that the release of the OS needs to be swift and smooth to avoid the sins of Vista's past.

RPyC (Remote Python Call) is a transparent and symmetrical python library for remote procedure calls, clustering and distributed-computing. RPyC makes use of object-proxying, a technique that employs python's dynamic nature, to overcome the physical boundaries between processes and computers, so that remote objects can be manipulated as if they were local. Read the tutorial for a thorough overview. This release introduces remote services and capability-based security, which make RPyC an ideal remoting framework.

O'Reilly interviewed 27 OpenBSD developers to present the new release. They discussed buffer cache improvements, the new malloc(), the work to make the math library more C99 compliant, what is new in the SCSI area, crypto support for softraid, a lot of fundamental work happened in PF, a new tool to merge configuration files during upgrades, the status of OpenCVS, some cool features of OpenSSH 5.1, the initial support for USB webcams, the never-ending work on improving and extending the sensors framework, and more.

Terra Soft Solutions, the company behind Yellow Dog Linux and the PowerStation PowerPC workstation (among other things) has been acquired by Fixstars Corporation from Japan, a company solely focused on the Cell/B.E. broadband engine. The entire product line and staff of Terra Soft Solutions will be maintained in Loveland, Colorado.

Back in 1983, 25 years ago, the world was quite different. The market for the home computer - still a fairly new market - was wide open, but Apple was about to make a major splash with its Macintosh. It was also the year in which a company from Redmond first introduced its "Windows" operating system. What is this Windows you speak of?

"Since the announcement of the upcoming Microsoft Office Web Applications at this year's PDC, there has been a lot of excitement about this new service which will allow for creating, editing, collaborating, and sharing documents using the web. However, as I've followed the blog posts about this topic, I've also come across quite a bit of misinformation about the web apps, too. In an attempt to dispel some of the rumors out there, I've created this special Q&A which will hopefully answer some of your burning questions about the new web applications."

LLVM 2.4 has been released. "LLVM 2.4 includes many bug fixes, much faster compile times at -O0, substantially better code generation in various cases, a new PIC16 target, new IR features, and numerous other improvements and features (see the release notes for details)." You can get it at the project's download page.