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?

When KDE 4.0 was first released, it was met with quite some criticism. Even though people saw the huge potential, the lack of functionality and stability, as well as quite a few bugs detracted from the experience. The KDE developers continued to work on implementing their relatively radical vision, and with the release of KDE 4.2 creeping ever closer, it seems they're well on their way.

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.

"In essence, CoreUI is a low-level framework that - ultimately - will be responsible for drawing all the user interface widgets in OS X. Among other things, CoreUI will define the look and feel of the Aqua interface. I say 'will' and 'ultimately' because at the time of writing CoreUI is still something of a work in progress. Some folks have reported that CoreUI isn't used at all in Leopard, unless you change the scale factor from its default value of 1.0, but this is simplistic. By default, CoreUI is used for drawing a number of user interface elements in Leopard."

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.

This week, we start with a new regular occurence on OSNews: the imaginatively named Week in Review, where we do a quick rundown of the preceding week's most important news, and maybe add in a few new items that didn't make the cut earlier in the week. We will close off each of them with My Take, a short random musing about whatever subject we please. This week, the news was dominated by MacWorld, Windows 7, and Palm.

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.

Late last year, Creative launched a website and teaser campaign for a new product called Zii, with the only clue being its tagline: "Stemcell computing". While you can argue whether or not it's smart to focus attention on such a sensitive subject, the product that has rolled out of this campaign today is quite tantalising.

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.

Google has barely released Chrome 1.0, but the company is already hard at work on version 2.0 of its web browser. They released a pre-beta for Chrome 2.0, which comes with a lot of new features, including ones that should've already been in Chrome 1.0. In addition, it seems as if the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are getting closer.

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.

To supplement storage space with the initial purchase of the Aspire One (8 GB SSD version), I bought a 16 GB Transcend TS16GBSDHC6 card that integrates nicely into the left card slot. The pre-installed Linux Linpus just wasn't what I needed since I use many networking tools at work and at home. I initially ran Ubuntu 8.041 with the /home partition on the 16 GB SDHC card. I discovered Eeebuntu while searching for information on how to boot and run Linux off a SDHC card. The goal was of multi-boot installations of Ubuntu, with one install specifically loaded with the tools I use at work. The Acer Aspire One BIOS does not 'see' the card, so you can't boot from it using the startup key (More on the SDHC boot up further in this article).

Even though the Windows 7 beta had been available on piracy networks for a while now, it still hadn't been officially released. During his pre-show keynote at CES, Steve Ballmer officially launched the Windows 7 beta onto the world via TechNet, MSDN, and Connect. It will become available to the general public this Friday.

Thanks to SGI, a potential disaster for Free software purists has been averted. Back in January 2008, it was discovered by the OpenBSD guys that some of the contributions to X.org and the Mesa 3D Graphics Library made by SGI were covered under permissive open source licenses that didn't fall within FSF's definition of Free software. The FSF Compliance Lab worked with SGI to resolve the issue, and they succeeded.