Many of the Microsoft watchers and customers I know have been expecting Microsoft to ship the first service pack (SP) for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 before the end of 2010.

The number of people using Facebook hit the 500 million mark on Wednesday, meaning one in every 14 people on the planet has now signed up to the online social-networking service.

"As of this morning, 500 million people all around the world are actively using Facebook to stay connected with their friends and the people around them," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a blog post.

Mozilla has upped the bounty it offers to anyone that discovers a bug in its software.

In a blog post Mozilla said that the evolving threat landscape had lead it to raise its reward to $3,000 in order to "better support constructive security research".

We reported early last month that a public beta of Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) was on the way. Microsoft has stuck to that timetable and the public beta can now be downloaded.

"As Gavriella Schuster and I have mentioned in previous blogs, SP1 for Windows 7 does not contain any new features specific to Windows 7," said Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc on Blogging Windows. "For Windows 7, SP1 is simply a combination of updates already available through Windows Update and additional hotfixes based on feedback by our customers and partners."