Just shy of Firefox's first birthday party, the Mozilla Foundation celebrated the 100 millionth download of its Web browser Wednesday. "This is a great milestone. Our massive, worldwide community of grassroots marketers and users - not to mention the developers - have helped to put out a product that's really kicking butt," said Asa Dotzler, the Mozilla liaison to the SpreadFirefox community.

VMWare released today the VMWare Player, a freely downloadable tool that 'plays' virtual machines (it just doesn't let you create any). This can prove a very important tool for OS makers who would like to demo their OS to new users, users who don't want to burn live CDs and also keep the OS makers safe from any hardware incompatibilities in the user's machine (as the OS would run inside VMWare Player, the compatibility is always guaranteed). VMWare already posted a demo for their VMWare Player, a 200 MB 'Browser Appliance' based on Ubuntu.

Think installing Mac OS X and a suite of applications, documents, and settings on a single Mac takes all day? Imagine doing it on ten or a hundred or a thousand Macs! Fortunately, tools like Apple Software Restore and NetInstall have allowed administrators to do it a little bit faster, and now Apple has provided an even more amazing tool that gives administrators the ability to roll out hundreds of custom Mac OS X installs in a couple of hours!

For a conventional software tester, an Extreme Programming project may be an intimidating challenge. Testers often find that they're not welcome on XP projects, but Jonathan Kohl shares how skilled testing can overcome such difficulties. Jonathan discusses lessons he learned from working on two different XP project teams, only one of which initially welcomed his testing and feedback.

The recent release of Novell SUSE Linux 10.0 has elicited strikingly different reactions from a pair of reviewers -- Alan Canton, president of a software consulting company, who is experiencing SUSE for the first time; and eWEEK.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, a seasoned SUSE user.

"We are pleased to announce the availability of the first full release candidate for the upcoming X.Org Foundation release of X11R6.9 and X11R7. This release marks the completion of the development cycle for the modular source tree. We have tagged both the monolithic and modular trees and have prepared tarballs for you to test. We have updated the schedule on the release plan page."

A lot of misinformation about the OpenDocument digital format has started to appear in the mainstream media and interest groups. Answers to many questions on the topic already have appeared, but they are written by techies for techies. This article is different, however. You can print out this one and pass it on to everyone, regardless of their computer skill level.

"We sat here watching Ben Goodger doing a talk about Firefox at EuroOSCON, it got me thinking about this concept of taking a huge and bloated project (such as Netscape) and cutting it down to the core and releasing a spin-off project such as Firefox. With all of the recent discussion and email I have been receiving triggered from Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org, it makes sense if this process was drilled into OpenOffice.org." In addition, OpenOffice is nearing the 50 million downloads.

The generics support in the Java programming language is the most significant syntax change in its history. This article highlights how Eclipse has responded and the changes wrought by generics to the Java language. It shows how to take full advantage of generics within Eclipse, including support in Quick Assist, Quick Fix, refactoring, and project preferences. It also shows some subtle and important aspects of a fully generic language.

A new resolution introduced in the US Senate offers political backing to the Bush administration by slamming a United Nations effort to exert more influence over the Internet. At the heart of this international political spat is the unique influence that the US federal government enjoys over Internet addresses and the master database of top-level domain names - a legacy of the Internet's origins years ago. The Bush administration recently raised objections to the proposed addition of .xxx as a red-light district for pornographers, for instance, a veto power that no other government is able to wield.

Microsoft is slashing the number of licenses it will use for its Shared Source Initiative from now on, while at the same time radically shortening and simplifying the text of those licenses. The move, which will be announced on Wednesday morning at Oscon, the O'Reilly European Open Source Convention in Amsterdam, will see Microsoft cutting back the more than 10 Shared Source licenses that currently exist to only three template, or core, licenses.

Miray has announced to show their realtime OS µnOS ('mu-nano-OS') running on Genesi's Open Desktop Workstation at the Systems 2005 fair for IT specialists in Munich, Germany. From the mission statement of this microkernel OS: "It is the goal to make µnOS available to the largest number of hardware platforms. A portable, scalable and real-time capable architecture should be delivered, which should make possible the usage of µnOS in embedded systems as well as in desktop computers up to servers."

"Microsoft is right on schedule with this month's Windows Vista CTP. We had to really pull some strings to get this release slightly ahead of schedule, but we managed it and it's our pleasure to bring you our initial analysis of the new build, titled 5231. It's becoming clear that Microsoft is serious about Vista, as it keeps getting better with every CTP release."

A rather ambitious new FreeBSD-derived distribution called BSD-HALO is currently in the planning and proof of concept stages. Amongst other things, one of the biggest goals is to attempt to produce a virus, malware, and exploit resistant environment. UI will also be a major design factor, and some pre-alpha screenshots can be viewed on the site as well.