Internet Explorer has reversed a years-long slide in browser usage, at least for the month of June, reclaiming share at the expense of Firefox. The change in fortunes was significant enough that Microsoft couldn't resist crowing about IE's progress in a blog post on Thursday.

"While HTML5's video support enables us to bring most of the content and features of YouTube to computers and other devices that don't support Flash Player, it does not yet meet all of our needs," said YouTube programmer John Harding in a blog post Tuesday. "Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube's video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it."

The story was first reported by The New York Times, which stated that Dell employees were aware that the approximately 11.8 million affected computers might break or cause fires, but were instructed to downplay the problems when talking to customers.

While at the HP Technology Forum 2010, a particular breakout session stood out in that it was all about Linux. In fact, I've stolen the title of the presentation and made it the name of this article. Bdale Garbee, a very comprehensive and impressive individual (also the HP Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist), gave a talk on the basics of Linux and HP's involvement in it.

Opera 10.60 has been released July 1 for Mac OS X and is available for download. The features highlighted on the changelogs page are: layout engine (codename 'Presto'), HTML5 with support for offline web applications, WebM, which has been available in Opera (in a special build) on the very day of the announcement at the Google I/O conference, web workers for running scripts in the background without impeding the browsing experience, and geolocation. Version 10.60 is also available for Windows and Linux/BSD.

So, the iPhone 4 has been out for a while, and is getting mostly pretty good reviews - there's one major sore spot, though. Apple made this hoopla about their fancy antenna thingie, but as it turns out, this thingie is kind of a design flaw, causing signal loss (and dropped calls) for some people. Despite downplaying by Steve Jobs himself, AnandTech has done a thorough investigation, and they've found out that the problem - which affects every mobile phone - is a whole lot worse on the iPhone 4 due to the new antenna. At the same time, however, the iPhone has much better reception in low signal situations. What?

Microsoft has killed the Kin after only six weeks on the market. The first Windows Phone 7-ish phone apparently didn't sell, likely thanks to its too-high-for-the-demographic $30 data fee from Verizon.

I was lucky enough to receive an invitation to the HP Technology Forum 2010 via OSNews and just spent most of this last week in Las Vegas with five thousand other nerds of varying caliber. The tech forum is focused more on enterprise technology than that of the consumer, and-- let's face it-- even if any of us could afford a $30,000 rack of servers, most of us have little idea of what we'd do with so many resources except brag. Despite the focus on an area not quite as natural to OSNews and many of its readers, there was a plenitude of good and interesting information shared-- aside from that, the forum was simply fun. There were a few subjects that were especially eye-catching, though many of them not necessarily comprehensive enough to base an entire article on; thus this overview.

This could very well be another attempt by Google to establish itself as a successful social network under the title 'Google Me' after Orkut and Google Buzz. The seed to this rumor was originally a Tweet by Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg.

Archivers rejoice! Seagate introduces the world's first 3TB external HDD. One can fit up to 120 HD movies or 1,500 video games on this 3.5 inch thick external hard drive.

There are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems. Most people will be familiar with some of the big names - distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Mandriva. Most of the well-known Linux distros are designed to be used as general purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. But beyond these distros are hundreds of others either designed to appeal to very specific audiences or to fulfill the somewhat niche needs of some users. We rounded up some of the most interesting Linux distros out there that you might not have heard of.

"Developers Ronald Bultje, David Conrad, and Jason Garret-Glaser are creating a native VP8 video codec implementation for the open source FFmpeg project. The aim of this effort is to bring first-class VP8 support to FFmpeg and demonstrate the feasibility of producing an independent VP8 implementation."

The open-source Mesa/X.Org developers have been working on LLVMpipe, a Gallium3D driver that accelerates OpenGL and other state trackers on the CPU rather than any GPU driver to provide a better software rasterizer via LLVM optimizations. Unfortunately, it's still slow and can barely keep up with games.

Google announced late Tuesday night that China will not renew its Internet Content Provider license - a key authorization scheduled to expire Wednesday--unless Google stops redirecting Google.cn visitors to Google.com.hk.