The Firefox project was rewarded on Wednesday when Guinness World Records accepted that the 8,002,530 downloads of Firefox on 'Download Day' in June constituted a world record. Firefox is now officially in the record books for receiving the most downloads from a Web site with a 24-hour period.

This article by Shane Schick looks at changes Steve Ballmer should consider making at Microsoft now that Bill Gates is out the door. A couple of the most interesting: making user education a priority and establishing an open source project.

An opinion article at APCMag: "The focus of Snow Leopard is on core upgrades, not shiny new features. A bedrock focused update that delivers a streamlined, enhanced OS X. Stability. Efficiency. A "new generation of core technologies." All this is about raising the floor on the entire system. Multi-core optimization, support for 16TB RAM (yes, Terabytes), and a language to allow developers to tap the power of the graphics processor are just a few of the key upgrades. But you can't lift the floor and let people walk around where the floor used to be all at the same time. Not without leaving holes for a potential rising damp problem further down the track."

Apple's OS market share increased by nearly 32% in the last year. Windows Vista and Linux also increased their shares by 8% and 18%, respectively, to end the month accounting for 16.14% and 0.88% of the online OS market. The full results from the survey can be found here. The results came as there is increasing speculation about the new version of OS X having a business focus.

The IBM AIX operating system has kept to what's important: stability, functionality, robustness. And it has done it by keeping a strong command-line interface (CLI). If you never learned to use the CLI or need a refresher on its basics, read on.

Learn XML schemas that provide solutions for all sorts of problems, from the basics of Web services to data description. Also, cover database-like solutions that involve contacts and invoices. The schemas in this article were chosen for their usefulness and utility, plus their impact on the XML community in how information is shared and exchanged using the XML format.

Microsoft has responded to a recent challenge from Sun to answer some serious questions about Hyper-V — in particular, how Hyper-V can compete with Xen-based alternatives, and whether a Windows-only virtualization technology can hack it in today's increasingly heterogeneous datacenters.

Not as sick as you might think. Building on the output of the synclient program, the Perl code presented here allows you to assign specific application functions to "Three-Finger Swipe," as well as open- and close-pinch gestures on your Linux laptop. So if you've been wanting your Linux device to act more like your iPhone, here's a start.

"IBM has just announced it is Platform Solutions, Inc. (PSI), its small but most significant competitor. PSI is/was a small mainframe manufacturer that had sued IBM over the same anticompetitive practices in Europe and New York. The Computer & Communications Industry Association sees this as a clear attempt by IBM to purchase a company solely to foreclose competition in the mainframe marketplace, protecting IBM's cash cow at the expense of consumers. This acquisition should be a cause of concern for competition authorities throughout the world." Update: more discussion on this story here

Building Telephony Systems with OpenSER is a new book from Packt, which acts as a step-by-step guide to building a high performance Telephony System. Written by Flavio E. Goncalves, this book teaches users how to develop a fast and flexible SIP server using OpenSER, an open-source VoIP server based on the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), an application-layer control (or signaling) protocol for creating, modifying, and terminating sessions with one or more participants, including internet telephone calls, multimedia distribution, and multimedia conferences. This book is a well illustrated, step-by-step guide to building a SIP based network using OpenSER.

"Microsoft Monday confirmed it is investigating two-week-old reports from users unable to update client PCs using Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), but said that it is "premature" to assume the snafu had the same source as another patch glitch the company has grappled with since mid-June. . . The WSUS bug was outlined nearly two weeks ago by Cecilia Cole, a WSUS program manager."

"Firefox 3 has been out for two weeks now and it's time to hack it. The newest version of Mozilla's browser has plenty of new features, including the site identification button, the Bookmarks Library and what has become known as the "Awesome Bar" -- and how to hack them all."

Dru Lavigne's very useful book turns the arcana of FreeBSD into a comprehensible set of tools.

"After the recent release KDE 4.1 beta 2 and openSUSE 11 with KDE 4.0.4, some critics have been especially vocal in expressing their displeasure with the KDE 4 user interface paradigms. The debate has grown increasingly caustic as critics and supporters engage in a war of words over the technology. The controversy has escalated to the point where some users are now advocating a fork in order to move forward the old KDE 3.5 UI paradigms. As an observer who has closely studied each new release of KDE 4, I'm convinced that the fork rhetoric is an absurdly unproductive direction for this debate."