Although Microsoft recently touted the 100 millionth installation of Internet Explorer 7, Web measurement firms said that the new browser is simply being swapped out for older editions and hasn't had an impact on Firefox's continued climb. " January 8th, we had the 100 millionth IE7 installation," said Tony Chor, an IE group program manager, in an entry on the team's blog. "Even more important than installations is usage. According to WebSideStory (the company we use to measure browser usage), as of this week, over 25% of all visitors to sites in the U.S. were using IE7, making IE7 the second most used browser after IE6." While Microsoft had the WebSideStory numbers correct, it didn't tell the whole story, says Geoff Johnston, an analyst with the Web metrics company. " seems to be exclusively at the expense of IE 6," says Johnston. not eating into the Firefox share at all."

"This howto covers the installation of XenExpress and the creation of virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress is the free virtualization platform from XenSource, the company behind the well known Xen virtualization engine. XenExpress makes it easy to create, run and manage Xen virtual machines with the XenServer Administrator Console. XenExpress can run up to 4 virtual machines at the same time with a max. total amount of 4GB RAM. The XenExpress installation CD contains a full Linux distribution which is customized to run XenExpress."

"A number of search engines are available for the Gnome and KDE desktop environments, many based around the open source Lucene search engine. It would be tremendous if we could adopt one of these search engines for the Gnome platform, so we can provide the type of integrated search experience for our users that they really need, irrespective of which distort they are using. So to help in this assessment we have carried out a comparison of four different Unix based indexers ."

This small tutorial will show you how to transcode your videos and movies to be suitable for viewing on an mpeg4-capable cellphone.

"I found that any Firewire-equipped Mac can be made into an HD-PVR for unencrypted content at the expense of an appropriate firewire cable. Apple even provides the necessary capture software that you need, provided that you know where to look." More here.

The Java community has resisted closures so far, even as competing languages such as C# add them. Closures are anonymous functions with closed scope. It's best to think of a closure as a code block that you can use as an argument, with special scoping rules. This article dives deep into Closures and uses Ruby to show how closures work.

Work has begun on a Windows-based installer for Ubuntu. "The aim of this installer is to provide an easier way for a Windows user to install Ubuntu without having to know how to burn a CD .iso, set the BIOS to boot from CD, repartition the disks, set up a multiboot system, etc. It will not replace any of the current Ubuntu installation options, and will not require that Windows is installed prior to the installation of Ubuntu." Update: Screenshots.

"Fedora Core 6 was released on October 24, 2006 and scheduled to come out a half-year later is the seventh major release for the Fedora Project. However, unlike Yarrow, Tettnang, Heidelberg, Stentz, Bordeaux, and Zod, Fedora 7 is shaping up to be the most ambitious release yet. With all the work and reform going into Fedora 7 it poses the question, will Fedora 7 be Linux's knight in shining armor?"

OpenVG is a standard API for hardware accelerated vector graphics. It's meant to accompany OpenGL on the road to fully hardware accelerated rendering framework. Unfortunately up till now there was no Open Source implementation of it. Zack Rusin just released the first implementation. He talks about it in his blog and this posting to the Khronos OpenVG forum.

Oracle on Tuesday released fixes for 51 vulnerabilities that affect its software products. The update is part of the company's quarterly patch cycle. Oracle preannounced its patch release Thursday, when, for the first time, it published an advance notification so customers could plan ahead to apply the fixes.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of California is investigating the stock options backdating activities of computer and consumer electronics manufacturer Apple. The federal action comes in the wake of the disclosure by Apple last month that it completed an internal investigation of options backdating and concluded that, although Apple chief executive officer Steve Jobs recommended some backdating of stock options for himself and other Apple employees, he wasn't aware of the accounting implications of those recommendations. Luke Macaulay, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in San Francisco, confirmed the existence of the investigation, but did not provide additional details.

Origami, the top-secret Microsoft project that became the Ultra-Mobile PC, was finally unveiled last March, and devices utilizing the new form factor appeared shortly thereafter. The UMPC is a full Windows PC with a small touch-screen display and a virtual keyboard, and despite issues with short battery life, the early units were impressive. Now, Microsoft has announced a major upgrade for the young UMPC, which it calls the 'Origami Experience'.

Last July OSNews hosted the first version of the article "MorphOS - The Lightning OS" by Fulvio Peruggi as an entry to the OS Contest. The article has now been updated and extended, making it an even better introduction to the MorphOS operating system for a reader who does not know anything about MorphOS, and can be found here. Italian, German, Russian, Spanish and French translations are available as well.

"This may seem like a bold statement. Apple's just released iPhone is not only very attractive as we would expect from an Apple product, but includes some impressive features and specifications. It's probably unrealistic to claim that anything currently available on the market competes with this offering. However, is it really a revolution in mobile communication devices? Maybe not if there still is something that can overshadow it, and do it very soon."