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Microsoft has recently unveiled how they view virtualization, and how they plan to make virtualization grow in the near future. More specifically, they've talked about what their primary goal is – to oust VMWare from its comfortable 80% or higher lead in virtualization deployments.

It seems Microsoft's primary intention is not to directly compete with what VMWare is offering, and instead take the next “technological step”, moving to a management infrastructure that is both physical and virtual. They put a lot of emphasis on managing virtualization deployments, and see that as more important than the actual implementation. This is definitely true, at least from a business standpoint, as one of the goals of any virtualization suite is to become seamless.

If anyone knows how to operate a monopoly and control large market share, that would be Microsoft. VMWare could be in danger here. Even with a technically superior product, they might find themselves in a serious hurt if they do not react to Microsoft's plans, on top of several other vendors like Sun and Cisco competing for VMWare's current domain as well.

Mozilla has pushed back the release of Firefox 3.1 by several weeks in order to build into it a number of features that include a highly touted 'private browsing' mode, further optimizations on its JavaScript engine and improvements on how the browser's address bar works.

With this timetable the first beta of Firefox 3.1 is expected to see the light as soon as next week, while a more feature complete Beta 2 is expected on early November. Mozilla anticipates to have the final version out by the end of the year or early 2009, with a set date being announced later on.

Firefox remains the second most used browser worldwide with ~18% market share. By comparison Internet Explorer dominates at large with about 76,3% of users and Safari comes in at third with 3,8%.

The temporary sales ban issued earlier this week on RealDVD has been extended for at least another month. According to reports, U.S. District Judge Marilyn Hall Patel (known for presiding over the original Napster litigation) upheld the decision after reviewing documents related to the case and concluding she is not “satisfied that [the] technology is not in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”

The injunction is now in place until at least November 17, after which another hearing should take place to determine if the software violates the DMCA’s prohibition on circumventing copy protection schemes and whether or not a permanent ban on sales is necessary. RealNetworks, for its part, maintains that their software is legal because the original CSS encryption of the copied material is left intact.

While the MPAA has succeeded (at least for now) in blocking the sale of RealDVD, Hollywood is still reeling from other free and paid programs widely available online – such as Handbrake or AnyDVD – that simply crack the encryption on DVDs to let users create a backup copies of their media.

Opera has launched a new version of its web browser. Besides being just plain faster, it brings a laundry list of bug fixes and feature improvements all around, including a new low-bandwidth mode in the built-in email client, expanded syncing between multiple devices with Opera Link, and a new feed preview feature that allows users to see RSS feeds before subscribing to them.

Opera mail now also features a handy option to ignore or follow contacts, which allows you to blacklist certain contacts so their emails are never downloaded, but also to specify important contacts so that their emails are highlighted when they arrive. Of course, 9.6 also sports the slew of features found in previous versions of the browser, such as Speed Dial, mouse gestures, note-taking, BitTorrent support, and voice-controlled browsing.

You can grab a copy of Opera 9.6 from our download section, or read a complete list of everything that’s new in the release notes.

If you are a Linux user and have been wanting to run Google's photo organizing and editing software Picasa on that OS, your wait is now over. Google has released a
Linux port of the software based on its latest available version. The software reportedly utilizes portions of Wine to function, so it wouldn't be accurate to call it an actual “port”. As a result, there are a few features missing in this release due to Picasa relying on certain Windows components.

Picasa 3 Beta is also available for Windows now, which is no surprise, but not for the Mac. We wonder if this is some sort of trend setting at Google, let's remember that the company's month-old Chrome browser remains at large a Windows-only application.

Mac OS X has slowly crept up in popularity since its release, never making huge jumps but rather steadily pushing skyward. To Apple's delight, Mac OS X gains come at the decline of Windows, and recently OS X has seen a 5% growth since last month. That increase puts it at just over 8% overall, a significant number when you consider the sheer amount of desktops in the world. These gains seem to come directly from Microsoft losses. Could Windows market share slip below 90% for the first time in many years?

That's certainly a possibility, with Windows estimated to be around 90.29% - quite a drop from a year ago, even more of a drop from three years ago.

The fight against spammers and those who push malware and spyware has taken many faces, and resulted in people being taken to court many times. Usually, though, the lawsuits come from the Government, not from individual businesses. That's why this latest lawsuit involving Microsoft is so interesting. Microsoft, partnering with the state of Washington, has decided to take a Texas company to court over their “abuse” of the Messenger service built in to Windows.

The company, who produces “RegistryCleanerXP”, is no doubt known by many technicians as nothing more than company selling a fake cure. Not everyone is aware of that, though, and according to Microsoft and the Washington state Attorney General, the company gives customers a “false” sense of security.

The companies are fly-by-night operations, demonstrated by the fact that Microsoft and the state do not even know the identities of many people they are suing. We all know the answer to spyware and malware isn't in the courts, but at least they are trying.

Microsoft announced the upcoming release of its Visual Studio development suite this morning. Previously code-named Hawaii or otherwise referred to as VS 10, the next version of Microsoft's developer tools and platform has received its official name as Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

Besides some fancy marketing talk, there are some relevant details on what the upcoming suite has defined as its five areas of focus: riding the next-generation platform wave, inspiring developer delight, powering breakthrough departmental applications, enabling emerging trends such as cloud computing, and democratizing application life-cycle management.

An additional interesting feature has been detailed by CNET. Meant to act as an airplane's black box, a new tool will let developers recreate bugs usually found by end users that are difficult to reproduce. Internally Microsoft calls this feature "TiVo for debuggers" as it will record the bug as it occurs from both a front end and back end approach. Visual Studio 2010 is slated to ship in the first half of 2010.

Mozilla Thunderbird users should be aware of a recently published update. The group released version 2.0.0.17 of the e-mail client today, for Windows and Mac, to address some potential security flaws. Only two of them were rated as critical, and one would only be of concern if you use Thunderbird as a newsreader.

The most dangerous of the plugged holes was a buffer overflow involving UTF-8 URLs, which could theoretically be used to compromise a system through the use of maliciously crafted URLs in messages. Some other minor issues have been corrected as well. You can get the update here.

Mozilla has published new versions of its Firefox web browser, fixing a number of security vulnerabilities, including two rated as critical that could allow attackers to inject malware onto PCs. Specifically, these critical flaws addressed in Firefox 3.0.2 include a crash bug that could result in memory corruption and another involving privilege escalation via XPCnativeWrapper pollution.

Two other moderate issues were addressed with the update, as well as a variant of a “click-hijacking” vulnerability first reported in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer a while back. Mozilla also patched similar flaws on Firefox 2.0.0.17, for those still using the earlier version of the browser. As usual, you can find the latest version in our downloads section or hit the Help menu and choose "Check for Updates" instead.

One of the more popular Windows torrent clients, uTorrent, has had a Mac version in the works for a while. Though the original client itself began development more than three years ago, the Mac version was pushed back due to various reasons and has yet to see any official release. Recently, though, someone has deemed it necessary to release an alpha version of the client and distribute it through, of course, torrents.

This is ahead of the developer’s schedule, and a VP for BitTorrent confirmed that the released version was an internal development build, not suitable for public use – therefore they are considering that version a leaked version. Though they had planned to release a version themselves soon, some people weren't content to wait.

People are excited about the client coming to the Mac because it is a true port, not anything based upon existing Mac libraries. BitTorrent has cautioned people, and rightly so, that it is an unofficial alpha release and comes with no support whatsoever. Early reports look promising, though anyone who takes it upon themselves to use alpha software should already understand the repercussions.

A significant update to one of more well-known virtualization suites has been published, with Sun releasing the first self-named Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0. While the update itself is light on technical improvements, it is the first update of the software since Sun acquired it earlier this year.

The update includes a performance boost and a wider profile of operating system support. The latter includes support for 64-bit operating systems, including Linux, Windows and Solaris. If you have used VMWare in the past and are a fan of virtualization on the desktop, this is definitely a worthy candidate for general-purpose virtualization. For the desktop it is completely free, and from my perspective is one suite that could definitely be an equal with VMWare as development continues.

As expected, Adobe today further detailed the widely anticipated Creative Suite 4 product family, a new release of the company’s design and development software for virtually every creative workflow. The new release includes significant new versions of Photoshop and InDesign, plus enhanced versions of its Design Premium, Web Premium and Production

One of the biggest changes users will notice right away is the new tabbed interface in CS4, but there are plenty of other time-saving features that will make this a worthy upgrade. Of the many application improvements, Photoshop seems to have gotten the most exciting ones, including true 64-bit compatibility and GPU acceleration to enable smoother panning and zooming.

Another new GPU-enabled feature is called Pixel Bender, which lets people apply special effects quickly and easily create their own. While Pixel Bender won't initially ship with CS4, it is promised to appear as an update through Adobe Labs soon. There are many more features worth checking out at Adobe’s web site and we’ll be sure to point you to the downloadable trials once they become available along with the full version sometime next month.

McAfee is expanding their security portfolio, following an announcement made by the company that they plan to acquire Secure Computing Corp. McAfee has offered $465 million for the outfit, hoping to bring additional email and network protecting systems into their fold. As they are the number two security firm around, acquisitions are the logical move for them to grow.

McAfee claims that the acquisition shows how the company wants to focus exclusively on security, and will continue to do so. They don't mention if any tools that Secure Computing provides will be carried over to their existing software suites or services, or if they plan to just let the company operate more or less as-is.

OnTrack has expanded their services with aim at VMWare, giving their customers another gift with the addition of some new data recovery tools. These new tools are aimed specifically at virtual machines, intended to help people recover from virtualized disasters. The adoption of virtualization has presented challenges, including what exactly should be done when you have corrupted or missing data inside a virtual machine. Sometimes standard tools work, but many times they don't – and OnTrack has sought to fix that problem.

They don't specify whether or not their software can retrieve data from a VM outside of the VM itself, though on the surface that seems unlikely – you usually must access a virtual disk through the hypervisor or console.

Earlier this month Google released their beta version of their new open source web browser Chrome. The program was received with much fanfare – as it’s almost the norm with everything Google releases – with many in the online community praising the browser’s speed, lightweight user interface and multi-threaded nature.

Upon further testing, however, many went back to their usual browser of choice claiming they felt “naked” with Chrome’s apparent lack of advanced features and add-ons. That's set to change, according to InformationWeek, which has just confirmed the browser will eventually support add-ons and user scripts à la Greasemonkey – a move that could definitely entice power users and the Firefox faithful to make the switch.

The report does not mention when we can expect the new features, but Google is said to be working hard to make sure its add-on paradigm keeps Chrome stable and fast.

A quick end has been brought to the controversy surrounding Mozilla and the EULA they include with Firefox. In a recent blog update, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla has announced that rather than re-writing the EULA as they'd originally planned, they will be abandoning it altogether. Instead, all that will ship with the browser is a notice about the license it comes with – the one it has had for some time.

This should certainly appease those who found the concept of a EULA inside free, open source software to be distasteful. That's where this issue began, largely due to the negative connotations that come with a term like EULA. I am glad to see that Mozilla has sided with user opinion in this matter.

AMD has just issued the ninth update this year for its Catalyst driver software package. Version 8.9, in addition to the usual round of bug fixes, includes a new 1080p @ 50Hz display mode, overclocking support for quad-Crossfire X configurations through Overdrive and OpenGL 3.0 support – which is limited to 10 extensions at the moment, but AMD promises it will “continue to expand support.”

Check out AMD’s release notes (PDF file) for the full list of changes, or go ahead and pick your OS to download the latest Catalyst driver:

ATI Catalyst 8.9 for Windows XP
ATI Catalyst 8.9 for Windows XP 64bit
ATI Catalyst 8.9 for Windows Vista 32bit
ATI Catalyst 8.9 for Windows Vista 64bit

After noticing the upset caused in the community by their EULA, including some backlash from Ubuntu users and the company behind it, it seems Mozilla is ready to re-think the Firefox license.

Indeed, Mitchell Baker of Mozilla has commented that the concept of EULA was at first considered necessary for Firefox, but may be pointless now. He isn't talking about disposing of a EULA altogether, but rewriting the existing one, in such a fashion that they feel everybody will be happy with it. Of course, one of the big complain that users are having is that a FOSS browser like Firefox shouldn't need to have any sort of EULA to begin with.

Personally, I see little need for an agreement to use a browser that is pitched and offered as completely free anyway. It's Mozilla's choice, and I hope this time they will side with the users.

As promised last week when it announced higher-capacity models, Microsoft has now made version 3.0 of its Zune software available for download. Similar to Apple’s recent iTunes update, this latest version focuses on music discovery, with new features such as Buy from FM, wireless access to the Zune Marketplace, and Microsoft’s own recommendation engine Mixview.

The new features will be available to every model of Microsoft Zune, not just the most recent ones. Also, as part of the launch, Microsoft has announced a deal with McDonald's that gives Zune owners free Wi-Fi access in any of the restaurant chain's locations equipped with the Internet hotspots – similar to what the iPhone gives you at Starbucks locations.

The revamped Zune software is available for download here, and you can get further details about what’s new here.