Xen.org, the developer of the open source Xen project, on Wednesday announced the release of the Xen 3.3 hypervisor engine. The product is the result of a distributed development effort by senior engineers from more than 50 leading hardware, software and security vendors. Xen 3.3 includes enhancements that further advance its position as a fast, scalable and secure virtualization engine for a broad range of server and PC chipsets from supercomputers to PDAs.

Mozilla Labs launched a new prototype Tuesday aimed at giving Internet users new ways to create mashups of online content. Dubbed "Ubiquity," the technology is Mozilla's solution what it sees as a common and time-consuming problem Web surfers face when they try to compile information from the Web. "Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between Web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time," Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla, wrote on his blog.

Dell is going after emerging markets with a new line of low-cost computers. The Vostro notebooks and desktops are the company's first models targeted specifically at China, India and a handful of other Asian, African and Latin American nations. The systems will sell for about the equivalent of $440 to $475. The move marks a distinct shift in strategy for Dell, which has previously focused on building standard products that stay constant from country to country. The change follows similar steps by competitors such as HP and IBM, which are pushing low-cost models of their own.

As editor for LinuxInsider for more than a year now, I figured the time was right to start walking the walk with my personal machine. So I took my Dell Inspiron 1150 to this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo with the intention of switching my operating system to one of the many Linux distros. I visited the booths of several distros, Ubuntu, Suse, Red Hat and even BSD, grabbing disks along the way. The plan was to give each a test drive, then choose one based on my experience.

Mozilla has announced the launch of a new feature for its Firefox Web browser designed to make it perform faster. Called "TraceMonkey," the feature is an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine and will be built into Firefox 3.1, according to the company. To increase JavaScript speeds by an order of magnitude or more, Mozilla designed TraceMonkey with a new type of just-in-time compiler. The company has measured speeds up to 37.5 times faster for specific "micro-benchmarks," according to Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology officer.

While postal services want to promote letter writing, the trend is clearly working against them. With a push of the button, an e-mail lands in the inbox of its recipient before a letter writer can even moisten the stamp. The tools of the trade are e-mail programs known as "clients." They are used to manage correspondence on the computer, but nowadays they can often do far more. An estimated two-thirds of all computer users over the age of 14 have their own e-mail address. "Most people use standard e-mail programs from Microsoft or simply Thunderbird," says Holger Bleich of c't magazine.

Red Hat issued a security advisory Friday notifying customers that some of its servers were compromised last week due to a network attack. The company called the advisory critical and said it sent out the alert primarily for those who may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers. The servers -- for both the company's commercial products and free versions of Linux -- were breached; however, immediate action on the part of Red Hat prevented the attacker from gaining access to Red Hat Network, according to the company.

It's not often we here at LinuxInsider get to write about celebrities -- other than the Richard Stallman variety, of course -- and indeed, many of the geeks who grace our pages from time to time seem to shun the limelight rather than seek it out. So it was with great glee this week that we found cause to mention none other than Jerry Seinfeld. Indeed, as our sister publication reported on Thursday, the comedian famous for his stories about nothing will soon be a spokesman for much the same.

Last week was kind of amazing -- I knew a number of things that were going to be happening at IDF but was blindsided by an announcement Intel made that could change the world as we know it. Nikola Tesla turned over in his grave, and we are one step closer to his Tower of Power. Intel also fleshed out its Atom platform, which I think forms the basis of a new class of cloud computing-based client devices. Apple, on the other hand, appears rudderless all of a sudden. The new iPhone -- recall I suggested you avoid this product -- is having a massive number of problems.

Not long after Joichi Ito uploaded a photo he had taken of Internet pioneer Vinton Cerf to the online encyclopedia Wikipedia last year, he noticed something odd. Most of the Internet luminaries and technology gurus who had write-ups on Wikipedia had poor-quality photos or none at all. It wasn't just that. "I realized that some famous people have no free photos online," says Ito, a U.S.-educated Japanese venture capitalist and cofounder of Digital Garage, a Tokyo Net startup incubator.

A sliding share price and gloomy forecasts have prompted speculation that Sun Microsystems might be a tempting takeover target for acquisition by Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu or another tech giant. A sale would be momentous, involving billions of dollars and spelling the demise of one of Silicon Valley's most venerable companies. But no one has confirmed any talks. Executives at the Santa Clara server and software maker have continued to voice confidence in their strategy for turning the company around, while a spokesperson declined to comment on the prospect of a sale.

One of the nation's largest electronic voting systems has a software flaw that can cause it to drop ballots, its manufacturer has revealed. Premier Election Solutions -- a subsidiary of Diebold -- says its machines that operate in 34 states are affected by the glitch. The problem, it is believed, has been present in the program for the past decade. The company says it's "confident" election workers would have caught the mistakes during certifications over that time period and thereby prevented any votes from being excluded.

Remember the good old days? Like back in 1999 when you could, as a friend of mine put it, "make a hundred thousand dollars a year for being able to spell Java." Those were the days, back when programmers driving Porsches had become a cliché. Now, more than a decade after the dot-com boom began, tech people once again find themselves earning less money despite bringing significantly more value to their employers. Instead, as demands on technology workers increase each year, we see diminishing returns on our labor.

A lot of effort in recent months has been expended toward something people are calling "data portability." Just about everywhere you look; you'll bump into people pontificating about it. In case you've been out of the loop -- perhaps hiking in the Himalayas -- you can run the term through your favorite search engine to pull back numerous articles and blog posts on the subject. You might even want to dip into the Twitter and FriendFeed streams to see the ebb and flow of the micro debate.

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT support from Novell for its Suse Linux Enterprise Server. Microsoft and Novell struck their deal in November 2006 in an effort to boost interoperability between Microsoft's applications and Novell's open source operating system.

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative process. This kind of proprietary work ethic leads to researchers arriving at similar discoveries independently. The possibility of pooling such research to go even further together is not a main priority among many researchers.

Google is finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel with its long-awaited and much-hyped Android phone platform. This week has seen two significant developments: the first Android-powered device officially being approved by the FCC, and the beta version of the Android software development kit being released by Google. Both moves mark the end of months of speculation. Rumors have popped up every few weeks suggesting problems and potential delays with the first Android phone's shipment.

Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is now a member of the Linux Foundation. The foundation, a nonprofit organization supporting the accelerated growth of Linux, announced Canonical's membership on Tuesday. Ubuntu community members have been active participants in a variety of workgroups at LF, including the Linux Standard Base, Desktop Architects and Driver Backporting groups. In addition, Canonical supports a range of other open source projects including Bazaar, Storm and Upstart.

Buoyed by a court ruling and prospects for new mobile phone products, The SCO Group says it is on track for a Phoenix-like rebirth. The company believes those two factors have finally given it the breathing room to emerge from bankruptcy and continue its traditional computer server business, as well as market promising new mobile products and pursue its high-profile legal battles over the millions of dollars it believes it is owed from users of Linux-based servers.

Microsoft's Open XML format overcame its final stumbling block and is moving forward as an official ISO standard. The file format had been held back earlier this year by claims that the voting process was rushed and that Microsoft's specification information was incomplete. Open XML got the green light to move forward after appeals from Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela failed to gain enough support from the other national standards bodies. Microsoft's file format will now also be known as ISO/IEC DIS 29500, Information technology -- Office Open XML formats.