The Mozilla Foundation has set a world record and achieved new heights in its battle for browser market share. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0 Web browser set a record for the most downloads in a day. It was the first time a browser-maker attempted to set a record.

Mozilla set the record with 8,002,530 downloads in June. The Mozilla Foundation will receive the official certificate in London next week.

“Setting a world record really doesn’t matter. It’s a marketing stunt,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at JupiterResearch. “At the end of the day you still have to look at who has the overwhelming browser market share. It still belongs to Microsoft.”…

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On his final full day at Microsoft Corp., Bill Gates went on stage to reminisce with his longtime friend Steve Ballmer, and neither man could hold back tears as Ballmer handed Gates a large scrapbook as a farewell present.

Gates, who is stepping back to focus on his philanthropy, sat with CEO Ballmer in a Microsoft conference room and meandered through moments in Microsoft’s history. They stopped to get in a few good digs at IBM Corp., whose first personal computers were loaded with Microsoft’s DOS operating system before IBM adopted its own operating software and their relations strained.

“They went off with OS 2, we were left with good old Windows, and sure enough the David versus Goliath story came out with the right ending,” said Gates, eliciting laughter from the crowd of 830 Microsoft employees.

Gates, who founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, admitted that Microsoft has faltered along the way, and certainly isn’t perfect today…

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You may not have noticed, but technology has passed a significant, if little-recognised, milestone. The news emerged only this week, but late last month a supercomputer built for the United States Government performed what is known as a petaflop, or one quadrillion calculations per second.

Few of us know what a quadrillion looks like (in Europe it’s known as a billiard), so, if you’re curious, here’s one you can study in private: 1,000,000,000,000,000. Big, isn’t it?

Mathematicians have calculated that a quadrillion-high stack of five-cent coins would reach Saturn, but that’s probably not much easier to visualise. Or spend…

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Microsoft’s abandoned takeover bid for Yahoo appears to have culminated with a disheartening thud for those two companies but amounted to yet another coup for online search leader Google.

What began in January as Microsoft’s most audacious attack yet on Google instead paved the way for the Internet’s most powerful company to gain even more clout through a deal that gives Google access to a large chunk of Yahoo’s advertising space.

By submitting to a partnership that endorses Google’s search advertising technology as a better choice than its own, Yahoo is giving online marketers even more incentive to spend most of their money with its biggest rival, according to industry analysts.

It looks like such a sweet deal for Google that the U.S. Justice Department and lawmakers are expected to take a hard look at the arrangement to make sure it doesn’t give Google too much control over the Internet’s search advertising market.

Google currently has about 75 percent of the U.S. search advertising market followed by Yahoo at 9 percent, according to the research firm eMarketer…

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Apple Inc. yesterday patched 40 security vulnerabilities in more than 25 different components and applications bundled with Mac OS X, including Flash Player, iCal and Apache.

The year’s third update fixed fewer than half as many flaws as the previous collection, which Apple issued two months ago to plug nearly 90 holes.

Apple tagged 16 of the 40 patches in Wednesday’s update with its “arbitrary code execution” phrasing, putting them into the category most other vendors would label “critical.”

According to the Security Update 2008-003 advisory, the most-patched components by vulnerability count were Apple’s version of the Apache open-source Web server (eight bugs fixed) and the version of Adobe’s Flash Player that Apple tucks into Mac OS X (seven flaws patched)…

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Greenpeace says the world’s most popular electronic game consoles contain high levels of toxic chemicals, though they do not pose an immediate danger to gamers.

A report by the environmental watchdog group says Nintendo’s Wii, the Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 use varying degrees of bromine, PVCs and other potentially harmful chemicals, including phthalates, which can affect human hormones.

Greenpeace acknowledged the level of toxic material does not violate European regulations, although some are banned from use in toys meant for small children. Though not harmful in the amounts used, some chemicals are released into household dust, inhaled and pile up in the body over time.

“Nobody will drop dead tomorrow,” Greenpeace campaigner Zeina AlHajj said today. “But these products are used by kids … They are persistent and they are accumulating through our life.”…

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Yves Rossy, the self-styled “Fusionman”, leapt into the skies 2500 metres above the small town of Bex in western Switzerland clad in his new carbon wing.

He performed various manoeuvres for five minutes before landing with the aid of a parachute.

His “wing” is 2.5 metres in diameter and comes with four tiny jets, which are lit inside the plane just before he jumps.

Once in full flight, Rossy can reach speeds of up to 300kmh, but he can only stay in the air for a maximum of ten minutes due to the small fuel capacity of his jets…

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Now these may look like normal AA batteries, but the magic is revealed when you pop the top open to reveal a USB plug. Instead of needing a bulky recharger you plug them into any powered USB port and they’re fully recharged in only 5 hours. Just think, you have so many potential chargers in your home. From PCs and laptops to keyboards, hubs, games consuls, even some monitors.

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Adware pushers have found a new way to trick you into downloading their annoying products: fake MP3 files.

On Tuesday, security vendor McAfee reported that it’s seen a huge spike in fake MP3 files spreading on peer-to-peer networks. Although the files have names that make them look like audio recordings, they’re really Trojan horse programs that try to install a shoddy media player and adware on your computer, said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee.

“Once you run it, there is no content. You’re taken to this site to install this player which you don’t really need,” he said…

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Quote “I believe you have every right to expect excellent performance from Windows Vista, and I’m going to back that conclusion in today’s post, the latest in my Fixing Vista series, with details on how to use Vista’s built-in tools to find and fix the problems that stand between you and an excellent Vista experience. ”

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