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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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