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Internet Explorer's decline, from 95.48 percent in June, is primarily due to the Mozilla and Firefox browsers, which saw their market share numbers climb almost as much as Internet Explorer's fell, to 6.02 percent. Both Mozilla and Firefox are available for Mac OS X. Opera, another third-party Web browser, combined with Safari to account for just over one percent of Web browser users.

The NHS has awarded a nine-year software contract to Microsoft, a week after the OGC sang the praises of open-source alternatives. The contract involves Microsoft providing its operating system, desktop products and bespoke software to the NHS. Microsoft is expected to create bespoke software which will allow the NHS' current clinical technology to run more smoothly on the Windows operating system.

The toolbar, available from toolbar.a9.com, uses the standard Firefox extensions mechanism to offer the same features as those available to Internet Explorer users.

This month, Belgacom, the leading telecommunications company in Belgium, will begin deploying 1,000 Linux-based IPTV STBs (Internet protocol television set top boxes) in home test sites located on its DSL network throughout Ghent, Brussels, and Liege. The STBs are being supplied by i3 Micro Technology, and are fitted with a customized user interface (UI) based on Espial's Escape middleware.

Sun offers new details on its open-source strategy. Officials say its forthcoming Solaris 10 will be cheaper than comparable Linux solutions.

Red Hat’s Runtime Partner program is now available worldwide as part of the Red Hat Partner Community. The Red Hat Partner Community is designed to encourage the combination of open source and traditional technologies into the fabric of enterprise computing to provide technology solutions that give customers more choice.

A US community organisation is using an open source web-based survey application, which was developed by a Melbourne resident, to keep track of what it deems to be voting irregularities in the US election. Jason Cleeland, the developer of PHPSurveyor, a PHP based online survey tool, said he was excited by the fact that his application was being used by Verified Voting Foundation, a non-partisan body which was set up after the 2000 US elections, as part of their Election Incident Reporting System.

Adobe Systems, maker of major desktop software products such as Photoshop and Acrobat Reader, has begun a quiet effort to become more involved with Linux.

Joseph Cheek CEO of Lycoris has published a letter to their customers and the community. In the letter Joe addresses many outstanding issues that have gone unresolved over the past few months, and outlines major changes to Lycoris the company, the products, and future direction. Quote: "... During the past week I have felt that there are other unresolved issues with Lycoris as a company. In particular, I have taken a hard look at our current business model and whether it is sustainable or not. Currently I conclude that our business model is not sustainable, and have decided to make some other fundamental changes. ..."

So you've recorded the last six seasons of "Red Dwarf" off of PBS, and now you'd like to burn them onto a disc that you can watch on your TV? Most DVD players support two formats that you can burn onto a regular CD: Video Compact Disc (VCD) and Super Video Compact Disc (SVCD). This article will help you create your own videos on SVCD, the superior of the two formats.

Despite what TechWorld, InfoWorld, Groklaw, and other IT news outlets reported yesterday and today, The SCO Group still plans to post a new Web site that tells the company's side of the story of its patent-infringement lawsuits against IBM, Novell, and other companies.

Placing your own code between a program and the libraries it is linked against is easy when you use the LD_PRELOAD environment variable.

Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) has large-scale plans for deploying OpenOffice.org on Windows PCs, a MINDEF spokeswoman told ZDNet UK on Tuesday. "MINDEF has already installed the OpenOffice productivity suite on 5,000 desktop computers," said the spokeswoman. "We hope to deploy OpenOffice on 20,000 desktop computers by the end of March 2006."

A change in the voting weights of EU members means that the EU Council members which supported controversial changes to the EU Software Patents directive no longer have a majority vote, prompting some campaigners to call for a recount.

The conference "Open Standards and Libre Software in Government" is organised by MERIT in coordination with the Dutch Presidency of the European Union, on November 18, 2004 in The Hague, The Netherlands. It is supported by the European Commission, Dutch Ministries of Economic Affairs and of the Interior, and the Dutch Government's OSOSS Programma.

In what it's calling the largest technology release in its history, Wind River today announced a new development suite, three market-specific platforms (MSP), one general-purpose platform and its first Linux platform.

Linuxlookup.com is reporting on how Transgaming released a time limited demo of its flagship Linux product, Cedega. The Cedega Time Limited Demo will be available only for a two week period, from November 2nd to November 15th and can be downloaded at www.transgaming.com. Cedega allows hundreds of the top triple ‘A’ PC titles to run on the Linux operating system, seamlessly, transparently, and out-of-the-box with equivalent game-play and performance as the original PC version. Some of the blockbuster video games supported by Cedega include the yet unreleased and highly anticipated Blizzard’s® World of WarCraft®, Electronic Arts’™ Battlefield 1942™, NCsoft’s™ City of Heroes®, UbiSoft’s™ Far Cry™ and Edios’™ Hitman: Contracts™, among hundreds of others; Cedega also supported id Software’s DOOM 3™ the same day as its commercial release.

Microsoft's lead in the browser market may still be huge, but it is being chipped away by open-source rivals

At this year's Linux World Expo & Conference Europe, taking place in Frankfurt, Germany, KDE's mail application KMail received the Linux New Media Award in the "Best Mail Client" category. The prize was awarded to "Kontact/KMail" to honor the groupware integration efforts made by the KMail developers. KMail maintainer Ingo Klöcker was the one to receive the award. The Linux New Media Awards are among the most significant international prizes for Linux- and Open Source products. The jury consisted of 100 Linux- and IT experts, among them Linux kernel hacker Alan Cox and Knoppix inventor Klaus Knopper.

The two years leading up to today's U.S. presidential election have not been good for electronic voting, which is estimated to tally, or at least attempt to tally, about 30 percent of all U.S. votes, or an estimated 50 million ballots. The failures of voting machines and the software they run has been rivaled only by inadequate federal and state election certification procedures that allowed questionable technology to be carrying, or possibly corrupting, American votes. However, after all of the frozen voting terminals, lost software loads, mysteriously found machines, and vendors' efforts to keep it all hushed, there is some good news on e-voting.