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Briefly…

• Embarcadero Buys CodeGear, a division of Borland Software, for $23 million.
• Gates, on his last day, predicts Yahoo deal unlikely
• Rumors fly about Microsoft seeking to buy search engine Powerset
• Adobe Acrobat 9, soon to be released, will include support for Flash and multimedia content.
  
• New updates released for CorelDRAW X4 .

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In 2006, Microsoft founder and front-man, Bill Gates, announced plans to step down from his full-time role at Microsoft. As June draws to a close, that day has finally come. Handing the reigns over to CEO Steve Ballmer, Gates is stepping down to part-time employee and chairman. Gates’ primary focus will shift toward his charitable foundation, according to Newsweek.
Steve Ballmer sounded off on Gates’ departure: “He founded the company, he’s accumulated this wealth, he’s got this foundation, he’s got this fame. That’s irreplaceable. Also, Bill grew up with every one of the technologies in this company. He’s got more capacity to remember things than anybody I’ve ever known. It’s unlikely we’ll have anybody again who has that breadth.”

Within the first week of release, Firefox 3 has been downloaded in excess of 17.3 million times. The latest version of the popular web browser caught attention this month with its attempt to set a world record for the most downloaded software in the first 24 hours of release. With 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours, Firefox 3 set a statistic currently being considered by the Guinness Book of World Records.
By comparison, Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times in its first 24 hours.
New features in Firefox 3 include one-click bookmarking, the smart location bar, phishing and malware protection, spell check, session restore and full zoom. Download Firefox 3.

Software security company McAfee named Hong Kong’s “.hk” the world’s most dangerous domain. According to a report released this month, over 19 percent of “.hk” sites contain malware, viruses, high rates of spam, or aggressive pop-up ads. The report was compiled using McAfee’s SiteAdvisor software in comparing 74 top-level domains. China’s “.cn” comes in second with over 11 percent of its sites found to be similarly hazardous.
According to the study, Finland’s “.fi” ranks as the safest with only 0.05 percent hazardous sites.
One Hong Kong based security analyst points out potential flaws in the survey. “McAfee are only looking at the top-level domain bit, they are not looking at the location of the server,” said Richard Stagg, director and managing consultant at Handshake Networking, a vendor-independent security consultancy. “They’re not paying attention to where sites are actually hosted.”
Stagg points out that many spammers and malware authors choose domain registrations in foreign countries where it’s difficult to shut those domains down.

VMware, Inc.announced this month that the top universities from the Times-QS World University Rankings have employed VMware’s virtualization solutions to reduce operating costs, carbon emissions, and power consumption.
Some of the prestigious schools using VMware include Harvard, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue, the University of Maryland, the University of Auckland, and the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Diego.
These and other universities are running database systems and education-specific solutions like CollegeNET in VMware virtualized environments.
In addition to the environmental benefits of virtualization, these schools also expect to see an improvement in application availability and performance. Read more about how virtualization can help your business.