It appears that Oracle has lost interest in supporting the Solaris port for IBM SystemZ machines: "The SystemZ port of Solaris is dead. Oracle pulled all plugs and refused to further help the authors." In two years, the project has been downloaded only 1000 times.

"One game on the Web has been accused of being little more than an elaborate scam designed to bilk gamers out of their money. The game, Evony, has an extensive Web presence that has gained a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons, and that's just the beginning of the bad press surrounding the title. Accusations of shady business practices, legal bullying, and physical intimidation surround the game; some of these claims are easy enough to parse, while others are practically impossible to figure out because the real story has become so convoluted that it's a Gordian Knot of facts."

Catching up on the last few weeks of news, we give time to false rumours being spread about Palm, only adding to their unfortunate pile of woes at this moment. Deja vu strikes with us discussing Windows Phone 7 Series not having copy and paste and won't allow third party apps outside of the marketplace store. Internet Explorer 9; could this really be the end of excuses for developers clinging to IE6? The ticking timb bomb that is H.264 and why Theora isn't necessarily the answer. We end on Adobe Flash--will Adobe take the opportunity to embrace what is happening with HTML5, or keep up their assault on Apple? All and more in this episode of the OSnews Podcast.

This is a little bit off the beaten track for OSNews, but hey, it's about science fiction and it's funny. "This month, 'Battlefield Earth', the blockbuster bomb based on the novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, won the Razzie for 'Worst Movie of the Decade'. J.D. Shapiro, the film's first screenwriter, accepted the award in person. Shapiro, who also wrote the screenplay for 'Robin Hood: Men in Tights', 'We Married Margo', and is developing a King Arthur spoof called '524 AD', explains what it's like to be attached to one of Hollywood's most notorious flops."

"Search has become an integral part of Windows, particularly in later versions. While the major search improvements began with Windows Vista and were backported to Windows XP, it's really only with Windows 7 that the larger majority of users are discovering the search bar all over in the operating system. Search is built into every aspect of Windows 7 to help users cope with the increasingly rapidly growing number of files, be they work documents and e-mails, personal photos and videos, or music collections. Many users perform searches without thinking nowadays: it's an ingrained habit of using the operating system. Like many habits, this one is worth breaking in order to to develop an even better one. Here we take a quick look at a few basic search techniques and a few more advanced ones. Force yourself to use them and you'll soon become a master of Windows Search. A bit of extra time now will save you loads of effort in the long run."

"For many users of Mozilla's open source Firefox Web browser, Firefox is simply a tool for looking at Web content. For others, Firefox is an enabling tool to actually help develop content and code for the Web. This week, Mozilla released the results of a developer survey it conducted in November 2009. The survey received responses from 5054 developers spread across 119 countries and provides some insights into how developers work with Firefox - and what about Firefox makes it so critical as a tool for developing."