Clearly the Middle Child: Mass Effect 2

And here I am, a week later. The Xbox home screen is patiently waiting for input, and as I put the controller down, my eyes drift towards the left, towards the closet where I keep my Xbox games, ordered according to which I find the best. Out of excitement, I had put the Mass Effect 2 box in the prime position when I bought it, but now that I've finished the game, I can't help but take it down a few pegs - behind Mass Effect 1, behind Dragon Age, but just above Fallout 3. I find it hard to admit, but Mass Effect 2 failed to meet my (admittedly) insanely high expectations.

Windows Azure Platform Hits General Availability

"As expected, Microsoft has announced the general availability of the Azure platform (Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and AppFabric) in 21 countries. Starting today, Microsoft customers and partners in those regions will be able to launch their Azure production applications and services with the support of the full Service Level Agreements. The Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service Bus and Access Control will continue to be free until April 2010 for those that sign up for a commercial subscription."

Episode 20.x: How Did We Do?

Back in August of 2009, the OSnews team spent 3 full hours discussing Apple. In the course of discussion, we spent some time talking about the then-mythical "Apple Tablet." So, 5 months later, how did we do? Were we accurate in our predictions? How did you envision the Tablet, long before the nonsensically named "iPad" became a reality? This clip, which I've called "Episode 20.x" and inserted into cannon retroactively, is pulled, unaltered, from the original podcast.

MPEG-LA Further Solidifies Theora as the Only Video Tag Choice

Despite the recent interest in adopting HTML5's video tag, there is still one major problem: there is no mandated standard video codec for the video tag. The two main contestants are the proprietary and patended h264, and the open and free Theora. In a comment on an LWN.net article about this problematic situation, LWN reader Trelane posted an email exchange he had with MPEG-LA, which should further cement Theora as the obvious choice.

Google Phasing Out Support For IE6 in 2010

BBC News reports: Google has begun to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6, the browser identified as the weak link in a "sophisticated and targeted" cyber attack on the search engine. The firm said from 1 March some of its services, such as Google Docs, would not work "properly" with the browser. It recommended individuals and firms upgrade "as soon as possible".

Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux Released

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Linux today. "Bordeaux 2.0.0 marks major progress over older releases. With version 2.0.0 and onward we bundle our own Wine build and many tools and libraries that Wine depends upon. With this release we bundle Wine 1.1.36, Cabextract, Mozilla Gecko, Unzip, Wget and other support libraries and tools. We have improved support for Microsoft Office 2007 (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) and preliminary support for Internet Explorer 7 in this release, there has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the back-end."

What’s Next for Solaris, Linux at Oracle?

"Several of the concerns about Oracle's acquisition of Sun have revolved around how Unix technologies led by Sun would continue under the new ownership. As it turns out, Solaris users might not have much to worry about, as Oracle executives on Wednesday affirmed their commitment to preserving the efforts. In the case of Solaris, Oracle had already been a big supporter of the rival Linux operating system. Oracle has its own Enterprise Linux offering, based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, the idea that Linux and Solaris are mutually exclusive is a false choice."

Oracle’s Bold Plans for Java Bode Well

Any doubts regarding Oracle's stewardship of Java were dispelled yesterday, as Ellison and company have made it clear that they are very interested in making Java an even stronger alternative to .Net, writes Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister. "We have the money to invest in Java, because Java is a very profitable business for us already," said Ellison, whose plan for integrating Sun technology is ambitious, serving an even more ambitious goal: to create a soup-to-nuts tech juggernaut akin to IBM in the 1960s. Java will remain a key component of this push, with a new Java runtime, greater modularity, better support for non-Java languages, improved performance, and multicore-optimized garbage collection in the works, McAllister writes. Also revealed are plans to unify the Java SE and Java ME programming models and APIs and to enable JVM to run natively on hypervisors, allowing developers to run multiple Java instances on a single virtualized server.

Preview of QML UI Designer

Trolls (the Trolltech ones) are blogging about a technology preview of the UI designer for QML, integrated to Qt Creator. A youtube video is provided. QML, accompanied by an UI designer, provides an open alternative for piecing together flash-like high-FPS programs with heavily customized and animated user interfaces, built on QGraphicsView framework. While QML allows authoring the whole program in QML markup and Javascript, QML can be incorporated to Qt C++ programs with relative ease.