If you've ever struggled to play a file you downloaded from the hinterlands of the Web, you clearly didn't try opening it with VideoLan's VLC media player, a free, hugely popular, and open-source media player.

Whether you just want to play media files or also want to convert them, VLC can handle just about anything you throw at it. When all other media players fail, whether on Windows, Linux, or the Mac, VLC will almost always deliver.

I realize that sometimes there is a bit of housekeeping to do in the form of closing files but--give me a break--should that really have to take up to five minutes? And there have been countless times in my experience when it simply never shuts down, forcing me to hold the power button for several seconds. I've even had laptops that were so stubborn that I had to remove the battery to turn them off.

Sometimes the program just hangs there forever, sometimes it quits after a random period of time and sometimes the entire computer just crashes.

The Maw is a very short game; downloadable from the Xbox Live arcade, you can get through the entire storyline in about three hours. And this was the one thing that annoyed the otherwise-thrilled critics.

Still, the uniform kvetching about The Maw's short span made me wonder: Why exactly is 40 hours considered the natural length of a videogame?

Forty hours might sound like a reasonable amount of play. But the truth is that very few games offer an experience that truly requires - and rewards - 40 hours of play.

Microsoft on Friday released an open-source program designed to streamline the labor-intensive process of identifying security vulnerabilities in software while it's still under development.

As its name suggests, !exploitable Crash Analyzer (pronounced "bang exploitable crash analyzer") combs through bugs that cause a program to seize up, and assesses the likelihood of them being exploited by attackers.

Some toolkits aim to create entirely new ways of envisioning and creating projects that appeal to younger minds, such as games and animations, while others aim to recreate the "basic"-ness of BASIC in a modern language and environment.

A multitude of other programming languages and environments exist to teach children, such as Greenfoot, Phogram, and Microsoft's Small Basic, though many of them exist as proprietary implementations. Scratch, Alice, and Shoes are all open source, include support channels such as forums or chatrooms, and have large, thriving communities.

Server virtualization juggernaut - well, at least on x64 iron - VMware is beside itself with glee that a virtualized Linux server running atop ESX Server hypervisor narrowly beat out real Linux boxes on a popular Web serving benchmark test.

Unfortunately for anyone trying to figure out what overhead ESX Server imposes, VMware's VMark benchmark is explicitly designed to obfuscate any calculations you might want to make.

Taking a page out of Apple's book, Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service "twice as fast." Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features.

Google recently dumped Firefox in the Google Pack application bundle and replaced it with Chrome. Last month, the company added a direct download link for Chrome on Google and YouTube.

Running Java benchmark tests on both Windows Vista and Ubuntu Linux has shown that yet again, Vista came last.

The Successive Over Relaxation (SOR) test with Java SciMark also ran fastest on Ubuntu, as the test ran about 33 per cent faster under Linux than it did under Vista.

On the Monte Carlo test with Java SciMark, Vista was again blown out of the water, as the JVM was a whopping three times faster on Ubuntu.

Vista did come out on top in one test.

This week, Dell announced it will offer systems with the aging Windows XP for a surcharge of US$150 over the newer Windows Vista--this only five months after it stopped offering XP on its Inspiron consumer desktop and laptop PCs.

The deadline for Windows XP downgrades has been pushed back twice now, remaining in effect until July 31, 2009-a strong indication that enough users want to stay with the aging XP rather than give Vista a chance.

A four-year-old software glitch wiped out almost 200 votes from a small California county's November elections tally, causing officials to certify results that are now known to be incorrect.

The error only came to light after a volunteer outfit using open-source software and an off-the-shelf paper scanner audited the results.