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Brian says, the reports of blue’s death have been greatly exaggerated. I just got back from Berlin, where I was covering the Magic World Championships for the Sideboard. Going into the tournament—which was the first to feature post-Core Set Standard—blue was expected to be a non-factor. Without Counterspell, Memory Lapse, Mana Short, Opposition, Merfolk Looter, and Force Spike it was expected that blue could not keep pace with aggressive Zombie decks, black-green creature recursion decks, reanimator decks and so on. Going into the final day of Worlds, there were four of the Top 8 decks that featured blue permission (countermagic). They were all Mirari’s Wake decks with blue, white and green mana. The green is for Mirari’s Wake and Moment’s Peace. The white is for mass removal such as Wrath of God and the occasional spot removal spell—Chastise or Wing Shards. The blue is for—what else?—countermagic and card selection / card drawing. I saw at least one Wake deck over the weekend that ran copies of Rewind, Mana Leak and Syncopate—it’s hard to keep the blue mage down.Read more.

Wes Peters says, In an email to the FreeBSD Hackers mailing list, Rink P.W. Springer reports success in porting FreeBSD 5.4 and 6.0 to the XBox game platform. Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on a port of FreeBSD for the XBox. During this effort, Ed Schouten has given me assistance by reviewing patches and giving advice. The port is fully functional. The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard for the console). Only ethernet is missing, currently, as the binary only driver in /usr/ports/net/nvnet fails with an error 5, for some reason. Assistance there would be very welcome. Read more.

Brian David-Marshall says, Blue-Green Madness relies almost entirely upon commons and uncommons from the Odyssey block to operate. The deck first emerged at Pro Tour – Osaka as an Odyssey Block Constructed deck when Ken Ho won that event with a Tarnished Citadel and Upheaval as his only rares. The key cards in the deck were Wild Mongrels and Aquamoebas. Those two cards allow you to exploit the madness cards Basking Rootwalla and Arrogant Wurm. They also serve as an outlet to toss Roar of the Wurm into the graveyard for a turn-4 6/6 token creature. Ken Ho played a very similar deck at the Chicago masters event. He replaced the Tarnished Citadel with three City of Brass and the Aquamoebas became Merfolk Looters—exchanging power for card selection without losing madness outlets. Read more.

BSDForums says, FreeBSD Release Engineer Scott Long announces FreeBSD March-June 2005 status report. Some of the project highlights include the Summer of Code, the starting of the FreeBSD 6.0 Release Cycle, kernel, network infrastructure, userland updates and many many more. BSDCan 2005 report and EuroBSDCon 2005 – Basel, occuring later during the year round out the list of events in this report. Read more.

Martin LaMonica says, IBM has begun participating in open-source Java project Harmony and intends to contribute code to the initiative, according to a Big Blue executive. In the past week, IBM has dedicated an employee to working with the proposed open-source project, which is being done at the Apache Software Foundation, said Rod Smith, vice president of advanced technology at IBM. At this point, IBM’s participation is limited to thoughts on design, but the company likely will contribute code to the project, Smith said. Read more.

Zanlius says, in October 2003, hot new talent Chiaki Kuriyama made her American debut in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Volume 1 as Go Go Yubari, the school girl with perfect hair, impeccable clothes, and a killer personality. Whereas Chiaki is a full-fledged teen idol in her home country of Japan, her name elicits no recognition from mainstream filmgoers in the West. Nevertheless, she is not a complete stranger to the geeks of international cinema, who can’t easily dismiss her stirring performance in Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale. In addition to Battle Royale and Kill Bill, Chiaki has an excellent body of work behind her with credits in both film and TV. Her most recent film is Kagen no Tsuki (Last Quarter), which opened in Japan on October 9, 2004. Future projects for Chiaki include Azumi 2: Death or Love, a much anticipated sequel to one of the best samurai films and Yôkai Daisensô. Read more.

BSD Cert Staff says, The BSD Certification Group announced today that the report of the results of their recent Task Analysis Survey is publicly available. The survey was initiated in late April and was offered in several languages. Approximately 60 countries had at least one responder and 637 people participated in the survey. The report covers the purpose and methodology of the survey and includes evaluations of over 200 system administration tasks, proposed testing methods, and certification types and levels. The BSD Certification Group intends to use the report to develop a certification roadmap, including a curriculum, test methods, and timetable. Read more.