YouTube have announced a beta of HTML5 support. These are broadcasting videos in H.264 format for browsers that understand HTML5's tag. The choice of H.264 is perhaps unsurprising, since that's what Apple's iPhone supports natively (and indeed, is how the YouTube mobile application is rendered). This means that other browsers that don't support H.264 won't be able to render content.

Looking to upgrade to Firefox 3.6? On Windows and the Mac, you don't need to do much more than download a file, perform a few clicks, and you're done. But for the moment, if you want to upgrade it on Linux, you'll be in a world of pain...

I've been writing about the ReactOS for at least five years (the project itself is more than 10 years old). It's an effort to try and replicate a Windows operating system in open source.

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

In case you don't know, Lubuntu uses LXDE, a very lightweight and minimal desktop environment using the openbox window manager, the PcManFM file manager, and a very select list of default applications. It is compatible with basic freedesktop standards and all needed parts are already packaged in Ubuntu today.

The first beta of what will become Element MediaOS version 1.0, an HTPC centric distribution based on Ubuntu 9.10, is available for testers and developers.

Firefox 3.6 was released yesterday, after over six months since the last major release, version 3.5.

Except for those operating systems that are still gaining their foothold (Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS), it seems as though we are becoming increasingly platform independent.