Fresh on the heels of releasing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical has delivered an updated version of its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. As found in previous versions, this new update features applications likely to be appreciated by business users, and doesn’t include various games and other entertainment-focused options. The update is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and here’s more on what you’ll find in it.

Canonical, of course, has made much noise recently about how it wants more enterprises and businesses of all sizes to adopt Ubuntu. The 12.04 release expanded long-term support and added cloud computing options for just that reason. The new Business Desktop Remix is squarely focused on business users, as noted on the Canonical blog:

"Designed for corporate and government organisations evaluating Ubuntu for their desktop infrastructure, the Business Desktop Remix is a simple base image that can be deployed into your corporate environment or used as a starting point for further customisation."

The post also clarifies some of the choices regarding bundled applications:

"To save time in deployment, we’ve removed games, social networking programs, file sharing apps and technical tools. In their place, you’ll find software more appropriate for a corporate environment, including VMware View, the Adobe Flash Plugin and the OpenJDK 6 Java runtime environment. Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix provides full language support in both 32 and 64-bit builds, just like the standard Ubuntu. Users also benefit from the great new productivity features introduced in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, including built-in support for Microsoft Windows RDP 7.1 and the Microsoft Visio diagram importer in LibreOffice Draw."

Can a combination of long-term support, and a set of applications optimized for business users help Ubuntu become more entrenched in businesses? Many businesses are standardized on Microsoft’s platforms, and in some cases extricating these businesses from those platforms is a tall order. However, just as Red Hat has found success aggressively supporting open source software, Canonical can definitely increase Ubuntu’s footprint in businesses.

The Business Desktop Remix requires registration, and you can register and download here. 

Changes are a-coming to chkdsk and NTFS health in Windows 8, and unlike the controversial Metro interface, these tweaks should make everyone happy. As hard drives get bigger, the Windows 7 chkdsk times get longer (and longer, and longer…) when hard disk errors occur, as infrequent as they are. In a worse-case scenario, attempting to boot a corrupt drive can take hours. The new system changes all that.

The Windows 8 improvements will let NTFS try to identify corruptions on-the-fly and make an instant fix in the background, no usage interruptions required. If that doesn’t work, Windows 8 will conduct a “spot verification scan” to determine if the corruption is genuine or just a brief memory glitch.

Genuine errors will be reported to the user and the OS will start scan the system during idle CPU/storage times and log the location of the problems. When the scan is done, Windows 8 will prompt the user to reboot the PC at his convenience. Chkdsk will then use the information NTFS logged about the errors to fix the corruptions quickly.

“The restart is quick (adding just a few additional seconds) and the PC is returned to a healthy state,” core manager Kim Bangalore writes on the Building Windows 8 blog. Hopefully it really is that quick and simple! For all the nitty gritty details and a helpful FAQ, hit the link.

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Hey, remember that whole Mass Effect 3 ending thing? Mercifully, I don’t plan on giving it any further attention beyond that sentence. But it did – in its less oppressively obnoxious moments – give rise to a renewed discussion about videogame endings. The general consensus? It’s the point where even the mightiest fall, tumbling from a perch of lofty regard to the turgid depths of disappointment. BioShock, Fallout 3, Knights of The Old Republic II – even the most beloved franchises have proven all-too-capable of heinous back-stabbery at the 11th hour. 

And those are only the standouts. Plenty of other series have committed last-second crimes both large and small, so you could be forgiven for thinking we’re in the midst of an epidemic fatal specifically to fond memories. Where, after all, is your satisfaction-fueled victory lap? Why, instead, is there an angry mob waiting at the finish line, pitchforks, torches, and voices raised in a howling thunder of angry regret? Why do games seem incapable of producing satisfying endings? That’s the question many gamers have been asking themselves, and they’ve yet to uncover an answer. 

Perhaps that’s because they’re asking the wrong question. 

“Why do so many endings suck?” is a half-formed thought. Yes, we now understand that it probably won’t fly with fans if their send off is a closure-free cliffhanger in which the hero and villain stare each other down, banter cryptically, and then clash blades/guns/Pokemon, only to be cut off mid-sentence by a “To be continued. In two years. Maybe. If this one meets publisher expectations for the fiscal quarter.” 

But, in grumbling about flops and bellyflops and probably flip-flops, we’re missing an incredibly key point: games are – and have already proven to be – capable of incredible endings. Some of the most moving, memorable final moments I’ve ever encountered – regardless of medium – have come from games, and most of them hedged their bets on particularly potent tools from gaming’s bag of tricks. 

The most basic of these techniques, of course, is the possibility of multiple endings. But that, in itself, isn’t really so spectacular. Some of gaming’s most interesting finales have emerged from developers’ awareness of that potential last-second possibility smorgasbord. Endings, after all, don’t have to be opposing forces, locked in an eternal tug-of-war between “good,” “bad,” and Silent Hill 2′s dog ending (aka, “best”). What happens when we consider these things frayed ends of the same rope? 

That’s where we get endings like those in Bastion and indie survival-horror hit Lone Survivor. I’ve already discussed Bastion at (possibly excessive) length, but in both cases, there are multiple equally valid endings, each feeding into and informing the others. The full picture only becomes clear when you’ve assembled jigsaw pieces from both sides of the story. 

Lone Survivor, especially, uses that necessary repetition to amazing effect in conjunction with gaming’s most obvious end-of-the-line exclamation point: the player’s experience of actually, you know, playing the game. (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD.) At first, I approached the game like I would any other zombie apocalypse fight-or-flight-in-fright situation: Did it move? Shoot it. Did it then say, “Wait, stop shooting me”? Shoot it again anyway. Did it follow with “I’m still alive, somewhat miraculously, and am willing to forgive you – possibly because of blood-loss-related delirium”? Hm, that’s a toughie. Flip a coin. Heads: shoot. Tails: flip another coin.   

And it was miserable. My masked avatar’s body was as beaten and broken as his incredibly fragile mind. Meanwhile, progressing became incredibly difficult for me as a player. Ammo was in short supply, as were food and drink (yes, it’s a survival-horror game with actual survival) and means to get back to my apartment for precious, frequently necessary sleep. I got extremely frustrated, and eventually, I just sort of gave up. I became all at once cynical, despondent, and hopeless. 

And my character echoed those feelings. He complained of exhaustion every time he got out of bed. Momentary glances into mirrors were met with laments of “I’m such a mess” or “I don’t even recognize myself anymore.” I met a couple other characters who’d somehow avoided the horrific flesh monster mutation that was seeping the nation, but they wanted supplies. How the hell did they expect me to lend them a helping hand when I could barely even take care of myself? Eventually, I managed to make a mad, desperate dash for the game’s finish, and I was treated to a confusing hallucination in which my character ultimately took his own life. It was a powerfully fitting final scene, to be sure, but it also felt empty. I felt like I was missing something. 

So I tried again. Violence, I decided, would be my last resort. I was patient and methodical – venturing from my apartment only as far as I knew food and stealthier routes would allow. It took time, but my character kept his cool – and so did I. At that point, Lone Survivor ceased to be a game about zombies for me. I became obsessed with keeping this desperately feeble human being happy. 

And it worked. He became confident and capable. Toward the end, I even had an excess of supplies, so I spread the wealth to characters less fortunate than my own. This time, my ending hallucination featured a couple of the same pieces of key imagery and some incredibly similar lines, but the context, mood, and end result were entirely different. One ending, then, was not complete without the other. But neither would’ve been nearly so powerful if I hadn’t sat side-by-side with my character on that irritating, amazing emotional rollercoaster. (END SPOILERS.)

Elsewhere, on gaming’s less traditional fringes, we find a coin with two incredibly disparate sides: 1) endings that only occur precisely when the player’s ready and 2) endings that give the player no control whatsoever. The former happens all the time – though admittedly in all sorts very different forms. 

If you’ve ever unsubscribed from an MMO, for instance, that’s about as close to a final act as you’re liable to get without a post-credit scene where Samuel L. Jackson asks you to join The Avengers. I mean, when I quit World of Warcraft after years of play to focus on college, I bid farewell to a place, group of people, and portion of my life I’d really come to love. It signaled an end to far more than a simple piece of escapist entertainment for me. Honestly, at that point in my life, it was one of the more intensely personal things I’d ever done.

On a somewhat similar note, I highly recommend that you read the final entry in Brendan Keogh’s Toward Dawn Minecraft blog series. After spending more than a year chronicling his adventures in a single Minecraft world, Keogh decided to hang up his pick axe and settle down once and for all. I won’t butcher the piece (which, again, I can’t recommend enough) here, but the point remains the same: when we find games that really resonate with us on a personal level, they have a way of lingering – clinging to our skin and hair and the undersides of our fingernails until we scrub them away, only to feel oddly naked without them.         

The latter of the previous two categories, meanwhile, is still pretty small, but experimental darlings Passage and The Graveyard both focus on death by natural causes. In doing so, both make interesting (if short-lived and minimalistic) points about mortality and the frail nature of relationships, but imagine if that limit were applied to something slightly more robust. Shooter, adventure, MMO, something entirely new – it doesn’t matter. In each case, every second would count. Tick-tock-tick-tock. Death’s right around the corner. 

Games have taught us to treat death as a minor setback, so what happens when it’s a foregone conclusion – or rather, the forgone conclusion? Decisions can’t be taken back. How do you spend the minutes, hours, months, or even years until your character wastes away? Do you seek out unlimited power, weave your social threads into a comforting social sweater, or explore until your heart’s content/has an attack? Do you try to do everything?

I guess what I’m saying is, do you waste your time on web forums complaining about crappy videogame endings? Or do you cherish the great ones and marvel at how lucky you were to get the chance to experience them?

Mozilla isn’t mincing words when it comes to Microsoft’s decision to limit or restrict the behavior of non-Internet Explorer browsers in Windows RT, the version of Windows 8 intended for systems with ARM hardware inside. In a semi-angry blog post, Mozilla raged against reports that Internet Explorer will be the only browser allowed to run in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment, calling the move “an unwelcome return to the digital dark ages where users and developers didn’t have browser choices.” Ouch.

“It’s reported that Windows RT (the name Microsoft has given to Windows running on the ARM processor) will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment,” Mozilla explains. “In practice, this means that only Internet Explorer will be able to perform many of the advanced computing functions vital to modern browsers in terms of speed, stability, and security to which users have grown accustomed. Given that IE can run in Windows on ARM, there is no technical reason to conclude other browsers can’t do the same.”

The way Mozilla sees it, Microsoft’s strong-arm behavior effectively excludes competing browsers from the platform, giving users just a single viable browser choice when running Windows in an ARM environment. If the reports are true and Microsoft doesn’t reverse course, it could find itself defending its decision in court.

“Because Windows on ARM relies upon so many traditional Windows assets, including brand, code, footprint, and experience, the decision to exclude other browsers may also have antitrust implications,” Mozilla said. “If Windows on ARM is simply another version of Windows on new hardware, it also runs afoul of the EC browser choice commitments and seems to represent the very behavior the DOJ-Microsoft settlement sought to prohibit.”

Mozilla didn’t come out and say it would be the one filing suit, or urging for an investigation, but if nothing changes between now and the time Windows 8 is released, it’s a pretty safe bet Microsoft will have some explaining to do.

For years now, Dell Computer has experimented with shipping computers pre-loaded with Ubuntu, and Dell also just announced a long-term Linux-focused agreement with Red Hat. Now, Dell–the world’s number two PC maker–is seeking community input for the design of an Ubuntu-based laptop aimed specifically at developers. The initiative is dubbed Project Sputnik, and is yet another way that Dell remains open to Ubuntu-based computers.

According to the Project Sputnik page:

"Project Sputnik is based on Dell’s XPS13 ultrabook and supports Ubuntu 12.04.  The image will come with the necessary drivers to support the HW along with a very basic set of general developer tools.  Then you can use the included profile management tool to pull down appropriate tools from a github repository [this is currently being developed].  The initial profiles will be for Ruby, Android and JavaScript development."

There is also a blog post with much more information on Project Sputnik, which notes:

"To put it in context, Sputnik is part of an effort by Dell to better understand and serve the needs of developers in Web companies.  We want to finds ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible.  And what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish, running the 12.04 LTS release of Ubuntu Linux."

The idea is a very good one. Lots of developers might welcome an Ubuntu-based laptop loaded with the right tools for a very low price. And, the blog post makes clear that the Sputnik computer will eventually spread out to the cloud via the OpenStack platform:

"When we initially pitched Sputnik to Ubuntu’s founder Mark Shuttleworth a couple months ago he really liked the idea.  In his eyes however, he saw something bigger.  Where it got really interesting for him was when this laptop was optimized for DevOps.  In this scenario we would have a common set of tools from client, to test, to production, thereby tying Sputnik via a common tool chain to a cloud backend powered by OpenStack.  Developers could create ‘micro clouds’ locally and then push them to the cloud writ large."

This project is one worth watching, and Dell has set a six-month timeframe for bringing it to fruition.