An anonymous reader writes "Darklegion Development and Microsoft have apparently been working on a new version of Tremulous for the Xbox 360. Timbor, project founder and a main developer of Tremulous, said this in a recent announcement: 'What does this mean for you? You will now be able to play Tremulous on Xbox Live with thousands of other gamers, earning achievements and showing off your gaming skill. In the best interest of maintaining a steady and secure Tremulous playerbase, Tremulous is going to be exclusively available for Xbox Live. Existing infrastructure will no longer receive official support. Players who have already been playing for at least three months can apply for a €5/$7 coupon as a show of our appreciation of your enthusiasm so far! What does this mean for the community? Hopefully nothing! While the production of Tremulous switches from its current open source development to a closed source environment handled by the very capable and experienced Microsoft engineers, the efforts of the community will still be valued. In this collaboration we have made it very clear that the Tremulous community is very important to the game, and Microsoft agrees with us on this point. We are confident that this move will not stifle the creative output of the community.'"

Spacezilla writes "EA is dropping the bomb on a number of their video game servers, shutting down the online fun for many of their Xbox 360, PC and PlayStation 3 games. Not only is the inclusion of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles odd, the date the games were released is even more surprising. Yes, Madden 07 and 08 are included in the shutdown... but Madden 09 on all consoles as well?"

jamie pointed out an important announcement in the Perl community. Adam Kennedy, known as Alias, developed Strawberry Perl to "make Win32 a truly first class citizen of the Perl platform world." Over the last year, major CPAN modules have used Strawberry Perl to get to releases that work trouble-free on Windows. But the tens of thousands of smaller modules on CPAN are lagging, in many cases because of lack of access to a Windows environment for development and testing. Now Alias has worked with Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab to provide for every CPAN author free access to a centrally-hosted virtual machine environment containing every major version of Windows. "More information (and press releases) will follow, the entire program under which this partnership will be run is so new it's only just been given a name, so some of the organisational details will ironed out as we go. But for now, to all the CPAN authors, all I have to add is... Merry Christmas. P.S. Or your appropriate equivalent religious or non-religious event, if any, occurring during the month of December, etc., etc."