Microsoft's attempt to catch up with Adobe's dominant and newly updated Flash has reached final 1.0 status for Mac and Windows. Novell will bring Silverlight to Linux for Microsoft. A handful of obligatory partners were announced, and of course, several Microsoft Web sites will be using the browser plug-in [Scott Guthrie's blog]

Yippee! No more crappy, blurry YouTube videos! No more pixelated garbage filling every corner of the Web! Adobe's addition of the advanced H.264 high-definition codec — "codec" being a fancy way of saying "video algorithm" — to its popular Flash software. Flash, of course, has become the ubiquitous means of distributing video on the Web. Adding H.264 will finally bring high-quality moving images into the Web mainstream, and put an end to the rein of amateurism in online video. Or will it? Not so fast.