Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
It’s now widely known that roughly 1 in 5 of all XBox 360s will catastrophically fail, most likely due to the motherboard overheating and the chips coming loose from the board.
So, if this happens to 360s under normal usage, what does it take to get a PS3 to fail? This website took their tests to the extreme: 0 degrees in a freezer for 108 hours, and 64 hours in a sauna at 120 degrees – all with continuous cycling of BluRay movie playing and game playing. And no failures. Not bad I’d say.
This is a great article that gives Flash videos of various VM configuration options and demonstrates the Garbage Collection behavior of the Java SE 6 VM when configured sub-optimally for a given application.
I don’t know if anyone has thought of this before but seeing the patterns develop as they happen via Flash videos is a great way to convey what is happening, that would be far more difficult to express with just words alone.
Sun has long used it’s Technology Compatibility Kit (or TCK) as the benchmark for testing compliance against specification standards, for example testing that a vendors Java EE Application Server meets the specification requirements.
Since Java in now Open Sourced, Sun has made available the TCK for Java SE so that people working on building on top of the OpenJDK can check compatibility with the SE specification.
Jobs unveiled the new iMacs yesterday, which have been given a cosmetic facelift, looking very slick in aluminum and a glass front. Check out the pictures on the Apple site.