Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
JBoss AS 4.2 was released on May 11 this month and includes many key features from Java EE 5, such as EJB3.0, JSP 2.1 and Servlet 2.5.
JBoss AS 5.0 will be the complete EE 5 implementation, but 4.2 has been made available to get these features out now, rather than waiting for 5.0 to be completed.
Sony really pulled an ace out from their sleeve with this latest firmware update this week(1.80); it is stuffed with so many new features it’s going to take a while to check them out. This more than makes up for last Thursdays rather barren Playstation Store update (1 game video and a downloadable game, Rampage, that didn’t appear for many until several days after the store update)?
Most of these features had been talked about for a while but no-one was sure when they were going to come, and whether or not they were just rumors in the community – the PS3 now has HD upscaling for Playstation and PS2 games, as well as a smoothing (anti-aliasing?) feature. I checked out the upscaling and smoothing briefly and it makes PS2 games look pretty cool in 1080p on our Bravia 🙂 DVD upscaling is now also included – haven’t tried this out yet, but I’m very excited about this since it means I no longer have to look for a new DVD player that does upscaling to HD.
The other addition that I’m sure people will be very excited about (and I can’t wait to try out) is the ‘Remote Play’ internet access from a PSP across the internet. Very cool – this will now let you browse and play any of your photos, music and videos stored on your PS3 remotely from any location where you can get WiFi access on your PSP – your PS3 is now your own remotely accessible media server. Very sweet. Will have to take a trip to a local coffee shop with weekend with my PSP and try this out!
Another feature I had not heard anyone discussing previously is the ability for the PS3 to connect to any machine running Windows Media Player 11 and stream content from it. I tried this out and it works well. You can browse all your media content stored on your PC from your PS3, so you no longer have to copy across media onto your PS3’s harddrive if you already have a large collection of media on your PC. I used this to brwose through some large MPEG video captures (1-2 GB) that were on my PC that I haven’t edited down yet to DVDs, and was surprised that even with files this large this works extremely well.
Now that JavaOne 2007 has come and gone, we’ve time to reflect and digest the wealth of information condensed into one week. The main announcement that grabbed everyone’s attention was JavaFX, the new addition to the Java platform to ease and simplify development of compelling user interfaces for users (meaning not ‘developers’).
During the week there were numerous comparisons to Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight, a browser plugin to enable creation and delivery of .NET based rich internet applications, however this blog post puts JavaFX into perspective. Without the equivalent of Macromedia’s Flash Professional currently there is no time based UI and animation creation tool for JavaFX. Editing and syntax highlighting support was mentioned as an add-on for Netbeans, this is no competitor to Flash Professional’s content creation support. Also, without further details it is assumed that to run JavaFX you will need a Java Runtime Environment on your machine – this is a significant download compared to the lightweight Flash Player plugin for most browsers.
JavaFX holds a lot of promise, but there is definitely room for the concept to grow if it is to complete in the same area as Flash.
The Folding@Home project has benefited immensely from the addition of the online network of user’s PS3’s running the Folding@Home client – 124,758 PS3s has added 555 TeraFLOPS of processing power, compared to the 187 TeraFLOPS contributed by 1,697,764 PCs running the client on Windows. This clearly shows the raw processing power that the PS3 is capable of in comparison with your typical home PC.
So where is the XBox360 and it’s contribution to science? Well, according to this article which describes a critical flaw in the design of the XBox360, if the 360 runs at 100% CPU and 100% GPU for a sustained period of time, the amount of heat generated warps the motherboard inside the case (which apparently is part of the design of the system) to such extent that the solder holding the chips to the board will fail… leading to the infamous 360 ‘Ring of Death’ (2 red quadrants indicates the machine is overheating, 3 red quadrants indicates the hardware has completed failed).
So if this is to be believed, don’t expect to see a Folding@Home client running on the 360 anytime soon, not unless it is handicapped to run at anything less than 100%, since doing so will do nothing but accelerate and increase the failure rate of the 360, which according to current (disgruntled) owners is in excess of 10%.