bbweblog – Page 88 – Kev's Development Toolbox

November 20, 2006

Java’s Duke out-sourced along with Hotspot and javac?

If you’ve been following the news over the last couple of weeks then you’ve heard that the Hotspot compiler and javac have been open sourced under the GPL license, Java EE has been relicensed from CDDL to GPL, and also ME has also been open-sourced.

What you may have missed amongst all this news though is that Duke, the Java mascot, was also open sourced. This is an unusual move to have a logo available as open source, but it means he can be developed and used by the community along with the terms of the license. And if you’re interested in shirts, check out the shirts currently available on CafePress.

November 18, 2006

IT Week: “PS3 is an Engineering Masterpiece”

ITWeek has an article about iSuppli, an electronics industry reasearch company, who recently acquired a new PS3 and took it apart so you don’t have to. The component cost for the $599 60GB PS3 according to iSuppli is around $840, which is going to lead to some serious losses for Sony until they can get their manufacturing costs down. Of course over time they will be able to recoup this cost through games sales, but it’s still rather eye opening that you are buying a piece of hardware $200 below the cost of the parts inside the box.

Andrew Rassweiler, a services manager and senior analyst at iSuppli described the PS3 as ‘an engineering masterpiece’, offering ‘the performance of a supercomputer at the price of an entry-level PC’.

November 18, 2006

PS3 eBay craziness – too many listings on eBay may result in bargins in next couple of days?

The crazy thing about the insane eBay sales going on right now with people selling their PS3s is that there are so many PS3s listed (around 21,000?), that at some point once the initial frantic bidding dies down there may actually be some bargains to be had. There are plenty of listings currently with no reserves and no bids – it might just be possible that you can pick one up in the next few days for very close to the original paid price.

Who knows, wouldn’t it be ironic if some of these people who capitalized on the hype and demand and only bought one to resell actually ended up taking a loss? Now wouldn’t that be funny.

November 17, 2006

Netbeans 5.5 GUI Builder tutorial – ‘Building Great Looking GUIs’

If you haven’t yet found the GUI Builder feature in Netbeans 5.5 (where have you been?), this feature (previously known as ‘Matisse’), makes it incredibly easy to create pretty good looking user interfaces in Java relatively simply.

java.sun.com have a great article on their site walking through the steps involved in building a UI with Netbeans 5.5. It’s well worth a look if you haven’t seen or used this feature yet.