The PS3 units sold in Japan and the US since November ’06 until present have reportedly included the PS2’s chipset to provide near 100% backward compatibility (a few rendering issues needed firmware updates but were fixed). When the PS3 launches in Europe in March, according to news articles this week, the PS3 will not include the PS2’s hardware but will instead emulate the PS2 in software. This is a smart move for Sony as a first step in reducing manufacturing costs, but of course people are worried that this means backwards compatibility will have less that 100% support compared with the original Japan and US consoles.
The future of Java: deprecate or remove features?
Ted Neward recently interviewed Bill Venners, president of Artima, on the subject of the future of the Java language. One of the main discussion points was whether language features should be deprecated, or completely removed in future releases. This has become a hotly debated topic recently, especially since the JDK download is continuing to grow with every new release.
Check out the discussion summary here.
Overview of desktop improvements in Java SE 6
Java SE 6 has introduced a large number of desktop improvements including features to improve the look n feel and integration with the native platform when running on particular OS’es (System Tray integration, text anti-aliasing, native look n feel).
Check out part one and part two of this article for a detailed look at these improvements.
JSR 310 for new Java Date and Time API voted in
JSR 310 is proposing a new Date and Time API to replace the current (mostly) deprecated Date and the hard to use Calendar APIs with an alternative. Read the details in the JSR here.