Kev's Development Toolbox: Tech News Feed

Sony pull long awaited PS3 2.40 firmware update due to booting issues?

Kevin Hooke — 2008-07-03 07:00:37.0

Some PS3 users are reportedly having issues booting up their PS3s after the long awaited updates included in this weeks 2.40 firmware release (which adds in game XMB support). If you didn't already get the 2.40 release, it's now no longer available to download.

Firefox get Guinness World of Records recognition for largest number of downloads in a day

Kevin Hooke — 2008-07-03 06:49:59.0

Beat this Internet Explorer - Firefox had 8 million downloads in a single day on their much publicized Download Day for Firefox 3, getting the official World Record for largest number of downloads of software in a single day!

RedHat has release candidate for JBoss App Server 5 - is it too late?

Kevin Hooke — 2008-07-02 07:54:33.0

Since RedHat bought JBoss, the JBoss world has been quiet, maybe too quiet. It used to be fun and interesting to read whatever Marc Fleury was currently ranting about in their monthly newsletters and other random forum and blog posts from various JBoss employes but since the departure of Fleury the company seems to have been swallowed by a black hole. I wonder how much of this is intentional direction driven by RedHat, or has the company just lost momentum since Fleury's departure?

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Why Microsoft needs to scrap Windows Vista and go for a complete rewrite

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-30 08:04:46.0

Randall Stross has a great article on news.com titled 'Windows could use a rush of fresh air" in which he suggests that Microsoft needs to abandoned the current Windows backwards compatible codebase and go for a compete rewrite for the next version of Windows.

In some ways this makes a lot of sense. Vista introduced some incompatibilities with consumer's existing apps and hardware device drivers and so did XP befo...

6/27/08 - Bill Gates last day as a regular Microsoft employee

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-27 01:38:27.0

Today is Bill Gates last day in the office as a regular Microsoft employee. He's still going to be providing input spending around 20% of his time working with the company, but from this point onwards the Microsoft ship is being captained by dancing monkey-man Balmer. Wow. If there's one man I would not want to be in charge of my company it would be one who jumps around like a monkey in front of your developer commu...

Joel Spolsky on Bill Gates' leadership style

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-26 07:53:50.0

I like to read Joel Spolsky's blog, he tells it like it is with no messing around (although his posts are becoming less frequent over the past year or so). If you haven't come across his books before I recommend picking up a copy of set to arrive in Q4 this year, maybe a little later than expected. Based on screenshots, Android is set to be a definite Windows Mobile killer, and looks to be a strong competitor to Apple's iPhone. Good news for developers is that applications running on the phone are written in Java

When will Sony bring TV, movies and music to the Playstation Store?

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-20 12:31:17.0

Sony recently revamped the Playstation Store on the PS3, which used to be a bit clunky with it's web-based interface to a new and improved installed client. But when are Sony planning on bringing downloadable movies, TV and music to the store? They are noticeably absent in this space, with the XBox 360 having downloadable movies, Apple's TV set top box offering accessing to movies and a wide range of other downloadable content from podcasts and othe...

RAM is the new disk, disk is the new tape?

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-19 07:06:49.0

There is an interesting article by Steven Robbins on InfoQ pulling quotes from various industry thought leaders, titled "RAM is the new disk", and therefore "disk is the new tape". The point of the article is that we have reached the point where it is no longer cost prohibitive to have huge amounts of RAM for storing a system's most frequently used data, and in large scale OLTP systems acce...

Accenture's partnering with SpringSource hits mainstream press

Kevin Hooke — 2008-06-18 07:24:12.0

It's not new news as this blog entry mentions, but Accenture and SpringSource's joint partnership to develop SpringBatch is mentioned in this article on news.com this morning.

SpringBatch is an open source Batch processing framework built on top of the Spring Framework and leveraging Accenture's best practice prior experience from building large en...