Java 1.5/5.0 introduced a new pacakge of concurrency utilities (based on Doug Lea’s Oswego package) that offer far more granular control over threads and their synchronization. java.sun.com have an interesting article that introduces these new features.
Windows ‘Longhorn’ release – will it sell?
Longhorn is expected to be another leap forward in Windows technology, similar to the jump that Windows 95 was from Windows 3.1. The trouble is that many of the exciting new features to be included in Longhorn, for example WinFS (the next generation file storage system, possibly based ontop of a database engine), may not even see light of day in the first releases. New features have been gradually put on the backburner as the delivery schedule has been slipping, and what new features remain is anyone’s guess at this point.
Spring 1.2 rc1 released
RC1 of Spring 1.2 has been released.
Main new features are support for Hibernate 3.0, and annotation support for JDK1.5 to mark entities as ‘transactional’ (this sounds very similar to one of JBoss AOP’s features)
Next-gen XBox may not be backwardly compatible
Rumours have it that the next-gen XBox, possibly going to be called XBox360, will not be backwardly compatible with the current XBox. This may indicate Microsoft is taking a departure from the current ‘cheap PC in a box’ game platform, maybe heading towards something more radical. If they’re keeping tabs on Sony’s upcoming PS3 then they had better pull something pretty stellar out from up their sleeve, since the hype surrounding Sony’s Playstation 3 is leading us to believe their new box is going to be a supercomputer for the masses…