Author: kevin

Microsoft has announced their plans to offer movie and TV downloads as part of the online XBox Live service for the XBox. Their new service will be live on November 22.

Sony have been quiet for some time about the ‘Tivo-like’/media center type functionality that the PS3 will be able to support, which may mean that TV and movie downloads may not be initially available for download from their online service from day 1, however Sony’s online service is going to be free to all PS3 users, unlike the XBox Live service which has some free access but also a paid subscription service.

BEA’s dev2dev site has a good introductory article to Groovy and Grails. This is worth checking out if you have yet to take a look at what is going on with Grails, which although still in early development, is currently functionally rich enough to be usable, and is worth looking at to see how much complexity in web application development can be removed by approaches such as ‘convention over configuration’.

This is an awesome idea from Sun – fill a shipping container full of processing power and associated support equipment, all installed, setup and ready to go, and then deliver to where ever the customer needs it.

Sun’s ‘Project Blackbox’ is exactly that. Datacenters in shipping containers, ready to be delivered. Offered in various configurations, with one that will give you a computer with enough processing power to put you in the Top 200 list of supercomputers, this really is an awesome idea to get processing power delivered to where ever you need it.

Netbeans 5.5 has been officially released. The 5.5 version has been in beta for quite some time now, and even in beta form was extremely stable and usable.

I personally switched from Eclipse to Netbeans for my own development projects at home since I was frustrated with the Eclipse WTP approach for building web projects. Netbeans 5.5 really has it all from the groundup, without the need to go out and install plugins like WTP that give you the functionality that really should already be there in the base version.