Washington Post have an interesting historical article listing in their opinion what were the worst PCs sold of all time – take a read here and see if your machine from hell made the list.
Microsoft announce end of life for J#
Microsoft have announced end of life for their flavor of Java, J#, which as far as I know was a further development of J++ supported on .NET’s Common Language Runtime platform.
Bits.Bytes have some further comments in their blog on ‘The Demise of J#’.
Microsoft have long been known to be extemely anti-Java, due to it’s platform neutrality and ability to ‘write-once, run anyway’ feature, which of course is a major threat to a company who makes it’s money from getting people to ‘lock in’ to one vendor and write all their applications for one specific operating system. Bearing this in mind it has always amazed me that Microsoft would invest time and money to developing their own flavor of Java and the Microsoft Java VM – although their ‘additions’ to the Java language in J++ and J#, namely adding native platform support to Windows libraries were clearly an attempt to retain developers and products and keep them tied to the Windows platform.
PS3 ‘Remote Play’ functionality to be added in firmware 1.6, shortly after European launch
The ‘Remote Play’ feature which will allow you to remotely access any media content (MP3s, photos, movies) on your PS3 from a WiFi connected PSP will be included in the 1.6 update of the PS3’s firmware. Phil Harrison of Sony confirmed this feature at a recent Playstation event in London.
Java Pet Store 2.0 – a Java EE5 based, Web 2.0 style, mashup example
If you’ve been around for a while then you’ll remember seeing or hearing about the ‘Java Pet Store’ example application that Sun put together to illustrate how to build a Java EE technology (then J2EE) together with best practice patterns.
The latest version of the Java Pet Store is now available on the java.sun.com website. It has been redesigned and built using latest Java EE5 technologies, for example JSF and Java Persistence API, but also incorporates many ‘Web 2.0’ typical features. For example, the web app now features extensive use of AJAX, RSS feeds, and also integrates with Google Maps (apps integrating in this style with other websites are commonly called a ‘mash-up’).