Category: Kev’s Blog

Hot on the heels of Google’s launch of their online spreadsheet web-app that has already gained a lot of attention in the press, Microsoft have described further details of their plans for ‘Windows Live’.

Windows Live is Microsoft’s latest attempt to gain traction in the web-application space, and their plans to sell online access to applications as an alternative to users purchasing and installing software onto their PCs.

This is not their first attempt – their previous attempt was the ‘Hailstorm’ initiative which came and went without hardly anyone noticing back in 2001. Were they too early with this approach before? Possibly. Then again, maybe customers are still not ready for subscription based online services. Especially if someone like Google is giving away a killer online spreadsheet – why would I pay to ‘rent’ one from Microsoft?

This almost sounds too familiar – are they being beaten at their own game? Remember when Microsoft starting giving away free copies of Internet Explorer? Look what this did for Netscape.

One interesting note in this article – the comment about deploying apps to a ‘rich client’ – “Microsoft seek to make it easier to write mashup applications that run on a “rich client,” or a full-featured Windows PC, rather than through a browser” – given the current trend to try and deploy rich client applications via the browser, this could be a step in the right direction – to offer a platform with support for rich client application deployment, but without the curent limitations of the browser (as we know it today)?

1.0 of the Seam framework has been released. The web framework integrates JSF with EJB3.0 and business rules using jBPM.

The framework also addresses the ‘multiple browser window’ problem with the concept of ‘conversations’. This problem is often seen but ignored in many web apps where if the user opens up another browser window with a Ctrl-N, the new window is in the same session. Unless the app handles this, the user can experience issues when attempting to create and/or update data from the tow or more windows.

This website has a good demo of the UML design capabilities of Netbeans 5.5 beta. The demo walks you through creating a class diagram, and also shows code generation from the model.

Rumours this week are that production yields for the 3.5GHz Cell processor for the PS3 are not high enough, and that the processor speed is likely to be reduced to 2.8GHz for the final shipping PS3s later this year in November. The same article mentions that they may be having cooling issues with the hardware crammed into a case that’s too small, so expect to see an external PSU brick instead of an internal unit.

Sony may also have faced issues ensuring backwards compatibility with PS2 and PS One support running in software emulation, so rumours last week suggested that the initial versions of the PS3 will come including the PS2 chipset in the box. Wow, thats quite amazing and a surprise. The PS2 emulates the original Playstation in software running on the one of it’s chips that’s not even the main CPU (I can’t remember which, but I think it’s the I/O controller chip).