Kev’s Blog – Page 395 – Kev's Development Toolbox

February 25, 2006

PS3 – CNN Money says will still ship in 2006

Despite rumours flying that the PS3 will not ship in 2006 due to higher than expected component costs, and the fact that the copy protection scheme for BluRay disks has not yet been finalized, CNN Money is speculating that Sony are forced to ship this year, otherwise the loss in market share to Microsoft’s XBox360 may not be recoverable.

Although the article does not quote any sources, CNN Money is saying that the Spring 2006 launch in Japan is now very doubtful, but a Novemeber launch for the US is still planned.

February 24, 2006

Netbeans 5.0 presentation and demo

Haven’t seen Netbeans 5.0 yet? Javalobby have a presentation by Roman Strobl, a Netbeans Evangelist, giving an overview and demonstrating using features in the IDE.

Having lived in the Eclipse world using IBM based IDEs (WSAD and RAD) for the past 3 years, I must admit that Netbeans is looking more and more impressive, and is definitely worth a look. I have been put off from taking a look since using it briefly in 2000/2001 (I think) and I wasn’t very impressed at that time – the UI appeared too clunky to me and wasn’t very easy to use. Now it is looking very impressive – very slick and polished.

Think extending Eclipse with plugins is easy? Take a look at the demo on adding ‘actions’ to Netbeans… an incredibly simple wizard driven approach to add new functionality to Netbeans.

February 24, 2006

IDC report shows Windows servers outselling Unix-based servers?

I find this report very hard to believe and the results must be seriously skewed somehow, but IDC have a report called Server Watch, which apparently shows Windows server boxes outselling Unix boxes in 2005 (by $17.7bn to $17.5bn).

Not unexpectedly, in terms of web server software market share Apache still dominates the market running on more than 3 times as many web servers as Microsoft IIS, has has done so consistently since the mid 90’s with no signs of Microsoft even getting close. Although this server survey is just a web server survey, this makes me question the usefulness of IDC’s report of server sales – does this include various Linux flavours, and since being free, are they included in IDC’s report? Probably not. So in terms of sales Windows servers may be leading Unix, but in terms of installations I have no doubt that there are more Unix based server installations in the wild than there are Windows, and I doubt even Microsoft would argue with that.

February 23, 2006

Will Oracle kill MySQL?

With Oracle’s recent purchase of Sleepycat, developer of the Berkeley DB engine used with MySQL, and last year of InnoDB, MySQL is left without a transactional database engine. MySQL supports plugable engines for it’s file storage, and the two that support transactions and the typical ACID properties have both been bought by Oracle. The remaining engines such as MyISAM do not support transactions.

Long term what does this mean for MySQL? The MySQL user conference is in April this year, so it will be interesting to hear from the source what the long term strategy is for the product.