Kev’s Blog – Page 461 – Kev's Development Toolbox

July 6, 2005

XBox 360 screen shots of Project Gotham Racing suspected as fake – because they look too real?

Last week, game studio Bizarre Creations released a couple of screenshots of their work in progress, Project Gotham Racing 3 for the upcoming XBox 360, and the press dismissed the images as actual screen shots, because they looked too real.

This week on their site Bizarre Creations have released a couple more in game screenshots, and confirmed that these pictures of New York buildings are real and are in game graphics. And to tell you the truth, they do look so real that I think we are truely in for a treat when the new next gen consoles (PS3 and XBox360) hit the streets.

July 2, 2005

PS3 to sell at a loss of $100 and may not include a harddrive?

Current rumors are indicating that the PS3 will shop for $399 when it ships, which will be at a loss of $100 per unit for Sony. If this article is correct, Merrill Lynch Japan Securities are indicating that Sony will lose $1.18bn dollars in the first year, on expected sales of 11 – 12 million units.

Also, previous rumors that the PS3 will ship with an integrated hard drive may not be correct, as Sony may choose to make the hard drive an option add on, in an attempt to keep the initial street price low.

June 28, 2005

JavaOne 2005 day 2: Annoucements

Sun have announced today that they have added Real Time processing support to the Java platform.

This opens up a range of possibilities and applications that we not possible with Java before, in embedded systems, where up until now other languages suych as C/C++ would have been used instead.

June 27, 2005

JavaOne 2005 day 1 annoucements

Sun have announced today at day 1 of JavaOne 2005 that they will be open sourcing the new release of Java System Application Server Platform 9.0, indicating their commitment to the open source community.

Also being offered as open source is Java ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), an implementation of the Java Business Integration spec, JSR208, to support SOA based architectures.

Other annoucements today:

Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE), 5.0, the successor to J2EE 1.4 api spec. Sun have also released their Application Server 9.0 based on the Java EE 5.0 spec, as the Reference Implementation).
I expect EJB3.0 with the long awaited and enhanced (as it should have been from day one) Entity Bean spec, based closely on Hibernate, will be part of the Java EE 5.0 platform.
A preview of new features of the Java SE 6.0 release expected next year, with new Windows ‘Longhorn’ look and feel, revamped XML stack, improved support for annotations, and dynamic scripting language support. All of these are currently avaialble as source code to be downloaded from java.net