Kev's Development Toolbox

Looking for examples of well-designed AJAX applications on the web? Dan Grossman has a list of what he considers the current top 10 on his site (notice the obvious ones, Google GMail, Maps, and their Google Suggest are not on his list).

News has been quiet on the PS3 recently, especially since it was initially due to ship in Spring 2006. However, there are a couple of articles today confirming some additional features that may put the PS3 ahead of the XBox360, in terms of it’s support for media.

• BluRay DVD: we’ve known for some time that the PS3 will come with a BluRay DVD player – in HDTV terms (and data capacity) this already puts the PS3 in a different league from the XBox360. News today however hints that this may not be a significant cost to the console, as the Cell processor architecture will handle processing of this new media. Standalone players won’t have this luxury and so will need their own custom hardware, which will be a significant part of the cost for new players.
• Integration with the PSP: the PS3 and PSP are going to support Sony’s LocationFree functionality, which will allow users to remote control the PS3, download media (video and audio) content onto their PSP and take it with them on the go.
• This article today mentioned one feature that I have been waiting to hear: the PS3 will function as a DVR. Very cool. My Tivo is sounding sick and I’ve been waiting to hear this about the PS3 for a long time. This is one of the most exciting prospects for the PS3 – with this feature the console is far beyond just the gaming console of the XBox360.

The bad news – the article mentions that US PS3 developers are being told to prepare for a fall release…

VMWare is rumored to be planning on releasing one of their Virtualization products for free. The company is best known for VMWare Workstation, which allows you to install and concurrently run multiple Operating Systems on the same host machine. Woekstation is primarily aimed at endusers for thier desktop machines. The company has two other server based products GSX Server and ESX Server. GSX Server allows a datacenter to dynamically provision and run muliple server installations on one box, but still requires a host operating system to run on. THis is the product that VMWare are expected to give away. ESX Server is their high end product which operates at a lower level and does not require a host OS.

The biggest threat to VMWare is most likely the Open Source offering from XenSource, whose software is soon to be bundled with Linux Enterprise Server packages from RedHat and Suse Linux.