Longhorn is expected to be another leap forward in Windows technology, similar to the jump that Windows 95 was from Windows 3.1. The trouble is that many of the exciting new features to be included in Longhorn, for example WinFS (the next generation file storage system, possibly based ontop of a database engine), may not even see light of day in the first releases. New features have been gradually put on the backburner as the delivery schedule has been slipping, and what new features remain is anyone’s guess at this point.
Spring 1.2 rc1 released
RC1 of Spring 1.2 has been released.
Main new features are support for Hibernate 3.0, and annotation support for JDK1.5 to mark entities as ‘transactional’ (this sounds very similar to one of JBoss AOP’s features)
Next-gen XBox may not be backwardly compatible
Rumours have it that the next-gen XBox, possibly going to be called XBox360, will not be backwardly compatible with the current XBox. This may indicate Microsoft is taking a departure from the current ‘cheap PC in a box’ game platform, maybe heading towards something more radical. If they’re keeping tabs on Sony’s upcoming PS3 then they had better pull something pretty stellar out from up their sleeve, since the hype surrounding Sony’s Playstation 3 is leading us to believe their new box is going to be a supercomputer for the masses…
IBM Supercomputer sets new processing speed record
The Blue Gene/L is currently benchmarked at 135.3 trillion floating points per second. When completed, the computer is expected to have 64,000 IBM Power PC processors, and is expected to reach 360 teraflops.