Kev's Development Toolbox

People wanting to be among the first to pick up a Sony PSP on its release day today (March 24th, 2005), camped out overnight in San Francisco at the Metreon Center to be first in line at 12:01am when the store opened it’s doors.

News.com has an article and pictures of the crowd waiting in the rain last night.

A Sun research group called Barcelona have been working on a prototype of a multitasking version of the Virtual Machine.

A user can today run multiple processes each one in it’s own running VM instance, but this substantially duplicates loading of reseources, libraries, and does not effectively use resources on the host machine.

The prototype from the Sun lab allows multiple Java apps to be executed concurrently within the same VM, each process sharing resources with each other, where possible, and controlled by the VM itself.

NASA have built a suite of applications using the Eclipse Rich Client platform for the Mars Rover programme.

Also of interest is that for the same programme they are using Hibernate with PostgreSQL.

Sony’s upcoming new entry into the handheld gaming market is coming this week, the PSP.

Aiming at the older 20’s to 30’s age range, the new gadget is a multimedia combination of game platform, digital music player, and handheld video player. This is also possibly giving an indication of where Sony will be heading with soon to come Playstation 3, which rumour has it will be released in 2 versions – possibly a pure game platform, and also possibly as a home media server edition.