Kev's Development Toolbox

An attempt to build a supercomputer comparable in processing power to the fastest currently on the Top500 list from donated PCs fell short of the expected results.

The network of 700 PCs donated in the ‘Flash Mob’ experiment at the University of San Francisco was capable of 180 billion ops/sec – far from the the 35 trillion ops/sec capable by the Japanese Earth Simulator – currently the fastest computer in the world.

This blog (/dev/null) has a list of some news items that were going around yesterday that were April Fools – the JavaRanch one was pretty funny – there’s a link to the image that was on the page (saying Bill Gates had hacked the site 🙂

Sun has settled with Microsoft and has agreed to receive a payment of $1.95 billion from Microsoft to drop all antitrust and patent issues.

JSR 241 has been approved as the specification for the Groovy language.

Groovy is an OO language similar to features found in Ruby, Python and Smalltalk, that compiles to Java bytecode and can be executed on a regular Java VM.

The goal of Groovy is to produce a scripting language that can provide RAD development features and fill the gap in Java development, where sometimes a scripting language is needed to perform simple tasks.

The Groovy project page is here: http://groovy.codehaus.org/