Q: Who will win the console wars? A: IBM, as it's producing MS's Xbox 360, Sony's PS3 and Nintendo's Gekko processors. Of course, this is far from where the money will be made in the console business but it sure is a notable fact. Cell review one , two . Xenon review one , two .
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Well the final match of the Champions League just concluded with a tie 3-3 so in the end Liverpool won on penalties and became the new champion. What can I say, having lost both the Champions League and the A-Series Milan has been through a very rough year. Perhaps lady luck wants to tell Berlusca something :)
Groove networks has been bought by Microsoft. Their cool project management system will certainly find interesting use in the MS Office space especially if they decide to integrate it with the new Office Communicator and MS Project. However I do wish there would be a free alternative to this kind of integration in project management. Once again MS has found a fresh cool company and absorbed it.
Yesterday I was at the cinema to see Episode III of the Star Wars -ilogy. All in all I liked it very much. It left that feeling of a classic, Lucas knows his stuff. However what I kind of disliked was the repetitive moving from scene to scene. Now I can understand the wish to put everything in a reasonable time format and the hard work needed to do every single one of these sets but it still left the impression of too tightly packed feature. Also there was a scene that reminded me of horror movies in the 1920-ies, perhaps it could have been done better.
While attending class on digital electronics, I saw some slides that mentioned HighK , materials with a high dielectric constant which will bring a lot of benefits to power usage and reduce gate leakage. As I saw this information in the context of Intel presentations I found odd this news from about a month ago that Intel has dropped that line of action. Why?
Some time ago I saw the flags library donated by the sodipodi users. As I didn't know svg and I was in a markup fase (did some xslt's and xml) I decided to try drawing the flag of the Republic of Macedonia using only svg tags. That means no useless tags added by an editor and I followed the guidelines from FOTW . As the sodipodi developers didn't include my work yet (there is a flag but it has wrong proportions and bad color), I'm putting my work here in hope that someone will find it usefull. I'm fully releasing it in the public domain.
Jorge Cortell , a lecturer on a well known Spanish University had to resign because of pressures by the music business cartel. I fear the day corporations will have the influence here in Europe as they do in the US. It's a sign of our times that we are getting closer to the US model all of the time and we have to put effort to sabotage this degeneration of a healthy Democracy. We need corporations but they should be scrupulously monitored and limited in the way they can influence our political systems and or social environment as happened in this case.
Lately there's a bit of buzz on 'improving' the SysV init system. For instance Apple has introduced the launchd with few goodies like launching processes in parallel, writing configuration in xml (great for tools), responding to system events (as I understood it) and also ways to query it and act accordingly. Here is a better review . I think that Apple has released launchd as open source though it's to be seen whether it's GPL compatible (I'm a bit skeptic on Apple's opening to open source as they are notoriously closed company). Solaris is also going open source so they are to going to introduce interesting ideas in this area as well. However what I really wanted to blog about was initng . It's a new small project that is having some big momentum these couple of days. The bootchart graphs show some really great speed improvements that can be obtained by launching daemons in parallel and let's hope something useful will come out. One side note tho...
Going crazy these days, having a bunch of lessons, things to do, people to see. And also to test the M4 of eclipse's WTP and the new 4.1RC from netbeans . I also bought a used Sony Ericsson T610 a couple of weeks ago and I finally started to keep a electronic agenda in combination with Outlook and a Bluetooth dongle that I got yesterday. I feel kind of happy but also overwhelmed to see how much of the time I'm doing things. I also have a feeling that my relationship is suffering so I'll have to make a stronger effort as far as quality time spending together.
I wanted to check out Amazon's search engine A9 and I actually found a link to one of my posts on TabletPC. In hope that someone will read this I'll make my second wish. I wish that the TabletPC kit can be installed on a "normal" PC with a graphic tablet (I installed the SDK, but it's not the whole experience and the lines are not smooth). I have a low budget Wacom tablet and a except from having tilt recognition has excellent pressure sensitivity and rather good precision. I have a news for the corporate folks, drawing with tablet is great, taking notes also, but hey, if you are one of the 1,3 billion Chinese the tablet just might be the best input device they have ever seen. So don't consider this technology to be for the top 5% penetration but something that potentially has HUGE market. A good laptop (without tablet support) in this moment starts around 1200€, I bought my tablet for 69€ a year and a half ago. So... go figure.
Jayson Falkner's Servlets and JavaServer Pages and Hans Bergsten's JavaServer Pages are my favorite J2EE books. They are rather straightforward, and go from the simplest concepts to rather good implementations. Some advanced issues are not covered but they are good anyway. Falkner's book can be downloaded for free if you are a member of theserverside but there is an alternative .
I'm adding this to my agenda. When the time traveling device is invented I'll have to go to the time traveler convention . May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC) East Campus Courtyard, MIT 42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W (42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees) Mental note: Earth is not static in space, we better take into account the expanding of space, the revolving of Earth around the Sun, Earth around its axis and other possible noise.