ipjohnson - Slashdot User

Submission + - Blue Laser Costs Coming Down; Could PS3 Price Cut

Submitted by

njkid1

on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:35PM

njkid1 writes: "Sony is ramping up blue laser diode capacity for its Blu-ray players much faster than we anticipated, and the costs are coming down. A price drop on the PS3 this year is starting to seem more and more likely. Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter tells GameDaily BIZ that PS3 could cost 100 dollars less by mid-year. The Blu-ray drive in the PlayStation 3 has been a source of much contention among industry observers. The inclusion of Blu-ray in the PS3 is one of the main reasons the console is being sold for $600. But as with any product, economies of scale should help to eventually bring costs down. http://biz.gamedaily.com/industry/feature/?id=1593 1&ncid=AOLGAM000500000000025"

Submission + - Controlling Microsoft Office from Java, seamlessly

Submitted by sbohmann on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:34PM

sbohmann writes: Widely ignored, but still fully functional, I recently discovered IBM / Rational's good old Java-COM-bridge. I had long been searching for a way to control Microsoft Office and other Windows Applications from Java, and it turned out that with just minimal effort, doing that is not much more sophisticated than doing it from .Net, because unlike with other solutions, Java classes and packages are created that reflect the bridged COM API, so there is no need to pass method and parameter names as strings.

I was immediately able to start MS Word, create a new document, fill it with text and tables and save it to a file, all from Java code. And, unlike some proprietary tools, this Java-COM-bridge seems to be free to use and integrates excellently with recent versions of Eclipse, despite its age.

Does this support the idea of doing virtually anything in Java, including Desktop Applications, even with COM support?

Feed Head researchers turn their attention to beer (pheedo.com)

From feed by nsfeed on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:33PM

Brewers should get a new level of control over their beer heads thanks to the mathematics of bubbles

Feed HDTV reception and network streaming in a box (slashdot.org)

From feed by lcfeed on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:33PM

I have been a TiVo owner since almost day one; seven years with a Series 1 box. But TiVo's elimination of lifetime subscriptions has made me plan on migrating to a do-it-yourself DVR, probably running MythTV. As I spec out hardware, I am...

Feed Apple's iPod Shuffle: the next great appetizer? (engadget.com)

From feed by engfeed on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:32PM

Filed under: Portable Audio

Although this won't go down as the first restaurant to mix in a little iPod action with the meal, it's fairly safe to say that Fat Duck chef Heston Blumenthal has melded portable audio with dining like no other. Apparently, the culinary guru "wanted to experiment with using sound to enhance a dining experience," which landed a person with a plate full of silver electronics and tangled white cord to compliment the rest of the Sound of the Sea dish. Aside from the food itself, the iPod was pre-loaded with "soothing sounds of the sea breeze and waves gently caressing the seashore," presumably to further enhance the eating experience. Still, we can't really envision how listening to sounds related to our meal would make things more appetizing -- you know, unless deafening moos just jazz up your taste buds when rolling by a burger joint.

[Via Kottke]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Comment Re:Typical virtualization workload? (Score 2, Informative) 111

by Sunil_Saxena on Thursday March 15, 2007 @04:20PM (#18367157) Attached to: Virtualization in the Data Center

You are asking very good questions:)

vConsolidate definition was based on market data that outlined what application types are being consolidated in a data center. Market data here means information gathered from market research (e.g., IDC), end-customer feedback and various OEMs / ISVs.

We have heard that there are two consolidation usages. One you can call it to be homogenous application consolidation (e.g., file servers) and the other one to be heterogeneous application consolidation, and vConsolidate uses both. The advantage of homogenous application consolidation is from a manageability perspective, where all the applications exhibit the same behavior and the IT administrator has a better understanding of how to manage the environment. vConsolidate use case represents SMB (Small-Medium-Business) environments where they can gather their applications on a few machines along with the environments. Once the applications are consolidated, they employ VM migration technology for load balancing. With VM migration, the VMs are migrating around the data center where at any one instance you will have a mixture of VMs on a physical platform. Market data shows this is a growing trend in the data center.

Looks like you are aligning with our stated advantages of consolidation mentioned above. Your use case is Test and Development which is also another consolidation usage. We believe that the future would be heterogeneous application consolidation where folks will become 'comfortable' with the notion of mixed workloads. This is the value of vConsolidate, where we can address the concerns (e.g., QOS). BTW, all the VMM vendors are supporting (or planning to support) this migration technology.

Duke Nukem Forever Reviewed 80

Posted by CowboyNeal on Saturday April 01, 2006 @01:23PM from the future-of-gaming dept.

Aranth writes "The staff at Ars Technica has gotten its hands on a demo of Duke Nukem Forever, and has written up a review. It seems the game is near ready for release! As the article explains, the reason it has taken so long to develop is because this is the first real Web 3.0 application- it has 'been rewritten as an Ajax application written using the Ruby on Rails framework' and runs in any web browser, although some seem to have difficulties." Sadly, the game looks to be deficient in the area of ponies. :(((( But, it's playable from my hiptop!! :))))

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