technology

CNET: "The Blu-ray Disc Association, the standards body for the format, has decided it will adopt Java for the interactivity standards," said Yasushi Nishimura, director of Panasonic's Research and Development Company of America, speaking at Sun's JavaOne trade show here. "This means that all Blu-ray Disc player devices will be shipped equipped with Java." Oh dear. 30 second boot time. Dropped frames from Java using too much resources. Higher costs to deal with Java's huge memory needs....

Well I thought it was time for a new mouse. Well in truth I buggered my old IntelliMouse Explorer 1.1 up, by trying to get some dirt out of the lens with a screw driver (it was all I had to hand at the time) which crippled it, it become very picky over what surfaces it worked well on (the top-right corner of my mouse pad basically). Note to self, don't jam screw drivers or hard objects onto the lens of optical mice....

Well it's about time, being stuck on the old original ADSL product myself like so many other early adopters and trialists, we had no upgrade path to higher speeds, without a couple of weeks of downtime. Yes we love the good old engineer install. Well all that changed a few hours ago when Demon announced they were going to move everybody up to 2Mbps or whatever their phone line supported. Although it's primarily a BT thing it's nice that Demon have finally announced it (most ISPs did months ago)....

"From the start, we intended to make not just a game machine for kids, but a computer for entertainment that adults throughout the world could enjoy, other companies may talk of game machines, but we've always referred to 'computer entertainment,' even in our press materials. It's entertainment and also a computer. That's what's important." Your average washing machine is a "computer" stop trying to sound important. "This time, Microsoft has stated clearly that it is going after PlayStation....

Apple are still advertising their dual 2.0Ghz PowerPC chip as being faster then a 3.6Ghz Pentium 4. I wonder how their legions of fanboys who claimed this to be the truth, that PowerPC wiped the floor with x86, will react at the news that they were wrong all along, and that we were right? Apple are switching to Intel, time for them to launch a campaign getting their Mac users to switch back....

As about 50 people have pointed out to me, some of the websites aren't working. That's correct the two name servers that handle the effected sites ns1.ukdnsservers.co.uk and ns2.ukdnsservers.co.uk are not behaving. As far as I can tell they've been down for about an hour. They had better be up soon.

Just the other day I came across Ryan Dawson's entry on his blog, he talks about the Start Menu and how it could be improved in Longhorn. When I got my Tablet PC it really hit me, running at 1400x1050 resolution really made it hit home - the Start Menu needs to be more prominent. Coming across his entry got me thinking more. I was a huge fan of the Windows XP Start Menu, sure a lot of people hated it, but I loved the quick access it can give to programs and links to My Music etc....

A pair of unpatched vulnerabilities in Mozilla's Firefox Web browser -- rated as "extremely critical" by one security firm -- could allow an attacker to take control of a PC simply by getting a user to visit a malicious Web site. Not good, and what's worse this exploit is actually out on the net today. This would mean the forth critical security patch for Firefox this year, when 1.0.4 is released, in comparison IE has only had 2, both of which were promptly fixed....

Got it yesterday, fantastic absolutely fantastic! Full review coming later. The Tablet PC is future of computing.

Following up to the problems with Laptops Direct mentioned in my previous entry I spoke to Steve who said the money would be back into my account within 2 to 3 days, this was on Thursday the 14th. It's still not appeared so that's still trying to be sorted. It is currently in stock. However I can't actually buy it until the money re-appears. I also see no mention of a 2Ghz version anywhere, what the hell is going on with that?...