Bluray won the HD format war!

Now it's official: Bluray finally won the HD disc format war over the HD-DVD format.
Just as expected I might say :-)

Today Toshiba announced that they will stop any further development of the media and players that support the HD-DVD format. However they will continue to support and repair the players and other gadgets already sold.

They say that they won't be doing any Bluray stuff themselves but rather focus on all the other areas that they can impact the adoption of High Definition technologies (such as TV sets etc.).

Congratulations to Sony for succeeding in pushing a new technology and helping Blueray to win over HD-DVD.

Microsoft stays silent on their future HD strategies.

Read the Toshiba announcement here:
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2008_02/pr1903.htm

Choose Bluray, not HD-DVD!

Today (about 3 hours ago) it was announced, that Warner Brothers - one of the early backers of HD DVD - have now chosen to exclusively back Bluray! :-)

Links to the announcement can be found here:
http://www.highdefforum.com/showthread.php?t=60942

This just might be the beginning of the end of the format war. Joy to all us owners of PS3/BD players!

Personally I'd like to see Dreamworks/Paramount move to Bluray as well. Movies like Shrek the Third should definitely be on Bluray.
You can sign a couple of online petitions here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/BD1/petition.html
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/gobacktobluray/

BTW: If you're interested in Bluray and a Java developer, you should read about BD-J:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BD-J
http://www.blueboard.com/bluray/

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Netbeans 6.0 final released

Hey - I've been too busy lately. But one of my colleagues hinted me about the announcement of the final version of Netbeans 6.0.
Good work guys!

For those of you who haven't used NB6 yet because you wanted to wait for the final version - go get it now! ;-)

Get it here:
http://sunmicro.vo.llnwd.net/c1/netbeans/6.0/final/

Read about all the glory features here:
http://www.netbeans.org/features/

N95 20.0.015 software update!

Nokia has released a new update for the software on the N95 - version 20.0.015.

It should increase the performance and stability of many major parts of the software (including Maps), and enhance the battery lifetime by about 30% while listening to music (from 9 to 12 hours of listening).

I haven't tried it out for myself yet, but I'll update this blog very soon when I have.

In the meantime you can fetch it for yourself here:
http://europe.nokia.com/A4579163

Specs on the update can be found here:
http://europe.nokia.com/A4577225

After updating you can install the new enhanced menu structure using this link:
http://nds1.nokia.com/files/support/nseries/phones/software/New_Menu_Structure.SIS

UPDATE: After installing it myself, I strongly recommend all you N95 users out there to do the same. The entire phone seems remarkably faster, in the menu, the applications (calendar, messaging, contacts) and in just about every corner of the feature set that I've visited tonight.. Go get it!

JRuby 1.1 beta 1 released

Last Friday JRuby 1.1 beta 1 was released:
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JRUBY/2007/11/02/JRuby+1.1b1+Released

The last time I tried to check out from trunk (about a week ago), I couldn't get it to work properly with the Rails support in Netbeans 6.0 beta 2, but I'll try it out again as soon as possible.

The performance is now better than MRI (the original C based Ruby implementation) in 14 out of 18 tests, and what's very important to many: It's even faster on Rails!

JRuby is now the most performant option for Rails deployments. w00t!

Congrats JRuby team! :-)

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More performance numbers on JRuby 1.1

I finally got the time to take a deeper look at JRuby 1.1 (trunk).
just checked it out, and ran a small performance test.

Immediately after I ran the exact same test for MRI.

These are the results, showing an approximate 4-10 times performance from JRuby over MRI!!!

E:\ror\jruby>jruby -J-server -O test/bench/bench_method_dispatch.rb
Control: 1m loops accessing a local variable 100 times
  0.422000   0.000000   0.422000 (  0.422000)
  0.282000   0.000000   0.282000 (  0.282000)
  0.141000   0.000000   0.141000 (  0.141000)
  0.156000   0.000000   0.156000 (  0.156000)
  0.156000   0.000000   0.156000 (  0.156000)
Test STI: 1m loops accessing a fixnum var and calling to_i 100 times
  3.781000   0.000000   3.781000 (  3.781000)
  3.625000   0.000000   3.625000 (  3.625000)
  3.125000   0.000000   3.125000 (  3.125000)
  3.110000   0.000000   3.110000 (  3.110000)
  3.172000   0.000000   3.172000 (  3.172000)
Test ruby method: 1m loops calling self's foo 100 times
 12.094000   0.000000  12.094000 ( 12.094000)
 11.859000   0.000000  11.859000 ( 11.859000)
 11.063000   0.000000  11.063000 ( 11.063000)
 10.890000   0.000000  10.890000 ( 10.890000)
 10.875000   0.000000  10.875000 ( 10.875000)

E:\ror\jruby>ruby test/bench/bench_method_dispatch.rb
Control: 1m loops accessing a local variable 100 times
  5.625000   0.000000   5.625000 (  5.672000)
  5.625000   0.000000   5.625000 (  5.625000)
  5.562000   0.000000   5.562000 (  5.562000)
  5.704000   0.000000   5.704000 (  5.719000)
  5.640000   0.000000   5.640000 (  5.703000)
Test STI: 1m loops accessing a fixnum var and calling to_i 100 times
 18.891000   0.000000  18.891000 ( 19.328000)
 18.937000   0.000000  18.937000 ( 19.344000)
 19.016000   0.000000  19.016000 ( 19.235000)
 19.375000   0.000000  19.375000 ( 20.125000)
 21.172000   0.000000  21.172000 ( 23.781000)
Test ruby method: 1m loops calling self's foo 100 times
 37.156000   0.000000  37.156000 ( 42.984000)
 39.141000   0.000000  39.141000 ( 55.672000)
 33.812000   0.000000  33.812000 ( 37.156000)
 33.047000   0.000000  33.047000 ( 34.032000)
 32.938000   0.016000  32.954000 ( 33.609000)

The Gimp 2.4 final

Yup, the final release of The Gimp version 2.4 is finally out! :-)

Windows users - get it here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=121075&package_id=250052&release_id=549292

Other users can find their version here:
http://www.gimp.org/

Netbeans 6.0 Beta 2

I was too busy last week, didn't have much time to blog about anything..

Now is the time to briefly mention the most important news from the week that passed.

The first one is Netbeans 6.0 beta 2. Since I haven't been using much of it's Java features recently, I decided to go with the Ruby-Only version.
And what a joy that is!

It's a tiny download - about 19 Megs.
It starts in a flash!!
It rocks..

Get it - now - here:
http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.0/beta2/

Gimp 2.4 released tomorrow

According to gimpusers.com, the Gimp 2.4 (final) will be released tomorrow:
http://www.gimpusers.com/news/2007-10-22/gimp-24-release-24-october.html

Joy to the (open source gfx) world!

Blazingly fast JRuby

Yesterday Charles Nutter did some extreme performance work on JRuby, making it outperform the MRI in most cases:
http://headius.blogspot.com/2007/10/performance-update.html

A lot of individual performance tests are shown here at Ola Binis blog. The list shows that JRuby outperforms MRI at a factor of more than 20 in some cases! In most cases the JRuby performance is a little faster (from a few percent to 2-3 times the performance). In a few cases MRI is still the fastest (ie. regexp):
http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2007/10/mystery-expos-on-jruby-performance.html

Unfortunately the performance on JRuby on Rails are a hog.. The latest findings from Ola Bini shows that this might be a result from very, very, very slow regexp-performance in JRuby, alongside symbols:
http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2007/10/jruby-discovery-number-one.html

Congratulations on the fantastic work on the general performance! I think this is a milestone to remember.

When the performance issues on JRuby on Rails is fixed, JRuby will surely be the Ruby implementation to use! I'll test it on SAP NetWeaver as soon as I get the chance.

technorati tags:jruby, performance, compiler, charles nutter, ola bini