It’s the first major release of Java in five years; many additions have been made to the language, including Strings in switch statements and the try-with statement.

A great TED Talk that shows some of the earliest PC viruses, including the Brain virus whose authors Mikko Hypponen actually met in Pakistan.

Due to to the way that double buffering works, a v-sync enabled game that drops below 60 frames per second reverts to 30FPS, but id Software’s upcoming Rage intentionally allows screen tearing at the top of the screen when the frame rate drops slightly below the 60FPS threshold.

So what we do on the consoles, where we have this tight control, is we say, OK, you’re going 60FPS, it’s v-syncing, there are no tear lines. But if you miss by a tiny little bit, we’ll let it tear at the top of the screen and we adjust the resolutions dynamically to let it catch back up.

It’s a really novel idea, and one that id managed to convince vendors to implement:

We were able to convince all of the vendors to go ahead and implement that extension on Windows, so we’re now able to do that at 60FPS as long as you’ve got the horsepower. But if you get a hiccup, where it slows down a little bit, it reverts to tearing, which is exactly what we want for gameplay reasons.

You just have to love how id always strives to push graphical boundaries as far as possible.

Google’s SPDY is a web protocol designed as an improvement over HTTP.

Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site’s code to make pages load more quickly.

Mainstream adoption may prove difficult for Google; the protocol requires changes to both browsers and server software. Currently, the only browser to support SPDY is Google Chrome.

I recently took a university course where we worked in small teams to create a Windows Phone 7 application in five days. This post highlights some of the pros and cons mentioned about the SDK and related tools (pre-Mango update).

Pros

• The freedom to choose either C# or Visual Basic as a programming language
• The simultaneous use of Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to work on UI design independently of underlying application logic
• Two-way data bindings
• Automatic memory management
• Every single Windows Phone 7 handset adheres to a set of baseline requirements
• Windows Azure

Cons

• Known issues with the SDK, e.g. IsolatedStorage.ApplicationSettings
• APIs yet to be implemented, e.g. CivicAddressResolver.ResolveAddress
• No proper multitasking on handsets
• The Windows Phone emulator: no support for GPS, multi-touch gestures on normal displays etc.

The disadvantages are relatively minor and will likely be addressed in the Mango update. With my limited five-day experience, I’d say Microsoft is off to en encouraging start with its mobile phone initiative.

Not only informative, but also beautiful.