Important new releases

I don't usually write about the releases : Who am I kidding? I only write about releases, it's been months since I wrote a useful Howto. I promise one as soon as I find some mythical free time.

Oracle has released an early version of Java 7. It promises some important features, most importantly native support for other languages on JVM. Speaking of which, O'Reilly has a short summary. Also from Oracle, new version of VirtualBox is mostly a bugfix release.

Samsung, as a part of Khronos group, is working to make GPUs useful (yep, I'm not a gamer, for me they're useless power drains most of the time). You've probably heard of OpenCL, a platform for running all-purpose software on GPUs or special-purpose accelerators (with a nice feature of falling back to CPU if nothing else is available). WebCL is a JavaScript binding for OpenCL that allows to use GPU computing in client-side web apps. Samsung not only released the WebCL implementation, it also did it under BSD license, meaning it's free to use for any purpose.


On more personal side, I got a couple of machines for an experimental XenServer pool, meaning I can test new features without jeopardizing production VMs. Shiny!