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Jeffrey Richter has completed CLR via C#, Third Edition and the book is at the printer! We’ll post chapter excerpts when the book is available in a couple of weeks. Here is Jeffrey describing the book in his Introduction:

Dynamite Entertainment is set to launch its new series of Stargate comic books in 2010, starting with Vala Mal Doran #1.  The limited series is set in the SG-1 universe and features the sexy thief played on television by Claudia Black. Series writer Brandon Jerwa talks about the story in a new interview with Comic Book Resources. Jerwa, known for his work on G.I. Joe, Highlander and Battlestar Galactica, revealed that the story will feature a “heist” for which Vala assembles an Ocean’s 11-style group of cohorts. “Vala’s working with a crew of science fiction ne’er-do-wells that are all new to the franchise,” Jerwa told the site. “I’m going to keep the hard details under wraps for now, but let me give you some glimpses into my madness: Vala’s crew has a weirdo alien pilot, an officious robot, a tiger warrior, a midget assassin and a hot chick with a space monkey.” Look for the SG-1 team to be involved too, of course — including Jack O’Neill.

This article features an example chapter from a new *Hot-off-the-Press* book on FPGA Design that just recently hit the streets in August 2010. This chapter is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher – Springer. This book -- FPGA Design: Best Practices for Team-Based Design -- describes best practices for successful FPGA design. It is the result of the author’s meetings with hundreds of customers on the challenges facing each of their FPGA design teams. By gaining an understanding into their design environments, processes, what works and what does not work, key areas of concern in implementing system designs have been identified and a recommended design methodology to overcome these challenges has been developed.

Part 1 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, examines the ways to make rooms better for the purpose of critically listening to music.

Microsoft Surface is a prime example of how natural user interfaces can change the way we interact with computers. As designers and developers, one challenge with creating natural user interfaces for multi-touch devices such as Microsoft Surface or Windows 7 is getting around the old ways of thinking and old habits for interface design. Joshua Blake from InfoStrat decided to tackle this problem by creating SurfaceCube. SurfaceCube is a simple 3-D puzzle game for Microsoft Surface which he designed to illustrate as many as the Surface Interaction Guidelines as possible. I had the opportunity to sit down with Joshua and discuss SurfaceCube and the thinking behind some really interesting design decisions that makes it stand out as a natural user interface. We also briefly discuss Joshua’s upcoming book about natural user interfaces and multi-touch development, Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight, due Fall 2010 (since recording this interview, the book titled was updated). As a special offer to Channel 9 readers, you can use the following coupon to order the book through the Manning Early Access Program and read the chapters as Josh writes them. Coupon code channel9y is good for 35% off Multitouch on Windows: NUI Development with WPF and Silverlight when ordered through manning.com, and expires on April 24, 2010.

This book is intended for those who work in or provide components for industries that use digital signal processing (DSP). There is a wide variety of industries that utilize this technology. While the engineers who implement applications using DSP must be very familiar with the technology, there are many others who can benefit from a basic knowledge of its' fundamental principals, which is the goal of this book—to provide a basic tutorial on DSP.

Part 5 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics," fourth edition, begins with a brief look at noise-reducing headphones and "mosquito" units and ringtones, and then delves into the ins and outs of audio coding systems.

Now that Harry's the prime suspect in the killings he was charged to solve even his best friend doesn't trust him. And it could cost Lt. Murphy her life! Can Harry reach her in time?The Dresden Files: Storm Front rolls on with its hallmark mix of mystery and adventure that made Jim Butcher's novels a smash hit!

That age-old question, "where did life on Earth start?" now has a new answer. If the life between the mica sheets hypothesis is correct, life would have originated between sheets of mica that were layered like the pages in a book.

As many long time readers know, I am an enthusiast of the F# programming language.  I make no apologies for the fact that, if you are developing software on the .NET platform, F# is one of the better choices you can make for numerous reasons.  It is one of the reasons I proudly contributed as a co-author to the book, Professional F# 2.0, which is being published by Wrox in October. Some of the oft cited benefits of F# are that, to distill them quickly, it is good at doing intensely mathematical operations, it is built for parallelism, and it is good at helping define domain specific languages.  Those benefits are so often cited by speakers on the F# speaker circuit that they pretty much seem cliche to me at this point (note, yours truly is proud to call himself a member of said circuit, and often gives this talk!)  As great as these features are, there are a couple features, that in my more mundane F# experiences, seem to stand out as things that “save my ass”, for lack of a better phrase, more often than not.

The AVATAR script reveals some background about the AVATAR world including sex, drugs and suicide. But lots happens before the movie's events take place and producer Jon Landau says James Cameron wants to write a prequel novel: "Sigourney teaching at the schoolhouse. Jake on Earth, and his back-story and how he came here, and Tommy, Jake's brother." The possibilities are endless. Cameron could flesh out the Na'vi beyond the movie's "noble redskin" stereotypes and even show something besides evil white guys and noble blue guys, but could just as easily blast right-wing critics. Or explain how unobtainium really got its name. Or write himself in as a Na'vi character. The good news: Cameron hopes to have the book done by the end of the year.

The first textbook of its kind, Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach launches today, authored by Dr. David B. Kirk, NVIDIA Fellow and former chief scientist, and Dr. Wen-mei Hwu, who serves at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as Chair of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, co-director of the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center and principal investigator of the CUDA Center of Excellence. The textbook, which is 256 pages, is the first aimed at teaching advanced students and professionals the basic concepts of parallel programming and GPU architectures. Published by Morgan Kaufmann, it explores various techniques for constructing parallel programs and reviews numerous case studies. With conventional CPU-based computing no longer scaling in performance and the world’s computational challenges increasing in complexity, the need for massively parallel processing has never been greater. GPUs have hundreds of cores capable of delivering transformative performance increases across a wide range of computational challenges. The rise of these multi-core architectures has raised the need to teach advanced programmers a new and essential skill: how to program massively parallel processors.

If the Fringe Graphic Novel isn’t enough to satisfy your appetite for the Fringe extended universe, you might be interested in a new six-issue comic miniseries from Wildstorm Comics, titled Tales From The Fringe. The series is said to take place within the Fringe universe, meaning it will explore stories that we might not necessarily see on the show itself, but will add extra context to the Fringe mythology. As with the original comic series, it looks like each issue will contain a main story focusing on our main characters, and a looser second story. The first issue lands June 23rd, 2010, for $3.99. Head past the jump to read the official description from Wildstorm Comics.

The question of the relative roles of nanotechnology and AI in forging the shape of the future has been argued in techno-futurist circles for decades. Eric Drexler mentioned AI as a potentially disruptive technology in his seminal 1986 book Engines of Creation, and it was discussed at the very first Foresight conference 20 years ago

Part 2 of an excerpt from the book "Acoustics and Psychoacoustics", 4th edition, looks at acoustic and psychoacoustic principles applied to the clinical measurement of hearing ability, as well as procedures used in psychoacoustic testing.

May 13, 2011: Okay, try to keep up! The Transporter Team! Dark Matter Ship Designs! Movement on the Anime Front! Stargate: SG-1 Season 6 Memories! Notes on Network Notes! And I Answer Your Stargate Questions!

The Berkeley-based startup is developing exciting new technology that is truly the stuff of comic books and, formerly, of science fiction. Specifically, the company is making wearable, artifi­cially intelligent bionic devices that it calls “exoskeletons”. This has taken shape in two significant forms: eLEGS and HULC. Both of which you can see (as well as an interview with Berkeley Bionics CEO Eythor Bender) in the accompanying video.