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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!

Today sees the launch of Visual Studio 2010, at five launch events around the world, as announced by Bob Muglia, Jason Zander and S. Somasegar, and presented live today in Las Vegas.   Visual Studio 2010 includes the official version 2.0 of the F# language. As is our custom on the F# team, we also release a matching MSI and ZIP of F# 2.0 (for use with Visual Studio 2008 and as a standalone compiler on a range of platforms)   Today represents the culmination of 7 years of work on the language at Microsoft Research, and, more recently, the Microsoft Developer Division. I am immensely proud of what we’ve achieved. F# brings a productive functional and object-oriented programming language to .NET, extending the platform to new audiences in technical, algorithmic, data-rich, parallel and explorative domains, and its inclusion in Visual Studio 2010 represents a huge milestone for the language.   To help understand what we’re doing with F#, I’ve listed some of the common questions people have about the language below.  We thank everyone who has been involved in the production of F#, especially the many users who have given us feedback on the language!

Zipping through space at nearly a million miles per day, NASA's New Horizons probe is halfway to Pluto and just woke up for the first time in months to look around. An artist's concept of New Horizons. "Our spacecraft is way out in exotic territory, in the middle of nowhere," says Hal Weaver, New Horizons project scientist at Johns Hopkins University. "And we have a lot to do." It's the perfect opportunity to test New Horizon's instruments before the probe reaches Pluto in 2015. "We don't want to miss a single breathtaking moment during the Pluto encounter," he says. "So we're checking everything out now to make sure we're ship-shape and ready to go." The 9 weeks of testing commenced on May 25th. Mission controllers plan a thorough checkout and recalibration of all seven science instruments onboard. First up is LORRI, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, one of the largest interplanetary telescopes ever flown. "On July 14, 2015, the date of closest approach, we'll be able to distinguish objects on Pluto as small as a football field," says Weaver. "That's about 300 times better resolution than anything we have now."

Japan’s Explay Ltd recently announced that it has begun to ship its pico projector engines to developers around the world. The Explay Projector Engine is only 6.7 cubic centimeters in size and just 7mm thick (~1/4 of an inch). Despites its tiny dimensions, the pico projector generates 14 lumens laser light on just 1.3 Watts of power (1.8 with control circuits) and can produce images 7 to 70 inches in size. Resolution is a respectable 852×480 and with a laser based system it should stay in sharp focus over a wide range (20 to 200cm). While Explay has yet to announce which manufacturers will be using their projector they did say that they expect it to appear in devices as early as February of 2011. Looks like we’ll need to watch for it at CES. Explay plans on improving their projector engine further. They hope that the end of 2011 will see the arrival of a 25 lumens WXGA 1366×768 version. A member of the R&D team in Israel (part of XDM Ltd) shows off the 14 lumens pico projector in a prototype testing rig in the video below. Not a bad image for the world’s smallest laser projector.

In this session, Don McCrady discusses how C++ programmers can fully utilize multicore in their applications using the Concurrency Runtime (ConcRT), the Parallel Pattern Library (PPL), and the Asynchronous Agents Library that ship with Visual Studio 2010.

Oracle made a big noise in the Linux community yesterday by announcing its own spin on the Linux kernel on top if its so-called Unbreakable Linux. Oracle presented the announcement as offering a "modern" Linux kernel on top of its own clone of Red Hat. Underneath the hype, what's Oracle really offering, and what does it mean for Linux? For years, Oracle has ridden Red Hat's coattails and tried to present it as a good thing to its customers. Oracle rebrands Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), slaps its own support package on it, and lets Red Hat do all the heavy development lifting while it tries to poach Red Hat's customers. All perfectly legal according to the licenses that RHEL is shipped under, but a bit skeezy nonetheless. Or perhaps parasitic might be a better word.

Friday nights on Syfy Channel this past fall wasn’t the only place to get a fix of Stargate Universe. Each week MGM also released new kino webisodes — short scenes that complement the TV show. Some of these are general introductions to the ship and its (reluctant) new crew; others tie in directly to an episode, functioning as something of a deleted scene.

In case you missed them, below you can see all 22 kino webisodes released during the first half of the season! The kino webisodes were directed by Ivon Bartok (friend of the site), with a total of 30 installments to be released during SGU’s first season.

In this video we present four types of wall climbing robots that were developed in Dr. Amir Shapiros lab at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. The robots shown are: First, a magnetic climber that has compliant magnetic wheels and is capable to climb on ferromagnetic surfaces. This robot can be used for inspection of ship hull or bridges. Second, is a Snail inspired wall climbing robot capable of climbing on non metallic surfaces using hot melt glue. The robot secretes the adhesive at the front and peels off the track from the wall at the bottom leaving a trail behind just like the snail does. Third, is a robot that uses sticky wheels in order to attach itself to the wall. It simply has 3Ms sticky tape on the wheels. It can climb on smooth surfaces like glass. Fourth, is a four legged wall climbing robot for climbing on rough surfaces. It has 12 claws made of fishing hooks mounted on each footpad, and it climbs like cat or other rodents. For further information email: ashapiro@bgu.ac.il. See also: www.bgu.ac.il/~ashapiro and http://bgurobots.pbworks.com/

The Khronos™ Group today announced the release of the OpenGL® 4.0 specification; a significant update to the most widely adopted 2D and 3D graphics API (application programming interface) that is deployed on all major desktop operating systems.  OpenGL 4.0 brings the very latest in cross-platform graphics acceleration and functionality to personal computers and workstations and the OpenGL standard serves as the basis for OpenGL® ES, the graphics standard on virtually every shipping smart phone.   The OpenGL 4.0 specification has been defined by the OpenGL ARB (Architecture Review Board) working group at Khronos, and includes the GLSL 4.00 update to the OpenGL Shading language in order to enable developers to access the latest generation of GPU acceleration with significantly enhanced graphics quality, acceleration performance and programming flexibility.  This new release continues the rapid evolution of the royalty-free OpenGL standard to enable graphics developers to portably access cutting-edge GPU functionality across diverse operating systems and platforms. The full specification is available for immediate download at http://www.opengl.org/registry .

Chemicals giant Merck KGaA (Darmstadt, Germany) and Plastic Logic GmbH (Dresden, Germany), the developer of the Que e-reader, have announced plans to develop, test and commercialize novel lisicon-type organic semiconductors from Merck in Plastic Logic's displays. The introduction and production of the materials is planned for 2011. Having shown the Que e-reader at the Consumer Electronics Show in January Plastic Logic was originally expected to ship the e-reader in April 2010 but that launch has now slipped to June, it is reported. Merck recently invested in the expansion of its Chilworth Technical Center chemicals research site in Southampton, England, by adding laboratories to intensify and accelerate display material developments based on plastic electronics.