Aasemoon'z Cluster

The VMKit project is an implementation of a JVM and CLI virtual machine (.Net is an implementation of the CLI). It translates Java bytecode and MSIL in the LLVM IR and uses the LLVM framework for optimizations and compilation. For garbage collection, it uses MMTk. You can get and build the source today.

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!

In this talk Microsoft Technical Fellow and C# Chief Architect Anders Hejlsberg gives an overview of the new features in C# 4.0, including dynamic typing, co- and contra-variance, named and optional parameters, and improved COM interoperability. Anders will also discuss some of the ideas that are envisioned for future versions of C#. This session is presented by Anders Hejlsberg during Microsoft DevDays 2010 in The Hague in The Netherlands.

Margus Veanes, a Researcher from the RiSE group at Microsoft Research, gives an overview of Rex, a tool that generates matching string from .NET regular expressions. Rex turns regular expressions into symbolic automatons, then gives them to a constraint solver to find matching strings.

As I noted last week, US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller told the US House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies that the follow-on to the notoriously failed $170 million Virtual Case File program called Sentinel would once again slip its schedule and cost targets. The latest cost estimate is in excess of $481 million with a total program slip now of some two years and counting.    Director Mueller told the House Committee that the FBI decided to suspend work on Sentinel in early March to correct some "minor" technical issues and make some design changes. These issues included, according to the New York Times, "slow response times, awkward display pages and screen print that was too small."

Visual Studio 2010 is a fairly important release of the developer tool of choice for writing Windows applications. One of the important advancements in the new update is how it enables developers and architects to better visualize the assets and dependencies through UML (Unified Modeling Language) diagrams. In this episode, Cameron Skinner gives us a quick overview of how Visual Studio 2010’s new UML visualization tool's design might help you with better understanding the overall structure of your applications.

The portal is about in and around the world of entertainment. Also information links to other places that cater for event listings and news from the demoscene. Demo groups and music artists have a contributional aspect to the making of this inspirational website. Some links will open a new browser window. Enjoy..sjt

William Bell may currently be stuck Over There, but he could soon be Over and Out. According reports, Leonard Nimoy is set to retire from acting – but when, and what does this mean for his part on Fringe? Head past the jump to find out. Warning, we feel that his retirement will be general knowledge, but the details of which are below the jump for a reason -  do not click link if you don’t want to know the details! In an interview with Toronto Sun, Leonard Nimoy revealed he will be bringing the curtain down on his 60 year acting career. Having just shot his final appearance as William Bell for the Fringe Season 2 finale, Nimoy says he plans to “go out on a positive note”.

Dr. Cormac Herley spends most of his time thinking about why and how computer users reject security advice (originating from both fellow humans and software security warning prompts). Recently, his paper So Long, and No Thanks for the Externalities: the Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users, received a fair amount of attention from the general media (Boston Globe, Tech Republic, NPR, etc). The paper also prompted our favorite software renegade, Dr. Erik Meijer, to send me an email simply asking "please set up and E2E with Cormac Herley". I did just that and the following conversation is what happened...

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.

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.

How's this for a wedge issue on a slow news week? When Xilinx announced earlier this year that it was changing one of its foundry suppliers from UMC to TSMC for the 28-nm node, it seemed like a blow to differentiation—at least from a process technology standpoint—between Xilinx and Altera, which has been using TSMC for years. But while Xilinx chose to go with TSMC's high-performance/low power process, Altera said this week it is going with TSMC's high-performance process. Altera maintains that customers in the high end communications equipment market are much more concerned about performance than power. Luanne Schirrmeister, senior director of product marketing at Altera, put it this way: "In communications infrastructure, nothing is battery powered. Everything is plugged into a wall."

Catalan researchers have discovered in the rubbish dump of Can Mata in the Vallès-Penedès basin (Catalonia) a new species of Pliopithecus primate, considered an extinct family of primitive Catarrhini primates (or "Old World monkeys"). The fragments of jaw and molars found in this large site demonstrate that Pliopithecus canmatensis belongs to this group, which includes the first Catarrhini that dispersed from Africa to Eurasia.

Carved in stone on a Civil War-era bridge -- a world-class feat of engineering that stands a couple miles northwest of Washington -- are the names of builders and officials of the day.

A key name, however, is missing. New research shows that Virginian Alfred R. Rives led the design and construction of the Cabin John Bridge. Also called the Union Arch Bridge, the aqueduct and roadway reaches 220 feet across Cabin John Creek in a single span -- the world's longest single-span masonry bridge for nearly 40 years and the nation's longest still today.

A new triple-rate (3G/HD/SD) audio/video clock generator from National Semiconductor Corp., eliminates the need for external clock conditioning in professional and broadcast video equipment. The LMH1983 produces all the major video and audio reference clocks required for a broad range of applications. The highly integrated LMH1983 also provides the industry’s lowest-output jitter (40 ps peak-to-peak), enabling Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) compliance using field-programmable gate array (FPGA) SerDes transceivers.