Techspectacular.com

Hewlett-Packard is hoping a little Voodoo will help it compete against Apple’s MacBook Air and similar ultra-portable notebooks.

On Tuesday, the computer giant unveiled the Voodoo Envy 133 at its Connecting Your World event in Berlin. The new Envy, part of the company’s line of Voodoo computers, boasts a height when closed of half an inch and a weight of less than 3.4 pounds. It features a 13.3-inch display and runs on Intel’s Centrino mobile platform.

Ready for an Art Gallery

By comparison, the Air’s screen is the same size, weighs in at a svelte three pounds, and offers a height-when-closed of three-quarters of an inch in the back and 0.16 inch in the front.

Another computer in the thinner-than-thou category is the Lenovo ThinkPad X300. It also has a 13.3-inch screen, uses an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, and is less than three pounds.

HP is emphasizing the new Voodoo’s style, as well as its thinness and technology. Mike Perkins, vice president and general manager of the Voodoo business unit, said the Voodoo systems “exemplify technology excellence while also looking like they would fit as well at an art gallery as on a desk.”

With its Instant-On feature, the Envy boasts a fast-loading system, which HP said provides “near-instant access to the Internet and Skype.” The Aura PowerConnect offers a one-to-one wireless connection between the notebook and an Ethernet connector located on the power supply.

The Envy also features Ethernet and Wi-Fi connectivity, a multi-touch touchpad, a replaceable battery, and a HDMI port. It includes an external eSATA optical disk drive and is expected to begin shipping this summer.

The Envy has a base price of $2,099, compared to the ThinkPad X300’s starting price of $2,500 and the Air’s $1,799.

‘Advanced Cooling’ System

Also at the Berlin event, HP announced the Voodoo Omen, a luxurious…

Linux vendor Red Hat announced Wednesday that it has settled patent-infringement claims filed against it by two companies. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The Raleigh, N.C.-based company said the settlement with Firestar Software and DataTern “protects Red Hat’s customers and the open-source community” from similar suits, as well as setting a precedent “in the breadth of protection for the open-source community.”

Covers Customers and Community

Rob Tiller, vice president and assistant general counsel at Red Hat, added that a patent settlement usually involves a company “getting safety for itself,” but his company wanted broad provisions to cover its customers and the open-source community.

In 2006, Firestar sued Red Hat in federal court in the Eastern District of Texas. The lawsuit contended that Hibernate, a JBoss product, infringed its patent related to a method for interfacing an object-oriented software application with a relational database. JBoss is owned by Red Hat, and Red Hat denied the claims.

As the lawsuit proceeded, Red Hat said that its products had not infringed the patent and that, at any rate, the patent was invalid. At one point, the patent was assigned by Firestar to DataTern, which became a party to the suit.

Firestar products include EdgeNode, a platform for managing business processes between companies. DataTern’s products include a data-services runtime engine called ObjectSpark that controls data between the logical processing layer in an application and the data sources.

The products covered in the settlement include all software distributed under the Red Hat brands, in addition to predecessor versions, derivative works, and combined products.

Another Patent Suit

Software patents in general have been the source of more than a little controversy in the software industry. Red Hat said its position has been that software patents impede innovation and conflict with open-source development and distribution.

Red Hat is not out of the patent-litigation woods yet. It is…

Three of the largest Internet service providers — Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint — have agreed to block access to newsgroups and Web sites that serve up child porn, New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced Tuesday.

Cuomo said, “The pervasiveness of child pornography on the Internet is horrific and it needs to be stopped. We are attacking this problem by working with Internet service providers to ensure they do not play host to this immoral business.” He said the companies have “stepped up today to embrace a new standard of responsibility, which should serve as a model for the entire industry.”

The attorney general’s office conducted a months-long investigation into child porn on the Internet and discovered 88 Usenet newsgroups containing 11,390 “sexually lewd” photos of prepubescent children, which in some cases depicted children being raped and sexual activity with animals.

Hashing Child Porn

Investigators developed a system for identifying digital child pornography. Taking advantage of the hash values that every online image contains, investigators built a library of hash values for known child-porn images. The tool allowed the team to quickly search through thousands of images at a time and quickly identify which ISPs were providing access to the images.

The ISPs have also agreed to block Web sites listed by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as containing child pornography. NCMEC maintains an updated list of illegal sites.

Verizon, Time Warner Cable and Sprint also vowed to created new systems to improve their responses to user complaints about child pornography and to provide a combined $1.125 million to fight child porn.

‘Major Step Forward’

Ernie Allen, chief executive of NCMEC, called the agreement a “major step forward” in combating child pornography. Cuomo’s system “cuts online child porn off at the source and stops it from spreading across the…

Pickersgill-Kaye Ltd, a member of the Pickersgill-Kaye Group, is a manufacturer and supplier of door locks for rail vehicles.

LOCKING PRODUCTS FOR RAILWAY APPLICATIONS

Carriage Door Slam Locks, Striking Plates and Handles
Cab Door Locks
Internal Door Locks for Toilet, Cab/Saloon, Parcel Areas, Inter Car Connecting Doors, Emergency Cupboards and Budget Locks
Passenger Emergency Systems - Passenger Emergency Alarm Handles (Electric and Pneumatic), Emergency Talkback Units, Remote Public Address Units, Internal/External Door Releases (Electric and Pneumatic)
Water Control Diaphragm and Foot Valves

COMPANY PROFILE

Pickersgill-Kaye was formed in 1855 by Joseph Kaye as a small engineering concern involved primarily with the manufacture of oil cans. During the latter part of the 19th century the company continued to diversify and eventually specialised in the design and manufacture of Kaye’s patent door locks supplying the architectural and railway industries throughout the United Kingdom.

These days our primary business focus is the UK railway industry with our biggest customer being Railpart, the UK’s railway vehicle component supplier. Our product range has continued to grow and, as well as door locks, we now design and manufacture:

Complete Door Systems (e.g. the interior door for the Strasbourg Tram)
Electro-Mechanical Assemblies for Audio Communication Systems (e.g. Emergency Talkback Units and Passenger Alarm Handles)
Electro-Mechanical/Pneumatic Assemblies for Train Braking Systems (e.g. Passenger Communication Units)
LED Indicator Lights

Other capabilities of the Pickersgill group of companies include: Metal Finishing and Painting Services, Non-Ferrous Foundry (lost wax and shell moulding), Repair and Overhaul Facilities, engineering and problem solving and reliability and performance improvements.

RECENT PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Pickersgill Kaye’s most recent products for the railway industry include:

LED Cant Rail Light
LED Indicators
Secondary Locking System
Strasbourg Tram Cab Door Equipment
Passenger Emergency Alarm/Talkback Units

PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

Pickersgill-Kaye’s product development benefits from all the latest design tools including CAD, Solid Modelling and Casting Solidification Simulation. We also specialise in reliability studies covering fault trees, failure mode analysis, failure mode effect criticality analysis and maintainability

The company also offers Project Management, Project Engineering and Simultaneous Engineering services.

FOUNDRY

Processes - Lost Wax Investment Casting. Shell Moulding and Fettling / Finishing
Materials - Copper Based Alloys (AB1, HTB1, DCB3), Aluminium Alloys (LM4, LM5, LM6, LM25, LM31) and Zinc Alloys (ZA5)
Capability - Casting sizes from 50g up to 12kg, wax sizes up to 150 x 200 x 150mm, shell mould sizes up to 350 x 550 x 150mm

QUALITY

Pickersgill-Kaye Ltd operates an ISO 9002 Approved Quality Management system offering Confirmation of Reliability and Quality Culture-Operator Responsibility.

CUSTOMERS

The company’s extensive list of railway customers includes ABB Daimler-Benz Transportation Limited, ALSTOM Train Services Limited, Bombardier Prorail Limited, Brush Traction Limited, Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail), Midland Main Line Limited, National Railway Supplies Limited, SAB WABCO Davies & Metcalfe Products Limited, Northern Ireland Railways Company Limited and Westinghouse Brakes Limited, amongst others.

Pickersgill-Kaye also work with railway technical consultants Interfleet Technology, The Engineering Link Limited and WS Atkins Rail Limited. Pickersgill-Kaye also supply components directly to the Railway Train Operating Companies.

Memotec’s CX platform features a wide range of access (RAN) and core network optimization solutions for GSM cellular networks based on voice and data bandwidth compression. It includes link optimization solutions for Abis interface (BTS to BSC links), A and Ater interface (BSC to MSC links), and E interface (MSC to MSC and MSC to PSTN telephony links).

With more than 400 links already deployed and multiple GSM networks in operation in Africa and Asia, Memotec offers proven and reliable solutions to cellular operators for transmission cost reduction.

The Memotec CX can accommodate any transmission technology and network protocol (TDM, Frame-Relay, ATM, IP), providing GSM 2G / 2.5G mobile operators a migration path to 3G (CDMA, UMTS) while delivering substantial cost savings to mobile operators using offnet transmission facilities, and in particular satellite links.

THE MEMOTEC CX IP-RAN (ABIS) GATEWAY AND BANDWIDTH COMPRESSION SOLUTION

The Memotec CX is a unique RAN (Abis) packet gateway solution which converts a 2G RAN or 2.5G GERAN into an IP-RAN, while providing bandwidth optimization. The technology is based on packetization of the TDM Abis interface and suppression of empty time slots or non-value information (idle frames, silence frames) in each voice channel. Since no transcoding is involved, the Abis payload and the voice quality is preserved.

The CX sits at the Abis interface, at each end of the transmission link between the BTS and the BSC, connecting transparently the BTS to the transmission device (e.g. satellite modem) at the remote end, and to the BSC at the other end, while providing the interface and protocol adaptation to the transmission facility (TDM, Frame-Relay, ATM or IP).

The CX delivers up to 50% bandwidth savings at the Abis interface when compared to traditional TDM Drop and Insert, and has been tested and validated with all the major GSM vendors. The data compression capability will also help keep transmission backhaul costs under control as operators introduce 2.5G services (GPRS or EDGE).

EXTENDING CELLULAR REACH WITH MEMOTEC ABISXTENDER™

The Memotec AbisXtender™ is a bundled solution designed to enable mobile operators to extend cellular services to “out of coverage” areas.

The Memotec AbisXtender™ enables operators to cost efficiently deploy BTSs in remote or low-density areas with the highest reliability, increasing their revenue stream and service coverage. The solution combines a state-of-the-art SCPC modem from Comtech EFDATA with the Memotec CX IP-RAN Gateway bandwidth optimization solution.

Unlike conventional terrestrial deployment, with AbisXtender™ one BSS cluster can span an entire region or country, yielding additional cost savings by centralizing BSCs to the MSC core and eliminating costly backbone transmission links.

With AbisXtender™, cellular operators can lower by 40% the minimum number of subscribers required for sustaining profitable service deployment, and save up to 70% on the satellite transponder resources when compared to conventional satellite backhaul solutions for a BSS cluster of 20 remote sites or more.

MEMOTEC CELLULAR DCME SOLUTIONS FOR THE NETWORK CORE

Memotec delivers a unique and scalable DCME solution which addresses the specific needs of evolving cellular core backbone. First, the Memotec DCME solution grooms and multiplexes Ater or A/E voice trunks with service data (IT, IN) and user data (EDGE / GPRS) data traffic. Second, it provides a flexible adaptation to data-centric backbone infrastructure (ATM or IP).

Memotec’s DCME solution also guarantees superior toll-grade quality 16:1 voice compression and delivers bandwidth compression for SS7 traffic (4:1) as well as for data traffic at the Gb or Gn interface.

Last but not least, Memotec’s Transcoder Free Operation is a key component in making the DCME solution ideal for deploying services over satellite in remote areas where multiple hops are required, avoiding multiple voice compression / decompression cycles and therefore preserving voice quality.