NEW TECHNOLOGIES
Web Page sponsor Oxley Developments
www.oxleygroup.com
23 Mar 07. A Scottish consortium is developing technology which is set to revolutionise underwater wireless communications, with £560,000 funding from the Department of Trade and Industry-led Technology Programme. Wireless Fibre Systems, will lead a £1.1m, two-year research project consortium with Aberdeen-based Tritech International Ltd and Insensys Ltd, to develop the wireless equipment which will be invaluable for oceanographic and environmental monitoring and increasing safety through improved communications for oil and gas industry workers. The ‘underwater radio’ works like a wireless modem and can be used to transmit data to and from unmanned machinery in deep sea and also help divers to ‘talk’ underwater, where previously only hand signals were possible.
Mar 07. The new V-Series 900 Digital from Premier Electronics is the fastest DVR in the market delivering 25 ips per channel at D1 resolution from up to 16 channels simultaneously. This is achieved by using MPEG-4 hardware compression cards, MPEG-4 streaming also means less hard disk and bandwidth usage. The V900 series allows up to 100 recorders to be built into a system allowing the system to be scaled from small to large coroprate users. The intuitive user interface allows easy and efficent operation. Real time or playback camera windows can easily be opened just by clicking an icon on a map or floor plan of the surveillance site. Media clips can be exported from even a multi-view playback window, the window can include both audio and video. Adaptive motion detection adjusts to continous movements in the camera view, such as trees, leaves, snow or rain and learns to filter out the from detected motion. The authenticity of the recordings is guaranteed with watermarking. Data is recorded on several hard disk units, modified RAID 0, to eliminiate loss of data in case of disk failure. The system includes bidirectional VoIP for door and gate applications. Software Watchdog monitors the system and sends e-mail notifications of system problems and/or activates a digital output. Support for PTZ camera control and external matrix control allows for further flexibility.
23 Mar 07. The Raytheon-developed X-Band Radar (XBR) portion of the Sea-Based X-Band Radar, or SBX, performed successfully in a flight test of the Ground Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the Ballistic Missile Defense System conducted by the Missile Defense Agency March 20, 2007.
22 Mar 07. Green Computer Era Is Coming, AMD Chief Says. The era of “green,” or energy-efficient, data centers and server computers is in the offing, said officials of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in a March 22 session of the Federal Office Systems Expo 2007. At the same time, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) official, Andrew Fanara, said he hopes an Energy Star specification for server computers will be available by this time next year. Fanara said the federal government “is the biggest buyer of IT [information technology] products and of energy in the world.” AMD, an Austin, Texas, manufacturer of microprocessors, has a substantial federal presence. During the last six quarters, the U.S. Air Force has acquired 100,000 PCs using AMD’s central processing unit (CPU) chips, according to the company’s federal business development manager. Keynote speaker Hector Ruiz, AMD chairman and chief executive, noted that the energy consumption of public and private data-center computing entities called “server farms” doubled between 2000 and 2005 to 45 billion kilowatt hours a year, at a cost of $2.7bn. Ruiz called a recent order from President George W. Bush to study power consumption by data centers “a landmark call to action for our community.” EPA’s Fanara said the use of data centers “are vitally critical to our economy,” but added that their “energy consumption is growing exponentially. “We cannot afford to expand these [data] serv