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26 Mar 07. India successfully test-fired a short-range air-to-air missile yesterday, the defence department said. The Defence Research Development Organisation (DRDO), the agency responsible for carrying out missile tests, said a 12ft solid-fuel propelled indigenous missile, Astra, was launched off the coast of eastern state of Orissa. The test of the Astra missile was due on Monday, but it was brought forward after a scheduled test of nuclear-capable ballistic missile, Dhanush, could not take place due to technical problems. “We made use of the time today and the Astra test was successful,” a DRDO official told Reuters. “It will be inducted in the Indian Air Force after a few more routine tests.” Astra can be fitted into fighter aircrafts, has a range of 25km and can jam ground radar signals, officials added.DRDO officials said they would conduct the first test of the Dhanush next week, along with several other missiles. Dhanush is estimated to have a range of 250km. (Source: Gulf Times/Google)
27 Mar 07. IPv6 transition: All deliberate speed. IPv6 is “absolutely essential” to the Defense Department, Maj. Gen. Dennis Moran told an audience at
the U.S. IPv6 Summit in Reston, Va. But the Army’s vice director of command, control, communications and computers spent much of his keynote address Tuesday managing expectations about the department’s use of the next generation of Internet Protocols. “We’re a conservative organization,” Moran said. “The DOD has a huge challenge in how we implement them.” DOD in 2003 set a goal for making its network backbones IPv6 capable by 2008. Two years later, the Office of Management and Budget set the same goal for civilian agencies. Defense is on target to meet that deadline, Moran said, but having the ability to carry IPv6 packets on a network is a separate matter from employing IPv6 applications. The department is moving cautiously with new applications using the capabilities of the new protocols. Need, money and the availability of a killer app will determine how fast new functionality is rolled out. This caution on the implementation of the protocols was not what U.S. IPv6 Summit chairman Alex Lightman wanted to hear. Lightman has made a career of evangelizing IPv6, urging U.S. government and industry for five years to move faster in its adoption. The protocols hold the promise of a new generation of networking applications and services, and he sees their adoption as a matter of national economic survival. It is almost a foregone conclusion that the country will eventually move to IPv6, and Lightman said completion of the move would come sooner rather than later. He went out on a limb and predicted that IPv4 traffic, the current version of the protocols now in use on most of the Internet and other IP networks, would peak by 2011, and that the government would shut off IPv4 traffic entirely by 2017. Most observers think that versions 4 and 6 will coexist on our networks for well over 10 years as legacy applications and equipment continue to be used, and Moran’s comments seem to bear this view out. (Source: GCN)
21 Mar 07. Curtiss-Wright Controls Embedded Computing, a leading designer and manufacturer of rugged deployed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) VME, VPX and CompactPCI products, has announced the availability of the CHAMP-FX2, its first FPGA-based VPX-REDI (VITA 46/48) compute engine. The new 6U board combines the flexibility of Xilinx FPGA-based reconfigurable computing, high performance Power Architecture™ (PowerPC®) processing, and the high bandwidth of serial switched fabrics provided by the new VPX standards to address demanding defense and aerospace signal processing applications that require survivability in harsh environments. The CHAMP-FX2 Xilinx FPGA and PowerPC-based VPX compute platform is designed for demanding, high-performance signal and image processing applications including radar,