High quality voice and data coverage
RF Window’s Solo is the world’s smallest digital relay — commonly called a repeater. This plug-and-play digital relay delivers high-quality cellular phone coverage to indoor, poor signal areas using a consumer-installable relay system. The Solo supports W-CDMA, HSPA, CDMA and EV-DO with GSM support on the road map.
Solo is only 16cm tall and 15.5cm wide. Because of the small size of the Solo ICS Digital Relay, its service antenna is embedded and its donor antenna may be embedded or external depending on the RF environment. Product specifications are available from www.rfwindow.com.
Full Arabic support for Silverlight
Microsoft has announced the availability of full Arabic support for Silverlight 2, which is its latest platform that provides modern, rich Internet applications. The Arabization has been developed by Santeon and it is now available as a downloadable add-on from www.santeon.com.
Microsoft Silverlight is a programmable web browser plugin that enables features such as animation, vector graphics and audio-video playback that characterize rich Internet applications. Version 2.0, released in October 2008, brought additional interactivity features and support for .NET languages and development tools. The beta of Silverlight 3 just became available on March 18.
Law journals launch Web magazine
A consortium of America’s most influential law reviews has launched The Legal Workshop (www.legalworkshop.org), a free, online magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews: Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review.
The Legal Workshop features short, plain-English articles about legal issues and ideas, written by an author whose related, full-length work of scholarship is forthcoming in one of the participating law reviews. This is not a collection of abstracts, rather is an engaging alternative to traditional academic articles, enabling scholars to present their well-formulated opinions and their research to a wider audience.
The green IT business case
“The Greening of IT: How Companies Can Make a Difference for the Environment,” (ISBN 0137150830) by top green IT expert John Lamb, presents compelling reasons why businesses must establish more efficient technology practices. The fact is that while saving the environment, companies can save money.
The book focuses on the sustainable practice known as “IT greening,” or the process of using information technology more effectively to reduce fossil fuel-based energy consumption. The book’s opening chapter presents an overview of the basics, including both the benefits and challenges involved in moving to green IT. Lamb devotes an entire chapter to virtualization, a process for consolidating hardware and software, perhaps the most promising technology for green IT. He also includes information on new energy-efficient cooling technologies that support IT. A Q&A with the author and sample chapters are available at www.informit.com/earthday.
Personal chemical alarm device
The LCD 3.3 is an individual hazardous vapor-warning device from Smiths Detection. The device offers real-time, nerve, blood, blister and choking agent detection at, or immediately below, dangerous concentration levels. Using proven Ion Mobility Spectrometry technology, the LCD 3.3 features a non-radioactive source to identify unknown substances. The device also records and stores key data for later analysis.