Army to launch its own mobile service!

Not one to be left behind, the Indian Army will next month launch its own mobile communication system christened 'Mercury blaze', says a PTI report.

An army spokesperson said the mega project is being handled by the Corps of Signals, who are currently weighing the system in terms of reliability and security, among other parameters.

The project was actually launched in January last year, and is expected to reach completion by end of this month.

Sources familiar with the project said the new system will replace the old wireless communication service used during counter-insurgency operations in the state.

They said that the sophisticated technology would ensure faster mobility of troops during anti-terrorist operations. Besides helping provide the best secured communication to troops, the system would provide data communication directly to operational areas.

The sources added that the system would enhance battlefield transparency, with troops being able to coordinate and carry out counter-insurgency operations in the best possible manner.

The countdown to the launch has begun, with a series of mobile towers and other infrastructure already set up across army formations in the country, including Jammu and Kashmir's Rajouri, Doda, Udhampur, Jammu, and Poonch districts.

It is learnt that the new system was put to the test in the army's Nagrota-based 16 Corps operational area that spreads out from the South of the Pir Panjal range to the Jammu plains. And, the trial emerged error-free and successful, according to sources.

The Future of Your PC's Hardware - Memristor: A Groundbreaking New Circuit

Since the dawn of electronics, we've had only three types of circuit components--resistors, inductors, and capacitors. But in 1971, UC Berkeley researcher Leon Chua theorized the possibility of a fourth type of component, one that would be able to measure the flow of electric current: the memristor. Now, just 37 years later, Hewlett-Packard has built one.


What is it? As its name implies, the memristor can "remember" how much current has passed through it. And by alternating the amount of current that passes through it, a memristor can also become a one-element circuit component with unique properties. Most notably, it can save its electronic state even when the current is turned off, making it a great candidate to replace today's flash memory.

Memristors will theoretically be cheaper and far faster than flash memory, and allow far greater memory densities. They could also replace RAM chips as we know them, so that, after you turn off your computer, it will remember exactly what it was doing when you turn it back on, and return to work instantly. This lowering of cost and consolidating of components may lead to affordable, solid-state computers that fit in your pocket and run many times faster than today's PCs.

Someday the memristor could spawn a whole new type of computer, thanks to its ability to remember a range of electrical states rather than the simplistic "on" and "off" states that today's digital processors recognize. By working with a dynamic range of data states in an analog mode, memristor-based computers could be capable of far more complex tasks than just shuttling ones and zeroes around.

When is it coming? Researchers say that no real barrier prevents implementing the memristor in circuitry immediately. But it's up to the business side to push products through to commercial reality. Memristors made to replace flash memory (at a lower cost and lower power consumption) will likely appear first; HP's goal is to offer them by 2012. Beyond that, memristors will likely replace both DRAM and hard disks in the 2014-to-2016 time frame. As for memristor-based analog computers, that step may take 20-plus years.