At first glance, Cisco’s AON (Application Oriented Networking) looks like a brilliant idea. Essentially, it proposes to suck all manner of security, administrative, and even business policy functions into its routers and switches. That looks as if it should benefit everyone – especially existing and prospective Cisco customers – and might even grease the wheels for quicker and easier adoption of SOA.

But it’s by no means clear that the rest of us should uncritically welcome “putting intelligence into the network”. One of the main reasons for the Internet’s success has been its profound indifference to the content of the packets it transports. Compromising on the hallowed principle of “dumb pipes” could crack open Pandora’s box – indeed, several boxes.

In Cisco’s words, AON “makes it possible to embed intelligence capabilities into the network”. Obviously this is a gross exaggeration: all it really does is to teach Cisco’s network devices a bunch of new rote tricks. Any intelligence involved must come from the developers, security specialists and sysadmins who write the rules (no doubt with plenty of help from Cisco’s Advanced Services, which will go to boost AON’s gross margins).

At the marketing level, AON really is a work of genius. It presses every hot button, leaves no fashionable acronym unmentioned, and on top of all that it promises to align IT with business, and cut costs, quickly and with little effort. Specifically, it is said to support Web services, SOA, BPM, and EDA, while supercharging BI, BAM, and RFID. It also helps companies to ensure compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, and BASEL II. It’s fast, secure, selective, visible, cheap (well, relatively) – and it slices, dices and rices. What’s not to like?

Of course, the primary beneficiary of AON is meant to be Cisco itself. Despite its boast that “The Cisco name has become synonymous with the Internet”, the San Jose giant’s 85 per cent share of the router market in the late 1990s has dropped to somewhere between half and two thirds, depending on which segments you look at. Rivals like Juniper and Alcatel are winning sales and slicing into Cisco’s dominant position.

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Cisco’s AON: Jeeves in a router or a box of evils?

Linux operating system specialist MontaVista Software, Inc., has teamed with Mobilinux Open Framework partners SKY MobileMedia, Bluefin Mobile and Digital Airways to develop an integrated mobile phone solution atop MontaVista's Linux OS.
MontaVista's Linux operating system forms the underlying platform, Bluefin Mobile's LinuxTel provides the hardware abstraction layer for communication with the wireless network, while SKY MobileMedia's SKY-MAP the mobile applications engine. Digital Airway's Kaleido MMI is used for the visual interface and managed end user interaction.
The software operates atop a Texas Instruments OMAP processor-based smartphone reference platform.
The companies used this week’s World Handset Forum in San Diego, California, to demonstrate the initial design which, they say, addresses many of the complexities associated with the integration and interaction of voice and data software components, making it easier for handset developers to design Linux-based mobile phones.
The partners worked on the project under the auspices of the MontaVista's Mobilinux Open Framework program, an initiative designed to assist handset vendors that are migrating from proprietary operating system platforms to Linux.

Companies team for Linux-based integrated phone

Submissions are being accepted through Dec. 8 for the annual Student Design Contest, jointly sponsored by the Design Automation Conference (DAC) and the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC).
The contest accepts designs for analog, digital or programmable circuits and systems. Submissions can be embodied as ICs, reconfigurable processors, system-on-chips (SoCs), platform-based or embedded systems designs.

Submissions are open to full-time graduate and undergraduate students in three categories: operational, which means that an IC design was built and tested; system design, which focuses on FPGA or other programmable architectures; and conceptual, where a project was designed and simulated. The design must be part of the students' course or research work at the university and must have been completed within 18 months prior to the Dec. 8 submission deadline.

The total prize money is expected to be close to $15,000, shared between first, second and third place winners in each category. Winners will be notified prior to the DAC in July and offered travel assistance to attend.

The contest is made possible through the contributions of corporate sponsors who are encouraged to provide financial support for this year's contest. An award ceremony will be held here during DAC. In 2005, the Student Design Contest had 48 submissions from 14 countries and 34 schools.

Submissions being accepted for Student Design Contest

Motorola Inc. and PIPS Technology are releasing an innovative license plate reader technology to public safety organizations nationwide.
Called Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR), the technology installed in police cars "reads" vehicle plates as they enter the view of a vehicle-mounted or roadside infrared camera, and checks them against a database for nearly instantaneous identification. The system runs continuously, automatically capturing images of license plates with a camera that works in nearly every lighting condition.
"This technology is completely automated and built into the car's operation, so it requires no action on the part of the police officer to capture the plate numbers and have them verified. It is not something the officer has to initiate," said Steve Most, multimedia business director, Motorola radio systems division, in a statement.
Previous technologies required officers to manually type in a plate number and request a database search for each number, which can be time consuming and prone to errors.
Before bringing the ALPR system into Motorola's product portfolio, Motorola (Schaumburg, Ill.) worked with PIPS (Hampshire, U.K.) to further ruggedize its license plate technology to meet Motorola specifications for mission critical public safety communications in the United States.

Motorola unveils license plate readers

Proponents of an emerging video codec called H.264 are predicting the scheme will turn the video market on its head by enabling delivery of Internet Protocol-based broadcast-quality video at data rates of less than 1 Mbit/second. Although demand for H.264 may not hit volume before 2004, the broadcasting industry's interest in the codec has gone way past the talk stage — far enough that MPEG-4, long pitched as the logical interactive enhancement to MPEG-2, could be lost in the shuffle.

The first rumblings of the promised upheaval were felt here last week at the International Broadcasting Convention (IBC). Chips, evaluation boards and software tools targeting the H.264 codec (formerly H.26L) trickled into private demonstrations and a few public venues at IBC. Presenters of H.264 previews included Canadian company VideoLocus Inc. and Germany's Heinrich-Hertz-Institut f¼r Nachrichtentechnik Berlin GmbH (HHI). Texas Instruments Inc., in launching its 600-MHz digital media processor, joined with such third-party partners as UB Video Inc. and Ingenient Technologies to show an H.264 video algorithm running on its C64x DSP family. And Equator Technologies similarly claimed its media processor's architecture will be capable of real-time H.264 encoding and decoding.

The yet-to-be-ratified international codec is now officially known as H.264 in the telecommunications world. Some in the MPEG community, however, are calling it MPEG-4 Part 10, and yet a third faction refers to it as "the proposed JVT/AVC standard."

H.264 codec jeopardizes MPEG-4's ascendancy

BLACKBERRY maker Research In Motion Ltd has moved a step forward in challenging one of the patents at issue in a key infringement case against the company.

The US Patent and Trademark Office has issued a "non-final action" rejecting all the claims supporting one of five key patents in the BlackBerry dispute, according to a document posted on the patent office's website.
The patents being challenged by RIM are at the centre of a long-running legal battle with patent holding company NTP Inc. that could force RIM to settle the case or face a court-ordered shutdown of most US BlackBerry sales and service.
In the November30 document, an examiner said NTP's arguments in defence of one of the patents had been deemed "non-persuasive". The examiner stopped short of a final rejection pending review of a European report.
However, patent attorneys caution that at this stage the patent office findings are only the beginning of a long appeal process that will likely stretch out months or even years.

Move in Blackberry patent challenge

Michael Robertson, who challenged the music industry as the founder of MP3.com, unveiled yesterday a new online digital music storage service that enables users to play their songs on any computer or digital music player.

Oboe is similar in concept to MP3.com's online music locker: Users duplicate and store personal music files on a Web site.
The service, called Oboe, essentially offers music lovers a way to save a backup copy of their personal music library for $39.95 a year.

MP3.com founder's backup plan

The wheels have been set in motion for the first rewriting of the GNU General Public License (GPL) in more than 15 years, with the release of a document specifying the process and guidelines of the historic revision.
The most important licence for free and open source software, the GPL underpins nearly three quarters of free software programs.
The first draft up for discussion will be presented at the International Public Conference for GPL v3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on 16 and 17 January 2006. This will be followed by a period of response and redrafting from the community to create a second draft in the summer and a final draft in the autumn. The finished GPL v3 is scheduled to appear in the spring of 2007.

Wheels in motion for GNU General Public License v3...

A computer disc about the size of a DVD that can hold 60 times more data is set to go on sale in 2006. The disc stores information through the interference of light – a technique known as holographic memory.
The discs, developed by InPhase Technologies, based in Colorado, US, hold 300 gigabytes of data and can be used to read and write data 10 times faster than a normal DVD. The company, along with Japanese partner Hitachi Maxell announced earlier in November that they would start selling the discs and compatible drives from the end of 2006.

Holographic-memory discs may put DVDs to shame...

A 122-year-old dairy equipment company has used embedded Linux in a robotic cow-milking system (the system is robotic, not the cows). The Voluntary Milking System (VMS) allows cows to decide when to be milked, and gives dairy farmers a more independent lifestyle, free from regular milkings, the company says.

Device Profile: DeLaval Voluntary Milking System