As water and wastewater treatment plants grow in both size and complexity, so does the need to control equipment that make up the unit-operations of that plant. Distributed Control System (DCS) is a control system method that is spread, or distributed, among several different unit processes. These processes may be related, as in a water treatment facility, or unrelated, as in a manufacturing plant where many different products are fabricated.

The DCS is typically a hard-wired system and exists within finite boundaries, such as a process plant or within a factory. Wired systems are reliable and are well suited for the typical process environment where flexibility is not an issue. Wireless systems are starting to become popular and hold the promise of improved flexibility in both physical and logical layout of the facility. An entire process may be retooled to the extent that several parts of the process will be physically moved or removed. Using wireless, system reconfiguration is as simple as disabling the station address or downloading the suitable database.

Whether wired or wireless, distributed control systems offer the advantage of centralized control, while retaining the capability of distributed, or local control. True distributed control systems use localized control, which is in turn controlled by the operator located at a central location. Distributed Control Systems consist of the following:

* Remote control panel
* Communications medium
* Central control panel or facility
* Control, interface and database software

This recently-developed NeoPDP technology has been incorporated into two types of PDPs: a super high-efficiency 42-inch PDP “that achieves triple luminance efficiency while reducing the power consumption to 1/3 of the 2007 models yet achieving the same brightness,” and an ultra-thin 50-inch PDP just 8.8 mm (or approximately 1/3 inch) thick. It also happens to have the world’s highest moving picture resolution of 1080 lines, too.

In another debut, the company’s NeoLCD technology is integrated into a super energy-efficient 90kWh per year 37-inch LCD panel that achieves moving picture resolution of 1000 lines, close to that of PDP. It also has the lowest energy consumption of any LCD HDTV in the world.

This morning I got a chance to sit down with the guys at Samsung Semiconductor, who among other things, specialize in solid state drives. We had a good chat about the pros and cons of SSDs — the cost to manufacture versus the savings in heat production, energy use, and above all, faster performance.

To sum it up: business notebooks will soon be all SSD. Or, to quote Steve Weinger, SC’s senior marketing manager: “SSD-only is the new wave of 2009.”

Why? According to them, business users shouldn’t necessarily need to store music and movies and the like, so they won’t really need enormous capacity. (Technically, they should be saving things to the server.)

To show the differences in the performance between the two, the company had a setup running two Windows Vista machines through various paces — closing and opening Windows, booting up and shutting down, and so forth. It’s pretty clear which machine won:

The new Nikon D90 digital SLR camera has a feature called Live View, which means you can frame pictures using the screen instead of the viewfinder. (This is, of course, dead common on snapshot cameras, but they don't have a mirror blocking the way to the sensor.) And as David Pogue points out in The New York Times, this means it's the first DSLR that can shoot video:

High-definition video, at that. Stunning, vivid, 720p, widescreen, 1280-by-720, 24-frames-per-second video, with the color and clarity that only an SLR can provide.

Evidently, it occurred to some engineer: "Hey, we're already showing a video image. Isn't that, in essence, what Live View is? Maybe we could figure out a way to record it!"



So you buy a DLR and you can do bits of hi-def video on a camera with interchangeable lenses:

With a huge telephoto lens, sitting in my bleachers seat at the Pilot Pen tennis tournament, I was suddenly filming what other people could capture only as still images. (You can see sample stills at

A look at the latest oscilloscopes: the Agilent 9000, the LeCroy WaveSurfer 104Xs-A, the National Instruments USB 5132, the PicoScope 5000, the Tektronix 70000 and Yokogawa DLM6000

it seems like all of the top car manufacturers of the world are jumping on the four-door band wagon this year – these cars are not quite super cars, and definitely not family sedans. If you want to be able to comfortably load your children into the back seat, then take your sports car for a nice afternoon drive, here are four prime picks. The Rapide, Estoque, Panamera, and Karma all feature the classic sports car styling of their little brothers, maintain much of the performance, but add a couple of doors and some comfort for your back seat passengers.
Aston Martin Rapide

Aston Martin Rapide

We had a chance recently to catch up with VUDU Executive Vice President Edward Lichty to capture his views on the role Vudu is playing in fostering the burgeoning over the top (OTT) video market, as well as his perspective on the market in general. Click here to listen to podcast.

Vudu has certainly been making a lot of noise lately. They seem to be at the forefront of many of the major innovations in the OTT space. First, while many skeptics thought the delivery of quality Internet HD on demand could not be done with any kind of a reasonable user experience, Vudu has embraced high-def, with 2,000 of their 15,000 movie titles available in up to 1080p resolution, more than any other OTT provider and more than the total Blu-ray library, according to Vudu. As a result, Vudu’s $150 box (they also sell a higher end $500 box) boasts the highest revenue per subscriber of any VoD service, with around $20 per month collected from customers. This is high compared to cable, a fact that Edward pins on the fact that, for cable, VoD is a service primarily used to buttress the value of their subscription-based service, as opposed to the core transactional business that drives the Vudu user experience. Edward also chalks this up to Vudu’s superior selection, high quality 5.1 sound, convenience, and ease of use. (By the way, for those following the protocol wars for HD video distribution in the home, Edward made it clear that even WiFi G is enough for them to deliver HD content in real-time with delays of 1 second or less. Of course, a mix of VoD and streaming live TV would be more taxing.)

Vudu is not afraid to try out new business models. Last week, the company announced a deal with Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment for the first major download-to-own service for movies. “I think this is another example of Hollywood endorsing Vudu as a premier HD platform,” he said.