Everything shows that this year will be decisive for selecting technology for 4G wireless systems. Wireless networks of the Fourth Generation should provide mobile data transmission at speeds of 100 Mbps - to fast-moving terminals - and 1 Gbps in the case of relatively fixed positions of the terminals. Currently the development of mobile technologies for 4G goes two ways, WiMAX and LTE.

WiMAX technology is more advanced in terms of implementation. However, it lacks a major marketing success which could persuade manufacturers to start production of new, cheaper devices.

The concept of building all-American 4G networks based on WiMAX - first pushed by Sprint company, then developed as a common project with Clearwire - still faces difficulties. Despite the expenditure of 3 billion dollars, the service has so far been launched only in Baltimore and Portland. The companies announced to include another 10 cities this year. However, there are new disturbing facts - at the end of last year Alcatel-Lucent abandoned development of solutions based on WiMAX technology, in January this year Nokia stopped work on WiMAX devices as well. According to vice-president Anssi Vanjoki from Nokia, LTE technology is more promising.

LTE (Long Term Evolution) is being developed to improve the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS). LTE is to increase the performance of the 3G UMTS packet service (based on TCP/IP protocol), with data rates over 100 Mbps. It has been adopted as a 4G standard by AT&T, Telstra, Vodafone, China Telecom, T-Mobile, and Verizon yet.

In January this year, an agreement was signed between Ericsson and TeliaSonera to launch commercial LTE network in Stockholm. In early February 2009, Motorola started the first test 4G network using LTE technology in Swindon, UK.

For a company that was facing a financial brick wall, Sun Microsystems should count itself lucky to have had so many buyout options on such short notice.

You've probably heard that Oracle has offered to put up $7.4 billion for Sun, a deal that would value the company at about $5.6 billion and assume about $2.6 billion in debt. That's roughly where IBM's last offer was rumored to be earlier this month before talks fell apart.

Naturally, a deal of this magnitude has all sorts of implications, so I'm going to refer you to my ITBE colleague Dennis Byron for the big-picture overview and what it means for Oracle's future. For my money, nobody drills down into the essence of these kinds of events better than Dennis.
For my part, I thought I'd take a look at what some of the integration possibilities are between Sun and Oracle technology. Clearly, the biggest gain for Oracle will be control of both Solaris and Java that already provides a home for many of its database and middleware platforms. Tighter integration on this level has the very real possibility of putting Oracle back in the driver's seat in enterprise productivity.

Still murky, though, is what Oracle plans for the Sun hardware portfolio. Does the company plan on becoming a full-service enterprise supplier a la IBM and HP? Will it stick to its software-only model, perhaps looking to play a larger role as an open source provider?

According to Cnet's Stephen Shankland, the key to merging the two companies' technologies lies in a project called Raw Iron that has been on the back burner for close to a decade. The idea was to partner with hardware firms like Dell and IBM to devise a more application-centric platform in which hardware played only a supporting role as far as new features and innovations were concerned. Naturally, hardware providers haven't been too keen on the concept, but now that Oracle has hardware of its own it can really show what it has to offer.

Another key element in the deal is MySQL
. It's no secret that Oracle has coveted that little piece of software for quite a while, so now we'll get to see whether the intent was to shore up the lower end of the database market, or to kill off a drain on Oracle's higher-end offerings. Enterprises that are heavily invested in MySQL had better hope for the former.

Right now, Larry Ellison is talking up the convergence angle pretty good, emphasizing the possibility of end-to-end platforms consisting of integrated Oracle hardware and software products. That may sound good on the surface, but is it really what the enterprise wants?

Elma Watch Master is a testing machine that can be used for testing of quartz and mechanical watches. The testing station has many features including mechanical beat rate indicator, quartz pulse rate indicator, quartz circuit tester, motor tester, electrical resistance indicator and power supply checking. The tester has a movement clamp with a special design, electrical probes, mirrored observation platform and a beat rate measuring bed. The Elma Watch Matic mechanical watch testing station is specially meant for mechanical watches. The testing machine measures and displays rate deviation, amplitude and beat error. It supports many measuring modes for Swiss made escapements, coaxial escapements, AP escapements and a mode with specific amplitude filter where only the rate is measured. The machine is equipped with a speaker to test acoustics and it can be connected to a PC, printer or GPS receiver to allow the numeric results to be stored or printed.

The MTG 1000 TYMC multifunction timegrapher is a compact model which is used to measure beat number, beat rate, neat error and amplitude of the balance wheel. It is a very useful machine in watch service. It can produce an acoustic simulation of the watch beat. It has a microprocessor with a LCD display to display the beat rate and beat error and amplitude. It also has a microphone and the machine begins to measure immediately after a watch is put on the microphone. There are many models available in the multi function timegrapher, each with its own unique features.

The MTG 3000 timegrapher supports an automatic 6 position testing and can be connected to a microphone and a printer. It is very widely used across the world in professional watch repair shops. It comes with a high resolution display and supports display modes like horizontal and vertical – pushing and pulling modes. It can store up to 2048 beats. A watch can be tested for a programmed time in the 6 positions.

The 4000A model has a high resolution colour display, the new TYAPS signal processor and a highly stable TCXO time base. This machine has automatic adjusting of the input signal level, ato detection or manual selection of beat number, microphone rotatable in 6 positions, measuring of beat rate, beat error and amplitude and many more functions. The 4000B model is a double channel model which is used in final QC of watch manufacturing. With this model, it is possible to measure two watches having same beat rate simultaneously and show results on the display. The machine has 2 microphones rotatable in 6 positions and performs functions like the 4000A model. The MTG-500 model timegrapher is a compact and economical timing machine with all the basic testing facilities like measuring the beat rate and amplitude.