New storage systems are increasing using flash memory for system acceleration, such as faster transaction processing and data base searches.

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Royal Dutch Shell, an oil company, will use Darwin as a maintenance base for a floating processing plant for LNG from the Prelude field off Western Australia.

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Today she uses New York-based Merchant Processing Services, which charges her a base rate of 1.61% on each bill, plus 20 cents per card swipe.

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For example you might have Texas Instrument or TI which is the biggest supplier in the base-band market or DSP (Digital Signal Processing) but still have competition from the likes of Lucent, Motorola, Qualcomm.

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They can thus be found inside network routers, telecoms switches, mobile-phone base stations and many other devices that need both the processing speed of specialist hardware and the ability to respond to changing standards.

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The plan is to first launch a service craft -- replete with robotic arms and enough processing horsepower to work independently if needed -- followed by the tiny base-unit skeleton satlets.

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Also important, this processing power combined with advanced digital radio interface and signaling capabilities enables small-cell base stations to operate in a more efficient and dynamic mesh network, as opposed to a relatively static, point-to-point macro only system.

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