News

IndianExpress: THE arrest of an Alandi Road resident along with his driver for alleged links with a drug cartel by the Anti Narcotics Cell of the Mumbai police and subsequent seizure of 2-kg heroin at Wadgaon Maval has raised doubts over Pune’s emergence as a conduit for narcotics trafficking. Though senior police officials maintain that the city is not used as a transit point by the drug mafia, the arrests and seizure have raised serious doubts about Pune’s drug links.

‘‘Although the arrested man lived in Pune, he operated mostly in Mumbai and the drugs were seized while being transported from Rajasthan to Mumbai,’’ assistant commissioner of police Dilip Shinde, who heads the Anti Narcotics Cell of the Pune police, said.

IndianExpress: NINE-year-old Nisha Deepak Kamble from the poorest slum Garudiwasti in Dehu road weighs an unbelievable 9 kg while twenty one-month old Saskhi Hanumant is not quite five kg.

Nisha and Sakshi are only two of the 71 severely malnourished children (Grade III and IV) identified in the survey carried out in the last three months by the Sadhana Institute for Sustainable Development at 14 slums of Dehu Road. Project Coordinator Hirachand Chandanshive told media persons on Wednesday that a total of 1103 children were identified for the survey. With 596 children turning out to be malnourished, alarm bells have started ringing.

IndianExpress: A GANG of six dacoits struck at the residence of a former military officer at Undri early on Wednesday and decamped with cash and jewellery totally estimated to be worth over Rs 1.8 lakh.

Police said Captain (Retd) Vijaykumar Sharma, who lives at Sainivas bungalow in Retired Military Officers Society along with wife Amagautam were fast asleep when one of the dacoits forced entry inside the house after bending the iron bars fit on a window.

IndianExpress: TRAFFIC on the road from Sancheti hospital to Regional Transport Office (RTO) came to a standstill for almost five hours on Wednesday. The incident took place after a truck broke down near Engineering College at 7 am. A part of traffic was diverted from Wellesly bridge, which has been closed for heavy vehicles.

A scene of anarchy prevailed on Sancheti chowk and RTO chowk where several vehicles had lined up. The traffic police — who came to know the incident at 9 — had turned the signals off and manned the traffic. Around 3 officers and several traffic policemen were deputed to streamline the traffic.

IndianExpress: IN a major sweep, simultaneous raids was carried against pirated books at five places in the city jointly by the Pune police, Delhi based IP Beutic Information and Research company and Akash Chittranshi and Associates Law firms that has been authorised by international publishing houses to protect intellectual rights, resulting in seizure of pirated books estimated to be worth over Rs 30 lakh on Tuesday. Five persons have been arrested during the raid.

IndianExpress: A DESTITUTE living on the footpath near Swargate ST bus stand became a victim of a Pune Municipal Transport bus on Wednesday morning at Jedhe Chowk.

While the identity of the deceased could not be ascertained till late night, the police said vendors and stall-owners in the area say the woman they knew as Sagunabai, aged about 60, was homeless and lived on the footpath.
Sagunabai was crossing the Satara Road when the PMT bus heading towards Balajinagar from Shivajinagar took a turn to enter the PMT bus termini and ran over her. The bus has been hired from Jay Somnath on a contract basis. Sagunabai died on the spot.

TechTree.com: Elitegroup Computer Systems (ECS) has released the RoHS compliant PX1 motherboard with embedded Intel P965 Broadwater chipset, which features Core 2 Duo CPU support and next-generation micro-architecture (NGMA).

Based on the P965 chipset and Core 2 Duo CPU support, ECS believes the PX1 will offer great performance with lower power consumption, hyper-threading technology, and Advanced Fan Speed Control (AFSC) tuning optimization, making it a smaller, quieter, and more energy-efficient system.

The PX1 includes eSATA support and Intel Matrix Storage Technology (MST) for high levels of internal and external hard drive protection, performance, and upgradeability. The motherboard’s input/output interface includes an onboard eSATA that offers up to six times faster external storage when compared to traditional external drives like USB 2.0.

According to ECS, PX1 is completely Windows Vista Home Premium ready, and enables users to enjoy a wide range of exciting digital entertainment including building and organizing video content, digital photos, music libraries; sharing digital content over networks; gaming; and recording TV programs live from satellite.

ITWire.com: Computer maker Dell has launched a new level of support for server and storage system customers, The company says its Platinum Plus service is the result of a $200 million investment and will integrate Google Earth to provide an interactive 3D command centre for clients.

According to Dell, Platinum Plus provides breakthrough productivity tools and is a key differentiator in Dell’s strategy to enable a higher level of control for its business, education and government customers, which comprise about 85% of the company’s revenue.
The new Platinum Plus service also includes an operations performance benchmarking feature that allows customers to routinely compare critical IT performance metrics to historical results and similarly configured environments. The new offering is designed to help IT managers cross-check performance in various locations against case activity rates and time needed to resolve issues.
 

SeattleTimes: WinFS, a once-prominent Microsoft technology for intelligent searching of computer files, was demoted last summer from a key feature of the flagship Windows Vista operating system to a stand-alone product without a schedule for release.

Now Microsoft says WinFS won’t be released on its own at all. Instead, the best pieces of the software will be parceled out to other products.

The much-touted WinFS was to have a new file-storage mechanism that would keep more attributes of each file. The idea was to make possible complex queries — such as a search for all a user’s vacation pictures — that require more information about a file’s contents.

TechTree.com: Samsung has developed a faster, 2Gb version of its OneNAND, known as the world’s fastest memory chip.

The company has reportedly applied 60-nanomenter (nm) technology to the chip’s production process, so as to achieve greater manufacturing efficiency. The new 2Gb OneNAND chip doubles the capacity of a OneNAND memory device (1Gb), and increases “write” speed from 9.3MByte to 17MByte per second.

According to Samsung, its OneNAND architecture combines the fast “read” speed (108MB per second) of NOR flash memory, and high-capacity plus fast “write” speed of NAND flash. The chips can be interleaved to attain an even higher capacity, while allowing each chip to interact independently with the system