News

IndianExpress:  Soon after reports of the eight blasts on Mumbai’s suburban trains on Tuesday evening reached Pune, shops on Laxmi Road, MG Road and other places began downing their shutters. They closed at least half an hour before their normal time.

Within minutes of the news about the blasts came through, the Pune police was put on high alert. Police Commissioner D N Jadhav contacted all senior police officials and asked them to step up security arrangements. ‘‘We are on alert and security arrangements have been beefed up,‘‘ Jadhav said, adding that there was no untoward incident reported in the city.
The city control room had contacted inspectors in charge of all the 20 police stations in the city and asked them to take measures to scale up security in their respective areas.

IndianExpress: Continuing its drive against electrical equipment lying around dangerously in the city, the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has appealed to the citizen’s to come forward and report such dangerous poles, DP box, transformers and feeder pillars in their respective areas.

As per the notification issued by the Maharashtra Electricity Regulation Commission (MERC) on June 26, appropriate action needs to be taken on maximum dead electricity poles by the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company Ltd (MSEDCL) officials by the end of July.

The notification also states that if there is any delay or negligence in taking the action, a fine will be levied on the respective MSEDCL officers from that area.

IndianExpress: The Women and Child Welfare (WCW) department has deployed a squad to check the records of Pune-based adoption agency Preet Mandir, which has been accused of malpractices.

On Monday, after being gheroed by some organisations, the department had issued an order, banning admission of children to the adoption agency. Moreover, the department also heeded to the demand of the agitating organisations to transfer the children from Preet Mandir, who belong to other districts.

Finally, the officials agreed to two demands, which included banning of admissions of children to Preet Mandir as well as transfer of children who are not from Pune district, to child care agencies in their respective districts.

IndianExpress: Sancheti hospital will launch its latest version of the Computer Assisted Navigation system on July 12. This system helps surgeons precisely maintain the mechanical axis, besides aligning the patient’s bones and joint implants with a degree of accuracy.

Dr K H Sancheti, who has indigenously developed the Indus knee implant said that it was fitted in at least 15 patients using the latest computer navigation system. So far a total of 127 patients have been operated using the Indus knee implant, but without the computer navigation system.The Indus knee implant allows the patients to sit cross legged.

Due to less dissection, the blood loss is also reduced considerably and the recovery period of the patient is also short. The technique also requires special training as the coordination between the surgeon and the computer has to be perfect.

IndianExpress: At every given opportunity, thirteen-year-old Saloni Satish Satav, a standard VII student of Abhinav Education Society’s English Medium School and Junior College, rushes off to listen to music. For a teen, it is but natural except that the music room is in her school and she is encouraged to attend it.

After learning how to sing a couple of ragadhari songs, Saloni calls those 15-minutes in the special room “a wonderful experience.”

It’s all to break the monotony of studies throughout the day. Like Saloni, other students in the city, are being introduced to a short music break of 10 to 15 minutes, either during their zero period or lunch break.

“This 15-minute break from studies helps students. Our education system is too focussed on academics. Such breaks refresh a child’s mind and bring out their talents,” says principal Sunita Sharma.

IndianExpress:  In yet another case of delayed project execution, the deadline for the eight-km stretch on the 28.5 km Katraj-Sarole road estimated to cost Rs 67 crore and a part of the Golden Quadrilateral has been put off by a year, to September 2006. The reason being cited by the NHAI officials is delay in land acquisition; landslides last year in the newly constructed Katraj twin tunnel compounded the problem.

According to P D Arora, project director, Pune section of Golden Quadrilateral, the project was flagged off some five years back, suffered time over-run as officials faced a tough time acquiring land for four-laning of 28.5 km Katraj-Sarole road. However, there has been no cost overrun.

News.com: Seagate’s Maxtor Shared Storage II, announced Monday, comes in a dual-drive configuration with two 500GB drives. This configuration can be set up for Raid 1 (disk mirroring), the simplest form of protection for disk drives, as all data is backed up on a second drive immediately, Seagate said.

According to the company, the Shared Storage II system includes two USB (universal serial bus) ports to connect and share two USB printers or two additional external storage products, or one of each. It includes Maxtor Drag and Sort software for organizing files, which can identify and sort a range of different file types and put them in specific music, photo, movie, Web, software or documents folders.

Users can automatically copy content stored on Maxtor Shared Storage II by scheduling an additional backup to a connected Maxtor OneTouch or Seagate Pushbutton USB external storage system, for off-site data rotation

TechTree.com: Epson has launched its highly portable and feature-rich multimedia projector, the EMP-S4, targeted at SOHO (Small Office Home Office) consumers, educational institutions, and home entertainment seekers.

The EMP-S4 features sophisticated 3LCD technology for sharper and more vivid visual reproductions; E-TORL (Epson Twin Optimize Reflection Lamp) technology for enhanced lamp brilliance by reduction of light leakage and diffraction; plus a speedy four-second start-up and instant-off.

Kent Lew, manager - visual instruments, Epson Singapore, said. “The EMP-S4 is specifically designed for SOHO users, for whom multimedia presentations are almost a daily occurrence. The new projector integrates features which allow users to rapidly set-up, quickly stop or resume a presentation, and power-off the machine immediately with minimal intervention. Its excellent visual display quality also means the projector is versatile enough for home entertainment needs.”

Epson says the main highlight of its EMP-S4 is the innovative A/V mute slide, which cuts-out all light, and reduces fan noise when projector operations need to be suspended momentarily by users.

CIO.com: Sun Microsystems launched three Opteron-based servers Tuesday, positioning them as midrange servers to be used for network computing in data centers.

The Sun Fire X4500 data server, Sun Fire X4600 server and Sun Blade 8000 are all powered by Opteron processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Sun engineers chose the chip because it draws fewer watts and offers more sockets than competing processors like Intel’s new “Woodcrest” dual-core Xeon, said Lisa Sieker, vice president of systems marketing at Sun, in Santa Clara, Calif.

Sun changed its server processors from Intel to AMD in 2003, and credits the change with helping push the company from a worldwide market share rank of 16th that year to sixth in 2005, she said.

The product launch comes at a tumultuous time for Sun, which saw cofounder and charismatic leader Scott McNealy step down as chief executive in April, and announced plans in May to lay off at least 4,000 people over the next six months.

DailyTech.com: Recent reports suggest that Intel is working on research for 32-core CPUs by 2010. The new processor will contain a total of 24MB of last-level LL cache split among processor nodes. The CPU is anticipated to contain eight processor nodes with four cores per node and 3MB of LL cache to each node. Intel says that BBUL packaging method (which was actually announced back in 2001) will be just as crucial to attaining these specifications as is reducing transistor size.

Before reaching 32-core processors, or even half that, a number of technologies must still be developed to address key bottlenecks in manufacturing processors. Specifically, Intel will finally be developing new processor packaging techniques over the next several years using BBUL