News

IndianExpress: When President A P J Abdul Kalam visited Pune last month, it was not by chance that he was advised to cover the Lohegaon Airport-Race Course stretch by way of a helicopter ride. Instead, had he opted to travel by road via the Airport Road, the First Citizen would have got a true flavour of Pune roads.

But not many others taking a flight into Pune are in a position to arrange a chopper ride into the city and give the dug-up road covered with patches of asphalt the go-by. Thus, it has become a source of discomfiture to the city planners that the Airport Road, widely used by ministers, industrialists and regular air passengers, is still called the VIP road.

According to Kinetic Group chairman Arun Firodia, there is nothing VIP about the Airport Road as it is just as bad as other roads in the city. ‘‘Every road in the city is of the same condition and sooner they repair the better. Thus, when the President came to Pune he was told not to use roads but to travel by helicopter.

IndianExpress: The next time you eat mangoes at home, don’t get surprised if your child urges you to preserve the seed instead of throwing it away. This is part of a large-scale initiative being launched by the Social Forestry Department (SFD) in collaboration with the Education Department, which will encourage school children across the state to build up a good collection of seeds themselves, by preserving seeds of fruits like jamun, custard apples or mangoes.

“This initiative will be taken to 30 schools in each of the five districts of Pune, Satara, Kolhapur, Solapur and Sangli,” said SFD Joint Director Devendra Nath, who controls the five districts.

This was announced at the Vanmahotsav — the annual tree plantation programme organised at the Indian Law Society (ILS) Law College Campus on Monday

IndianExpress: It is another feather in the cap for this auto and IT hub of the country. Home to the world’s second largest forging company — Bharat Forge Ltd — Pune will now have a first-of-its-kind Rs 22-crore research and development, testing and validation centre for the forging industry in the country.

Having already set up the country’s first auto cluster, now the forging centre will give another boost to the auto industry, especially the small and medium enterprises — catering to the auto component industry — that will be able to test their products. ‘‘The global outsourcing for the automotive industry is $375 billion a year, and if we can upgrade our products it can attract contracts to the tune of $35-40 billion. But we need a quantum improvement in technology,’’ Bharat Forge CMD Baba Kalyani, who had submitted the proposal for setting up the centre two years ago, said. Currently, $4-billion auto components are exported annually.

IndianExpress: Two separate bomb hoaxes, which were reported from various parts of the city, kept the Pune police on their toes on Monday morning. These bomb hoaxes were reported from a multi-storied building on Jungli Maharaj Road and Revachand Bhojwani Academy School in Salisbury Park area.

Officials from the police control room received a call around 8.15 am saying a bomb might have been planted at Revachand Bhojwani Academy school in Salisbury Park area.

The police dispatched a team of two officers and four constables from the Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad to the school. The school building was vacated and given a thorough anti-sabotage check with the help of two sniffer dogs. No objectionable article was found during the search.

IndianExpress: The meeting of Right to Information (RTI) activists and relatives of road accidents with the officials of the Pune Municipal Corporation’s (PMC) road department on Wednesday to discuss the bad road condition in the city would be the first meeting between the citizens and civic officials to be videographed.

The citizens’ right to videograph their meetings with civic officials had come to light in May 26 this year when PMC’s Public Information Officer (PIO) Arun Patil in response to a requisition submitted by Right to Information activist Vihar Durve had sent a letter saying such videography could be done after obtaining the permission of the Municipal Commissioner.

IndianExpress: Two separate robberies were reported to the police from various parts of the city on Sunday. The police claimed to have solved one of the robberies after arresting two youths.
Shyamsundar Ramchandra Named (26) and Nilesh Umesh Raikar (23), both employees of a milk transporter from Bhilarewadi hemlet near Katraj, have been arrested by the Wanavdi police for alleged involvement in stealing cash collected from the milk centre and faking a robbery to hush up the incident.The incident took place while Named and Raikar had gone on a routine trip in the tempo with driver Vilas Khavale in Wanavdi area. Khavale and Raikar went to have a cup of tea after parking the tempo on Shivarkar Road while Named stayed back in the vehicle with the cash.

BBCNews.com: DA chip the size of a grain of rice that can store 100 pages of text and swaps data via wireless has been developed by Hewlett-Packard.
The tiny chip was small enough to embed in almost any object, said HP.

The chip could be used to ensure drugs have not been counterfeited, on patient wristbands in hospitals or to add sounds or video to postcards, said HP.

But it warned that the device was at least two years away from being a finished product.

The chip, developed by the Memory Spot research team at HP, is 2-4mm square and current versions can hold up to 512 kilobytes of data.

HP said the amount of memory onboard the tiny chip was likely to grow in future versions

ITwire.com: Novell has released both server and desktop versions of the awaited SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 open source enterprise operating system, claiming it to be the best-engineered, lowest-cost and most-interoperable platform for enterprise computing, from the desktop to the data center.

However, home users who may have been hoping that the Linux desktop has finally arrived will probably be disappointed. The products are aimed squarely at enterprise users as opposed to consumers.

On the server side, one of the big features of SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 is the incorporation of the open source Xen virtualization hypervisor software, which allows a server to run multiple guest operating systems in virtual machines. IBM has simultaneously announced support for Xen in its Intel and AMD Opteron processor-based server and blade systems, and has publicly come out strongly as a backer of the Novell Linux platform.

ITWire.com: Dell has become one of the first laptop makers to offer support for the draft 802.11n wireless networking standard, but because the standard is still only a draft, full performance will only be achieved when used with base stations incorporating matching Broadcom 802.11n chipsets.

Dell has announced an internal wireless mini card claimed to be capable of delivering up to five times the speed (270Mbps) and twice the range of the widely used 802.11g Wi-Fi technology when connected to a wireless network router using Broadcom’s Intensi-fi 802.11n chipset.

The Intensi-fi chipset range comprises the BCM4321, claimed to be the world’s first draft-802.11n media access controller and baseband processor and interfacing to PCI, CardBus and PCI-Express hosts; and the BCM2055 supporting multiple input multiple output technology and claimed to be “the best-performing 802.11 radio, featuring smaller die size, lower power consumption, and lower phase noise and error vector magnitude than competing products.”

TechTree.com:  No sooner than Microsoft launched its new application, “Private Folder 1.0,” for storing private data and protecting it with a password, the company has been forced to withdraw the application, following a deluge of complaints against it.

At the time of release, Private Folder 1.0 was positioned as a useful tool for users to encrypt files within a password-protected folder called “My Private Folder,” and share those files with friends and colleagues.

However, soon after release, security experts and administrators have raised concern over users losing their passwords, and not being able to unlock their files. Parents too have voiced concern regarding kids using the feature to hide unmentionables.

Microsoft on its part says that the application was meant to be a benefit to customers running “genuine” Windows. However, the feedback expressing concern over manageability, data recovery, and encryption, has forced its hand to withdraw the application. The change will take effect shortly, according to the company.