News

IndianExpress:  SENDING a clear signal to private educational institutions in the State that donations in any form would come under their scanner, the Income Tax Department on Tuesday said they have detected anonymous donations in excess of Rs 100 crore to these institutes. Last year on July 21, the I-T Department had conducted search and seizure operations in private institutions offering medical, engineering and management courses in more than 70 locations spread over western and southern Maharashtra.

‘‘This data has come to light after the raids last year. The anonymous donations that we detected is for the last academic year,’’ director-general (I-T Investigations) S K Sharma said. The raids were prompted after the department received information that admission-seekers were paying hefty donations to these institutes.

As per the I-T department’s estimates, over 80 per cent of the donations received by private educational institutions are anonymous

IndianExpress: SAHYADRI hospital has launched Proxima- an advanced hip implant for hip replacement surgery. The implant has been specifically designed to preserve bone and soft tissue, Dr Francesco Saverio Santori, designer of Proxima told media persons on Tuesday.

This hip replacement prosthesis represents significant advancements for patients with hip arthritis, Dr Saverio said. According to Dr Sushrut Badve, orthopaedic and joint replacement surgeon, more bone is preserved as the size of the implant is smaller than the implant normally used in surgery.

IndianExpress: AN assistant divisional safety officer — who was a former Chief Vigilance Officer of the Central Railways, has been caught while accepting a bribe of Rs 30,000 from a suspended booking clerk at his residence in Mumbai. Railway sources said that the booking clerk, A K Singh, was suspended after vigilance officers A S Jagtap, N B Nagdaora, C D Pagare and Padma Rao found cash exceeding the amount that should have been generated by the sale of tickets from him.

They said assistant divisional safety officer S C Jain had allegedly asked for Rs 1.5 lakhs to help out Singh.

IndianExpress: WHEN India’s most ambitious space expedition — Chandrayaan — takes off in 2008, Pune will be watching keenly. Because, it’s the city-based Precision Automation and Robotics India (PARI) that will be working closely with Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram to design the lunar rover, which would collect vital information about the moon’s surface. Moreover, the company is also designing robotic models that could get Chandrayaan-1 to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere safely.

Chandrayaan-1 would orbit the lunar surface pole-to-pole for two years in a bid to conduct the first comprehensive mineral scanning and record high-resolution, 3D maps of the entire lunar surface.

Moreover, the Pune-based company is also currently on the verge of completing two related projects that deal with critical areas like a spacecraft’s ability to withstand extreme atmospheric pressure without disintegrating.

IndianExpress: OVER 41,000 students who had applied for admission to standard XI through the centralised admission process have been assured of a seat in their chosen streams as the results were announced on Tuesday evening. Even as the cut-off percentage for admission to standard XI increased by over two per cent in most city colleges, all students got a place.
However, there has been a huge surplus of seats in city colleges this year with almost 12,000 seats lying vacant. The education department has also come to the rescue of students who wish to change their college within one week of securing admission. The department has fixed a maximum of 10 per cent cut in college fees for such students.

IndianExpress:  A proposal to set up an independent Human Resource (HR) Department in University of Pune (UoP) was evolved at a two-day retreat held in Panchgani on July 14. Head of UoP departments participated in the retreat and unanimously agreed that the Human Resource (HR) department was long overdue to improve functioning of University. Prof Dr Capt Chandrashekhar Chitale, presented a preliminary concept note for the need of an HR department

News.com: Intel launched its “Montecito” Itanium on Tuesday, doubling performance compared with its predecessor and upgrading ambitions for a high-end chip family that got off to a rocky start.

Each Montecito chip has two processor cores, which is a first for the Itanium line. Of the six Montecito models introduced, the top-end 9050 has 1.7 billion transistors and 24MB of high-speed cache memory. The models range in clock speed from 1.4GHz to 1.6GHz and in price from $696 to $3,692 (in quantities of 1,000).

 Initial Itanium models were late, slow and burdened by software incompatibility with widely used x86 chips such as Intel’s Pentium. Intel retrenched, gearing Itanium to compete with Sun Microsystems’ Sparc and IBM’s Power in “big iron” high-end servers. With Montecito, Intel says its troubles are a thing of the past.

ITWire.com: Microsoft has announced another interim build release of its long awaited Windows Vista operating system. Among the more important enhancements, Build 5472 touts improvements in the loading time of Windows Media Center and easier user account management.

Despite rumours, hints and speculation that the release date of Windows Vista is going to be delayed yet again, there has been no announcement from Microsoft that the general release date of January 2007.

However, the fact that the release of Office 2007 has slipped beyond January 2007 to “early 2007″ has given rise to the belief that Vista will follow suit. After all, Microsoft itself has intimated in the past that it wants to time the release of both products so that they coincide.

ITWire.com: Microsoft and Nortel have announced a strategic alliance that they say will accelerate the availability of unified communications - a combination of e-mail, instant messaging, telephony and multimedia conferencing - and makes it easy and efficient for workers to reach colleagues, partners and customers with the devices and applications they use most. “Nortel and Microsoft have each led fundamental transformations in their own market - Nortel’s digital innovation and Microsoft’s software on every desktop,” said Mike Zafirovski, president and CEO of Nortel. “By combining our unique strengths, Microsoft and Nortel will accelerate the delivery of unified communications - delivering to our customers a higher-quality user experience, with greater reliability and lower total cost of ownership. That’s where we can make a real difference.”

Mobilised.com: Industry research outfit In-Stat has made the bold assertion that solid state (Flash Memory) storage could supplant the traditional hard disk drive in laptop computers in the near future.

Less than two months ago Samsung was the first vendor to get rid of the hard disk in a laptop and its Origami device, followed shortly after by Sony.

There are significant performance advantages to using solid state storage rather than spinning disks, but the economics of Flash memory currently make this option a premium choice.

To be fair in-Stat says it might take ten years for Flash drives to replace hard drives, but it’s confident that solid state drives (SSD) are up to the task and could reach a 50 per cent share by 2013.