News

IndianExpress: THE agony of travelling over the city’s potholes seems to have reached the top rungs of the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC). At Tuesday’s General Body meeting, corporators hauled the civic administration over the coals over the state of roads in the city, sought Chief Minister Deshmukh’s intervention and even asked for a change in hands in the civic administration.

However, Mayor Rajni Tribhuvan who joined the chorus of people seeking better roads, stole the thunder by threatening to resign if the roads were not fixed in the next four days, before Ganeshotsav that starts on Sunday.
 
‘‘Fixing the city’s roads is the responsibility of the civic administration and if it is not delivering then I do not have any right to head the civic body,’’ she said. Tribhuvan also announced at the General Body meeting that she would stop using her official vehicle from Monday unless the roads were done up.

IndianExpress: Just days after the Pune Municipal Corporation passed the buck to the Pune Cantonment Board by saying it was not their responsibility to maintain pipelines, the civic body was at it again. This time, they have asked residents of a housing society in Wanavdi to carry out the repairs of a leaking pipeline on Shivarkar Road.

Over six hundred residents living in 110 flats in Parmar Park, phase II woke up to a rude shock on Saturday when their water taps went dry thanks to a big leak in the main water supply pipeline.
 
In spite of prompt complaints by the residents, the PMC water supply staff turned up only on Tuesday afternoon and carried out temporary repairs.
 

IndianExpress: SUDHIR Poonamchand Parakh (46), a business man from Bibvewadi has filed a complaint at Sahkarnagar Police Station saying that four people cheated him between August 2000 and November 2005.He said that Yashwant Vitthal Joshi, Alka Yashwant Joshi, Ganeshprasad Chandrakant Pradhan and Mahesh Dadakrishna Lohoti assured him that his money will be invested in the share market.He then handed them Rs 16.70 lakh. Meanwhile, they gave him some money as profit. However, he alleges that an amount of Rs 14.85 lakh has been taken away by them. The police is investigating the case.
 

IndianExpress: A day after cable operators in the city stopped beaming signals of 15 channels following police crackdown against them for showing adults movies, Grahak Hitwardhini — an organization working to protect the interest of cable subscribers — urged subscribers to reduce next month’s subscription charges on pro-rata basis.

Speaking to Pune Newsline, Sudhakar Velankar of Grahak Hitwardhini said ‘‘On one hand, the subscription charges are increased without any prior notice and on the other hand, the subscribers suffer if police take any action against cable operators.

This leaves the subscribers in a vulnerable situation.’ Velankar said he has dashed off a letter to Police Commissioner D N Jadhav urging him to ensure that cable operators do not stop providing services to subscribers who reduce the subscription charges.

IndianExpress: FIVE students of the Khadki Cantonment Board-run Lal Bahadur Shastri High School were admitted to Sassoon Hospital on Tuesday for food-poisoning after they ate sugar crystals

Swapnil and Saddam found the sugar placed on a window sill of their coaching class. The students began vomitting once they reached school and were first moved to Babasaheb Ambedkar Cantonment General Hospital, Khadki. Later, when their condition appeared to worsen they were taken to Sassoon Hospital where doctors who treated them declared they were out of danger

HindustanTimes: Wipro Technologies has been selected by the Wi-Fi Alliance to become an authorised pre-certification test lab, only the third such facility of the global industry trade association in the world.
The other two such labs are located in the US and Taiwan, said Frank Hanzlik, Managing Director of Wi-Fi Alliance, which has close to 300 member companies devoted to promoting the growth of wireless local area networks (WLAN), at a news conference in Bangalore on Tuesday.

The pre-certification lab will allow Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of New York Stock Exchange-listed Wipro Limited, to pre-test products for Wi-Fi Alliance members who are planning to pursue Wi-Fi certification, and marks the non-profit association’s first presence in the India market.

News.com: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are using custom computer chips to tackle a problem in speech recognition that software largely hasn’t been able to solve.

Speech recognition has long been a computer industry dream–but it never has become practical reality for most computer users. But researcher Rob Rutenbar argues that using a custom processor rather than software will improve speech recognition speed and lower its power consumption.

“It’s time to liberate speech recognition from the unreasonable limitations of software,” Rutenbar said here Tuesday at the Hot Chips conference. He likened the situation to the now-widespread use of special-purpose hardware for graphics

TechTree: Samsung Electronics has announced developing a 70-inch LCD TV panel for the consumer TV market.

The 70-inch LCD HDTV, the company claims, is the largest LCD TV screen size in diameter, and will be unveiled at the International Meeting on Information Displays (IMID) 2006 to be held at Daegu in Korea, beginning August 23.

Commenting on the new LCD, Kim Sang-Soo, executive vice president, Samsung Electronics, said, “Our new 70-inch LCD is not only significantly larger, but also sets a new benchmark of excellence in terms of video image reproduction, viewing angle, and image quality. We have designed it to dramatically enhance the large screen LCD TV user’s viewing experience.”

TechTree:  LG Electronics has announced the launch of the Blu-ray version of its popular Super-Multi optical storage drive series. The new Blu-ray Disc Rewriter combines Blu-ray technology with all other optical disc formats such as DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, and DVD-RAM.

The company says its Blu-ray Disc Rewriter, available in an internal drive configuration of GBW-H10N, provides consumers with higher-quality video and audio rewriting, combined with greater storage capacity enabled by next generation optical disc formats.

The company says this “Super-Multi” capability has been pioneered by them to provide convenience to end users. Compatibility with all recordable disc formats takes the complexity and guesswork out of purchasing blank media.