News

timesofindia: Active and aware citizens of Maharashtra have emerged leading users of the Right to Information (RTI) Act 2005 in the country. The Maharashtra information commission received as many as 6,641 complaints and second appeals by December 2006, as compared to other state commissions which received an average of less than 2,000 each.

Significantly, the Central Information Commission, which has five information commissioners and is the second appellate authority for all Union government bodies, received 4,939 second appeals and complaints — much lower than the Maharashtra state commission.

Second appeals are applications made by the complainants against decisions given by local appellate authorities of various departments pertaining to appeals that challenge decisions given by the public information officers.

Mumbai-based activist Shailesh Gandhi, who procured the data to check the use of RTI across the country, told TOI that Maharashtra not only leads in use of RTI, but showed that the RTI movement had spread across the state, with all revenue divisions receiving a sizeable number of second appeals and complaints.

Most of the credit goes to noted social crusader Anna Hazare’s tireless efforts and his pressure on the state government, which resulted in enactment of RTI in the state way back in 2002 and the appointment of more than one state information commissioner, Gandhi said.

timesofindia: Only seven per cent of the voters from Tingrenagar had cast their ballots in favour of independent candidate Shivaji Shinde during the February 1 civic elections. Yet Shinde won, and now represents 14,952 voters.

Ditto is the case with Congress’s Usha Jadhav who got elected from the Rajbhavan ward, though she bagged 1,494 votes (10 per cent) of the total 14,687.

Shinde and Jadhav are not the cases in isolation. As many as 27 corporators secured less than 15 per cent votes, while 77 corporators got elected, though less than 25 per cent of the voters favoured them. It is another matter that these 104 corporators will represent their wards because they enjoy the support of “majority voters”.

Ironically, the corporators cannot be blamed for this. The main culprits are the 47 per cent voters who did not exercise their franchise. These voters, particularly those from the upper middle class and higher income group, who thought that their vote hardly makes any difference, need to ponder over the issue.

contentsutra: Moser Baer, which has been in the news for their Home Entertainment business has acquired a majority 81 percent stake in Philips optical technology and R&D subsidiary OM&T BV for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition has been done through their fully owned subsidiary in Cyprus - Peraround. Before two years are up, says Ratul Puri, Executive Director of Moser Baer, they’ll acquire 100 percent stake. Puri said that they’ve acquired multiple patents with this acquisition, but couldn’t disclose the exact number. OM&T is primarily a tech R&D company which does limited manufacturing of early stage products, and revenues of around 10million Euros. It is the only company outside of Japan that is shipping Blu Ray discs.
Puri sees the acquisition as a significant strategic move to get a piece of the future market for Blu Ray, by leveraging OM&T BV’s IP. Does he feel threatened by digital content delivery via IPTV or Internet streaming? Not really - the pipe is limited - around 5-6 mbps for IPTV, so there are problems when multiple users start viewing content - and thus the cost of delivery will be higher than the Rs.28 and Rs.34 price points for Moser Baer’s Home Entertainment segment.
Moser Baer already has IP related to HD-DVD, and I asked Rakesh Govil, EVP of Moser Baer if he’s willing to take sides on HD-DVD and Blu Ray. He believes that both technologies will exist simultaneously so Moser Baer sees opportunity in both. Will digital delivery of content make removable storage redundant? Not likely - people will always want to store critical content with themselves, rather than on someone else’s server.

techtree: Abacus Peripherals is launching three Biostar Motherboard models in the country.

The K8M800-M7A is a 754 socket Board with Via K8M800 Chipset. It has a 2X 184 pin DDR SDRAM DIMM slot, and supports upto 2 GB. With support for Hypertransport technology upto 1600MT/s, it has a 3 X PCI, 1 X AGP, and 1 X CNR Slot. The board has 6 X USB 2.0 ports.

The integrated video is powered by VIA S3 Graphics UniChrome Pro, while the audio is powered by Realtek ALC655 6-Channel AC97 CODEC, supports S/PDIF out, and complies with AC’97 Version 2.3 specification.

The LAN is powered by Realtek RTL8201BL/CL with support for 10/100MB/s auto-negotiation, Half/Full duplex capability, and also supports ACPI, PCI power management.

The SATA / RAID has two-channel serial ATA (SATA) PHY for support up to two SATA devices, and multiple RAID configurations support RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 0+1A) for support up to two SATA devices.

The K8M800 Micro AM2 with Socket AM2, hypertransport up to 1.6 G, and AMD cool and quiet technology. It has VIA K8M800 + VT8237R+ chipset. Further, it supports 2 X DDR2 Dual Channel 533/677 SDRAM DIMMS slot. It has 8X USB 2.0 ports, while the expansion slot includes one AGP 8X slot and two PCI slots.

The integrated audio is powered by Realtek ALC655/ALC658 5.1Channel AC’97 Audio, while the LAN is powered by Realtek RTL8201CL - Integrated 10/100 transceiver.

techtree: According to a Macworld report, Corel has unveiled a new version of it’s painting and illustration software, “Painter X” with major upgrades.

The new version aims at blurring the lines between traditional and digital art. It has been designed to be a full digital art studio. Corel stressed on this point by mentioning that they have literally traveled the world in order to know what users want from Painter and that they have managed to incorporate most of it.

One of the interesting new features introduced in “Painter X” is called “RealBristle Painting System”. Using this system, users can accurately make a photocopy of traditional art media with individual bristles that blend and splay, thus giving the look of a traditional painting.

Further, in order to make it easy for the user to move files from one application to another, Corel has made the layer system work in a way very similar to that of Adobe’s. Hence, files saved in the Photoshop file format can open in Corel “Painter”, with layer masks, alpha channels, and layer sets (groups) maintained.

Apart from this, the new version also features new Composition Tools, including Divine Proportion (also known as the Golden Ratio). This tool overlays a pattern of lines and curves on the canvas to help lay out creations.

The Photo painting feature too has been enhanced to make matching colors easier. A new Workspace Manager, and Dodge and Burn tools round out the feature set of Painter X.