News

bbc:  Anecdotal evidence from the BBC’s panel of broadband switchers suggests new rules have speeded up the process of moving net supplier.

The regulations make net service firms move quickly when customers declare they want to switch to a new firm.

The changes tried to improve the experiences of the growing number who had trouble migrating away from a broadband supplier.

Despite the improvement, one switcher said she was “wary” of moving again.

The new rules came into force on 14 February and force all net service suppliers to issue so-called Migration Authorisation Codes (MAC) within five days of being asked for one.

These alphanumeric codes are supposed to ease the process of switching by uniquely identifying a customer’s phone line.

Before 14 February not all the UK’s net service firms were part of the MAC scheme. In particular, many net firms that took over BT lines at the telephone exchange, known as local loop unbundling, sat outside the scheme.

Some consumers had to wait weeks without any service while their line was “cleared”.

The rules also stopped net firms charging for issuing a MAC or migrating someone to a rival supplier.

To find out if the new rules changed anything, the BBC news website recruited a group of consumers all of whom were about to move broadband supplier.

Some had begun the process before 14 February but others only started after the new rules came into force. .

bbc: Proponents of clean energy have long seen the oceans as a great hope for the future. Ocean waves carry tremendous power, and could, in theory at least, provide much of the world’s electricity.

But while other sources of renewable energy - such as wind and solar - have been widely adopted in recent years, wave energy has been slow to take off.

But that’s changing. Scottish engineers will soon deploy an offshore “wave farm” in Portugal.

They have also signed a deal to build an even larger farm in Scottish waters.

Construction of the wave farm in Portugal has been underway for the past year in a busy shipyard in the Portuguese coastal town of Peniche.

Engineers are building large devices called the Pelamis system. They are massive, red, steel tubes that look like rounded train cars.

  “We have very good waves. We have a very long coast compared to the size of the country

Teresa Pontes, National Institute of Energy, Technology and Innovation in Lisbon

“Pelamis is actually the name of a surface swimming sea snake, which is quite an apt description for the machine when you see how it moves,” says Max Carcas, who runs business development for the Scottish firm Ocean Power Delivery.

The firm has already deployed a prototype system around the Orkneys off the coast of Scotland.

These train-like tubes will eventually be linked together, four in a row, with the rows deployed in parallel to each other. More rows can be added to create more electricity and the rows of tubes are connected to the power grid via a single cable. Together, the hinged “snake” will be 140m (460ft) long

msnbc: Chinese PC maker Lenovo Inc. recalled about 205,000 laptop computer batteries made by Japan’s Sanyo Electric Co., warning that they could overheat and cause a fire.

The worldwide battery recall announced Thursday was the second for the company in the past six months and comes as Lenovo, the world’s No. 3 computer maker, tries to gain ground on its better-known competitors.

The latest recall includes about 100,000 batteries in the United States and another 105,000 worldwide, Lenovo spokesman Bob Page said. The recall follows four reports of overheating. In one case, a user suffered minor eye irritation, the company said.

Lenovo, which has its world headquarters in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park, said consumers should stop using the recalled products immediately. It said the batteries can overheat if the laptop is dropped a certain way, striking the battery on a corner edge. The advisory was made with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Sanyo officials defended the batteries Friday, saying the problems resulted from a strong external impact to the battery and were not triggered by the batteries themselves.

Sanyo said it was supporting Lenovo’s recall and has already taken steps toward “working together with Lenovo and putting the first priority on consumer safety.”