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indianexpress: IN the last three days, dengue cases have risen sharply in Pimpri-Chinchwad, with as many as 17 cases from Saturday. With this, the number of people affected by dengue from January has reached 188. On the other hand, malaria has recorded 505 cases. Four deaths due to dengue and three due to malaria have been registered in over nine months now.

PCMC health officials said the 17 cases which have been reported are mainly from eight civic-run hospitals and the private Nirmaya Hospital in Chinchwad. “The figures of several private hospitals are not available with us as they don’t report to us despite warnings,” officials said. The officials said over 400 people could have been affected by dengue from January. “Several citizens also prefer going to private hospitals in Pune rather than getting themselves treated in Pimpri-Chinchwad. Figures of such patients are also not available with us,” they said.

PCMC health director Dr Rajshekhar Iyer said anti-larval measures, spraying and fogging exercises have been launched on a massive scale across the town. “From tomorrow, we are going to put in place eight teams which will include staffers doing fogging and spraying work. The team will carry out massive fogging and spraying in the areas where dengue cases are located. The fogging and spraying work will be carried out in at least 25 houses in the area where even one dengue case is reported,” Dr Iyer said.

indianexpress: Since January 2002, P S Srinivasan, a retired private sector employee from Chinchwad has been drawing a monthly pension of Rs 650 from the Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO), which the State Bank of India (SBI) credits into his account.

“In August this year, my pension amount stopped getting credited into my account. When I visited the EPFO, no information was forthcoming. However, there is a notification outside the Chinchwad branch of SBI that they are not able to disburse the pension amount as they had not received the statement from the EPFO,” said Srinivasan.

Data available with the EPFO suggests that over 6,000 people like Srinivasan have not received their pension through the SBI for July, August and September. In Chinchwad itself, over 1,000 are affected.

These are people who are covered under the Employees Pension Scheme 1995 - a provision that allows those working in the private sector to receive pension after retirement. The EPFO has selected five banks for this purpose - United Trust of India (UTI), Bank of India (BOI), HDFC, Punjab National Bank, and the SBI.

Each pensioner has to submit a ‘life certificate’ or a non-remarriage certificate in the case of widows/ widowers to the banks, which the banks forward to us. These certificates are collected in November. We send these instructions to the banks each month. While the other banks have complied with the procedures, SBI is yet to send us the certificates of their pensioners, said Assistant Provident Fund Commissioner, V K Patil.

indianexpress:  BUS service was badly affected due to a sudden protest launched by the employees of the erstwhile Pune Municipal Transport (PMT) that inconvenienced residents of Satara Road. The employees connected to Katraj bus depot went on a flash strike on Monday demanding Pune Municipal Corporation absorb daily wages employees into the newly formed Pune Metropolitan Transport Corporation Ltd .

They also demanded that PMC should pay arrears of their DA immediately. The employees also marched to PMC headquarters. However, the employees called off the strike after an assurance from leaders of political parties. The standing committee had recently approved Rs 20 crore proposal to pay back the dues of employees and asked the administration to absorb the employees.

indianexpress: NEARLY 300 resident doctors of Sassoon General Hospital went on a flash strike on Monday to protest against the lack of security on the campus. The strike was called off after Dean of B J Medical College Dr Arun Jhamkar appointed 38 security personnel from Maharashtra Ex-Servicemen Corporation Limited.

Doctors were protesting against an incident where a pregnant resident doctor Samata Wardukar was robbed. The thief, Santosh Lingappa Bhandari, (19), from Tadiwala Road was trying to escape with two cellphones when Samata’s father who was visiting her woke up at around midnight on Sunday and called for help. Resident doctors in other rooms at the hostel rushed to their aid and caught the thief. Subsequently, an FIR was lodged.

During interrogations Bhandari told the police where his accomplices were. While Shravan Kumar Santosh Vishwas (19) of Yerawada has been nabbed, Narendra Kindalkar fled. One cellphone has been recovered.

However, the resident doctors decided to strike work and protested against the increasing number of incidents of robberies and sexual harassment on the campus. Lack of security on the 36-acre campus has posed a problem in the past. According to Dr P S Pawar, Medical Superintendent of SGH, there is one incident of robbery every week.

With an Out-Patient Department registering 2,500-3,000 patients every day, security of the doctors has become a cause for concern with the management authorities. Jhamkar said they had contacted the Directorate of Medical Education and Research’s office and got the sanction to appoint 38 security personnel. Even as the OPD functioned slowly due to the flash strike, Jhamkar said services were not paralysed and subsequently the strike was called off.

indianexpress:  THE Bombay High Court recently directed Municipal Commissioner Praveensinh Pardeshi to personally enquire into each case in which the Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC) has either renewed or issued licenses to hawkers in the Tulshibaug area.

Hearing a petition filed by Sanjeev Phadtare, the High Court in August, had directed the PMC to make the Tulshibaug area free of hawkers within 15 days. However, Phadtare pointed out that despite the HC order, the PMC continued to either renew or issue fresh licenses to the hawkers. He will soon be filing an affidavit regarding the issue.

The PMC after taking up an extensive anti-encroachment drive has now slowed down its action because of political pressure.

Earlier, the civic body had told the court that it has stopped granting licenses to stalls seeking permission on the 30 hawker free roads and will continue to do so. The court has said that if the PMC makes any change in its policy it will have to seek permission for the same.

Several hawkers’ organisations and political parties had criticised the anti-encroachment drive even, though the civic administration still has plans to turn 30 city roads into No hawkers’ zones and also start the rehabilitation process within three months.

indianexpress: THE Central Railway, Pune Division is in the process of modernising and developing its passenger amenities and facilities, as a part of the Railway’s ‘Touch and feel’ mission which was started to improve passenger interface. The Railway’s decision to observe this year as ‘Cleanliness Year’, has also led to devising of plans worth around Rs 20 crore, said Railways PRO, Y K Singh, in a press note.

Some of the major works proposed include implementation of DC to AC conversion, Route-Relay interlocking(RRI) and Automatic Signalling between Pune and Lonavla. Proposals to introduce 12 coach trains on the route are also in the pipeline. Facelifting of platforms and the circulating area, waiting halls and retiring rooms of the stations falling under the Pune division, utilisation of mechanised cleaning equipment, unreserved ticket machines, and so on are in the fray.

In a bid to foster public-private participation in these projects, the Pune Division of the railways, has invited applications for tenders. While some of these private-public initiatives like the installation of plasma televisions by private companies are already underway, the available contracts accompanied by their terms and conditions are available on the official website.

techtree: Zebronics has announced the launch of its latest chassis code named ‘Stealth’.

‘Stealth’ features a vertically mounted optical drive that stays hidden unless a uniquely placed button is pressed to eject the drive tray. There are LEDs attached to the front panel to give a cool Blue look in the dark.

The chassis has a sturdy shell and a CAG 1.1 design, and comes with one 80mm fan pre-installed, along with the option to install 3 additional fans that can be mounted at the bottom of the chassis.

‘Stealth’, though small, is capable of fitting a full ATX motherboard and a regular ATX sized SMPS.

Zebronics has also launched its first mainstream motherboard, the nVIDIA MCP61 based AMD socket AM2 motherboard, which is a mix of North and South bridge in a single chip based on C51 and MCP51 with some simplification.

Pradeep Doshi, director (Sales) of Topnotch Infotronix, said the new chassis is not just a computer box and that the Indian audience deserves such designs as compared to the old box for computer chassis.

infoweek: Google and IBM on Monday announced an initiative to advance large-scale distributed computing by providing hardware, software, and services to universities.

The two companies aim to reduce the cost of distributed computing research, thereby enabling academic institutions and their students to more easily contribute to this emerging computing paradigm.

“Google is excited to partner with IBM to provide resources which will better equip students and researchers to address today’s developing computational challenges,” said Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, in a statement. “In order to most effectively serve the long-term interests of our users, it is imperative that students are adequately equipped to harness the potential of modern computing systems and for researchers to be able to innovate ways to address emerging problems.”

The first university to join the initiative is the University of Washington, located not far from Microsoft’s corporate headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Carnegie-Mellon University, MIT, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Maryland are also participating in the program.

“The reason that we’re partnering with universities is that Google is an engineering firm,” said Christophe Bisciglia, a senior engineer at Google and a former University of Washington student. “We’re working with our academic partners to teach [large-scale distributed computing] to students.”

The fundamental architecture of computing is changing, Bisciglia said. Moore’s Law still applies, he said, but now more performance gains come from processor density than transistor density. “You need to design your software to that it scales horizontally,” he said, referring to the challenges of programming for many multicore processors working in parallel.

infoweek: Seagate Technology on Monday launched its first combination disk storage and flash memory hard drive, joining rival Samsung Electronics in offering hybrid drives that manufacturers say speed the boot-up time of PCs and significantly boost battery life.

The Seagate Momentus 5400 PSD, which stands for “power savings drive,” offers 160 Gbytes of traditional rotating disk storage and 256 Mbytes of flash memory. Sony is the first PC maker to offer the new product, making it available in its Vaio SZ650, Melissa Johnson, product-marketing manager for Seagate, said. Three other PC manufacturers also plan to offer products with the new drive, but Johnson declined to name them.

The Momentus sells for $190, which is almost a 30% premium over a traditional drive of equal storage. The higher price, however, gets the buyer technology that Seagate claims can quicken the time it takes to boot a PC by 20%, and uses half as much power as a traditional hard drive. The Sony Vaio gets 25% more battery life from using the hybrid drive, Johnson said. “There’s good value across the board for this hybrid technology.”

Samsung started shipping its hybrid flash/hard drive in March. Samsung and Seagate offer the same size drive, but Samsung also sells models of 80 Gbytes and 120 Gbytes. Over the next 10 years, Seagate plans to offer hybrid drives as an option across its entire line of disk drives for notebooks, desktops, and ultramobile PCs, Johnson said.

Seagate and Samsung have been working with Microsoft to take advantage of technology in Vista that can leverage their hybrid drives. ReadyDrive in Vista treats flash and disk as one memory space, so it can be used for caching frequently needed data, or as a disk-write cache when the disk is spun down in order to save battery power.

cnet: VMware announced details of its forthcoming Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 on Monday, including an experimental feature to shut down servers if they’re not necessary.

The feature, called Distributed Power Management, monitors how hard servers are working and moves virtual machines to new machines to let unneeded servers be shut down. When workload picks up again, the servers are powered up again, according to the publicly traded EMC subsidiary.

Virtual Infrastructure includes two main components. First is ESX Server, the underlying hypervisor that lets a single physical computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously in compartments called virtual machines. Second is VirtualCenter, which lets administrators monitor and manage those virtual machines.

Among other new features in VI 3.5, which is scheduled to be generally available later this year:

• The new ESX Server 3.5 gives Linux a boost with support for paravirtualization, which speeds some operations when the operating system is tailored to run on a virtual-machine foundation. It also can use a hardware feature called nested page tables that speeds memory accesses, modernizes storage and network abilities, and can run on servers with up to 128GB of memory.

• VMware Update Manager, which allows administrators to monitor which patches have been applied to operating systems and to apply those patches, regardless of whether a virtual machine is running or paused and saved to disk.