Tuesday, June 6, 2006

Google has launched an online spreadsheet site, in a private beta.

The site will allow spreadsheets to be shared between up to 10 users, which is aimed to be useful to teams and small businesses. “Many people already organise information into spreadsheets. Where they are struggling is to share it” said the product manager, Jonathan Rochelle.

Google recently bought the online word-processor Writely, launched a calendar product, as well as a desktop search tool. Many see this as them straying into Microsoft‘s markets.

Google Spreadsheets uses very advanced AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And Xml) and Client Side Scripting to mimic very effectively it’s desktop counterparts’ functions.

It is surprisingly fast, has very good formatting and advanced formula support, but best of all it has complete support for Microsoft Excel .xls files, and very good collaboration: just enter the e-mail address and you can share easily.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Two people have been killed and 47 people have been injured as the result of a coach crash in Cornwall, England. The vehicle, which was carrying 48 passengers as well as the driver, were travelling back from a journey to the village of Mousehole to see Christmas lights. The accident occurred at 2215 GMT yesterday in the village of Townshend, not far from the town of Hayle. Road conditions at the time were icy, which may explain why the accident occurred. The first police car that arrived at the scene lost control on the icy road and crashed into the already overturned coach. The two officers in the car were uninjured, however the earlier crash had caused the deaths of two women. One of them died at the scene of the accident and the other was later killed as a result of the injuries suffered. 47 people were injured, five of them seriously.

The sequence of events that is believed to have happened, according to Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, is that the coach went off the road, collided with a tree, going through a hedge before finally overturning, causing the vehicle to end up on its side. 60-year-old Ann Ellis, who comes from the village of Illogan in Cornwall, was physically involved in the crash. Desribing her experience of this incident, she said: “All I can remember is a big bang and we just went over. I got trapped under somebody else and there was someone on top of me. It was difficult to breathe but two gentlemen dragged me out. I was shaken, really shaken. I think we all were. It was horrific.”

Derek Smith, lives near where the accident occurred. He said that “[w]e were just going to bed when we heard a knock on the kitchen door. She was covered in mud and had no shoes or socks on and was shaking as she stood there. I could hear this commotion going on.

She said to ring the police and ambulance as their coach had turned over and there were 50 people in it and some of them were injured. My wife rang 999 and the lady was in a real panic. We gave her some socks and boots straightaway because she was freezing as she had nothing on her feet.”

75-year-old Charles Parker, who is living in St. Agnes in the county, was also injured in the accident, suffering injuries to his leg and his head. “The roads were so icy,” he explained. “I heard a cracking noise and all of a sudden we had turned over. I remember later being helped out of the coach through a window. We were close to a house and they took most of the people in there. Then helicopters turned up. It was very frightening.”

Inspector Matthew Shaw, who comes from Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, explained “[i]t seems from initial investigations that the coach has slipped on ice. The road is covered in a sheet of ice, it’s treacherous, it’s difficult to even walk down there.” The amount of time taken to transport the injured passengers to a hospital was four hours.

Friday, September 8, 2006

From September 3 to 8, experts gathered at the 10th International Congress on Obesity in Sydney, Australia, to discuss what they call the worldwide “obesity epidemic”. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 1 billion people in the world today are overweight, and 300 million of those are obese. “Obesity and overweight pose a major risk for serious diet-related chronic diseases, including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension and stroke, and certain forms of cancer“, a WHO fact sheet states. According to AP, experts at the conference “have warned that obesity is a bigger threat than AIDS or bird flu, and will easily overwhelm the world’s health care systems if urgent action is not taken”.

Of particular concern is the large number of overweight children. Dr. Stephan Rossner from Sweden’s Karolinska University Hospital, a leading obesity expert who was present at the conference, has warned that as a result of the increasing number of overweight children, “we will have, within a decade or two, a number of young people who are on kidney dialysis. There will not be organs for everybody”. UK-based International Obesity Task Force has said that junk food manufacturers target children, for example, through Internet advertising, chat rooms, text messages, and “advergames” on websites. Politicians are not doing enough to address the problem of obesity, including childhood obesity, the experts said.

According to Wikipedia, examples of junk food include, but are not limited to: hamburgers, pizza, candy, soda, and salty foods like potato chips and french fries. A well-known piece of junk food is the Big Mac. The US version of just one Big Mac burger contains 48% of calories from fat, 47% US Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of fat, 52% RDA of saturated fat, 26% RDA of cholesterol, 42% RDA of sodium, and little nutritional value. It also has 18% of calories from protein. According to WHO, most people need only about 5% calories from protein. Staples such as rice, corn, baked potatoes, pinto beans, as well as fruits and vegetables such as broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, oranges, and strawberries, provide more than this required amount of protein without the unhealthy amounts of fats or sodium, without cholesterol, and with plenty of fiber, vitamins, and minerals.

Both WHO and the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) define overweight in adults as a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 25 or above, and obese as a BMI of 30 or above. To combat overweight and obesity, WHO recommends that, among other things, people should be taking the following steps

• eating more fruit and vegetables, as well as nuts and whole grains;
• engaging in daily moderate physical activity for at least 30 minutes;
• cutting the amount of fatty, sugary foods in the diet;
• moving from saturated animal-based fats to unsaturated vegetable-oil based fats.

Friday, September 2, 2005

A UK ISP, Plusnet, terminated the service of two of their broadband service customers for asking too many repeated questions and taking up too much customer support time on their portal discussion forums.

Early last year, Plusnet, an ISP with nearly 200,000 subscribers, cut its prices for all of its broadband products. In doing so, Plusnet allegedly did not inform its existing customers by e-mail, and instead published new products and prices on their public portal. This manner of notice for the price changes may have resulted in thousands of customers paying almost twice as much for the same service.

Within the last month, Plusnet began Packet Shaping peer-to-peer transfers for users of its ‘Premier’ service, which is sold and described as a ‘clean’ connection.

They also recently introduced the throttling [enforcing a maximum limit] of customers using more than 150GB per month of bandwidth. Users whose bandwidth is throttled receive service of 70Kbps, while paying for 2Mbps. This figure is based on the PlusNet network contention of 30:1, being 2mb divided by thirty users. The throttle is in place until the end of the customers current billing period, and is meant to help keep broadband access for all Plusnet users fast by stopping a small percentage of users from using excessive bandwidth. As a result, the ISP has begun receiving numbers of customer complaints and criticism both privately and through their publicly accessible member discussion forums. Though the vast majority of comments on this new Sustainable Usage Policy have been positive.

Wade Woverly, 20, from Leeds (also known as “Wadev1589”), started a thread in the Plusnet member discussion forums challenging the ISP on a number of customer service issues. One of those was regarding the customers who were paying an unnecessary premium for the same internet connection. In addition, Woverly mentioned he was assisting the Trading Standards Institute with an investigation of the legality of terms and conditions of Plusnet.

The accusations by Woverly, that customers are being over-charged, are considered speculative. Woverly asked the same questions dozens of times on forum pages, hoping to receive some sort of answer from Plusnet that he considered satisfactory. Ultimately, he claims the ISP called him on the telephone and said that if he didn’t stop posting comments on their forums, they would terminate his ADSL internet connection and forum access. Woverly said Plusnet’s position was that he was using up excessive customer services resources.

After a night of lengthy posts both on Plusnet boards and at the forums at ADSLGuide, a Customer Services Manager at Plusnet, Carol Axe, allegedly contacted Woverly to inform him that they would be terminating his service, and that he has 30 days to migrate away until his line will be disconnected. Axe refused to allow her conversation to be recorded: “her voice was that of rude arrogance, not listening at all, it was a true ultimatum of a call,” according to Woverly.

Neil Armstrong, the Head of Marketing at Plusnet, commented, “Our comms team is there to serve all our customers, not to be drained by one unreasonably demanding customer.”

The Plusnet forums are led by a team of moderators, also customers, whose job it is to deal with problem posters, amongst other things. Forum Moderator Liam Martin, another stirrer, said “Part of our moderation involves restricting access to those users causing problems… and this is always carried out at our discretion when we believe somebody is causing a nuisance and/or breaking forum rules. ‘Wadev1589’ didn’t come close to being banned, in my book. This has come as a complete shock.”

A second user, “pr100” from Wargrave, has since then had his service ended after being given the same ultimatum. He was told that it was “in his best interests”. He responded on the Plusnet forum, “I did suggest to her that perhaps PlusNet should allow me to decide what will be in my best interest whereupon she stopped beating around the bush and said that my account was being terminated because of my anti-PlusNet posts in the forum.” Not all ISP’s would give you the option of migrating or losing your BB connection, some would just use their right to end your contract forthwith.

Another forum user, “chuffbears”, commented, “Carol [Axe] is in a position where she should be taking responsibility for customer service. In my book she should be issuing an apology over this entire situation.”

Monday, June 12, 2006

The Lower Saxony, Germany tax authority is migrating 12,000 desktops to use SuSE Linux with KDE as the desktop environment. The systems are being migrated from Sun’s Solaris x86 version 8, which has been in use at the organization since 2002.

According to Eva Brucherseifer, president of the KDE community in Germany and managing director of basysKom, the migration process in its “peak phase” and is porting 300 systems every day. The company basysKom is configuring the desktops.

Brucherseifer said “The decision made by the Regional Tax Office in Lower Saxony represents an important step towards increased flexibility, enhanced usability and — last but not least — reduced training and support costs.”

German cities using or planning to use open source software include Schwäbisch Hall, Mannheim, Treuchtlingen, Leonberg and Isernhagen. Mannheim is planning to deploy Linux on 110 servers and 3,700 desktops.

Friday, February 13, 2009

Politicians from both houses of the United States Congress have reached a consensus over a stimulus package worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

The package was bridged between the House of Representatives‘ version of the stimulus, which was worth US$820 billion, and the Senate‘s version, which cost $838 billion. The package now costs $789 billion, and devotes resources to tax cuts and spending intended to help revive the faltering US economy.

The House of Representatives’ version of the bill was passed without any Republican support, while the Senate’s version, which was voted upon on Tuesday, was backed by only three Republican senators.

The stimulus is aimed at giving help to those who have suffered from the recession, in the form of food stamps, health coverage, unemployment benefits, and various other things.

US President Barack Obama hailed the agreement as a “hard-fought compromise”.

“I want to thank the Democrats and Republicans in Congress who came together,” he said, “with the urgency that this moment demands.”

Obama is to sign to bill into law after the revised version of the stimulus is passed by Congress. He has said that he wants the bill on his desk ready to sign by this weekend.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid estimated that the package should introduce three and a half million jobs. More than a third of it is to be devoted to various incentives for middle-class Americans and tax cuts.

Republican politicians, however, still disapprove of the stimulus plan, saying that the package is too costly and will increase the size of the federal government and not create any new jobs.

US stock markets posted modest gains at the end of day following the agreement.