Google Search Down in Pakistan

April 30, 213, 6:45 pm Pakistan Time (+5 GMT)

Google search is down countrywide for 2 hours, and no reports that how much time it will take to restore.

World’s energy as dirty now as 20 years ago: IEA

The International Energy Agency’s executive director, Maria van der Hoeven.

NEW DELHI: Progress towards the use of cleaner fuel technology has stalled, with production of the world’s energy as “dirty” now as it was two decades ago, the International Energy Agency said Wednesday.
Two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions come from the energy sector and the lack of change should “serve as a wake-up call”, the IEA’s executive director Maria van der Hoeven told a Clean Energy Ministerial meeting in New Delhi.
She warned that with increases in wind and solar energy being offset by increased coal use in countries such as China and India, the world needed to act fast “to avoid a potentially catastrophic warming of the planet”.
“Despite much talk by world leaders and despite a boom in renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago,” Van der Hoeven said.
“The drive to clean up the world’s energy system has stalled.”
The Paris-based IEA has developed an Energy Sector Carbon Intensity Index, which indicates how much carbon dioxide is emitted on average to provide a given unit of energy, she said.
The index for the world’s energy stood at 2.39 tonnes of carbon dioxide per tonne of oil equivalent in 1990 and had barely moved by 2010, holding at 2.37 per tonne of oil equivalent.
While there has been investment in new forms of clean energy, such as solar or wind power, these benefits have been counter-balanced by the increasing use of carbon-intensive coal by rising economic powers such as China and India.
“Our analysis is stark reminder the world is not on track to realise the benefit of a low-carbon energy system — to limit long-term temperature rises to two degrees centigrade,” the IEA head said.
“We cannot afford another 20 years of listlessness,” she said, calling for a rapid expansion in low-carbon energy technologies.
Clean energy investment fell to its lowest in four years in 2012, she said at the Clean Energy Ministerial which brought together 22 countries and the European Union that are responsible for 80 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Apple, Samsung lawyers spar in court over patents

Apple attorney Harold McElhinny (C) delivers his opening statement in a high profile
trial between Samsung and Apple in San Jose, California July 31, 2012. – Reuters

SAN JOSE: Lawyers for Apple and Samsung debated the differences between copying and honest competition as opening arguments were held Tuesday in a huge patent trial involving the two tech giants.
Harold McElhinny, a lawyer for Apple in the blockbuster patent trial under way in San Jose, California, told the jury Samsung began copying the US firm as soon as the iPhone was publicly unveiled in January 2007.
“At the same time (Apple co-founder Steve) Jobs introduced the iPhone, he warned his competitors that he had filed for patent protection on more than 200 new inventions in the iPhone,” McElhinny said in his opening argument.
“Samsung could come up with its own designs, it could beat Apple fairly in the marketplace. Or it could copy Apple… it’s easier to copy than to innovate.”The lawyer said Samsung copied specific features, including a “bounce-back”feature in the scrolling process and a design with a black-on-black face.
“At the highest corporate levels, Samsung decided to copy every element of the iPhone,” he said.
“This was not accidental. Samsung’s copying was intentional.”He argued that Samsung made dozens of changes as Apple updated its products “so that the end result was identical to Apple products.”
Samsung lawyer Charles Verhoeven countered Apple’s opening with his own version of cell phone history, citing several large-screen phones that pre-dated the iPhone.
The South Korean firm is no “copyist” or “Johnny-come-lately,” said Verhoeven, but a major technology company that does its own innovation. He said internal Apple documents show that designers themselves were inspired by designs from competitors, including Sony.
The iPhone was an “inspiring” product to many – but that there was nothing wrong with that, said Verhoeven. “Is that infringement? No, that’s competition,” he said.
The lawyer said Samsung’s design can be easily distinguished from Apple’s, even by an ordinary observer.
He said Samsung will show its own patents for high-speed data streaming, sending email, and multitasking to back its counter-claims against Apple, which the jury will also consider.
The comments came as jurors began hearing the biggest US patent trial in decades, with billions at stake for the tech giants.
As testimony began, Apple industrial designer Christopher Stringer, the inventor on many Apple patents, took the stand to testify about the creative process behind the iPhone.
“We came out with something that was breathtaking,” said Stringer. “It was a revolution. The challenges in terms of producing that product were enormous.”Stringer said when phones like Samsung’s were released, it was “offensive”to his artistic sensibilities. “We’ve been ripped off, it’s plain to see – by Samsung in particular,” said Stringer.
Asked why there was no Apple logo on the front of the iPhone, Stringer said it didn’t need it. “When you make a startling and beautiful design, you don’t need to,” he answered. “It becomes an icon.”Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller was to be on the stand when the trial resumes Friday.
Just ahead of arguments, US District Judge Lucy Koh allowed one of the 10 jurors to be dismissed after the woman said she was confused about whether she was getting paid.
“The stress of this case is causing anxiety. She’s having panic attacks,” the judge said.
“We understand this case would be a severe economic hardship on

you.”Both sides agreed to the move which reduces the number of jurors hearing the case to nine, but does not impact the trial.
Apple is seeking more than $2.5 billion in a case accusing the South Korean firm of infringing on designs and other patents from the iPhone and iPad maker.
This is one of several cases in courts around the world involving the two big electronics giants in the hottest part of the tech sector, tablet computers and smartphones.
While the results so far have been mixed in courts in Europe and Australia, Samsung is clearly on the defensive in the US case.

Koh, who will preside in the jury case, has issued two temporary injunctions against US sales of Samsung’s 10-inch Galaxy tablet and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone developed with Google.
Samsung could face big risks: If Apple wins, it would automatically get a permanent injunction on sales of Samsung devices. And if Samsung makes only minor changes, Apple could ask for the South Korean firm to be held in contempt.
The case has huge financial implications for both firms and the burgeoning industry for mobile devices.
A survey by research firm IDC showed Samsung shipped 50.2 million smartphones globally in the April-June period, while Apple sold 26 million iPhones. IDC said Samsung held 32.6 percent of the market to 16.9 percent for Apple.
Samsung is the leading maker of smartphones using Google’s Android operating system, which has become the most popular platform despite complaints from Apple that it has infringed on its patents.

French summer camp workers sacked over Ramazan fast

PARIS: France’s main Muslim body on Tuesday angrily condemned a town council’s decision to sack four summer camp workers for fasting during Ramazan as “arbitrary and discriminatory.”
The four workers, who had been employed temporarily by the town of Genevilliers in the Paris suburbs to help run a sports camp in southwestern France, were dismissed on July 20, the first day of Ramazan, after being told they were endangering children’s safety by not eating or drinking between dawn and dusk.
They are now planning to contest their dismissal through France’s labour courts and the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) said Tuesday it was considering suing Genevilliers council for discrimination.
In a statement, the Communist mayor of Genevilliers defended the decision to suspend the employees on health and safety grounds after an official who visited the camp noticed that they were not eating or drinking at lunchtime.
“They did not respect the terms of their contract in a way that could have endangered the physical safety of the children they were responsible for,” the statement said.
“This lack of nourishment and hydration could have resulted in these employees not being in full possession of the means required to ensure activities at the camp were correctly and safely run, as well as the physical safety of the children in their charge.”
Nicole Varet, an aide to the mayor, said the decision to dismiss the four employees had been influenced by an incident three years ago in which a fasting camp worker had been taken ill whilst driving, resulting in an accident in which a child was seriously injured.
But Mohand Yanat, a lawyer representing the four sacked workers, told AFP the safety argument was a smokescreen for anti-Muslim prejudice.
“How can you judge the capacity of someone to do their job on the basis of their religious practice?” he asked.
Abdallah Zekri, a spokesman for the CFCM, echoed his remarks. “Religious freedom is a fundamental right and you cannot in any circumstances ban someone from practising their religion,” he said.
One of the four workers, who was only prepared to be identified by his first name, Samir, said he hoped the action they are planning to take over the “unfair and unacceptable” treatment they had received would make life easier for other Muslims.
“We are thinking about going to court to get clear answers to our questions,” he told AFP. “Do people have the right not to eat during the day? Are doctors who observe Ramazan putting their patients lives in danger.”

Monster blackout fuels calls for India power reforms

NEW DELHI: India’s government faced calls for urgent reform of the power sector Tuesday, after a monster blackout triggered the collapse of the entire northern grid, affecting more than 300 million people.
Leading the high-decibel reform choir were business lobby groups who said Monday’s outage — the worst to hit the country in a decade — underlined the government’s inability to address India’s perennial electricity shortfall.
“The increasing gap between electricity supply and demand has long been a matter of concern,” said Chandrajit Banerjee, director general of the Confederation of Indian Industry.
The CII, Banerjee said, has “consistently highlighted” the need for urgent steps to improve supplies of coal to thermal power plants and reforming state distribution utilities.
“This latest outage is just an urgent reminder for addressing these issues as a priority,” he added.
While the cause of the blackout has yet to be confirmed, Indian newspapers joined numerous experts in pointing the finger of suspicion at energy-hungry states overdrawing their allotted quantity of power.
The northern grid went completely down for six hours on Monday morning, stranding hundreds of trains, triggering transport chaos in cities and leaving a region that houses 28 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population without power.
With India running a peak-hour electricity deficit of 12 per cent, power cuts are a daily necessity, and states frequently seek to mitigate the problem by exceeding what is meant to be a carefully controlled power quota.
Although there are financial penalties for overdrawing from the grid, it is still a cheaper option than buying power on the open market for cash-starved state electricity boards.
A member of a three-man team set up by the power ministry to investigate Monday’s outage said most states were impervious to official warnings about overdrawing.
“These states have lost all fear. They overdraw from the grid to avoid paying costly power from the market,” the panel member, who declined to be identified, told the Business Standard newspaper.
Vivek Pandit, the director of energy, defence and aerospace at the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, said such “gross grid indiscipline” could only be remedied with drastic penalties.
“Some states are holding the whole grid to ransom and they should be taken off the grid for a day to stop them feeling they can just act with impunity,” Pandit said.
Alok Brara, publisher of the industry magazine Powerline, said the reluctance of state utilities to purchase power from national energy trading exchanges reflected deep structural problems in both supply and pricing.
“For every 100 units they buy, they will lose 30 to theft. Another 40 will be earmarked for sale to agricultural consumers at highly subsidised prices, leaving just 30 units to sell at a remunerative rate,” Brara said.
“So the argument for them is the more they buy, the more money they lose,” he added.
Apart from an overall increase in power generation investment, analysts and business lobby groups say the most pressing need at state level is to rationalise tariffs and crackdown on widespread power theft.
“Over the years, people have just got used to taking free electricity,” said Pandit.
“They pay telephone bills because they know that otherwise they’ll be cut off. The same doesn’t go for electricity bills.”
Several newspaper editorials on Tuesday pushed for reforms allowing competition in all areas of the power industry — generation, transmission and distribution — and freeing up pricing to make consumers more responsible for the electricity they use.
“India’s basic energy shortage is compounded by the policy of selling electricity to consumers at politically correct prices,” the Hindustan Times said.
“As it stands India’s energy pricing … is hopelessly caught in competitive populism,” the newspaper said.

Hybrid ”ultrabooks” blur line between tablets, laptops

A Gigabyte vendor answers questions about the new line of Ultrabooks on the opening day of the Computex exhibition at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, Taiwan

TAIPEI: Slide it, flip it or snap it on and off. The way keyboards are connected to touch screens on the latest generation of computing devices is making it tough to differentiate a tablet from notebook or an ultrabook.
Microsoft Corp, which has long been the dominant force in PCs but has fallen far behind in the tablet race, is set to unveil its Windows 8 operating system later this year, designed to run on super-thin laptops called ultrabooks and tablets powered by Intel Corp’s chips.
The impending launch has prompted PC vendors to come up with a rash of hybrid designs, featuring touch screens and myriad configurations of moving or detachable keyboards.
“In future, it’ll be a blur in the definition of an ultrabook and a tablet because of convertibles with either detachable or sliding keyboards,” said Tracy Tsai, a Taipei-based analyst at research firm Gartner.
At Computex Taipei, the world’s second largest computer show, visitors flocked to the booths trying out every twist and turn that converts an ultrabook into a tablet.
Lenovo Group Ltd’s IdeaPad Yoga and Asustek Computer Inc’s Taichi have screens that bend all the way back. Samsung Electronics’ Hybrid becomes an ultrabook when the tablet clips onto a keyboard with magnetic hinges.
One tablet-ultrabook convertible that garnered attention was Asustek’s Taichi, whose dual-sided screens can run different applications at the same time.
“There’s a lot of use cases on tablets and tablet convertibles that people might approach with lots of fun, content consumption type of activity, but want to pop into it and use a productivity application and a desktop mode,” said Chris Walker, Intel’s director of microprocessor product marketing.
“The great thing is people don’t have to make that choice.”
But will they fly?
Despite all the fanfare surrounding these hybrids from Microsoft, Intel and PC vendors banking on these gadgets to make up for lost time in the tablet sector, there remains some nervousness in the industry and uncertainty among consumers about whether they will take off in a big way.
“Most of us have a laptop for work and an Android or Apple tablet now, so whether I’ll buy one of these hybrids will depend on the performance and price,” said one Computex attendee in his 30s.
Prices for these touch-based ultrabook convertibles will not be announced until Windows 8 is formally released, widely expected to be in the fourth quarter.
But the hybrids are already prompting some analysts to ponder whether they should be classified as tablets or laptop PCs.
“A way to settle the argument is by the size of the gadget. Anything that is 10 inches or smaller should be categorised as a tablet, while those that are 11 inches or bigger should be called an ultrabook,” said Ricky Liu, an analyst with KGI Securities.
Intel executives said they saw ultrabooks and its convertibles as laptops, while some PC vendors grouped such hybrids under tablets.
“Anything with a detachable keyboard is a tablet,” said an Asustek executive as she clicked the Transformer screen back onto the keyboard at the company’s booth at Computex.

Daughter to follow Houston into showbiz

LOS ANGELES (AFP) - Whitney Houston’s daughter said Sunday she plans to follow her mother into show business, while the drug-troubled star’s sister-in-law admitted her untimely death could have been predicted.