SATYAM SAGA SHOWS HOLES IN INDIA CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Just three months ago, India's fourth-largest software services exporter, Satyam Computer Services received a Golden Peacock award from a group of Indian directors for excellence in corporate governance.

Now its board is in turmoil and its shares have plunged after a botched attempt to buy two infrastructure firms in which management held stakes, sparking concerns about conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency.

Analysts say the saga exposes serious shortfalls in corporate India that must be addressed to ensure its credibility in an increasingly globalised and competitive world.

Four independent directors have resigned from the board of Satyam since the scandal erupted. But that does not fix the problem, said Premchand Palety, director of the Centre for Forecasting and Research in Delhi.

"Independent directors are supposed to be the watchdogs, the ones responsible for safeguarding the interests of minority shareholders. They clearly failed in their duty," he said.

Satyam says it adhered to corporate governance rules, appointing the requisite number of independent directors with excellent credentials, including the dean of a top business school in its hometown of Hyderabad and a professor at Harvard business school.

But there are concerns that some directors may be too close to Satyam's chairman to be considered truly independent, and all of them failed to ask tough questions about the now controversial infrastructure deals, Palety said.

"If Satyam's board was convinced about the merits of acquiring (the two firms), then good corporate governance demanded that it should have taken into confidence at least the major institutional shareholders," he said.

Even though the company aborted the plan, the damage was done: New York-listed Satyam's shares have plunged by a third since it first announced plans to acquire two sister firms for $1.6 billion and then abandoned the deal two weeks ago.

Satyam's board will meet on Jan 10 to consider more options to improve shareholder value and corporate governance.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN DUAL CORE AND CORE 2 DUO

The Core 2 Duo is Intel's second generation (Hence, Core 2) processor made for desktops and laptops designed from the ground up to be fast while not consuming nearly as much power as previous CPUs, Dual core is simply a generic term referring to any processor package with two physical CPUs in one.

Dual core and Core2 Duo both use 2 cores to process instructions..... good.... ok... but what's the difference then...

Well... the main difference is in the cache memory they use.....
The Dual Core processors use single cache shared between the 2 cores... plus, the size of this cache memory is usually less as compared to Core2 Duo ones (typically in size of 128 KB to around 512 Kb or 1 MB)......

On the other side Core 2 Duo processors also use 2 cores but they have dedicated cache memory assigned to each of the core. so in effect there are two cache memories (note - in case if you don't know what exactly cache memory is - its a static memory - Static RAM - which is costly - and charged per KB size - because they are embedded into your processors.... and your processor stores instruction set into these cores and also info of frequently accessed memory locations so that it doesn't need to go to your main memory - RAM - on motherboard - every time and search indexes to get these locations. The result is - your access time is greatly reduced.. ok.. enough of info... lets get back to main topic)... so, the more cache your processor has got, the more costly will it be and more info can it store and faster will it become.... coming back to Core 2 Duo processors.... the cache size is typically 1 MB to up to 4 / 6 / 8 /12 Mb of size. so if a core 2 duo processor config states 4 Mb of cache, then effectively your 2 cores will use 2 Mb each... now you can make out the difference in speed between a dual core using 512 cache and a Core 2 Duo using 4 Mb of cache... and the same reason why core 2 duo processors are costly and more faster (about 40 %) than the dual core ones...

Finally... to summarize, dual core procs (less cache size and that too shared cache between two cores) are strip in version of Core 2 Duo procs (more cache size and independant cache between each of the two cores), which make Core 2 Duo procs costlier and faster than Dual Core procs... so the winner is Core 2 Duo (and its comes with a price...)

PAK HACKER ATTACKS E RLYS SITE, THREATENS CYBER WAR ON INDIA

In the first instance of cyber attack on Indian government websites, the attack on Eastern Railways site on Wednesday popped open vulnerability of government websites in the country.

While Eastern Railway took almost two and half hours to restore the site to normalcy, visitors to the site continued to be attacked by Trojan virus. ER officials could only primarily trace the roots to Toronto in Canada after repeated top-brass meetings all through the day.

As spotted by FE in the morning, the official site of the Eastern Railway-www.eastern railway.gov.in—was hacked on Wednesday. When opened, the scroll on the site— which normally consists of official announcements—had unusual notes. The first note read: "Cyber war has been declared on Indian cyberspace by Whackerz- Pakistan (24 Dec-2008)." This was followed by two other notes: "Indians hit hard by Zaid Hamid" and "We are f**ked up Indians. You are hacked."

When clicked, the scroll opened into a new window which claimed that 'Mianwalian of Whackerz" has hacked the site in response to the air violation of Pakistan. It also claimed that it will continue to hack more Indian military and government sites. The threat note also claimed that servers of Indian financial institutions will also be hacked with the help of the group's members working in computer departments of "foreign companies". Data belonging to "Indian nationals (only Hindus)" will be destroyed eventually, it added.

Another threat note asked the visitors of the website to watch the real Indian conspiracy in Mumbai attacks on the website-www.brasstacks.pk. Brasstacks claims to be "a unique Pakistani think tank devoted to the study of regional and global political events and their implications for Pakistan's security and interests." The note ended with the slogan "Long live Pakistan".

The third note, which showed the hackers' apathy towards India, Israel and USA, challenged Indians to save their 'motherland' from turning into pieces.

When contacted, ER officials seemed unaware of the entire incident and the site remained as it is for almost an hour, till 11.40am, after which ER blocked it. The website resumed to normalcy after 12, when the threat notes in the scroll as well as in the news and events section were removed.

"Our sites have cyber security certificate from US-based Thawte," said an ER official. "We have informed the service provider and will get a detailed response from them only after 24 hours," he added.

According to a cyber security expert, similar attacks can be done through SQL injection method. In case of a SQL injection attack, webpages with active content like feedback forms are used. Attackers can write malicious commands in the forms through a rich text format and get control over the database of the target site.

VOLVO TO UNVEIL WORLD'S FIRST ACCIDENT-PROOF CAR NEXT MONTH

Car giant Volvo is set to unveil its first ever "accident-proof car", which will drive itself in traffic by using radar to control the distance.

The Swedish manufacturer will unveil Volvo S60 with automatic brakes at the next month's Detroit motor show. It will go on the market in 2010.

"This technology helps us take an important step towards our long-term vision of designing cars that should not crash," the Telegraph quoted Thomas Broberg, the company's safety specialist as saying.

"Our aim for 2020 is that no one should be killed or injured in a Volvo car," he added.

The car can stop itself upon sensing that a collision is about to happen either a car or a pedestrian, even when travelling at low speeds.

It will feature a sophisticated cruise control system designed to automatically maintain a safe distance from the car in front.

It works with the help of a radar unit fitted in the car's grille, which not only detects what is in front of the vehicle, but how fast it is moving.

When the car believes that there is an imminent threat of a collision, a light flashes on a windscreen display in front of the driver at the same time along with an audible warning, the brakes are applied automatically.

Places :: Fact

Buckingham Palace has over six hundred rooms.
Central Park located in New York has 125 drinking fountains.
Cimeti?re du P?re Lachaise located in Paris is the most visited cemetery in the world. The cemetery opened in 1805 and has over one million people buried there, including rock star Jim Morrison.
Every year, an igloo hotel is built in Sweden that has the capacity to sleep 100 people.
Frank Wathernam was the last prisoner to leave Alcatraz prison on March 21, 1963.
From 1939 to 1942, there was a undersea post office in the Bahamas.
Hawaii's Mount Waialeale is the wettest place in the world - it rains throughout the year and about 460 inches per annum.
Ho-Ho-Kus, a small town in New Jersey, is the only town in the United States of America that has two dashes in its name.
Honolulu, Hawaii boasts the only royal palace in the United States of America.
In 1785, the city of Paris removed bones from cemeteries to ease the overflow of dead people. They took these bones and stacked them in tunnels now known as the Catacombs. You can visit these tunnel attractions and work your way along long corridors, which are stacked with skulls and bones.
In Czechoslovakia, there is a church that has a chandelier made out of human bones.
In Las Vegas, casinos do not have any clocks.
In Las Vegas, the busiest and two most popular days chosen for couples to get married are St. Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve.
Levan, which is located in Utah, got its name from "navel" which is levan spelt backwards. It was named this because it is in the center of Utah.
One of the steepest main streets in Canada is located in Saint John, New Brunswick. Over a distance of two blocks the street rises about 80 feet.
Tacoma Narrows Bridge which was located in Washington was nicknamed "Galloping Gertie" because of the unusual way it twisted and swayed with even with the slightest winds when people would drive on it. The bridge collapsed on November 7, 1940, fortunately no humans died, except for a dog.
The American Airlines Center in Dallas has more toilets per capita than any other sports and entertainment venue in the country
The Golden Gate Bridge was first opened in 1937.
The Great Wall stretches for about 4,500 miles across North China.
The Hollywood sign was first erected in 1923. It was first erected as "Hollywoodland."
The Library of Congress, located in Washington D.C., is the largest library in the world.
The Mall of America, located in Bloomington, Minnesota is so big that it can hold 24,336 school buses.
The Mount Horeb Mustard Museum which is located in Wisconsin has the biggest collection of prepared mustards. They have approximately 4,000 different jars and tubes from all over the world.
The North of Scotland's oldest inhabited castle is Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye.
The Sears Tower consists of nine framed tubes, which connects nine skyscrapers as one building.
The Sears Tower in Chicago contains enough steel to build 50,000 automobiles.
The Sears Tower located in Chicago, Illinois is made up 76,000 tons of steel.
The average stay for a prisoner on Alcatraz, when it was used as a prison, was five years.
The city of Chicago has the only post office in the world where you can drive your car through.
The deepest cave in the world is the "Lamprechtsofen- Vogelshacht" cave which can be found in Salzburg, Austria. The cave is 5,354 feet deep.
The first ice hotel was built in Swedish Lapland.
The largest ketchup bottle in the world is a 170 feet tall and is located in Collinsville, Illinois, USA. It was built in 1949 by the W.E. Caldwell Company as a water tower.
The largest school in the world is City Montessori School in India and has over 25,000 students in grade levels ranging from kindergarten to college.
The largest wedding chapel in Las Vegas is the Viva Las Vegas Chapel, which can seat 100 people.
The most famous movie theatre is the "Chinese Theatre" located in Los Angeles, USA.
The most popular vacation destinations for Americans in 1956 was Niagara Falls.
The names of the two stone lions in front of the New York Public Library are Patience and Fortitude. They were named by then-mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.
The oldest inhabited house in Scotland is the Traquair Castle. The castle has had 27 kings as visitors.
The only flying saucer launch pad in the world is located in St. Paul, Alberta, Canada.
The steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street located in Dunedin, New Zealand. It has an incline of 38%.
The tallest freestanding sculpture in the world is Chief Crazy Horse in South Dakota, USA.
The term "the Big Apple" came into common usage in the 1930s when touring jazz musicians referred to a town or city as an apple, making New York the Big Apple.
The world's largest bullfighting ring is in Mexico City. The "Plaza de Toros" opened in 1946 and has a seating capacity of about fifty thousand people.
The world's only museum of Phallology is in Reykjavik, Iceland. Phallology is the the science of the penis.
The world's tallest roller coaster is located in England and reaches a peak height of 72 meters.
The worlds tallest free fall rollercoaster is The Giant Drop located in Australia. The drops is 120 meters which is equivalent to a 39 storey building.
There are places in Saskatchewan called Elbow, Eyebrow, and Drinkwater.
There is enough concrete in the Hoover Dam to pave a two lane highway from San Francisco to New York.
There was a post office on the Russian space station Mir. Visiting cosmonauts would use unique postal "markers" to stamp envelopes and other items as having flown aboard the Mir space station.
Tomatina is the legendary Spanish tomato-throwing festival held in Bunol, Spain.

10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life

1) Digital Libraries

Having total connectivity is pointless if all you get is the latest gossip about Paris Hilton. But the digitization of mankind's accumulated works proceeds apace. All of MIT's courses are now online, for instance, and, if you haven't done so, check out Google Book Search. The time will come when any straightforward factual question can be answered immediately, online. But, alas, those are always the easy questions.



2) Gene Therapy and/or Stem Cells

A lot of maladies actually involve inherited conditions–they're in your genes, in other words. But scientists are working to change those genes and trick defective cells into growing correctly. Perhaps, someday, birth defects will be as treatable as pneumonia.






3) Pervasive Wireless Internet

WiMAX, 3G, 4G, etc., all point to a pervasive wireless Internet, where being on-line everywhere, all the time, will be routine. That implies the possibility of full connectivity between any two random devices. Want to check your burglar alarm from your cell phone? It'll be easy. Unjacking to get away and relax, however, may not be so easy.




4) Mobile Robots

The recent DARPA challenge (where robot cars navigated through suburban traffic) hints at what might come. Why drive to the deli to pick up your order when you can just send your car? We may see convoys of robot trucks on the highways. Admittedly, they'll probably have more initial acceptance in warehouses, handling pick-and-pull chores.




5) Better, Cheaper Solar Cells

The cost of photovoltaic cells (that turn sunlight into electricity) are coming down. In less than ten years the cost of solar energy could be at parity with the cost of electricity from the grid, and solar cells could be standard features in new residential construction. Your house could power itself about a third of the time. (Science can't do much about night and bad weather.)




6) Location-Based Computing

Instead of clicking an icon on a browser screen, you can walk outside, point your cell phone at an actual three-dimensional thing (presumably, a building that houses a business), click the phone, and get information about (or jump to the Web site of) whatever you were pointing at. As well as servers with Internet address, there will be servers with geographic coordinates.

7) Desktop 3-D Printing

Instead of going to the store for your next gadget, you might download a design of your choosing and generate it in your desktop 3-D printer. The next step will be to design your own gadgets, post the designs, and sell them, etc. Toys, kitchenware, and decorative household items should be fair game, at least. Cottage industry, here we come!






8) Moore's Law Upheld

The law, stated by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore in 1965, implies that available computer power can be expected to double every other year. For at least two decades pundits have been pointing out barriers to the law's fulfillment, and the chip industry has been smashing those barriers. Currently they can't agree if the law has a couple of more decades of life left, or 600 years. Either way, in terms of available computing power, it's clear that we ain't seen nothing yet.


9) Therapeutic Cloning

Forget the stories about generating identical copies of a particular sheep or person. The whole idea behind cloning all along has been to grow replacement organs or tissue in a vat, which the body would see no reason to reject. Cancerous or damaged organs could be replaced by new, disease-free clones of themselves.





10) The Hydrogen Economy

Instead of guzzling imported oil (and being at the mercy of oil suppliers) we could turn water into hydrogen and burn that (or use to charge fuel cells.) Meanwhile, the only byproduct of the combustion of hydrogen is ... more water! However, hydrogen storage remains a thorny issue, due to its low density, and hydrogen may end up being only one of many interlocking components that replace the current oil economy.

- referenced from http://www.livescience.com

AMAZING FACTS (HEALTH AND BODY)

* A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for approximately sixty-nine years.
* 1 out of every 4 kids in the USA is overweight.
* 41% of women apply body or hand moisturizer a minimum three times a day.
* 75-90% of primary physician visits are due to stress.
* A Russian man who wore a beard during the time of Peter the Great had to pay a special tax.
* A blink lasts approximately 0.3 seconds.
* A ear trumpet was used before the hearing aid was invented by people who had difficulty hearing.
* A fetus develops fingerprints at eighteen weeks.
* A fetus starts to develop fingerprints at the age of eight weeks.
* A fetus that is four months old, will becomes startled and turn away if a light is flashed on the mother's stomach.
* A headache and inflammatory pain can be reduced by eating 20 tart cherries.
* A human embryo is smaller than a grain of rice at four weeks old.
* A kiss for one minute can burn 26.
* A little under one quarter of the people in the world are vegetarians.
* A person infected with the SARS virus, has a 95-98% chance of recovery.
* A person who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day will on average lose two teeth every ten years.
* A person will burn 7 percent more calories if they walk on hard dirt compared to pavement.
* A sneeze can travel as fast as one hundred miles per hour.
* A study concludes that kids who snore do poorly in school.
* A study indicates that smokers are likely to die on average six and a half years earlier than non-smokers.
* A women from Berlin Germany has had 3,110 gallstones taken out of her gall bladder.
* A world record 328 pound ovarian cyst was removed from a woman in Galveston, Texas, in 1905.
* A yawn usually lasts for approximately six seconds.
* About twenty-five percent of the population sneeze when they are exposed to light.
* According to the American Institute of Stress, job stress approximately costs the U.S. industry over $300 billion dollars per year.
* After twenty-seven years, Betty Rubble made her debut as a Flintstones Vitamin in 1996.
* Air is passed through the nose at a speed of 100 miles per hour when a person sneezes.
* Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar were both epileptic.
* An adult esophagus can range from 10 to 14 inches in length and is one inch in diameter.
* An average adult produces about half a litre of flatulent gas per day, resulting in an average of about fourteen occurrences of flatulence a day.
* Approximately 1-2 calorie are burned a minute while watching T.V.
* Approximately 25,000 workers died during the building of the Panama Canal and approximately 20,000 of them contracted malaria and yellow fever.
* Asthma affects one in fifteen children under the age of eighteen.
* At least 7% of all health care costs in the United States are attributed to smoking.
* At one time it was thought that the heart controlled a person's emotions, Babies that are exposed to cats and dogs in their first year of life have a lower chance of developing allergies when they grow older.
* Babies' eyes do not produce tears until the baby is approximately six to eight weeks old.
* Being lactose intolerant can cause chronic flatulence.
* Between 12%-15% of the population is left-handed.
* Between 1997-2002, there was an increase of 228% in cosmetic procedures in the United States.
* Bile produced by the liver is responsible for making your feces a brownish, green colour.
* Brain damage will only occur if a fever goes above 107.6 degrees farenheit.
* By walking an extra 20 minutes every day, an average person will burn off seven pounds of body fat in an year.
* Carbon monoxide can kill a person in less than 15 minutes.
* Children grow faster in the springtime than any other season during the year.