Monday, December 30, 2002		Newsscape

Hindi font

TWO Delhi school students have created a Devnagri font - the Hindi language script - and declared it could be used by anyone for free. Class X students, Avneesh Chhabra and Shivaas Gulati, decided to publish the fonts under the Lesser GNU Public License (LGPL) despite being flooded with acquisition offers. Chhabra and Gulati jointly designed the font for an interschool contest. Their move has made the alternate Indian software circles sit up and take notice as the country is viewed as a battleground between proprietorial and non-proprietorial software. The students said it took them around two weeks to make the font. It took another week to assign the letters and putting in the glyph settings in the software for each letter, the size and placing. The students’ generosity has come in for praise.

Click for clouds

A new Website inaugurated here this week gives details of daily weather conditions of 680 cities worldwide in 69 countries. From Argentina to Vanuatu, www.worldweather.org. aims at providing the media and the international community with an authoritative source of up-to-date weather data around the world and round the clock. Developed by the Hong Kong Observatory under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation, the site offers weather forecasts several days ahead and monthly climatological information for 826 cities of 150 member countries. All information is provided by the National Meteorological Services, which operate collectively on the official worldwide weather observing network coordinated by the WMO.

Notebooks @ Gujarat

UK based Allied Computers International is planning to set up a Notebook computer manufacturing facility in Gujarat with an investment of Rs 50 crore in the next six to eight months. "In the next six to 12 months, we will have a manufacturing facility for Notebooks in Gujarat with an investment of about Rs 50 crore", Hirji Patel, CMD, Allied Computers says. The company has already acquired land for the purpose.

Global IT spending

The days of heavy IT expenditures have gone and are not coming back in the foreseeable future. But enterprises are expected to open their pocketbooks a bit wider, a market research firm has reported. The Aberdeen Group is hopeful that the worldwide IT spending on products and services would increase by four per cent, with US spending rising to 3.6 per cent. The global IT spending would reach 1.26 trillion dollars next year and further to $ 1.44 trillion by 2006. Overall, long-term growth is projected at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of four to five per cent worldwide and from five to six per cent in the USA. The Asia Pacific Rim is expected to lead the rest of world in IT spending from 2003 to 2006, recording a 6.5 per cent CAGR. North America is expected to follow with 4.9 per cent and Europe with 2.6 per cent.