South African GDP forecast cut by treasury

CAPE TOWN Oct 25 (Reuters) - South Africa's National Treasury on Tuesday cut its 2011 economic growth forecast to 3.1 percent, rising to 3.4 next year and said this depended on global prospects and was not enough to reduce unemployment and poverty in line with government goals.


Growth in Africa's largest economy is expected to improve gradually over three years before reaching 4.3 percent in 2014, assuming the European debt crisis is solved and the U.S. avoids recession, while emerging economies continue to perform well.


"The pace and progress of recovery is uncertain. The threat of global contagion is still with us," Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan said in a Medium Term Budget Policy statement in parliament -- his outline of policy objectives over the next three years.

"While this level of growth is not as vibrant as we would like, it is a base on which to build," Gordhan said, adding that the country's economic fundamentals were sound.


Stagnating global growth would reduce South Africa's exports, which is heavily reliant on trade with Europe, while capital flow reversals could see weaker equities prices on the Johannesburg bourse, putting greater pressure on the volatile rand currency.


Less demand from emerging markets could also reduce profitability in the underperforming mining sector, a top employer and major economic sector.


Gordhan said it was time to take difficult decisions as financial constraints forced government to choose between competing goals, with a shift of resources in favour of growth and jobs envisaged while keeping an eye on rising debt levels.


Infrastructure spending, which amounts to 802 billion rand ($101.1 billion) over three years, is key to helping the economy grow, he added.


"Ensuring a sustainable level of debt is also necessary to create an environment in which the private sector can grow, invest and create jobs based on stable inflation, a low cost of capital and a competitive real exchange rate," National Treasury said.



Household spending has helped the recovery but growth in consumption will moderate as rising inflation limits disposable income.


Inflation has stayed inside the Reserve Bank's 3 to 6 percent since February 2010, allowing the Reserve Bank to leave interest rates at 30-year lows. The Treasury expects inflation to average 5 percent in 2011, before rising to 5.4 percent next year. The Reserve Bank has kept the repurchase rate unchanged at a 30-year low of 5.5 percent since November 2010.


"Domestic conditions are largely supportive of growth. Real interest rates are low and will assist in bolstering private-sector consumption and investment over the medium term," National Treasury said.


At a press briefing later, Treasury's director-general Lungisa Fuzile, said the treasury expected pressure from oil and food prices to ease in future.


($1 = 7.932 South African Rand)  
(Reporting by Wendell Roelf; Editing by Marius Bosch)





Source : http://af.reuters.com
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Google Android Ice Cream Sandwich Introduced

When I said it would be a busy fall, I didn’t expect us to be covering two big announcements in one day, or three/four/five, depending on how you choose to count them. Samsung didn’t just show off new hardware, Google was there to show off the new software behind that hardware. Details of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich have been leaking for some time now but with the SDK published and the event wrapped up we have a better sense of what Google has in mind for the next phase in Android. Let’s get started.

Matias Duarte started off by introducing the audience to Android’s new font, Roboto. Playful though the name is, it is a stylish and elegant font, and while it might not strike the right note for everyone it certainly seems easy to read. It’s featured throughout ICS, including the digital clock on the lock screen which is where we’ll begin. The layout is familiar, and not too divergent in look. In function there’s some new tricks to show off. Swiping the unlock icon to the right takes you to your home screen, though swiping left takes you to the camera app, more on that in a bit. This trick has been seen before, most recently in HTC’s Sense 3.5. New - though perhaps not as revolutionary - is facial recognition based unlock, which Google aptly calls Face Unlock. This was a feature in my Lenovo S10 from several years back, and judging by the demo this implementation may face the same hurdles as that Lenovo, poor lighting leads to poor recognition. This may pan out, though right now it seems like a solution searching for a problem. 

The gold standard for notifications systems has been WebOS since its introduction, with Android following close behind. In its latest incarnation the differences are mainly cosmetic and in the addition of a music notification with playback controls and the ability to swipe away individual notifications. These are features that we’ve seen in skinned and modded versions of Android for some time, but welcome nonetheless. What we haven’t seen is the ability to peek at notifications from the lock screen and then go directly into the app that originated the notification upon unlock. 

 

Having unlocked your phone you are now presented with a home screen that looks like a comfortable marriage between Honeycomb and Gingerbread. Honeycomb’s on screen buttons have evolved and are delightfully animated, and though anchored to the bottom or right hand side of the device, depending on orientation, they rotate appropriately. This area is called the System Bar, and will also be home to the Notification shade on tablet ICS devices. Just above the System Bar is the Favorites tray, an evolution of the docks we’ve seen before. Here you’ll find icons for Phone, People, Messaging, Browser and, of course, App Drawer, though it will be highly customizable, even supporting Folders. When you do decide to open an app, the Favorites tray becomes the Action Bar and provides contextual actions for the app you’re in. It can be at the top or bottom of the screen and can change configuration within the app based on context. In the Gmail demo, for instance, they showed how while in the Inbox the Action Bar had buttons to compose a new message, search your messages or access labels. Upon opening or selecting an e-mail, new buttons populate the Action Bar. Adopting the Action Bar will be a key UI element in ICS apps. 

 

Back to the home screen, Google apps are now resizable and that functionality will be opened up to developers. The familiar home and back buttons are rejoined by the Recent Apps button from Honeycomb. This multitasking implementation looks and works very similarly as in the tablet OS, with the added ability to kill individual tasks with a swipe. This was an oft lamented absence in Honeycomb, as the list of apps could get quite long after several days of use. 

 

Phones are meant as communications devices so Google spent time on the Phone, Messaging and People apps. The People app replaces the Contacts app of old, and is livened up with larger pictures and a lot more data. Opening a contact’s profile reveals the typical list of numbers and e-mails, but it also includes connections through social media, and a swipe to the left reveals an integrated aggregation of that contact’s updates within those networks. They’ve also included a new Favorites tab that introduces a UI concept that we’ll see recurring in Android from now on, and it may look familiar to Windows Phone 7 users. The Favorites tab displays larger high resolution images of your most common contacts in a tightly aligned grid that is described as a ‘magazine style UI’ and bears a striking resemblance to the panels popular in Microsoft’s Metro UI. 

 

 

The Phone app has been updated with in-line visual voicemail (through Google Voice) amongst your call log, and a Favorite’s tab, as in the People app, that allows you to call common contacts with one touch instead of opening their profile first. Calling one of your contacts yields a new in-call screen that features a large profile image overlaid with call information and call functions. 

 

The Messaging app gets its biggest update from the improved keyboard, which has in-line spell check, improved word suggestion with easier to select options, and a  refined way to add words to the dictionary. The voice recognition functions of Android have been improved and they’ve implemented an ‘open microphone’ experience that allows you to dictate long messages and insert punctuation, regardless of any pauses you might have while composing. The engine even supports emoticons. 

 
Screenshot of the article, within the article... How meta.

The Browser gets a new ‘Save for off-line reading’ function that is aimed at more than just storing articles, but can include things like boarding passes, and train schedules. It also gets a tab management system that mirrors the Recent Apps function. The stock android browser now also includes incognito mode, which no doubt will be used in conjunction with Flash for lots of scientific research. 

 

Every browser iteration from Android features performance improvements and this one is no different. Google notes that the stock Android browser gets much improved rendering speed through an improved and updated version of WebKit, and faster JavaScript performance thanks in part to an update to V8's crankshaft JIT engine. Google claims an improvement of 220% in Android 4.0 over Android 2.3 in V8, and 35% faster SunSpider 0.9.1 performance on the Nexus S alone. We look forward to testing out this improved Android browser and seeing what other improvements are lurking inside very soon. 

 

Google's Browser Performance Benchmarks (Courtesy Google)

In the emulator the benefits of this new version of WebKit are readily visible, where Android 4.0's browser scores 230 and 3 bonus points, compared with 177 and 1 bonus point in Android 2.3.5. The new browser also thankfully now exposes a desktop user agent switcher, something that has been missing for far too long from the stock Android browser.

 

The Calendar app gets a new layout and features pinch to zoom for easily shifting from a broader to a more granular view of your agenda, and back again. They’ve extended the use of the swipe here to allow you to go back and forth between days/weeks/months. This same motion is found in the new Gmail app for browsing through e-mails quickly. And that Gmail app now gets two-line previews along with the other UI changes. 

Source : http://www.anandtech.com
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Blackberry Service Blackout Reasons

Engineers at its European headquarters in Slough, Berkshire, as well as its corporate base in Waterloo, Ontario, are still investigating what went so badly wrong. According to industry sources, however, a picture is beginning to emerge.


While Slough is the site of RIM’s European headquarters, and is also in charge of operations in the Middle East and Africa, it is not the physical location of the stacks of networking equipment that actually serve the tens of millions of BlackBerry users in these regions.
The firm is famously tight-lipped on such matters, but it is widely known within the mobile industry that the machines are actually maintained at its site in Egham, Surrey.


The problems began on Monday at around 10AM BST. Mobile networks noticed that BlackBerry internet traffic had fallen away completely. Senior RIM executives confirmed to them that there was a problem, and that an urgent investigation had been launched.

Blackberry OS7 Phones

Brief outages are reasonably common in the internet industry and at this stage there was no indication that this one would lead so many customers to vow to abandon their BlackBerry in favour of rival smartphones.


RIM’s investigation revealed the apparent cause of the outage to be a failed Cisco switch in its core network. Switches are basic components of Internet Protocol networks. They are specialised computers that direct communications within networks; in this case the emails, web browsing and instant messages of millions BlackBerry Internet Service users.


On day three of the crisis, RIM publicly admitted it had suffered a “core switch failure”.


If everything had worked to plan, the failure would not have mattered. A backup system also failed, however, for reasons that remain obscure and will surely be among the top priorities of RIM’s own post-mortem investigation.
Ironically, suspicion has fallen on a network upgrade programme specifically designed to prevent outages. 


Involving “fundamental” changes, it was initiated after a North American BlackBerry outage in December 2009. Work in Britain was completed only two months ago, sources said.


After Monday’s morning’s collapse, RIM’s engineers decided to revert the software running the switching infrastructure to the pre-upgrade version. This meant the Internet Protocol backbone of the BlackBerry network in Europe, the Middle East and Africa had to be rebuilt from scratch. Effectively reset, the switches and routers had to learn where they were within the network and how to talk to each other again.


Yet this is normally relatively simple job, perhaps taking a few hours, experienced network engineers have told The Telegraph. The core switch and backup switch failure, and the software rollback, need not have caused a 72-hour-plus disaster.


But an unknown point following the switch failure, the Egham data centre’s Oracle database, a bespoke and heavy-duty communications data storage application, was corrupted. This database is effectively the “brain” of the BlackBerry Internet Service, handling messages and forwarding data to users.


With saving the Oracle database the top priority, RIM was forced to repair software while it was still running – a difficult and fraught process known as a “hotfix”.
“Working with a live database like that is the stuff of nightmares,” explained one network engineer..
This database corruption problem, according to industry sources, is thought to be the reason the outage lasted well into Thursday for many users.


The period of message delays and patchy browsing that marked the end of the outage, and spread to North America and Asia, was caused by the backlog of data that built up. RIM’s global systems had to grind through huge quantities of data on as its European systems were gradually fixed.


The firm had prematurely declared victory on Tuesday morning, when it said services had been “restored”. But the database problems prompted a second collapse before users received any data. Of all the public relations mistakes commentators have said RIM made this week, this act of optimism annoyed its network partners the most.


“They should have just asked us - we weren’t seeing any BlackBerry traffic,” said a source at a British network.
"They were being far too positive. It didn't help."
Britain’s mobile network chiefs are said to be “absolutely furious” with RIM, but they know that the must continue to work with it, as BlackBerry users’ internet service will always depend on the firm.


In a press conference at 3PM on Thursday, Mike Lazaridis, RIM's founder and co-CEO, having already apologised profusely, finally announced systems were returning to normal. This time he was backed up by the mobile networks, who saw their BlackBerry subscribers data connections flicker back to life.


Source : http://www.telegraph.co.uk
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New plan for SA doctors in public sector

Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi on Tuesday announced a healthy R1.24-billion would be spent to "revitalise nursing colleges" and improve infrastructure to train more nurses, as part of the department's new human resource policy. 


Motsoaledi unveiled the health department's first human resource strategy to deal with the country's severe shortages of doctors and nurses, at the University of Witwatersrand's medical school in Johannesburg.


He had promised to address staff shortages in the public healthcare sector, when he unveiled the national health insurance green paper in August. 


Department spokesperson Fidel Hadebe said nursing colleges standing empty would have to be fixed up so that they were fit for use.


"For the current financial year we will spend in R220-million, and R510-million each in subsequent years," Motsoaledi said. "Even if Wits University takes an extra 1000 [medical] students it would not meet our needs."


He said the shortage of healthcare professionals extended beyond South Africa and there are currently four million vacancies globally.


South African universities currently train 1200 doctors each year. 


Training more staff


The plan proposed an increase in the number of medical students trained every year; investing more money in training facilities and nursing colleges; and building a new medical school in Limpopo. It also suggested a focus on primary health care by increasing nurses in schools and municipalities to prevent people from going straight to hospital. 

Doctors

Earlier this year Motsoaledi asked the deans of South Africa's medical schools to train 40 more students per year. He said Wits University was the first to do so by taking in an extra 40 at the beginning of the year at the cost of R8-million.


The Wits' medical faculty dean, Professor Ahmed Wadee, said the country was short of every type of medical specialist and it would take a long time to fix because it took "six to eight years to train specialists after they had qualified as doctors".


South African Medical Association president Dr Norman Mabaso previously told the Mail & Guardian the country had 24 000 doctors in 1990, while in 2008 this had only increased to about 34 000. It took 18 years to produce 10 000 doctors, which he said was unacceptable.


A short-term solution from the health department included employing 400 retired nurses willing to work. Motsoaledi said they told him "they are retired but not yet tired".


Private vs Public


Motsoaledi echoed this sentiment and said bad planning was to blame for the predicament South Africa finds itself in. 


"Some problems are self-made," he said. "Further evidence indicates that the training and production of certain key health worker categories have stagnated or reversed over the years. The weak management skills in the public service aggravate the situation even further."


Motsoaledi said that staff did not like to work in the public sector and more had to be done to make sure management of hospitals were up to scratch.


"Studies have demonstrated that it is not only financial incentives that make them leave but sometimes how they are managed or mismanaged. The public health sector has to ensure that environment in which health workers operate is conducive," he said. 


Motsoaledi said in order for national health insurance (NHI) to work, there had to be enough staff distributed equitably around the country.


The NHI green paper policy document, released in August this year, mentions that there is a disparity between numbers of staff in the public sector and those in the private but does not address how to change it.


Despite his frequent complaints about the over-commercialisation of medicine, Motsoaledi dodged a question about how the ministry planned to attract health care workers from the private sector back to the government sector. 


The minister was critical of the costs of private health care and said many people told him he was mad about wanting to fix the public health care sector. "I will not stop this madness of mine," he told audience.


"People tell me the health care sector is not going to work but it has to work -- 84% of our population rely on the public health care sector."


The NHI policy document that the minister launched was also critical of private health care and suggested prices on private industry needed to be regulated.


The document noted that private hospital costs have increased by 121% and specialist costs by 120% over the past decade. It targets those increases as unacceptable and "out of proportion" to the services provided, suggesting that pricing in private healthcare needed to be "radically transformed".


Source : http://www.mg.co.za
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Race for car of the year South Africa

A mixed bag of 10 French, Italian, German and Korean vehicles have made it through to the finals for the 2012 South African Car of the Year competition. The finalists were determined in a vote by the full members and a jury made up of 30 selected members of the South African Guild of Motoring Journalists (SAGMJ).

2011 Alfa Romeo Giulietta 1.4

The 10 finalists are:


2011 Alfa Romeo Giulietta 1.4 125 kW MultiAir Distinctive 
2011 Audi A6 3.0 T TDI Quattro S tronic 
2011 Citroen DS4 THP 200 Sport 
2011 Ford Focus 2.0 TDCI Trend Sedan Powershift 
2011 Hyundai Elantra 1.8 GLS 
2011 Kia Picanto 1.2 EX 
2011 Mercedes Benz SLK 350 BlueEFFICIENCY 
2011 Peugeot 5008 2.0 HDi Active Man 
2011 Suzuki Kizashi 2.4 SDLX Man 
2011 VW Jetta 1.4 TSI 118 kW Highline


The winner of South Africa's most prestigious motoring award will be determined in a two-day test session to be held in February 2012 at the Gerotek test facility near Pretoria, where the cars will be assessed independently by the jury members.


In keeping with the broadened competition, the testing at Gerotek will allow the vehicles to be evaluated under the conditions individual vehicles would be expected to perform under. While jury members are already familiar with the vehicles they have voted into the final, the testing days offer an opportunity to re-acquaint themselves with the cars. 


"It allows jury members to pay close attention to the cars' aesthetics, build quality and ergonomics, while considerations based on perceptions of value for money, cost of a spares' basket, safety features and environmental friendliness can be taken into account before scoring the top ten. Fuel consumption figures are also available as is a range of data that must be considered before pronouncing on which vehicle is the best of the best," according to Mark Jones, convenor of the competition.


South Africa's Car of the Year competition - sponsored for the past 27 years by wheels bank, WesBank, with additional support from Total and Hollard Insurance - is unique in the world in that it is determined by three rounds of voting, the first which is open to all full members of the SAGMJ yields the semi-finalists, a second round open to the only the jury, which determines the finalists and then a final allocation of points after a two-day evaluation session at the world class Gerotek testing facility.


The jury is selected from those SAGMJ members who has had the greatest exposure to new models launched between 1 October 2010 to 31 August 2011.The winner of the 2012 WesBank / SAGMJ Car the Year will be announced in March 2012.


Source : http://www.bizcommunitycom
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Gr8insurance salutes Steve Jobs (RIP)

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, a pioneering businessman in the microcomputer, animation, music, and mobile phone industries -- several products have made significant inroads recently in the legal industry -- died last night from an extended battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 56.


Born on Feb. 24, 1955, and adopted by a Mountain View, Calif., family, Steven Paul Jobs' legacy will be his profound impact as the Henry Ford of our time. He was a man who did not personally invent things, but saw the potential of existing inventions, and possessed both the marketing chops and business acumen to transform them into world-changing products and services. Jobs was unfortunately similar to other 20th-century titans in being widely disliked for his management style, yet unique among them for being just as widely beloved by his customers -- something Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg can only dream of.

Steve Jobs

Among his stated secrets for success, Jobs often said that his team built technology in response to great product ideas, not products in response to great technology ideas.


Jobs' friend Steve Wozniak, in 1976, designed a personal computer on a single circuit board. Wozniak, at the time a calculator engineer for Hewlett-Packard, was reluctant to form a company, thereby inspiring Jobs to have Wozniak's friends and family persuade him by proxy. Jobs was himself an engineer, but his true talent was in marketing and selling Wozniak's computer, the Apple 1. Its original price: $666.66. Approximately 200 units were sold, of which roughly 50 are known to exist today, easily fetching $20,000 or more among high-end technology collectors. One unit sold for a mind-bending $213,600 a year ago.


Apple's first smash hit was the Apple II, a preassembled consumer-oriented desktop computer, in 1977. It was far from being the first such computer and had stiff competition in the Commodore PET 2001 and Tandy TRS-80 Model 1. Commodore had the only design with built-in mass storage, and Tandy had the advantage of its Radio Shack retail stores. But it was Apple that conquered the education market by offering steep discounts, and then invaded the business market thanks to the third-party VisiCalc program, which was a popular early spreadsheet. By the time the IBM PC launched in 1981, the Apple II had dozens of competitors, but by far the largest dealer network and the biggest selection of aftermarket software for any purpose. Apple later became the first company to sell mainstream microcomputers that used graphical interfaces and mouses for input, starting with the little-known and poor-selling Lisa in 1983, and then blooming with the refined Macintosh in 1984 and beyond.


Commodore, Tandy, and even IBM are all now out of the personal computer business, and even market-leading HP, where Wozniak once begged his managers to produce his personal computer design, is heading out of the field, as well. Meanwhile, Apple today is the Mercedes of the personal computer and smartphone businesses -- a leader in products that combine luxury and performance, sold in elegant showrooms -- although it will never be the best-selling company in those fields. Apple has managed to be a best-seller in the smaller markets for personal music players and mainstream tablet computers. Music players are now being subsumed by smartphones such as the iPhone 4S, and the future of tablets is open to debate, but the modern Apple led by CEO Tim Cook and Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive is sure to remain influential in whatever fields it enters -- even in fields where it failed, such as the mid-1990s PDA market, and where it chose to delay its own entry, such as in smartphones.


Jobs has been just as famous in related fields, namely the iTunes music download service and his stake in the Pixar animation studio. The iTunes service gave legitimacy to its field, causing music industry executives to eventually embrace an idea that would destroy their traditional distribution methods, where previously Napster was loathed by the same companies. Pixar made animated feature films return to their past glory via digital techniques. In both situations, Jobs was backed by large and highly paid teams of experts, but deserves immense credit for his leadership and vision.


Then there are lawyers. Microsoft Windows has a stranglehold on law firms' desktop computers, but the iPhone has largely blown away Research In Motion's BlackBerry smartphones, and what savvy counselor doesn't use an iPad? Lawyers love their Apple gadgets for being easy-to-use, feature-rich, reliable, and packed with techno-sex appeal. "Major legal software company announces iOS edition" is something we routinely consider solid news.


Jobs changed our lives, our childrens' lives, and the greater world around us. It was on an Apple II that this reporter, in sixth grade, was impelled to put down his Atari joystick, learn BASIC programming, and start writing about technology for his middle school newspaper. There were always jokes about Jobs' Reality Distortion Field and minimalist wardrobe, but it's no laughing matter that he is already sorely missed.


Source : http://www.law.com
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Can Euro Market Crisis be avoided

RISING hopes that European leaders were preparing to tackle the euro zone's problems with a massive injection of funds into the region's banks provided a much-needed shot in the arm for global markets.


After a week of selling, the local market climbed as much as 2 per cent early in the session after a sudden recovery on Wall Street in the last hour of trade, as investors jumped on reports that Europe's finance ministers were looking at efforts to recapitalise banks.


Wall Street surged as much as 4 per cent towards the end of the trading session after the Financial Times reported European officials were examining ways of reinforcing the capital position of the region's troubled banks as a matter of urgency.





Some economists believe the European Central Bank will also cut its benchmark cash rate to 1.25 per cent from 1.5 per cent today to help spur demand across the region. This would come just three months after the ECB raised interest rates.


The focus on banks has come as euro zone governments struggle to approve a bailout fund for Greece.


Australia's benchmark S&P/ASX200 index closed up 54.4 points, or 1.4 per cent, at 3926.5 yesterday. In New York the Dow Jones ended 1.4 per cent higher. Key European markets opened more than 1.5 per cent higher last night.
With Europe's sovereign debt problems starting to evolve into a banking crisis, markets fear a rush of capital out of Europe's perilously weak banking system.


With euro zone leaders again delaying a delivery of bailout funds to Greece, worries are mounting that banks could start falling like dominoes if a chain reaction of even partial debt defaults is triggered from Athens.


The first cracks came this week when Franco-Belgian financial group Dexia called an emergency board meeting over concerns about its exposure to Greece.
Analysts said Dexia's problems stress the point that the Greek crisis is less about Greece and more about the potential for it to spark a much wider economic disaster.


The governments of France and Belgium yesterday stepped in to pledge they would guarantee Dexia's commitments. At the same time Dexia is expected to push ahead with plans to set up a "bad bank" to hold its troubled lending exposures.


"We're seeing a practical example of contagion playing out," said Jean-Pierre Lambert, an analyst at Keefe Bruyette & Woods, referring to Dexia's exposure to the debt of countries on the EU rim.


JPMorgan analyst Scott Manning said wholesale funding markets had ''effectively shut down'' because of the fear of contagion from Europe's banking problems. Australian banks are heavy users of wholesale funds, although they are cashed up given a combination of sluggish credit lending and growth in deposits.


Shares of Australian banks have been marked down in recent weeks as investors fretted over Europe.
Separately, James Gorman, the head of Wall Street bank Morgan Stanley, has moved to calm employees worried about the health of the bank saying "misinformation" is circulating through the market.


Morgan Stanley's shares have come under heavy selling recently, falling to their lowest level since December 2008, over concerns about its exposure to euro zone banks and reliance on short-term funding.




Source : http://www.smh.com.au/business/prospect-of-european-rescue-spurs-markets-20111005-1l9nv.html


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