This has been a bleak week for mankind. On Monday, Britain’s top chess player Michael Adams, who is rated seventh in the world, concluded his best-of-six-games match with the Hydra supercomputer. He had known that taking on this monster — a 64-way cluster computer that analyses 200-million moves per second — was going to be tough.
Anyone who searches regularly for articles and documents on subscription websites knows the problem: you can only search them one at a time because their content does not appear in normal web searches. Yahoo thinks it has the solution in what it calls its Search Subscriptions service.
The United States military official tasked with running the Guantánamo Bay detention camp on Wednesday rejected calls by critics to close the facility, saying it continues to yield vital ”actionable intelligence” in the US-led war on terror.
National Treasury officials spent over R15-million on travel costs, hotel accommodation and restaurant expenses during the past financial year, according to Finance Minister Trevor Manuel. The year before, in 2003, they spent about the same.
South Africa’s April 2005 leading economic indicator, which is compiled by the South African Reserve Bank (SARB), rose by 1,8% month-on-month (m/m) after a 1% m/m increase in March, but was still below the December 2004 level. Economists generally see four or more consecutive monthly declines as a warning signal of weaker growth ahead.
The total number of liquidations increased by 1,1% year-on-year (y/y) to 265 in May 2005 after rising by 14,3% y/y to 279 in April 2005, Statistics South Africa said on Thursday. The comparisons are distorted to a certain extent by the fact that Easter this year took place in March compared with April last year.
The South African textile industry says cheap imports from China are threatening to wipe out the local industry, where 75 000 jobs have been lost since 2002. "We’re a very distressed industry at the moment. We’re actually on our knees … we’ve been devastated," said the managing director of Gregory Knitting Mills, Selwyn Gershman.
Naspers — that has internet subscriber platforms including a stake in M-Web — hopes the imminent regulatory framework will help introduce real competition in the local market that has thus far resulted in Telkom dominating most spheres of the telecommunications sector.
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Members of the Congress of SA Trade Unions will be asked to help pay for former deputy president Jacob Zuma’s legal costs, Cosatu said on Wednesday. Cosatu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi said at a press conference in Johannesburg that members would not be forced to contribute to funds for this purpose.
The All Blacks say they have adopted a ”we’re second, they’re first” mentality to avoid over-confidence going into the second rugby Test against the British and Irish Lions here on Saturday. After demolishing the Lions 21-3 in the first Test, the All Blacks have every reason to feel confident of wrapping up the three-Test series in the second match.