As part of Can I Afford to Fill Up? a Panorama programme looking at how high fuel prices are affecting people across the UK, reporter Jane Corbin took to the road in an electric G-Wiz car to see just how easy it is to join the green revolution.I first met the G-Wiz electric car in front of Ray Morrison's house."Winnie" is bright yellow and saves Ray, a financial advisor, £9,000 a year on his daily commute from Richmond into central London.There is no road tax or congestion charge to pay because it has no exhaust emissions - plus Ray gets tax relief because he is self employed, and cut-price parking.Best of all, no petrol costs made the electric car a no-brainer for a man who used to drive a BMW to work.It paid for itself in the first year.Charging baysUK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has urged us all to plug into the electric idea - to wean us off our addiction to expensive and increasingly scarce fossil fuels and to save the planet.The government has pledged to reduce CO2 emissions by at least 26% over the next 12 years - but is Britain ready? Ray Morrison has saved £9,000 a year with his G-Wiz Ray took me to the central London car park he uses every day where there are special electric car charging bays - vital for juicing up for the journey home.But what about other cities? I set off in my own G-Wiz to find out.It is legal to drive a G-Wiz up the motorway to Birmingham but these cars have not passed the stringent safety tests that ordinary cars have.With a battery range of only 77km (48 miles) and a top speed of no more than 50mph I didn't fancy it. So I hitched a lift on a low loader to the outskirts of the city.Into the redLuckily the motel I was staying in gave me a ground floor room and I was able to plug my car in by feeding the charging lead through my window.Next morning I set off for the heart of the city built around the car in the 1960s. Westminster is the only council to offer plenty of charging points Bored estate agents staring ... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
China now has the world's largest net-using population, say official figures.More than 253 million people in the country are now online, according to statistics from the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC).The figure is higher than the 223 million that the US mustered in June, according to Nielsen Online.Net penetration in the US stands at 71% compared to 19% in China suggesting it will eventually vastly outstrip the US.The development is significant because the US has had the largest net-using population since records of how many people were online started to be... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
Former workers at the web giant Google have launched a rival search engine.Called Cuil, from the Gaelic for knowledge and hazel, its founders claim it does a better and more comprehensive job of indexing information online.The technology it uses to index the web can understand the context surrounding each page and the concepts driving search requests, say the founders.But analysts believe the new search engine, like many others, will struggle to match and defeat Google.Hard fightCuil, pronounced "cool", says it uses more than 120 billion webpages to build up its index of the... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
The British business tycoon, Richard Branson, has unveiled an aircraft in the US that will be used for his project to launch tourists into space.The high-altitude jet will act as the mothership for a spacecraft, releasing it in mid-air to take two crew and six passengers on sub-orbital flights.More than 250 people have already paid $200,000 (£100,000) each to be among the first making the tourist trips.Mr Branson predicts the maiden space voyage will take place in 18 months.A crowd of engineers, dignitaries and space enthusiasts gathered inside a hangar in the Mojave Desert in... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
Microsoft has bolstered its credentials with advocates of open source software.It has given cash to the Apache organisation which oversees development of open source web server software.It has also pledged to open up some of its communications software and protocols so developers are free to study and use them.The moves are seen as significant because of Microsoft's former opposition to the way open source software is written and maintained.Cash and codeThe announcements were made at the Open Source Convention in a keynote speech by Sam Ramji - a director of Microsoft's platform... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
Hundreds of recordings of disappearing dialects of English spoken in Wales from the 1960s onwards are being made available for research.Swansea University researchers taped the "folk-speech" of elderly villagers, and later urban youngsters, to compile the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects.Archive director Rob Penhallurick said: "In some parts of Wales, English has been spoken for nearly 1,000 years."Around 500 recordings are available via the British Library's online catalogue.The archive offers an ear on some of the oldest living varieties of English-spoken in Wales and... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
Social networking site Facebook is introducing a ranking system for good and bad application developers.Announced at F8, the Facebook developers conference in San Francisco, it aims to improve the quality of applications on offer.Dubbed Application Verification it will promote "secure, respectful and transparent" add-ons to the site."We haven't done enough to reward the good or punish the abusive," said Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg."We're going to have to find a way to ensure the applications that provide the most long term value are the ones that are... View More » Comenta la noticia. »
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