User:Gavin Wilson/sandbox
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[edit] Events
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 14th September | BT Global Services this week laid out its vision for the next three years: revenues to double in the USA, Japan, India and China, and £400m of savings each year, achieved through offshoring and slashing its procurement costs. |
| 13th September | Dell has been forced to delay its 2Q financial report as it deals with state and federal accounting investigations. Dell revealed last month that the SEC was looking into its past financial statements. As a result, it has been forced to put its stock buyback programme on hold until the market can be confident the share price is right. To correct its course, Dell has also announced plans to outsource more services as it expands around the world and to spend $150m on improving customer satisfaction. |
| 12th September | HP announced that Patricia Dunn would step down as chairman in January of next year, as a result of a pre-texting scandal. CEO Mark Hurd will become chairman. |
| 12th September | Microsoft warned that it may delay Vista, the next release of Windows, in Europe unless it receives clear guidance from the European Commission about its antitrust requirements for the operating system. |
| 11th September | The popularity of Websites that rely on user-generated content has increased dramatically in the UK, according to new statistics: MySpace is up 467% to 5.2 million visitors, Piczo is up 393% to 4 million, YouTube now has 3.9 million, and Bebo is up 328% to 3.9 million. Even Wikipedia saw a 181% increase in usage, year-on-year. |
[edit] Anniversaries
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 13th September | 50 years ago today, IBM launched the first magnetic hard disk. RAMAC offered 5MB of storage on a total of 50 disks measuring 24in in diameter. The disks were stacked on a cylinder and a reader head moved from one disk to the other to retrieve information. It was considered too expensive to have 50 reader heads. RAMAC was housed in an enclosure about the size of two fridges, and weighed several tons. |
[edit] Biographies
Robert Mellors OBE is an expert in tropical agriculture. He was born in 1954 and spent his childhood in Rampton, Nottinghamshire. He attended Retford Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was awarded an MA in Agriculture. Upon graduation, he worked for Booker McConnell, then took an MSc in Tropical Agriculture at Reading University.
Since then, he has spent most of his working life in Africa, helping the governments of Zambia and principally Zimbabwe in the development of their agriculture, for which he was awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List of 1999. He owns a house in Harare, but because of recent difficulties in Zimbabwe, he now spends little time in that country. Instead he acts as a self-employed agricultural consultant to countries such as Sudan from his base in Nottingham.
[[Category:Former students of Corpus Christi College, Oxford|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Honourable Artillery Company|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Thames Ditton|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Old Oundelians|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:IBM employees|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Alumni of the London Business School|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Former students of the University of Oxford|Wilson, Gavin] [[Category:Living people|Wilson, Gavin]
