Author: Serkadis

Last month’s slight down-tick in the Institute for Supply Management’s (ISM) services index has turned into something more substantial — falling to 48.7. This is well below the expected value of 51.5 and means it has now dropped two months in a row.

Moreover it has broken the key 50-level, indicating a contraction in services during November.

Looking at the detail a bit further, particular weakness came from the Business Activity and Order Backlog components of the index:

Read more details via the full release here.

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See Also:

• The ISM Services Index Stops Rebounding, Missing Expectations
• ISM Better Than Expected, But Industry Commentary Was Worrisome
• ISM Services Index Back Above 50, But It’s Not Helping Jobs

Electronic Arts is reminding gamers that the Call of Duty franchise isn’t the only big soldier-based FPS on the block. They’re bringing back the Medal of Honor series next year with a reboot called.. Medal of Honor.
 

Filed under: Japan, Crossover, Mitsubishi

Mitsubishi is dusting off and old name for its new compact crossover. The new RVR that will be released in Japan next spring is nothing like past Mitsus wearing the moniker, a model we knew here as the Expo LRV. The RVR shares the Mitsu family’s nose and physique, though the compact body is being described by officials as lightweight.

When it launches in Japan, the RVR will carry a 1.8 liter four-cylinder, and the MIVEC engine figures to keep the appetite for fuel in check. Mitsubishi is staggering the RVR’s rollout, so its spring 2010 arrival in Japanese showrooms will be first, but North American sales are promised eventually. From where we sit, the RVR and Colt are two bits of triple-diamond excitement to look forward to in the coming year, especially if the company goes all Ralliart-crazy on both. Official press release posted after the jump.

[Source: Mitsubishi]

Continue reading Mitsubishi’s new sub-CUV will be called RVR in Japan… what will it be called when it hits the US?

Mitsubishi’s new sub-CUV will be called RVR in Japan… what will it be called when it hits the US? originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Marcellus Shale is an untapped resource for natural gas sitting under New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

In Broome County, N.Y. alone, consultants say, shale gas development could create $15 billion in economic activity. Finally, energy companies are ready to drill baby, drill.

WashingtonPost.com: Just a few years ago, the industry didn’t have the technology to unlock these reserves. But thanks to advances in horizontal drilling and methods of fracturing rock with high-pressure blasts of water, sand and chemicals, vast gas reserves in the United States are suddenly within reach.

…The country is carpeted with shale gas plays, including the Barnett in Texas, Fayetteville in Arkansas and Haynesville in Louisiana. Since 2000, gas from shale has grown from less than 1 percent of the nation’s production to about 10 percent, according to the consulting firm PFC Energy, and it’s picking up fast.

Continue reading here >

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See Also:

• Watch Liquid Natural Gas Arbitrage In Action (UNG)
• Shale Is A "Game Changer" For Natural Gas (UNG)

The rally in all kinds of bonds this year means that risk-taking investors are once again willing to accept far less additional yield over U.S. treasuries these days.

The option-adjusted spread shown below is essentially the additional basis points of yield that bonds must pay over government bonds. The chart shows that while investors required almost 10% (1,000 basis points) of additional yield from global emerging markets bonds back in December 2008, today all they require is about 4% (400 basis points) more than U.S. treasuries.

Don’t forget that U.S treasury yields, that these spreads are based off of, are extremely low now as well. Thus in the bond market today, investors willing to take on risk for a far lower price.

(Chart via Econompic)

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See Also:

• Citadel Finally Steals A Bond Deal From Wall Street (AMD, JPM)
• Bill Gross’s Government Bond Holdings Hit 5-Year High
• Morgan Stanley: Bond Investors Receiving Zero Compensation For All The Risks They’re Facing

Ok, perhaps the title is a bit of an exaggeration, but it certainly appears to be what a Microsoft exec in the Philippines implied in a recent interview concerning Windows 7. Basically, he said that using unauthorized copies of the OS were really unsafe, so doing things like online banking or other sensitive stuff on such software could put users in serious danger. Of course, that makes you wonder what Microsoft has done to make unauthorized copies of the software so dangerous to use…

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Filed under: Concept Cars, LA Auto Show, Budget, Hatchback, Ford

While introducing the folks at the LA Auto Show to the American-market 2011 Ford Fiesta, Ford decided to go a step further. They didn’t just show the production sedan and hatchback, they also showed off the possibilities the platform presents as well. They had four customized Fiestas on display, done up by companies like H&R, 3dCarbon, FSWerks, and Steeda, as well as Ford’s in-house Racing and Custom Accessories team. And just for good measure, they also brought along that wicked Kenny Brack X-Games Rally Fiesta as well.

There’s a full press release after the jump, but here is a brief summary of the four featured vehicles:

Black Fiesta:

This car was put together by Ford Racing and Steeda Autosports. It features Steeda’s cold air intake, a Borla/Ford Racing Performance cat-back exhaust system, Steeda/Ford Racing suspension upgrades, Ford Racing multi-spoke Euro wheels and Brembo anchors.

Blue Fiesta:

The blue car was built by H&R Special Springs. Naturally, it received some suspension tuning with an H&R Street Performance monotube coil-over kit and a set of spiffy 18-inch OZ SuperTurismo GT wheels. It’s also the beneficiary of some Euro reverse-engineering via “Sticky Jewell custom graphics, custom Euro hood vents, stealthy blacked-out headlamps and a Ford Custom Accessories upper rear hatch spoiler.”

White Fiesta:

The white Fiesta (above) features Ford Custom Accessories, so it ought to be the easiest model the Average Joe to copy. Nearly every styling element can be purchased from the Ford Custom Accessories, Ford Licensed Accessories or Ford Racing Performance Parts catalogs. And get used to those graphics, because Ford has taken this opportunity to add a whole new line of them for the Fiesta. You can see the whole collection at fordfiestagraphics.com.

Red Fiesta:

Last, but certainly not least, is the red Fiesta by 3dCarbon and FSWerks. It’s the only one of the four that has some serious rejiggering underhood. It features an FSWerks Stage 2 intercooled turbo kit and 2.25-inch exhaust system. It also sports a 3dCarbon body kit with an “aggressive front air dam, aerodynamic side skirts and rear lower accent trim.”

We’d probably mix and match among these mods, perhaps the H&R suspension, the Brembos from the Steeda car, the OZ wheels and that FSWerks turbo setup. Or maybe we’d just take Brack’s car. Check out the gallery by clicking below and more details in the press release after the jump.

Live photos copyright (C)2009 Sam Abuelsamid / Weblogs, Inc.
[Source: Ford]

Continue reading LA 2009: Ford shows off some Fiesta possibilities

LA 2009: Ford shows off some Fiesta possibilities originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Someone seems to have walked up to the Square Enix counter, ordered an Adamantoise, and asked for a Supersize. It’s not the biggest news out there on the scene, but let’s face it, that thing is big. See for

HBM has released version 6.0 of its leading Perception data acquisition software. Perception integrates multi-platform hardware control, live display, data acquisition, review, analysis, report generation and data export in one package. It has been designed from basic principles ensuring that it is easy to use while allowing control of both small and large-scale systems.

This latest version adds live FFT capabilities to the HBM Genesis HighSpeed product family, allowing users to visualize signals simultaneously both in the time and the frequency domain. Because it is PC-based, it is usable with any Perception-controlled DAQ system, such as the portable GEN5i, GEN7t or GEN16t rack mainframes, and LIBERTY.

FFT is particularly useful, especially for customers that are just starting out in frequency domain analysis, because of its ease of use and high flexibility. For example, FFT can be enabled for transferring signals currently shown in the time domain to the frequency domain with a single click. The basic FFT option al-lows a choice of window lengths of up to 1 million samples, four different weighting filters, and analysis functions such as FFT Spectrum, Auto Power Spectrum or Power Spectral Density. For critical settings the software includes readily-accessible help ensuring users make the right choice for the best results.

Perception also provides powerful customization tools. Customer-specific plug-ins created with the Cus-tomer Software Interface (CSI) are fully integrated in the Perception operator interface so that user-specific and automated tasks can be included in the workflow. Close integration with Microsoft Office allows the user to easily transfer tables, displays and results into Word or Excel.

HBM’s patented StatStream technology allows large data sets – even with Gigabytes of data – to be han-dled, reviewed and analyzed in just a few seconds. With StatStream, several parallel, reduced data streams are produced in real-time during the measurement, and saved with the raw data. If, for example, a 10-Gigabyte data set is displayed on-screen, this display is then generated from a reduced data set.

Perception is HBM´s high-end software to control the Genesis HighSpeed product family. This ranges from rugged data acquisition systems with sample rates of 100 kS/s to the top-end GEN DAQ series with sample rates up to 100 MS/s.

Most companies will be running some sort of campaign and promotion for the holiday season. Most companies also don’t want to actually give away anything, most will be just glorified Christmas-themed advertising campaigns. The Gmail team though may actually be on to something with an interesting campaign for the holidays. Apparently, they think that regular mail should be just as free and easy to send as email so its enabling users to send postcard to their families or friends by filling out an online form and, as an added bonus, you don’t even have to be a Gmail user.

“Sure, email is great, but there’s something uniquely heartwarming about the kind of card that comes in the actual mail — especially for folks who don’t hear from us as often as they should, simply because they aren’t online,” the page set up for the campaign reads. “So we’ve made it as easy to send snail-mail holiday cards as it is to send email. Simply fill out the form below and we’ll send one free holiday postcard on your behalf. Yes, through the mail and everything.”

If Google had its way, everyone would be online and people would send their best wishes through email (preferably Gmail). But we’re not quite there yet and, shockingly, not everyone uses the Internet, even in the US. So, if you have a grandma you’d like to send a card but don’t really want… (read more)

What, you thought David Rosenberg has been on the wrong side of the market? Think again, he says

THE DOW IS BACK IN A BEAR MARKET! 
That is correct.  While the market did make a new high in ‘deflated dollar’ terms
just a short two-days ago, in gold terms, the Dow actually peaked on August 27
and is down 13.5% since then.  As an aside — just to show that the gold story is
not JUST a weak U.S. dollar, bullion prices rose a further 1.6% yesterday to yet
another new high even in the face of a 19bps recovery in the greenback (all sorts
of talk now that the Bank of Japan is set to intervene).   

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See Also:

• David Rosenberg: Buy The Gold Dips, Because It’s Only Going Higher
• Here’s Why The Mint Is Running Out Of Gold Coins
• The Nikkei Is Perfectly Aligned With The S&P 500 As Measured In Gold

Thanks to the graphical issues plaguing the PS3 version of Bayonetta, PS3 gamers are being saddled with an arguably worse version compared to the one their Xbox 360-owning counterparts are getting. Sega and Platinum Games are apparently working overtime

Service activities will mark Kansas Day for students at seven colleges in the state, the Kansas Campus Compact has announced. The projects are part of KsCC’s “Commemorate Kansas/Serve Kansas” program.

“These creative projects are an indication that students and faculty at Kansas colleges and universities are aware of the importance of connecting their education with civic purpose that serves all of Kansas’ citizens,” Matthew Lindsey, KsCC executive director, said.

»Read the entire article in The Topeka Capital-Journal.

2010 is almost here and we need to make sure the holidays don’t catch us unprepared. Well, the New Year is a month away and with the amount of ‘holiday cheer’, otherwise known as marketing, every company, site and organization worth its salt even castaways on remote islands have no chance of missing it. YouTube is doing its part with an Advent-style calendar celebrating, what else, the viral videos of the year.

“We’d give you chocolates with it if we could: This week marks the launch of our advent-style calendar counting down some of the most memorable videos of the year on YouTube,” Mark Day, Marketing Programs Manager, wrote. “Without giving too much away, you can expect to see some well-known YouTube videographers on the countdown, along with breakout viral videos and a selection of the year’s biggest pop-culture phenoms and memes.”

Most people would’ve probably taken the chocolate. On the other hand, everyone loves a savory Fred video or maybe the occasional sleepy kitty clip, when Solitaire and Minesweeper just won’t cut it anymore. YouTube says all sorts of clips will make it to the countdown and not necessarily the most viewed videos of the years. In fact, the site makes it clear that the videos selection is curated and it gets to pick the videos without a particularly … (read more)

If you’re familiar with Lotus Notes/Domino, I’m sure SharePoint, in many ways, feels like a déjà vu. But because we don’t cover the Notes client or the Domino server (well, not on its own, though we cover several IBM Lotus products that run on top of Domino), I’ve never really compared them head-to-head.

I was discussing this with my colleague Apoorv Durga today, and rather than focus on the resemblances, or the fact that IBM is slowly phasing out Domino in favor of newer platforms, we tried to think up the most essential differences. Of course, this is comparing apples to oranges; but if you’re willing to think of both as "grown in orchards" and "considered a fruit," you can, in fact, compare them:

• Notes/Domino comes with a mail server; with SharePoint, you need to add Exchange (but SharePoint and Exchange are much less integrated with each other than the Domino components, and in fact, they sometimes compete for the same collaborative scenarios.)
• A technically inclined person can quite easily build impressive forms-based processing in Notes/Domino. In SharePoint, you really need a .NET developer much more quickly than you’d think.
• But if you do start developing things, it’s hard to get your Domino applications past the initial "rapid prototyping" stage — most custom applications in Domino start out as something that’s quickly whipped up, and then keeps being modified. (They’re also notoriously difficult to maintain once the original creator has left your company.)
• SharePoint is much more developer friendly; Visual Studio is a very capable development environment, and though Notes/Domino does have development tools, they’re comparatively basic.
• And on a very technical level: the Lotus NSF "databases" are not relational. There is no way to do a JOIN with Lotus "tables" (they’re called "views" in Domino). Really. It’s impossible to do a look-up in a list field to another field in another list. If you think that’s some incredibly technical detail that’s not very crucial, well, try to create a view of all of your employees, with one field that displays their phone number (taken from another list). You can’t, and I’ve seen several Notes/Domino developers on the brink of a breakdown trying to get around this. By contrast, SharePoint stores everything in MS SQL; it’s really easy to do lookups within a list field.

This is just what we came up with in one afternoon, and by no means as comprehensive as the comparisons in our Evaluation Reports. So what do you think? I’d welcome any additions or corrections in the comments below. Lotus Notes/Domino may be yesterday’s news compared to SharePoint, but it’s still alive and well in many enterprises — and I have a nagging suspicion Apoorv and I are not the only ones comparing notes.

[Update: 07 December] Sorry about the comment on IBM phasing out Notes/Domino,
which obviously didn’t come across as it was intended. I’ve therefore
decided to delete it (or rather, for the sake of transparency, to
leave it there but to strike through.) My colleague Tony Byrne has added some more
thoughts about Lotus and SharePoint here.

Meanwhile, thanks to those who contributed technical insights in the comments. I have some follow-up questions that I’ll address there.

The mint that produces the gold American Eagle coins is running low. This chart, courtesy of Ed Steer, tells the whole story. Buyers are snapping them up at levels not seen in years.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• U.S. Mint Runs Out of Gold Coins
• Here’s The Real Peak In Gold
• Investors Are Going Nuts For Precious Metal ETFs

Filed under: LA Auto Show, Crossover, Kia, South Korea

Perhaps the most important fact about the all new Kia Sorento isn’t that it’s a “right-sized” compact CUV. If Kia’s boundless enthusiasm is any indication, the most important fact is that the 2011 Sorento is the first Kia designed and built in entirely in the USA. In fact, Kia claims that their all-new West Point, Georgia manufacturing plant will not only create 2,500 jobs (eventually – 1,200 for the moment), they say it is the most advanced Kia manufacturing facility in the world.

Then there’s the vehicle they just started building in Georgia sixteen days ago, the 2011 Sorento. Kia’s calling it “right-sized,” and pointing out that Americans are leaving their biggie SUVs in droves and moving to CUVs, specifically compact CUVs. But not that compact – the Sorento is designed to sit five adults comfortably or seven full-size persons “occasionally.” That’s our kind of euphemism! The Sorento, however, is not just a schlepper. It’s got a MacPherson struts in front and a multi-link suspension setup for the rear.

Coupled to a 276 horsepower V6 and an all-new built in-house six-speed automatic, the Sorento is able to get up and boogie a bit. Or at least as much as a top heavy CUV can boogie. Check out our First Drive of the Kia Sorento (a pre-production model from Korea) for more details. Long story short, a base Sorento will start at under $20,000 – about $1,500 less than the outgoing body-on-frame model.

Hyundai’s making a big media push, taking out a Sorento ad in Times Square that will be visible when the ball drops on New Year’s Eve. They’re also put together a short commercial some of you may have seen in movie theaters over the weekend. This spot, featuring a young all-American boy on a bicycle, will be airing until January. Kia is also co-sponsoring the Chick-fil-A and the Outback college bowl games. As Kia mentioned repeatedly during the presentation, they feel the brand’s got some momentum going. If the Sorento drives and works anywhere close to where Kia says it will, they might be right.

Live photos copyright (C)2009 Jonny Lieberman / Weblogs, Inc.

LA 2009: Meet the “all-American” 2011 Kia Sorento originally appeared on Autoblog on Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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