RIVERVIEW: School board hires new director of business and finance
By Jim Kasuba RIVERVIEW — A divided Board of Education has hired a new director of business and finance.David Flaisher was appointed Tuesday by a 4-3 vote, replacing Richard Muszynski, who is retiring at the end of the school year.Sixteen people applied and seven were interviewed by a six-person team that included board Treasurer Catherine Wells and school Supt. Dennis Desmarais.The team chose Flaisher, who met March 3 with Desmarais, Muszynski and the team. He was introduced to the school board March 9.The first indication that Flaisher might not be a unanimous choice occurred during a March 15 committee of the whole meeting when two board members expressed reservations.At least one trustee said that in these times of economic turmoil, the position of financial director is one of the most important in the district, second only to the superintendent.Board Vice President Kathleen Bosman said she thought Flaisher was “fine,” but not “extraordinary.”“I can’t believe with all the unemployment in Michigan we didn’t get more applicants,” he said. “He would not be my choice.”Wells said that of the seven people interviewed, he was the best candidate and is qualified.Flaisher’s most recent position was finance director for the city of Pontiac. He also was West Bloomfield Township’s supervisor from 2000 to 2008.Board Secretary James Wellman Kiturkes said he had some concerns, but if he is acceptable to Desmarais and Muszynski, then he’s OK with the appointment.Trustee Gary Face said Flaisher’s college transcript was not particularly strong, but he has plenty of experience to compensate for it.Flaisher was an auditor for Detroit’s Auditor General Office from 1974 to ’77. He was an accounting manager at Marx Manufacturing in Taylor in 1979-80.Desmarais said the recommendation would be for a one-year contract.Trustee John Price told the board that he had been “spoiled” by having Muszynski in that position for 13 years. He complimented Muszynski for his ability to explain complex financial issues in layman’s terms.“I don’t feel comfortable that (Flaisher) could do that, but, again, we are comparing him to Rick,” Price said. “I’m still on the fence.”Bosman suggested expanding the search. However, district officials had hoped that whoever was chosen would be hired in enough time to work with Muszynski before he retires.Desmarais said he anticipated that a statewide retirement incentive for school employees could produce a “mass exodus” of finance directors, meaning that Riverview could find even stiffer competition in hiring a talented person.On Tuesday, Bosman reiterated her concerns, saying advertisements posting the job opening were not as widespread as they could have been.“My request to you prior to the vote is ‘don’t settle,’ and I think we are settling,” Bosman told her colleagues. “We don’t settle; that’s why our school district is as good as it is. Nothing against Mr. Flaisher, but I would just like to see who else is out there.”Price said he was going with his “gut” on this one.“My gut is telling me that this appointment is OK because Rick (Muszynski) approves it, but at the same time I think probably there is somebody out there who is better. We need the best because we deserve the best.”Joining Bosman and Price in voting against the appointment was Trustee Amy Reeder. Board President Robyn Vitale, who was not present at the March 15 meeting when most of the discussion took place, voted with the majority.Desmarais said Flaisher is expected to begin in late spring or early summer.The resolution approving his hire directs Desmarais to negotiate with Flaisher, allowing for an annual salary of $80,000 to $85,000.
You don’t have to be a Fortune 500 executive or a multinational company to realize you have too much to do and could really use an assistant. Ever since the Seinfeld episode where Kramer hires a personal intern, countless people have wished that they should do the same for their daily tasks. With a newly-launched service called DoMyStuff, everyday people can now hire assistants for any number of personal tasks. “Our goal is allow everyone out there to take back some valuable time for stuff they really want to do, like spending time with family and friends,” DoMyStuff’s Darren Berkovitz told Ars. “We want people to say ‘Ah, I’m so busy, I don’t have time pick up my dry cleaning. I’m going to put it on DoMyStuff.’ I don’t think there is anyone out there who couldn’t outsource some mundane or time-consuming task that they have been meaning to do.” Making a listing on DoMyStuff works a lot like making a listing on eBay. “Employers” can make a listing for any task they can think up, from painting the garage to grocery shopping to filming an event to web site creation to making deliveries or pickups to setting up a computer or network to stuffing wedding invitations. They can then decide how long “Assistants” have to bid on the task, which can range from minutes to weeks. Employers can opt to limit bidders by their personal rating, where they live, or businesses (versus individuals), and can specify a budget range for the task. Once a listing is up on the site, the Assistants (those who are looking to perform the tasks for others) can bid on the task with a description of what they can do and how much they’d like for it. Like eBay, bidders can ask questions before bidding and the discussion is posted on the page for all to read. Bidders can even add certain listings to a personal Watchlist to keep an eye on for later. A feedback system is provided on the site for both Employers and Assistants. The bidding process is not actually treated like an auction, though, so the Employer can simply select whichever bid appeals to him or her the most. As for payment, DoMyStuff offers Employers the option of specifying their own payment methods in the listing or using an optional escrow service. “People using the escrow service can pay via credit card or bank account,” Berkovitz told us. “We hold the funds until the transaction is completed. Once both parties agree the transaction was done successfully, we release the funds to the service provider. There can be other arrangements as well, such as paying 50 percent of the task upfront, with the rest stored in escrow until the transaction is complete.” The service is not entirely free, however. The Assistants receiving payment from the Employers are required to pay a “small service fee,” although the fee scale is not published anywhere on the site. Right now, the service is still new and so there aren’t many listings for Assistants to choose from. Similarly, there aren’t many bids on the listings that are on the site, although Berkovitz says that they’re seeing over 600 new registrations to the site every day, so it’s growing quickly. For now, though, those interested in using DoMyStuff may need to wait for the site to gain some popularity before really making use of its services, especially since many of the tasks that most of us really need assistants for would require someone within geographic proximity to us. In the meantime, I wonder if I can really outsource breaking up with boyfriends…
Remember the day traders?They were hard to miss during the tech-stock mania a decade ago, when the Nasdaq seemed like a casino built by morons and a chimp with darts could pick winners, The New York Times’s David Segal reports from Encinitas, Calif. You would hear about these guys — nearly all of them were guys — and wonder: Could anyone make a living this way? And if the answer was yes, why were the rest of us suckers still holding down regular jobs? No doubt, it’s been a long time since a question like that troubled your imagination. And perhaps you assumed that the twin calamities of the Internet crash and the Great Recession had doomed the day-trader species in the unruly jungle of American capitalism. But some dreams refuse to die, and few, it seems, are more resilient than the dream of beating the market while wearing nothing but tighty-whities.Or, if you are Andy Lindloff, a pair of jeans and a black waffle-pattern shirt.“Banks are seeing a nice little lift,” he says, staring at computer screens one recent Wednesday morning, sipping coffee from a Denver Broncos mug. “The European banks are up, so that may bleed over to ours. Bank of America might be one to watch.”Mr. Lindloff, 49, is sitting in his living room in Encinitas, a city known as “surfer’s paradise,” about 25 miles north of San Diego. Surrounded by the playthings of his daughter — a toy oven, a doll house — he appears to be alone. In fact, he has plenty of company. With a hands-free headset, he is speaking to Steve Gomez, his partner in Today Trader, a two-year-old Internet venture that is “about helping traders find success through virtual technology,” as it says on the company’s Web site.The company charges aspiring traders $199 a month for a live, real-time view of Mr. Lindloff’s computer screen, along with the running banter, commentary and advice that he and Mr. Gomez provide through the morning. (After lunch, it’s just Mr. Lindloff.) The service is billed as a chance to look over the “virtual shoulder” of two veteran stock traders, but you don’t really see anyone’s shoulder. It’s more like staring at the instrument panel of a jet while eavesdropping on the pilots, plus the ceaseless tap-tap of a keyboard.By the opening bell, 21 subscribers are logged in.“Citigroup’s at $4.10,” says Mr. Gomez, 43, who is in his home in San Diego. “Probably going to hang around that strike price.”“A.M.D. is at an interesting stop there, too,” says Mr. Lindloff, hopscotching from one chart to another.“Keep it tight,” says Mr. Gomez. “Don’t fight the momentum.”All the while, subscribers send questions and share ideas in a chat room that is part of the service.“DRYS over 6.”“MNKD short?”“Watching this ALD.”“HBAN?”It might read like a teenager’s idea of a haiku, but this is the new frontier in do-it-yourself trading. Today Trader and its rivals are tiny operations, and they have modest followings. But they are harnessing all the crowd-sourcing features of the Internet circa 2010: YouTube, Twitter and companies like GotoMeeting, a Web conferencing service.They are also harnessing a lot of market-related rage. The gruesome stock plunge of late 2008 and early 2009 was a searing, fool-me-twice moment for many people. The market again seemed hopelessly treacherous, a mug’s game. And if you had an account with the brokerage arm of any number of Wall Street stalwarts — like Lehman Brothers, Citigroup or Merrill Lynch — your losses were doubly galling. Your team helped put a sleeper hold on the economy, the near-collapse of which then ravaged your portfolio.Even many of those who took the safe route and years ago bought index funds have seen little upside. Look at the performance of the Standard & Poor’s 500, the most popular index out there. If you put $1,000 in it in 1999, you now have slightly less money in your account (about 0.3 percent less, actually).If the motto of the original day-trade boom was, “If the pros can do it, so can we,” the motto today is, “We can’t do much worse than the pros.”“There’s this idea out there that retail investors are dumb,” says Howard Lindzon, the co-founder of StockTwits, which curates a gusher of stock tips and financial news alerts tweeted by 20,000 regular contributors. “Well, it turns out that the institutional investors are pretty dumb. They nearly blew us all up with leverage.”Of course, anyone hoping to join the day-trade caravan had better wear a seat belt, as Mr. Lindloff’s experience on this Wednesday morning demonstrates. Before lunch, he will buy and sell about 44,000 shares, in 17 trades. He starts off poorly, losing about $500. But a timely bet on a company called Rackspace Hosting (“I don’t know what they do,” he says), as well as quick investments in Applied Materials, Eagle Bulk Shipping and a few others, have turned things around.“Up $210,” he says, removing his headset. Factoring in commissions, he’s made $60.It is hard to say how many day traders are currently plying their craft, if that is the right word, in this country. Brokerage firms track the activity and demographics of their customers, but they have been reluctant to share that data. About the most we know is that the day traders skew male, and the number of trades per $100,000 in client dollars is a little less than half what it was back in 2000, according to the Charles Schwab brokerage firm.Even that figure seems high. As a job, “day trader” registers in roughly the same way as “disco ball manufacturer” or “Brooklyn farmer.” You know that someone has to be making disco balls and that maybe there are still a few plots of arable land in Brooklyn.Still, it can seem strange to see TV ads for an Atlanta company called Long Term Short Term, which offers two-day investment seminars, as well as DVDs, CDs and online tutoring, in cities across the country. Price: $3,995 a person. Part of the pitch taps into the simmering anger at professional investors.“People put their trust in stock brokerages that are now out of business, and have seen their 401(k) drop by 40 percent or more,” says Michael Hutchison, an executive vice president of Long Term Short Term, which does business as Better Trades. “Meanwhile, mutual fund companies are making $85 billion a year, and look at their performance. There are people who see all this and think, ‘Why don’t I educate myself?’”Mr. Hutchinson hastens to add that his company doesn’t encourage anyone to quit a job and trade full time. But more than a few attendees may be looking for a change in career. Many of the new day traders are people who recently lost jobs and can’t find work.“I get e-mails from people saying, ‘I worked for XYZ company for 20 years and I just got laid off,’” says Brian Shannon of Alphatrends, which, for $60 a month, offers proprietary online videos and a once-a-week live chat. “They’ve got a severance package or a nest egg that they want to invest themselves.”Mr. Gomez and Mr. Lindloff are among the few who started day trading in the late ’90s and never stopped. At a late breakfast, just after that $60 morning, the two are sitting at a sidewalk cafe. You expect them to be revved up and antsy. Instead, look like members of a mellow Southern California rock band that split up 15 years ago. The most agitated either gets while trading online is the occasional “goddangit,” Mr. Lindloff’s idea of an outburst.For years, Mr. Gomez was a manager at a self-storage facility, but he couldn’t resist trading commodities during office hours, and he had a hard time keeping his mind on his work. Mr. Lindloff worked at an Isuzu dealership for years, then made cold calls — knocking on doors — for Edward Jones, the brokerage firm. He left after three months.“I knew I wanted to trade,” he says.How good are they? Mr. Lindloff, who Mr. Gomez says is the more skilled of the two, says he has averaged somewhere between $100,000 and $120,000 a year for the last 10 years, even during the worst part of the Great Recession. With low expenses, he lives comfortably, though hardly extravagantly.“I basically have $80,000 to $100,000 in my trading account every day,” he says, “and take my earnings out of that account to live.”It is, to be sure, an odds-defying performance. The great mass of studies point to the same conclusion: trading is hazardous to your wealth, as an academic paper memorably put it. The losers far outnumber the winners.Exactly how far is clear from one of the most comprehensive looks at the subject in a yet-to-be-published study conducted in Taiwan. (The country is ideal for this kind of research because all trades go through one place, the Taiwan Stock Exchange, which is willing to share the information.) The authors sifted through tens of millions of trades, from 1992 to 2006, and found that 80 percent of active traders lost money.“More importantly, we found that if you were to look at the past performance of these traders, only 1 percent of them could be called predictably profitable,” says a co-author, Brad M. Barber, a finance professor at the University of California, Davis. Everyone else, it seems, was on a short-term winning streak. Even those who did modestly well found their that profits were wiped out, and then some, by transaction fees like commissions and taxes.“It’s not impossible to make money actively trading,” Mr. Barber continues. “There are slivers of people out there who are quite good. And everyone thinks they will be in that group of 1 percent.”So why do people persist in this line of work?“The technical term is thrill-seeking,” says Hersh Shefrin, a professor of behavioral finance at Santa Clara University in California and author of “Beyond Greed and Fear,” an exploration of investors’ mindscapes. “There’s an adrenaline rush. And the thing about day trading is that it gives you pretty quick feedback. If you buy and hold, a lot of things need to happen before you see a result, and much of what happens relates to external factors that are beyond your control. With day trading, you’re in charge.”Also, he says, “people enjoy trading.”If Mr. Lindloff is earning steady six-figure returns, he is squarely in the rarefied 1 percent of winners. But for $199 a month you sort of expect a man with a mansion, a hot tub and hyperbolic claims of double-digit returns. Why do a few dozen subscribers pay to watch these quite appealing but hardly world-beating guys at work?“Eighty percent of it is camaraderie,” says Mr. Lindzon at StockTwits. “Look, my wife watches cooking shows and I tell her, ‘That’s not going to make you a better cook.’ With these guys, you get a community, you get to hang out with people who love stocks, and if you get a couple great ideas in a month, even better.”Services like Twitter are naturals for traders, and not just because they offer a geyser of pointers, whispers and news flashes. They also give a far-flung group of people a simulacrum of fellowship, which is something that day traders need almost as much as good ideas.Asked about the Today Trader method of buying and selling, both men seem momentarily stumped, as if they never saw the question coming. Then they talk about the search for “set-ups,” which seems to translate roughly as “golden opportunities,” but they struggle to put a finger on what set-ups are, or how to spot them.It has something to do with tracking trading volumes of stocks and buying heavily traded stocks as they rise in price. But how to know a stock will keep rising? Intuition, they say. It tells them whether they’ve arrived at the party too late (in which case they won’t buy), at the right time (in which case they buy), or just before it ends (time to sell).“A common phrase in this business,” says Mr. Lindloff, “is ‘the trend is your friend.’”The more you listen, the more you realize that for all the high-tech gadgetry behind Today Trader, at its core is a Newtonian principle formulated more than 300 years ago: a body in motion tends to stay in motion.The problem is that stocks aren’t bodies and their motion is subject to forces Newton could never have fathomed. Some of those forces are hard for the Today Trader duo to fathom, too. Mr. Gomez says that day trading has become far trickier in recent years because of the rise of robo trading — the use of computers to automatically buy and sell huge numbers of shares in superfast bursts, based on algorithms.Big, muscular Wall Street veterans like Goldman Sachs have the money, smarts and brute power to dominate this computerized battle, and many day traders may not even be aware how outgunned they now are.“It’s not something we fully understand, but algorithms don’t have emotions,” says Mr. Gomez. “It’s like these machines can smell a human. They can smell the fear of a discretionary trader. Stocks will still go from Point A to Point B. But what used to be a waltz is now more like mosh pit.”Daily hand-to-hand combat with a bunch of robots? It seems kind of crazy. But is it any crazier than leaving your money in the same place where it languished for the last decade?This is a not a simple question. Fortunately, one man is ideally suited to answer it.Unfortunately, Charles Schwab doesn’t do interviews.This is ironic, as has been noted by reporters who have come calling of late, because the company has spent five years and a fortune on an ad campaign whose kicker is “Talk to Chuck.” But in 2008, Mr. Schwab vacated the C.E.O. job — he is now chairman — and the company would like to wean the public off the idea that Charles Schwab is the public face of Charles Schwab.No small feat, given the name of the company and given the ubiquity of that face in many years of advertising. Mr. Schwab once said he took his grandchildren out trick-or-treating on Halloween and some people thought he was wearing a Charles Schwab mask.Though he wore a jacket and tie in his TV spots, he seemed to have the heart and soul of a revolutionary. The idea behind the company was to cut commission rates so low — they started off at $70 a trade in 1975, which was then a steal — that the average investor could trade without paying exorbitant fees to Wall Street. If day trading had a patron saint, it was this man.The current C.E.O. is Walt Bettinger, 49, who is sitting one morning in his San Francisco office, which is next to Mr. Schwab’s and has a killer view of the Bay Bridge. He knows the subject is day trading, and you can tell he finds this topic slightly annoying, the way a movie star would find it annoying if you asked about a film he made 20 years ago.“I think the day-trade concept is a paragraph in the story of Charles Schwab,” he says. “But it’s not the book.”The book, he says, is Schwab’s evolution from a company that was just focused on what he calls “self-directed investors” to a company that also offers advice to those who seek it and full-on portfolio management for those who prefer to leave their investment decisions in someone else’s hands.As a strategy, this makes sense because it turns out that traders are fickle customers. Even during the banner years, Mr. Bettinger said, the company had to constantly replenish its base of very active traders.The push to advise clients and to manage portfolios started gaining traction in 2005, and the company says that last year, customers moved $21 billion into assorted fee-based advice offerings — which suggests that the era of professional hand-holding in the wealth-management world is hardly over.Schwab now offers every item at the steam table of financial offerings, and Mr. Bettinger will not say he prefers one investment strategy to any other. He is, in fact, completely agnostic on the question and surpassingly unhelpful at opining about day trading. If that works for you, do it, he’ll say. Unless you’d like someone to manage your money — in which case, do that.It is a politic, even-handed answer that proves just how over the whole trading phenomenon the company is. Schwab today is a bit like that part-time insurrectionist you knew in college who denounced “the man” and later became a management consultant. You can understand the evolution and appreciate the maturity, but you can still think fondly of the days when he stood outside the dining hall pushing copies of The Workers Vanguard.About the most Mr. Bettinger will say about day trading is that it’s a “tough gig.” “You’re competing against mega-institutions that are trading in hundredths of a second.”He’s right, and the Today Trader team keeps clashing with those mega-institutions. At one point, Mr. Lindloff buys shares in Patterson-UTI Energy, because he thinks it looks ripe for an uptick. Instead, it dives a few cents, and because Mr. Lindloff has an automatic stop on the trade — which sells the shares if they dip below a certain threshold — they are sold for a loss. A moment later, the shares shoot up.Mr. Lindloff thinks he has been juked and jived by a robo trader.“That was nothing but an algorithm boogie,” he mutters to the Today Trader faithful. “Goddang it. Drives me crazy.”“My analogy is that whole sector is doing great and they find one weak animal in a herd,” replies Mr. Gomez, “and they’ll attack it.”Mr. Gomez trades his own accounts but spends much of his time answering questions posted in the chat room. One is from a subscriber, Rick, who asks, “What do you guys do to stop kicking yourself (emotionally) about missed opportunity?”“The only thing you can control is your attitude,” Mr. Gomez replies into his microphone, moments after the question is posted. “Not looking back, not kicking yourself for not catching the whole move. You’re never going to be perfect. Nobody is going to be perfect.”Not even Today Trader. By the end of the day, Mr. Lindloff has traded 60,000 shares and is up $165. It would be a satisfying return, but commissions on those trades cost $300.“You know,” says Mr. Gomez, “a lot of people tell us that our down days are every bit as instructive as our ups.” Go to Article from The New York Times »
HomeCalcutta News.NetSaturday 27th March, 2010 (IANS)The government is expected to place before parliament suggestions it receives from media associations and regulatory bodies on ways to curb the phenomenon of paid news.A senior official of the Information and Broadcasting ministry told IANS: ‘The Press Council of India (PCI) has set up a two-member committee following complaints regarding paid news. The PCI is expected to discuss the committee’s report March 31.’The PCI is a statutory, quasi-judicial body which acts as a watchdog of the press.The official said that the two-member committee has contacted Indian Newspaper Society, Indian Language Newspaper Association and other stakeholders as part of its consultation process.Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni had, earlier this month, told the Rajya Sabha that the PCI report on paid news will be placed before parliament and the government will formulate its response to tackle the problem based on the suggestions of members.Putting forth the government’s point of view after the matter was raised through a calling attention motion in the house, she said paid news was a serious matter as it influences the functioning of a free press.She told the members that the PCI along with the Election Commission of India had set in a process to look at financial paid news and political paid news and the exercise was expected to be completed by the end of March.Bharatiya Janta Party leader Sushma Swaraj, at a meeting on paid news organised earlier this month by the Editors Guild of India, Indian Women’s Press Corps and Press Association and Broadcast Editors Association, said that the issue will be raised in the Lok Sabha during the second half of budget session beginning April 15.Swaraj and Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari agreed with Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat’s suggestion made during the meeting that paid news should be declared an electoral malpractice under the Representation of People’s Act.CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury said that government should stop its advertisements to newspapers and media houses indulging in the malpractice.BJP vice president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said that the problem of paid news was widespread and complex.’It should be tackled as part of larger electoral reforms,’ he said. Email this story to a friendHave your say on this story
AUTOSSouthfield-based automotive seat maker Lear said Friday that it sold $700 million in bonds in a move that refinances the company’s debt.The bonds, two sets at $350 million each, allow the company to pay down $925 million Lear owed on two lines of credit that were due in 2012 and 2014, and had tied up the company’s collateral.Lear, which emerged from bankruptcy protection in November, said that the bond sale has helped it cut its debt by $225 million and lowered its interest costs.Lear CEO Bob Rossiter called the refinancing transformational. It pushes out Lear’s major debt maturities to 2018 and 2020. Wall Street liked the news. Lear’s stock rose $1.70 or 2.1% on Friday to $81.85, a high since the shares started trading in November.AutoNation CEO’s compensation nearly doublesThe Associated Press says AutoNation CEO Mike Jackson made $5.2 million last year, about twice as much as the previous year, as the auto retailer posted a profit amid the worst U.S. auto sales market in decades.Jackson’s salary remained the same at $1.15 million, but he received a $1.7-million performance-based bonus after getting none the previous year. The value of his stock options and stock awards rose about 70% to almost $2.1 million.Toyota to idle plants in France, BritainToyota said Friday it is stopping production at its factories in France and Britain for a total of nine days amid falling sales that the company partly attributed to its recent recall woes.The world’s No. 1 automaker will suspend output at its plant in France for four days starting April 6, said spokeswoman Ririko Takeuchi. Toyota will also stop production at its two factories in Britain for five working days sometime in May.In early June, Toyota also plans to halt one of its two assembly lines at its Burnaston plant in Britain for another five working days, Takeuchi said.TECHNOLOGY: Hundreds rally in Ann Arbor for Google networkHoping to win Google’s national competition for an ultra-high-speed fiber-optic network, people packed the University of Michigan’s central campus for a three-minute event designed to demonstrate their enthusiasm for the project.
It’s a shocking political development, to be sure, but news about Ron Paul and what his determined, fervent bands of supporters call the Ron Paul Revolution is beginning to spread like some kind of wildfire before strong primary winds.First, there was this.Then, there was this.And that produced so many hundreds of Comments on this blog that it caused this later item on the Comments. Which produced even more Comments.And, in turn,that led to this item on the previous item on another blog.Supporters of the 72-year-old 10-term libertarian representative from Texas think he has a real shot at shocking the political establishment and snatching the Republican presidential nomination away from all those presidential pretenders like Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Fred Thompson with higher numbers in what must be obviously fraudulent polls. But now comes news that news about Paul is creeping onto television, that great Satan that ….
Reporting from Bogota, Colombia, and Caracas, Venezuela — Stepping up what opponents call a smack-down of opposition voices, the Venezuelan attorney general said Thursday that authorities had arrested the owner of the Globovision TV channel, one of the few remaining broadcasters critical of President Hugo Chavez.Guillermo Zuloaga was arrested at an airport in western Venezuela as he was preparing to fly his private airplane to Bonaire, a Caribbean vacation destination, for Easter week. Venezuelan Atty. Gen. Luisa Ortega Diaz said Zuloaga was detained because he was considered a flight risk.A judge on Wednesday denied bail for Oswaldo Alvarez Paz, a former state governor and Chavez critic jailed a day earlier on charges of incitement, conspiracy and spreading false information in a March 8 interview on Globovision.During that interview, Alvarez Paz said that Venezuela had become a hub for drug trafficking and implied that the government was partly to blame. Ortega Diaz said Zuloaga was jailed on charges of contempt and for offending the chief executive of the republic, as well as for statements made during the Inter American Press Assn. meeting in Aruba this month. At that meeting, Ortega Diaz said, Zuloaga had accused Chavez of “being responsible for shooting Venezuelans.”Chavez has lashed out at journalists as he has come under increasing criticism from opposition figures for the high inflation rate, violent crime and what foreign diplomats and law enforcement describe as rampant drug trafficking.In May 2007, Chavez denied the renewal of a broadcast license to RCTV, then the most popular network in Venezuela and also a staunch critic of the president. Chavez has also forced the closure of 33 independent radio stations and clamped down on regional newspapers.Mogollon and Kraul are special correspondents.
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Mar 25, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) –Hypercom Corporation /quotes/comstock/13*!hyc/quotes/nls/hyc (HYC 3.86, -0.04, -1.03%) today announced the appointment of William Rossiter as Vice President of Marketing. Mr. Rossiter will be principally responsible for the deployment of the Company’s mobile payment technology. He reports to Philippe Tartavull, Chief Executive Officer and President. “With this appointment we ramp up our capabilities and strengthen our competitive positioning in mobile payments,” said Mr. Tartavull. “Will is a dynamic and experienced executive with a keen understanding of the mobile and wireless markets and what it takes to win business, build market share and strengthen our global footprint.” Mr. Rossiter brings to Hypercom nearly a decade of marketing, sales, business development expertise in electronic transactions, mobile payments and consumer electronics. He served for six years with Oberthur Card Systems in positions including Vice President, Wireless Sales & Marketing; Director, Wireless Business Development; National Accounts Manager, and Financial Analyst. He joins Hypercom from the brand strategy consulting firm Bassett & Partners. In his prior roles, he has worked with globally-respected high-tech companies such as Microsoft and Dell, and leading wireless carriers including AT&T, T-Mobile, Telcel and Telefonica. Mr. Rossiter holds a master’s in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a bachelor’s in English and Economics from Santa Clara University. About Hypercom (hypercom.com) Global payment technology leader Hypercom Corporation delivers a full suite of high security, end-to-end electronic payment products, software solutions and services. The Company’s solutions address the high security electronic transaction needs of banks and other financial institutions, processors, large scale retailers, smaller merchants, quick service restaurants, and users in the transportation, petroleum, healthcare, prepaid, self-service and many other markets. Hypercom solutions enable businesses in more than 100 countries to securely expand their revenues and profits. Hypercom is a founding member of the Secure POS Vendor Alliance (SPVA) and is the second largest provider of electronic payment solutions and services in Western Europe and third largest provider globally. Hypercom is a registered trademark of Hypercom Corporation. All other products or services mentioned in this document are trademarks, service marks, registered trademarks or registered service marks of their respective owners. This press release includes statements that may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements regarding the qualifications, expertise and expected performance of the Company’s new Vice President, Marketing; the Company’s expected future performance; market acceptance of new products, product capability and performance, product competitiveness, product sales, revenues and profits, market share, and expected acquisition results and benefits. These forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations and beliefs and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. In particular, factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in forward-looking statements include: industry, competitive and technological changes; the loss of, and failure to replace any significant customers; the composition, timing and size of orders from and shipments to major customers; inventory obsolescence; market acceptance of new products and services; compliance with industry standards, certifications and government regulations; the performance of suppliers, contract manufacturers and subcontractors; the ability to successfully integrate the technologies, operations and personnel of acquired businesses in a timely manner; the ability to obtain the expected strategic and financial benefits from acquisitions; risks associated with international operations and foreign currency fluctuations, the state of the U.S. and global economies in general and other risks detailed in our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company’s most recent 10-K and subsequent 10-Qs and 8-Ks. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date made and are not guarantees of future performance. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements. HYCP SOURCE: Hypercom Corporation Hypercom Corporation Pete Schuddekopf, 480-642-5383 pschuddekopf@hypercom.com Copyright Business Wire 2010
On Thursday, the National Park Service hosted a festival preview on the shore of the Tidal Basin, where officials said that despite an overall drop in tourism to Washington, the two-week festival still is the biggest recurring tourism event for the city and the National Park Service.The festival, centered among the basin’s Japanese cherry trees, runs through April 11. The peak bloom is expected to be April 1 through April 4, with the blooming period from March 28 through April 9.The preview came as the Trust for the National Mall, the Park Service’s official nonprofit partner for improving the Mall, announced that it would take over fundraising for maintenance of the cherry trees from the National Park Foundation.The trust’s supervision of the Cherry Tree Endowment Fund marks an increased effort to raise money for the trees and to educate visitors about the need for tree maintenance, the organization said.”The cherry trees are centrally located on the Mall, and there is a need for additional funding to upkeep and maintain these national treasures,” a trust spokeswoman said. “The National Park Foundation and the Trust mutually agreed it made good sense to streamline the fundraising efforts and move the responsibility over to the Trust.”Meanwhile, officials of the Park Service, U.S. Park Police and the blossom festival were on hand Thursday to welcome visitors to the festival’s various walks, talks, and other events. They were joined by the great-grandson of first lady Helen H. Taft, who planted the first tree.Festival details are at nationalcherryblossomfestival.org.”It’s just amazing to see the transformation from the snows this year to spring awakening and the blossoms coming out,” said John Piltzecker, superintendent of the Park Service’s National Mall and Memorial Parks. “This is the time everyone comes out. . . . This is the time. Come out from winter. Come down to the Tidal basin, or out to Hains Point, and enjoy Washington D.C.”– Michael E. Ruane
Commentary by Albert R. Hunt Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — For the first time since 1932 apresidential election is taking place in the midst of a genuinefinancial crisis. The reaction of the candidates was revealing. John McCain, railing against the “greed and corruption”of Wall Street, won the first round of the sound-bite war. Hecame out with a television commercial on the “crisis” earlyon Monday of last week, and over the next three days gave morethan a dozen broadcast interviews. He and running mate SarahPalin would reform Wall Street and regulate the nefarious fatcats that caused this fiasco. It was a great start. It then went downhill as he stumbledover his record of championing deregulation, claimed theeconomy was fundamentally strong, and flip-flopped over thegovernment takeover of American International Group Inc. For his part, Barack Obama didn’t come across aspassionately outraged and wasn’t as omnipresent or as specific. More revealing, though, was to whom both candidates turnedon that panic-ridden morning of Sept. 15, and how the messagesevolved before and after that day. McCain called Martin Feldstein, the well-known Republicaneconomist and Reagan administration adviser, John Taylor ofStanford University, who served in President George W. Bush’sTreasury and Carly Fiorina, once the chief executive officer ofHewlett-Packard Co. Obama called former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker,and former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. It was a mismatch. Towering Volcker Feldstein, for all his intellect, was ineffective in theReagan administration; then-White House deputy chief of staffDick Darman cut him out of important action. Volcker, first atthe Treasury and then as chairman of the Federal Reserve, was atowering figure in every way. Taylor is a well-regarded academic. In four years asundersecretary of the Treasury, he left few footprints.Summers, as both deputy secretary and secretary, left a lot. Fiorina is smart and quick; to put it charitably, Rubinwill forget more about financial markets than she’ll ever know. When it comes to governance, and either Democrat Obamaor Republican McCain will inherit this miserable financial mess,the best guide is who they talked to, what they said, wherethey’ve been, and how knowledgeable they are. Obama’s record and earlier speeches belie some of his morepopulist rhetoric. Yet they also suggest, as do his advisers, amuch more activist government role than is likely under aMcCain-Palin administration. Comfortable With Subject Obama called for the overhaul of the financial-regulatorysystem and tougher enforcement well before this past week’straumas. Detached observers who watched him last week, especiallyin a Bloomberg Television interview, were taken by howconversant and comfortable he was on the subject, despite histhin record. Few detached observers came away with thatimpression watching the Arizona senator. Much of the re-regulatory fever focuses on the FederalReserve and any new agencies created to clean up the fiasco.Central, however, will be a more vigorous Securities andExchange Commission, or whatever holds that investor-protectionfunction. McCain displayed a sudden interest in the SEC last weekwhen he demanded that Chairman Chris Cox be fired. When hiscampaign was asked if the senator had ever criticized thecurrent commission’s performance before, they failed torespond. All For Obama Tellingly, three former SEC chairmen, a Democrat, ArthurLevitt, and two Republicans, David Ruder and Bill Donaldson,have endorsed Obama. Levitt is a board member of Bloomberg LP,the parent company of Bloomberg News. Donaldson, who was tapped by Bush to head the SEC, saysObama called him last year about the financial-regulatoryproblems. He has never heard from McCain. “Obama has been talking about the need for betterfinancial regulation well before this crisis hit and has donesome real thinking about it,” says Donaldson, a lifelongRepublican. “McCain comes across as someone who suddenlyrealized changes have to be made.” There is a case for McCain: it’s if you believe in lessregulation, that the government should get out of the way andlet the markets work their will. No `Real Understanding’ “I don’t think anyone who wants to increase the burden ofgovernment regulation and high taxes has any real understandingof economics,” McCain said this spring at an Inez, Kentucky,town hall meeting, where he also declared “the fundamentals ofour economy are good.” Until recently, he repeatedly invoked Ronald Reagan’scalls for less regulation. He voted for the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxleycorporate-governance regulations — then last year said heregretted that vote. McCain isn’t averse to some regulations. He has stronglychampioned a greater federal role in campaign finance, tobaccoand boxing. In each case, he saw a clear villain — special-interest money, a tobacco product that puts profits ahead oflives, and unscrupulous boxing promoters. There has been little evidence that prior to last week heever put financial firms in this category. Although he assailedexcessive corporate compensation last week, McCain has opposeda tepid House-passed bill that would give corporateshareholders the right to cast a non-binding vote oncompensation of top executives. Turning to Gramm The person he has turned to most for counsel on suchmatters is his ex-Senate colleague Phil Gramm. Gramm is apolitical Gordon Gekko, a brainy economist with a Darwinianview of markets and public policy. It’s not easy to remember what the financial world lookedlike 10 days ago much less 10 months ago. Decisions that willbe reached after this election will be the most important sincethe 1930s. Obama, as more than a few Democrats are complaining,hasn’t been as quick, sharp — or demagogic — as they wouldlike. McCain has been beset by deeper difficulties: an inchoateand inconsistent message that seems to reflect politicalexigencies more than principled convictions. On the financial crisis, last week belonged to Obama. (Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington atBloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.) To contact the writer of this column:Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net Last Updated: September 21, 2008 09:33 EDT
The commission chose the most elaborate of the designs, with a central grove and columns on the north and south sides, plus a “tapestry” of woven stainless steel mesh. Not a surprise exactly, but the choice certainly signals that the commission didn’t hire Gehry merely to plant colorful bulbs and shrubs and landscape the plaza.The design concept will be presented to the National Capital Planning Commission at its regular monthly meeting next Thursday. The Eisenhower memorial commission was formed in 1999 to begin planning a memorial to the man who led Allied armies to victory in World War II, created the Department of Health Education and Welfare and the interstate highway system. Commissioners selected Gehry last March, and he began his work around the beginning of this year.The four-acre site sits adjacent to the Mall, near the National Museum of the American Indian (to the north and east) and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building (to the south). The parcel, which is bisected by Maryland Avenue, has excellent views of the Capitol. Some opponents of the September 2006 decision to place a memorial there argued that it might close off Maryland Avenue from redevelopment as a vital thoroughfare in keeping with Pierre L’Enfant’s original city plan.The choice of Gehry attracted considerable attention. Gehry had been slated to design an addition to the Corcoran, but funding woes ended those plans in 2005. He was not an obvious architect to create a memorial to a man remembered as one of the country’s least flashy and most modest presidents. But the challenges faced by the commission — which has said it wants to create a new memorial language for the 21st century — led it to chose a major if sometimes controversial architect rather than a lesser name or firm that might reliably deliver a conventional but bland design.The memorial site conforms to efforts to begin widening the memorial “core” of Washington by placing new monuments off the Mall. But it is also close enough to the Mall, and several of its most popular attractions, that it could be a major test of architectural and planning efforts to lure visitors away from the main tourist drag defined by the space between Independence and Constitution avenues. Planners, and the memorial commission, hope that a popular memorial at this newly configured square could lure tourists on World War II remembrance visits, with stops at the World War II memorial and perhaps the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as well.The original estimate, in 2008, for design and construction costs of the memorial was $90 million to $110 million.
Launched in 2002 by three 20-somethings in a Calgary, Alberta, apartment, StumbleUpon now has 2 million registered users drawn by its knack for finding websites that match their interests and those of others with similar tastes as they “stumble” around the Net.Co-founder Garrett Camp (shown right), who totes around a mid-’80s Nikon F3 (yes, with actual film), came up with the idea as he was working on a master’s in software engineering.Frustrated as he tried to indulge his hobby online – “There wasn’t a good way to find the best photo sites,” Camp says – he tapped his own background in clustering technology. With coding help from Justin LaFrance and Geoff Smith, he created an early version of StumbleUpon. Having nailed the photo problem, the team quickly saw how the technology could click with all sorts of media. In the same way that it matches users with like-minded websites, StumbleUpon’s technology also pairs online ads with targeted demographics and interests. Now StumbleUpon is attempting to do the same for online video and video advertising. In December the startup launched StumbleVideo, a service that offers the closest thing to channelsurfing that you’ll find on the Web. Tell us what you think about StumbleUpon’s model: Is it the next MySpace?Funding: $1.5 million (Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Josh Kopelman, Brad O’Neill, Ram Shriram)Headquarters: San FranciscoEmployees: 12Founded: 2001Business model: Advertising, subscriptionsBragging rights: Cash flow positiveNext up: New features like content controls and mobile video recommendationsContact: Partners@stumbleupon.com
CURRENCY TRADING SUMMARY – 25th March (00:30GMT) U.S. Dollar Trading (USD) heavy gains against most majors were seen throughout the day with little retracement as US Bond Yields crept higher and the Euro buckled. February Durable Goods Orders were at 0.5% vs. 0.7% forecast. February New Home Sales at 308k vs. 300k previously. In US stocks, DJIA -52 points closing at 10836, S&P -6 points closing at 1167 and NASDAQ -16 points closing at 2398. Looking ahead, Weekly Jobless Claims are forecast at 450k vs. 457k previously. The Euro (EUR) was under pressure all day as markets pushed the Greece issue to the brink before today’s EU summit. Stops were hit under 1.3440 and then 1.3400 and the single currency was pressuring the 1.3300 level as the US session came to a close. German March IFO beat expectations at 98.1 vs. 95.8 previously. Overall the EUR/USD traded with a low of 1.3304 and a high of 1.3488 before closing at 1.3325. Looking ahead, EU Summit Begins. The Japanese Yen (JPY) finally broke out of the 90-91 range with an explosive move to the topside. USD/JPY led all the crosses higher as the Yen was the weakest currency in the market. The US session saw moves above Y92 and the pair settled comfortably above the figure. Overall the USDJPY traded with a low of 90.37 and a high of 92.42 before closing the day around 92.20 in the New York session. The Sterling (GBP) fell to the USD strength but held up well against the Euro and Yen. The UK budget did little to stop the GBP selling with Fitch commenting that it did not change it’s view of the UK public debt situation. GBP/JPY rose above Y137 on heavy Yen selling. Overall the GBP/USD traded with a low of 1.4854 and a high of 1.5039 before closing the day at 1.4880 in the New York session. Looking ahead, February Retail Sales forecast at 0.7%m/m vs. -1.8%m/m. The Australian Dollar (AUD) tracked gold and the Euro lower falling through the 0.9100 level to 0.9080 supports. AUD/JPY made small gains towards Y84 on the USD/JPY move but with stock markets weak in the US how Japan reacts will be hard to predict. Overall the AUD/USD traded with a low of 0.9064 and a high of 0.9189 before closing the US session at 0.9090. Looking ahead, RBA Financial Stability Review. Oil & Gold (XAU) pushed through $1100 and $1090 supports on USD strength. Overall trading with a low of USD$1105 and high of USD$1084 before ending the New York session at USD$1086 an ounce. Oil fell with the rest of the market but held above the key $80 a barrel level. Crude Oil was down -$1.31 ending the New York session at $80.60. TECHNICAL COMMENTARYEuro – 1.3320 Initial support at 1.3247 (May 6 low) followed by 1.3192 (Apr 30 low). Initial resistance is now located at 1.3507 (Mar 24 high) followed by 1.3569 (Mar 23 high) Yen – 92.30 Initial support is located at 90.35 (Mar 24 low) followed by 90.06 (Mar 23 low). Initial resistance is now at 92.44 (0.764 of 93.77-88.14) followed by 93.77 (Jan 8 high). Pound – 1.4875 Initial support at 1.4784 (Mar 10 low) followed by 1.4704 (April 30 low). Initial resistance is now at 1.5113 (Mar 23 high) followed by 1.5257 (Mar 19 low). Australian Dollar – 0.9075 Initial support at 0.9056 (Mar 9 low) followed by the 0.8979 (Mar 4 low). Initial resistance is now at 0.9199 (Mar 23 high) followed by 0.9252 (March 17 high). Gold – 1085 Initial support at 1078 (Feb 12 low) followed by 1071 (Feb 11 low). Initial resistance is now at 1108 (Mar 22 high) followed by 1124 (0.618 of 1144.98-1092.47). Oil – 80.30 Initial support at 80.00 (Intraday Support) followed by 78.00 (Intraday Support). Initial resistance is now at 82.00 (Intraday Resistance) followed by 83.20 (March high).
As an industry grows, it is quite common to find multiple solutions that all attempt to address similar requirements. This evolution dictates that these proposed standards go through a stage of selection—over time, we see some become more dominant than others. Today, the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is clearly one of the dominant VoIP protocols, but that obviously didn’t happen overnight. In this article, the first of a series of in-depth articles exploring SIP and VoIP, we’ll look at the main factors that led to this outcome. A brief history of VoIP Let’s go back to 1995 in the days prior to Google, IM, and even broadband. Cell phones were large and bulky, Microsoft had developed a new Windows interface with a “Start” button, and Netscape had the most popular Web browser. The growth of the Internet and data networks prompted many to realize that it’s possible to use the new networks to serve our voice communication needs while substantially lowering the associated cost. The first commercial solution of Internet VoIP came from a company called VocalTec; their software allowed two people to talk with each other over the Internet. One would make a local call to an ISP via a 28.8K or 36.6K modem and be able to talk with friends even if they lived far away. I remember trying out this software, and the sound was definitely below acceptable quality. (It frequently sounded like you were attempting to speak while submerged in a swimming pool.) However, the software successfully connected two people and introduced real-time voice conversation for a bandwidth-constrained network. It was immediately apparent to the first VoIP implementors that there are several differences between the telephone network and the data network. One of them is the message exchange design. The phone system works in circuit-switch, where a circuit is the complete path between two endpoints. Thus, it is possible to guarantee a single path for all messages in a single communication. The data network works with packets, where various hops along the way help to route the packets to their final destination, and this path may change from one packet to the other. Because of this structure, the data network cannot guarantee that the packets of a single session will traverse through the same path. VoIP therefore required some new innovations before it could really get off the ground. To start a call, you need a VoIP signaling protocol. The term “signaling” comes from the circuit-switch telephone communication world. In this system, we have signals sent from one end to the other in order to communicate and allow us to talk over vast distances. The role of a signaling protocol is to define the way these messages are structured and the rules that let us start, configure, and end conversation. It is worth it to point out that signaling messages do not include the voice one hears (the media of the call). The signaling protocol may include the media streams information and their attributes, but the speech itself in a voice call is not a signaling message. If you’re looking for a very high-level explanation, just think of signaling as the messages a device sends when you dial or hang up the phone. So the race was on to create a new signaling protocol. Some of these protocol specifications were open for everyone to implement, and others were vendor-proprietary solutions. And that race still isn’t quite over, as we’re constantly seeing new proposals that attempt to convince everyone that there’s a better way to do things. A VoIP signaling protocol must show how it integrates with the data network; this includes aspects such as defining a method of locating the communication devices, specifying server behavior, introducing new services, and security design. SIP protocol design SIP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocol and as such, it was designed to be an open Internet protocol. Its first release was in 1999, defined by RFC 2543, but its early drafts date back to 1996. It had some of its definitions revised later in 2002 by RFC 3261. Let’s look at a simple SIP request:INVITE sip:hannibal@arstechnica.com SIP/2.0Via: SIP/2.0/UDP home.mynetwork.org;branch=z9hG4bK8uf35fTo: Jon Stokes <sip:hannibal@arstechnica.com>From: Gilad <sip:gilad@voxisoft.com>;tag=n23ycsCall-ID: nbo34tsggvsqap@home.mynetwork.orgCSeq: 59164 INVITEContact: sip:gilad@voxisoft.comMax-Forwards: 70 SIP is text-based. Notice the addresses are very similar to email addresses. Although SIP can support telephone numbers, the basic idea is that the addresses do not have to be phone numbers, just as you would not expect your email address to look like your home or work address. A SIP message might resemble the following (partial) example: GET /reviews/ HTTP/1.1Host: arstechnica.comUser-Agent: Gecko/Firefox/3.5.5 Thus, SIP is quite similar to HTTP. The first line is the request line, which contains information regarding the type of request (GET in HTTP and INVITE in SIP for these examples) and the intended address, while subsequent lines are headers with additional information. Naturally, responses in SIP also look very similar to HTTP responses. The idea is to use the structure of one of the most popular Internet protocols and make it easier for software developers and network managers to work with SIP. These attempts to make SIP as easy as HTTP worked out to some extent, but the requirements of SIP addresses are more complex than HTTP, so the protocol is more complex. For example, it is a basic requirement in SIP to be able to have 2-way symmetric communication, whereas a typical HTTP scenario would be a client making requests to a server and the server sending a response. Even without prior HTTP knowledge, learning this message structure is a very easy task. For those who are wondering, the SIP example above is the first packet one might send when calling from a SIP phone to Ars Technica’s Deputy Editor, Jon Stokes. I will refrain from going into the technical details of the message contents at this time, as this is a subject for a separate article. Reuse, and keeping it simple The role of a signaling protocol is to define the way these messages are structured and the rules that let us start, configure, and end conversation. Another important factor in SIP’s design was the decision to reuse other existing Internet standards as much as possible. Address location uses DNS, user authentication uses HTTP digest authentication, setting the call media streams uses the Session Description Protocol (SDP), encryption uses TLS and, when applicable, users send each other XML information. This integration further helped establish SIP as part of the Internet protocol world, and vendors could reuse existing implementations in their SIP applications. On the other hand, in some cases the IETF had to make additional definitions in other protocols in order to serve SIP needs. Keeping the complexity of the servers, especially the proxies, along the call path as minimal as possible is also an emphasis in SIP’s design. SIP Proxies route the messages between the calling parties. The proxies defined in the standard are not aware of the call state, but rather operate on the transaction level and may also be stateless. This helps with scalability, because fewer devices can serve more calls. To do that, the protocol itself was separated to several distinct layers, a common practice programmers use to break down a complex system. This design helps to further simplify SIP and make it easier to implement. At times, keeping this minimal state forced some limitations (and later, some changes in the protocol), but these byproducts were kept to a minimum. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, SIP was not built solely as a replacement for the telephone system. It allows extensions, and it relies on them to provide additional services beyond just simple calls. For example, you can use SIP to maintain user status information in an IM client as well as to set up IM sessions. Another extension enables transferring a call to a third party, something that was simply not defined by the basic SIP specification. This is possible thanks to the fact that SIP provides the necessary basic constructs while limiting those constructs only when necessary. SIP defines the concept of “dialog” which is a 2-way communication, but does not limit dialogs to calls. Two-way communication also includes setting your IM status and receiving your IM friends’ updates. Extensions can also easily define new request or response types and new headers when needed.
Maybe the world has had it with celebrities after all. The Associated Press reports that Donald Trump has decided to reboot his NBC series and reintroduce the regular version of The Apprentice. He’s bringing back 14 ordinary men and women who are in search of a job, instead of relying on rockstars and athletes for entertainment.Read: Donald Trump Prefers the Original ApprenticeLast Wednesday, Trump and the network announced that the regular Apprentice might be airing this fall. With the economic crisis still plaguing the country, both parties believed this to be a step towards progress.From executive producers Mark Burnett and the Donald, the non-celebrity edition of the show premiered in 2004. It survived for five seasons before being replaced with Celebrity Apprentice two years ago. Though next year, a sixth installment is already in line.”[S]ince the economy went down the tubes, people have been saying, ‘Would it be possible to bring back the original?’” Trump explained. “In a way, it’s more important now than when we first did it.”Another twist that the tycoon wants for The Apprentice’s upcoming season is the candidates. Donald Trump will be recruiting those who have lost their jobs, are working in jobs they despise, and those who have finished college but haven’t been offered anything. Despite the broadness of those categories, the businessman admits that he’s still looking for those exemplifying one distinct quality. “Everybody has to be smart,” Trump said. “They all have to have brain power.”What’s more, their boss is looking to hand them advice on how to continue after the show. Trump’s post-You’re fired! words will lead these contestants to a bright future, should they choose to listen to him.”Instead of just sending them off in a cab, I’m going to sit and talk to them about their future — give them a little advice,” the Apprentice star said.Get to Know Business Mogul Donald TrumpTaping for the new season will begin this summer. Those who believe they have what it takes to be on The Apprentice should be on the lookout for open casting calls, which will be held across the country.Source: The Associated Press(Image Courtesy of WENN)