Syrian general Tlas in France after defection

By Kari Huus, NBC News

Handout / Reuters file

Syrian Brig.-Gen. Manaf Tlas

?

Syrian General Manaf Tlas, a defector once in?the inner circle of Bashar al-Assad?s regime, has resurfaced in France, French President Francois Hollande confirmed on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

News that Tlas, a former friend and ally of Assad, had fled Damascus emerged on July 6, but France had not previously confirmed his presence in the country.

"We have been informed about this situation. He is here," Hollande said at a news conference.

---

Tlas has not spoken publicly since his defection, but he sent a statement to the French news agency AFP on Tuesday, calling for a "constructive transition" in his country.

"I sincerely hope that the blood stops flowing and that the country emerges from the crisis through a phase of constructive transition that guarantees Syria its unity, stability and security, as well as the aspirations of its people," he said in the statement.

For a third straight day, Syrian military fought rebels in the capital where activists say government tanks are fighting back. NBC's Ayman Mohyeldin reports.

"I am ready like any other Syrian, with no other ambition, to fulfill my civic duty to contribute to a better future for my country, as much as I can, and like all those ... who have already made many sacrifices," he said.

According to a profile of Tlas published Tuesday in Al-Arabiya, the general was being groomed to be defense minister of Syria, following in the footsteps of his father, Mustafa Tlas, "one of the main pillars of the regime."

Manaf Tlas was involved in reconciliation efforts at the very beginning of the Syria?s uprising, but he had been under partial house arrest since May 2011 because he opposed the regime?s violent response to the unrest, according to a BBC report?on Tlas' defection.

"Since the beginning of the Syrian revolution, Tlas has been 'brooding' sitting alone at his home or visiting his daughter Nahid in Paris for treatment or to escape the miserable situation," according to a columnist and friend of the Tlas family, Jihad el-Khazen, in the Al-Arabiya profile.

In a visit to a Syria refugee camp, British Foreign Minister William Hague listened to harrowing stories of the people who have been forced to flee their homes. Nearly 140 thousand people have crossed the border from Syria into neighboring Jordan to seek sanctuary from President Bashar al-Assad's deadly onslaught. NBC's John Ray reports.

The BBC reports that some in the opposition believe Tlas could play an important role in Syria?s future because he is seen as someone from the military establishment who has not been involved in the bloodshed.

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Source: http://worldnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/17/12794303-syrian-general-tlas-in-france-following-defection?lite

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Getting Your Relationship or Marriage Back To Love 07/16 by ...

Sorry, Readability was unable to parse this page for content.

Source: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thestephanierockeyshow/2012/07/16/getting-your-relationship-or-marriage-back-to-love

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LA sheriff: Man recovers car 42 years after theft

In this image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department the stolen car sits on small transport trailer as it is delivered to Robert Russell 's home in Texas. Russell whose prized 1967 Austin Healy sports car was stolen 42 years ago, recovered the vehicle after spotting it on eBay, authorities said Sunday July 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)

In this image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department the stolen car sits on small transport trailer as it is delivered to Robert Russell 's home in Texas. Russell whose prized 1967 Austin Healy sports car was stolen 42 years ago, recovered the vehicle after spotting it on eBay, authorities said Sunday July 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)

In this image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Mr. & Mrs. Russell with car back in their Texas garage after it was delivered to Robert Russell 's home in Texas. Russell whose prized 1967 Austin Healy sports car was stolen 42 years ago, recovered the vehicle after spotting it on eBay, authorities said Sunday July 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)

In this image provided by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Bob Russell, center, and his wife standing next to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department East LA Auto Theft Detective Carlos Ortega. Russell whose prized 1967 Austin Healy sports car was stolen 42 years ago, recovered the vehicle after spotting it on eBay, authorities said Sunday July 15, 2012. (AP Photo/Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department)

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? A Texas man whose prized sports car was stolen 42 years ago recovered the vehicle in California after spotting it on eBay, authorities said Sunday.

Robert Russell told the Los Angeles County sheriff's officials that he had never given up searching for the 1967 Austin-Healey after it was stolen from his Philadelphia home in 1970.

The 66-year-old retired sales manager from Southlake told the Dallas Morning News (http://dallasne.ws/ML2fBq ) he paid a friend $3000 for the car. It had sentimental value to him because it was stolen the morning after he took his future wife out on their second date.

Russell said he spent years surfing the Internet looking for the car and didn't have much hope of finding it.

"The fact that the car still exists is improbable," he said. "It could have been junked or wrecked."

He said he checked on eBay periodically and spotted it a few weeks ago. He immediately called a Beverly Hills car dealership that was selling it.

He said the vehicle's identification number matched that of his car. He had the original key and car title, but not a copy of the stolen-car report to prove that it was stolen from him.

Russell contacted Philadelphia police for help and learned that the stolen-car report wasn't showing up at the FBI's national crime index because one vehicle identification number was entered incorrectly. The report was finally found and the file was reactivated, enabling Los Angeles authorities to impound the car.

Russell and his wife, Cynthia, drove to Los Angeles and took possession of the car. It's now valued at $23,000.

"It still runs, but the brakes don't work well," he said. "We're going to put it back the way it was."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2012-07-15-Car%20Theft-eBay%20Recovery/id-e530c7a49b1b4d40b73a648013c5218e

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Why business models for HPC are so very important | scalability.org

You need a sound business model. Not a sound business plan, but a concept of where revenue comes in, and how you will profit from it, and what your costs are, before you should build and sell a product.

In the case of state sponsored infrastructure, any model that looks like this:

1. Build it
2. ???
3. Profit!

is a failure waiting to happen. Its not a business model. Actually grant models which for point 2 have ?and we will go and find users in the business community for this resource? are also failures. You have to start out with ?and we have signed up these users, for this much minimum time and revenue, to this resource, with no single user responsible for more than 25% of our revenue? if you want to have a fighting chance at being successful.

Unfortunately, the New Mexico state supercomputer is like this. Build it and they will come, with only one customer, who went away. And left a nasty unpaid bill.

A business requires users who will pay for a product or service. If you can?t find users willing AND ABLE to pay for the product or service, you have to alter the product or service in such a way as to find your market.

We did that years ago when we realized that undifferentiated clusters were undifferentiated clusters. Anyone can stack a bunch of web servers and call it a cluster. Many folks do that. Few focus upon the real design issues. Few design to the customers needs. So these days, most of the clusters we build are bespoke ? specific to the task at hand. We stay away from the non-differentiated ones. There?s no margin in them, we can?t support running a business building just clusters.

Or desktops. We?ll occasionally get requests for desktop quotes ? not to the level we thought we?d see, but folks who think they need something genuinely powerful and customized. And then they inevitably compare them with random brand X, with a tiny subset of the spec they gave us, and a lower cost to go with that spec. Building to that spec would make no sense to us ? again, insufficient margin on a $1000 unit to support a company. You need volumes of millions of units for this to make sense.

This is also why we don?t sell parts. There?s no real value in selling parts. Can?t support a company on this without huge volumes. This is how Amazon is pretty much becoming the single goto market for stuff. They can lower pricing and make money with greater sales volume than their competitors. And they can live on the lower margins thanks to the greater volumes. Just wait until they no longer have meaningful competitors though.

So we avoid business that we can?t live on. We try to make sound business decisions. We take carefully focused risk. And sometimes we reap rewards (JackRabbit, DeltaV, siCluster, siFlash). Sometimes not (pegasus).

But there is no one backing us up. If we fail, we fail, and our business gets wound up. If we succeed, we grow and hire, and release more products to address markets that we see as being important.

The Applications Center was thrust into a financial crunch in November, after its largest customer ceased operations and defaulted on $934,000 in back payments, Bowles said. That caused the center to fall into arrears on $421,000 owed to a company for maintenance and operation services.

Other rules of business ? don?t have a single customer or small group of customers who you are solely dependent upon for your revenue. No more than 25% of your revenue should come from a single customer. Anything else is suicide.

Success in business means you have a set of opportunities you can profitably exploit. Ignore the president?s comments (previous post) on someone helping you out ? the guy obviously doesn?t know or understand what it takes for a business to succeed. Success requires perseverance, focus, goals, adaptability. It requires you find your customer. You identify them. And you get them to pay you for your service or product.

And you take steps to prevent not being paid. We have this as a problem ourselves, with large multi billion dollar corporations and universities wanting us to take anywhere from large to gigantic risks associated with providing them a service, without being able to charge them a premium for that risk. We walk away from crappy business (think onerous terms and conditions), and those who don?t pay us tend to speak with our legal folks. And we require partial prepayment on purchases larger than a certain amount, and full prepayment from various parts of the globe. We?ve learned. Some geographies have people whom are, how shall I put this, reluctant to pay their bills until they need you. Then they are happy to. Since we?ve had so much pain from those areas, everyone there gets to prepay for what we offer.

We?ve looked at getting some sort of payment insurance ? basically hedging against customer payment. There are ways that this can be done today. But the risk is still on you to a degree. You can sell your accounts receivables (AR) to other companies, and let them work collections if in arrears, though this costs you quite a bit. I?ve looked into hedging, and derivative products to see if we could get something akin to a Credit Default Swap (CDS) against AR (e.g. effectively insuring the credit we grant is in fact safe for us to grant as we have an insurance policy against non-payment). I should also point out that this spawned a really cool idea I don?t see in market (not this, but something else), that would take lots of capital to get started, but would be one helluva nice business (in the multi-billions per year very quickly). Would be interested in working to get that launched.

The US government offers Export-Import insurance, though this is targeted at the mega exporters/importers. This is to guarantee payment. It costs, but its not terrible, and you can add it to the bill for the customer. If they prepay, then the cost of insurance, cost of capital can be removed, and darn it, the stuff costs them less money. Go figure. Not sure why the GOP in the House of Representatives opposed the re-upping of the Ex-Im bank authorization. Sometimes our government does not do whats in our best interests. That was stupid of them.

It sounds to me like the Encanto business model was broken ? they depended heavily upon a single customer for most of their revenue. A non-profit company (bad idea for this) running an HPC center. Build it and they will come. Only one big one came.

The center was thrust into a financial crunch last November, after its largest customer, Cerelink Inc. in Corrales, ceased operations and defaulted on $934,000 in back payments, Bowles said. That caused the center to fall into arrears on $421,000 owed to SGI for maintenance and operation services.

Cerelink was working on film/video rendering and other bits. Leveraged NM?s production tax relief.

A note at the bottom of their page is curious

As a general practice, supercomputers are not made available to the private sector.

Ummm ? no. Not correct as a general statement. And not correct in this case either. Though its quite possible that the Encanto folks signed a sole reseller model with Cerelink, which made other business development efforts problematic. It is very rare that we would ever consider doing this ourselves. And we would make sure such agreements have exit clauses. But this would go to my statement about using a non-profit for running/operating the machine. Makes no sense. They won?t make business decisions the way a for-profit would make them.

Well, there?s another issue. Large projects which consume large amounts of state financial resources are as often as not political targets. New Mexico is not the wealthiest state in the country. Tax revenues have fallen since the onset of the Great Depression v2.0. And it absorbs capital that politicians want to spend elsewhere.

So it has a bullseye on its back. When it lost its customer, and had a $1M outstanding AR that it wouldn?t be able to collect on ? yeah ? that bullseye started sporting an arrow sticking out of it.

Another issue is that Sandia National Labs happens to have a very nice facility, and good set of computing facilities in Albuquerque. Its pretty likely that they offer some access to these for businesses.

Short version of this ? they probably really didn?t have a good business model (single large customer), and it came back to haunt them. This is not saying this was a bad group, or anything else like that. They were unlucky, and likely, due to their instantiation, they could not unwind the problematic implementation without making substantial changes. Which they were probably enjoined from making (non-profit).

I feel bad for them. Don?t get me wrong. But it would be a stretch to imagine them thriving. I?d love to be proven wrong. University level supercomputing centers are common. State/regional level centers are subject to politics as well as difficult business choices. Some have thrived, even in the face of painful changes (PSC). Others, not so much. Part of it is getting the right leadership to make the hard choices, the right business development team to sell the resources, and the right local/regional climate to encourage usage.

I do hope a formula is found to enable them to continue, but it probably will be in pieces or as a private concern. The latter would be more likely to make better choices.

Viewed 696 times by 232 viewers

Source: http://scalability.org/?p=3938

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Russia condemns U.S. criticism of new NGO law

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USB device conflict windows xp

Hi Guys

I've got a microsoft usb mouse that functions per normal until I plug in a Huawei 3g dongle. Then the mouse stops functioning and the 3g dongle connects successfully.

I have tried un-installing all usb drivers and it automatically reinstalls it at startup. Mouse functions again until I plug in the 3g USB device again. I have also tried plugging in USB memory stick and that doesnt cause conflict so it seems that the issue is only relevant to the 3g modem.

Please help.

Source: http://forums.techguy.org/windows-xp/1061014-usb-device-conflict-windows-xp.html

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Businesses see benefits to pro-gay stance

By Martha C. White

With its ?Legalize Love? campaign announced this week, Google became the latest in a growing number of companies to publicly take a position in support of gay rights.

Far from being simply feel-good initiatives, these moves are highly calculated, marketing experts say. Companies may be embracing the rainbow, but the motivating color is still green.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is a huge market with buying power of some $790 billion annually in the U.S. alone, according to?Witeck-Combs Communications. And gays have influence among the straight consumers who are their friends and relatives.

For many marketers, that is too much to leave lying on the table, even if they risk some backlash from consumers opposed to expanding gay rights. Companies ?have to satisfy shareholders at the end of the day,? said Bob Witeck, founder and president of Witeck-Combs, a marketing firm.

Paul Weber / AP

Target is selling these T-shirts to raise money for a group working to defeat a gay marriage ban in Minnesota.

Google?s campaign comes on the heels of Mother?s and Father's Day promotions by J.C. Penney featuring same-sex parents, a Gap ad featuring a male Broadway performer and his boyfriend, and Target selling t-shirts as a fundraiser for the Family Equality Council, a group lobbying against a same-sex marriage ban in the retailer?s home state of Minnesota.?

Last November, four dozen companies ranging from Nike to Microsoft signed a statement essentially supporting gay marriage by objecting to the Defense of Marriage Act. In February, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein participated in a Human Rights Campaign web video in support of marriage equality.??There?s no doubt that American businesses will be central to the dismantling of DOMA,? Human Rights Campaign president Joe Solmonese told Politico last month.

Although gay marriage is a hot-button issue, the gay-friendly corporate moves range widely. Google's campaign, for instance, is aimed at pushing foreign governments to do away with laws that allow discrimination and criminalize same-sex activities.

Others focus on the boardroom. The CEO of Ernst & Young, a Legalize Love partner recently said he will use his position on the board of directors of the Boy Scouts of America to try to make the group more inclusive. The Boy Scouts forbid openly gay people from serving as troop leaders.

Companies also are marketing, in a sense, to their own workers.

A growing number of America's largest companies have policies that guarantee equal treatment and benefits for LGBT employees, according to Human Rights Campaign, which tracks the issue in an annual index. A recent survey by?Out Now Consulting in association with Gay Ad Network found that 80 percent of respondents said it was either very or somewhat important to them that a prospective employer have an equality and diversity policy. In industries like technology, where competition for top talent is fierce, the perception that a company is unfriendly to gays can be a competitive disadvantage.

?Out Now's survey found that?gay-themed ads in mainstream media have a powerful impact. Companies are learning that leaving the safety of niche publications and channels for the exposure of mainstream media can grab attention and potentially cultivate loyalty.

In some case, this loyalty even trumps price. A Harris Interactive survey of LGBT consumers conducted in conjunction with Witeck-Combs last year found that 71 percent are likely to remain loyal to a brand they believe to be gay-friendly "even when less friendly companies may offer lower prices or be more convenient."?

The stakes are higher than ?the gay market, said Ian Johnson, founder and CEO of?Out Now Consulting. Views on issues like gay marriage have become, for many consumers, a litmus test of a company's moral compass in a cynical marketplace.

"They?re not just marketing to the 15 million Americans who identify as gay or lesbian," Johnson said. "They?re marketing to the millions of peole who support their work colleagues, their friends, their family."

In particular, companies are after the approval of younger Americans, who tend to support gay marriage and equal rights for LGBT people in higher numbers than their parents.

"As America is aging and Gen X and Y are moving into middle maangement, this is the core market," Johnson said. "It is a very strong statement for brand positioning,"?especially for consumer-facing retailers like J.C. Penney, he said.

Companies typically seek to avoid conflict, but today's post-Occupy Wall Street, post-Madoff culture has forced them to evolve: People are cynical and don't trust businesses, and with the growing rhetoric over same-sex issues, silence is perceived as unsupportive.

"Any signal that leadership is waffling on their core beliefs is a problem," Witeck said. "Companies today are being judged by a lot of executive behaviors... this is one where I think they earn reputation capital."

Consumers perceive a company taking a stand as a mark of integrity, Witeck said. "There?s a halo effect. Whether or not you have strong or no or negative feelings about gay issues, you still want to hear leaders stand up for what they believe in."

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Source: http://bottomline.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/12/12667034-some-businesses-see-benefits-to-pro-gay-stance?lite

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