Ownership of Daimler (Mercedes-Benz) changes hands to Dubai's Aabar Investment

DUBAI - A company owned by the government of Abu Dhabi has pumped an additional $1.41 billion into Aabar Investment PJSC, giving the emirate majority control in the investment firm set to become Daimler's biggest shareholder.

The announcement yesterday came a day after Abu Dhabi-based Aabar - an investment vehicle set up by the Persian Gulf sheikdom - said it would pay nearly 2 billion euros ($2.72 billion) for a 9.1 percent stake in the German automaker best known for its Mercedes-Benz brand.

Aabar differs from many of the oil-rich Persian Gulf's sovereign wealth funds in that some of its shares are publicly traded. That arrangement is expected to continue, although the government will now have a clear controlling interest in Aabar. In a statement yesterday, Aabar said Abu Dhabi's International Petroleum Investment Co. has finished buying 5.18 billion dirhams ($1.41 billion) in Aabar bonds that will be converted into ordinary shares. IPIC is fully owned by the government of Abu Dhabi, the largest of the seven semiautonomous city-states comprising the UAE and holder of most of the Persian Gulf country's vast oil wealth. Abu Dhabi is the federation's capital.

Yesterday’s announcement follows a similar cash injection worth about $408 million by IPIC last month. Once the latest stock conversion is complete, IPIC will own 71 percent of Aabar, up from about 36 percent now.

IPIC is chaired by Sheik Mansour Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a prominent member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, which controls the United Arab Emirates presidency. He led the takeover of English football team Manchester City and joined Qatari investors in pumping billions of dollars into British bank Barclays PLC last year.

The Daimler deal appears to be Aabar's biggest overseas investment yet. In December, Aabar agreed to buy American International Group's Swiss-based wealth management arm AIG Private Bank. According to its annual report, Aabar paid 307 million Swiss francs ($273 million) for the bank and assumed about 100 million Swiss francs worth of debt.Aabar will become Daimler's largest shareholder. The automaker's second-largest owner is Kuwait's primary sovereign wealth fund, which has a 6.9 percent stake.


Source: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/english/finance/11272849.asp

Happy 40th anniversary to Unix

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast?

1969

Unix was brought to life on a spare DEC PDP-7 at AT&T Bell Labs. When AT&T decided to abandon the Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) operating system on its minicomputers, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie cobbled together an operating system so they could continue to play a space travel game that Thompson had developed. A colleague gave the system a jokey name based on Multics -- UNICS, the Uniplexed Information and Computing Service, which morphed into UNIX or Unix.

Source: Computerworld.com

Intel Nehalem processor enables 192 GB RAM PC

Dell Inc. announced on Tuesday a new PC that, among its other impressive specs, can be upgraded to sport as much as 192GB of ultrafast DDR3 RAM.

The Precision T7500 sports 12 memory slots, each of which can take a PC10600 stick (1333 MHz) of up to 16GB.

Most new desktop PCs have two to four RAM slots that can take up to 4GB modules of DDR2 memory that runs between 400 MHz and 1066 MHz in speed.

Not a high-end gamer PC, the Precision T7500 workstation (which starts at $1,800) is aimed at video game designers, engineers and digital animators.

Lenovo, Cisco and Apple are also in the race...

Just imagine the gaming and virtualisation potential of such PCs

IBM is to eclipse the Sun

With the big buzz about 'cloud computing' of which Amazon is the pioneer, 3 big IT companies - Cisco, HP & IBM are now battling to become a leader in that data center technology market.
After Cisco willing to enter the server market, IBM has raised the stake by offering to buy Sun for $6.5B which is double what the company market cap was worth the day before the acquisition talks were reported, but less than half what the company was worth a year earlier.

What Sun has to offer: open-source Solaris operating system, the open-source database MySql, the Java platform and sun servers.

If this acquisition is materialised IBM will become the leader in java technology with its websphere application solutions.
Become a much greater stakeholder in the open-source domain with opensolaris, mysql - the worldwide famous database solution: it's the M in LAMP (Linux Apache MySql Php), and also staroffice / openoffice the office suite.
IBM will also dominate the unix market with his AIX solutions competing only with HP's HP-UX.

'Brain decline' begins at age 27

"The BBC is reporting that a new study suggests that our mental abilities start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, and 27 could be seen as the 'start of old age.' The seven-year study, by Professor Timothy Salthouse of the University of Virginia, looked at 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60, and used a number of mental agility tests already used to spot signs of dementia. 'The first age at which there was any marked decline was at 27 in tests of brain speed, reasoning and visual puzzle-solving ability. Things like memory stayed intact until the age of 37, on average, while abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or general information, increased until the age of 60.'"


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7945569.stm

Surviving the economic crisis

Companies that are still performing good despite the unprecedented economic recession includes Walmart, McDonalds, Citigroup and some IT services companies that have never been influenced by the crisis at all. Also the mobile phone business - e.g RIM (Research in Motion), makers of Blackberry is doing very well.

Yoga for life

In fitness the keyword in 'now'. Buy yourself a comfortable yoga mat today and keep it beside your bed. As you wake up in the morning do 10 minutes of stretching or some yoga postures specially those with your head down and feet up. We are always in an upright position and reversing the effect of gravity on our body for a few minutes a day can only be beneficial to you.

Remember astronauts living in space should do about 4 hours of physical exercises per day in order to maintain muscular mass in a zero gravity setting. On earth 10 - 30 minutes a day should be enough for most of us.

Also the spinal cord is an extension to our brain and vice-versa. Give these the attention they deserve.

US and Canada must quit Iraq and Afghanistan

One of the measures that IMHO can surely boost economic recovery is that the US and Canada should set a definite calendar for their withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan ASAP.

Dow at 9000 points in May

IMHO The economy will recover much much faster than it was thought it would.

Reasons:-

1. Summer is coming.., remember the crisis was acknowledged just before winter! And the summer is known to boost sales in all sector of activity.

2. House prices start stabilising . Maximum number of houses changing hands in February - March

3. Companies are still investing huge sum of money despite record losses over the past year

4. Citigroup announced profit for 2009, Madoff in prison, Obama plans show signs of progress

The child's way

Always maintain the same enthusiasm, adventure and quest of a child as you grow up and till your old ages.

Life becomes more appreciable.

Some good signs for the economy

Stocks markets have been up 4 days in a row this week.... and the Dow is as high as in november 2008 News that citigroup will make a profit in 2009, madoff finally in prison.. etc .. help the markets to increase..

But in fact this week has been my worst week ever professionally! I've got an unprecedented 4 sleepless nights in a row!!

Hello world

My first post

This is it!