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Presenting the All New 2011 Ford F-150 at Sam Pack Ford Dallas

The Ford F-150 has been revamped for 2011 with new and improved engine choices. The new V8 engine offers an output of 360 horsepower, with a towing capacity of 11,300 that puts the F-150 at the top of its class in terms of efficiency and value. Sam Pack Ford Dallas presents the new Ford F-150, including excellent financing and lease options.

Dallas, TX (PRWEB) January 23, 2011

Sam Pack Fordpresents the new 2011 Ford F-150 series, which has long been one of America’s most celebrated and best-selling vehicles. The new F-150 combines durability with heavy towing capacity and a comfortable ride.

For 2011, Ford has revamped the F-150 with some serious changes including; a major chassis upgrade, a total of 4 engine choices and an intuitive instrument cluster.An additional bonus includes new ignition keys which combine lock and remote control capabilities in one single unit.

One of the major changes for the 2011 F150 includes significant improvements to its V8 engine. The new top of the line V8 5.0 Liter engine is a winning blend of muscle, torque, fuel efficiency and affordability. Official figures have not been released yet by Ford Motor Company but mileage is expected to be twenty percent improved over that of the older 4.6 Liter V8 engine. The V8 5.0 Liter provides a total output of 360 hp at 5550 rpm and 380 lb-ft of torque at 4250 rpm.

The new state-of-the art engine also boasts the latest technology, including a dual-overhead-cam valve train with variable intake and exhaust valve timing and four valves per cylinder. Oil change intervals stand at a remarkable 10,000 miles. Due to the 6-speed automatic transmission, the engine will be capable of heavy duty towing as well as quiet commuting. Buyers who want an additional boost of power can opt for the top of the line 6.2 Liter V-8 with an output of 411 hp and 434 lb-ft of torque at 4500 rpm.

The F-150 offers best-in-class trailer towing capability with the added confidence and stability of standard Trailer Sway Control and an available factory-integrated Trailer Brake Controller. The selectable Tow/Haul Mode on the standard 6-speed automatic transmission compensates for altitude, grade and load to aid performance, especially when driving up steep grades or down extreme slopes.

The quiet environment inside the Ford F-150 owes much to the Ford 720-degree approach to noise reduction through sound engineering. Its stiff frame and body, shear-style body mounts, door seals, Quiet Steel and a noise-absorbing headliner all work together to reduce unwanted noise and vibration.

Sam Pack’s Five Star Ford Dealerships are kicking off the year with excellent financing and lease deals. Texas is Ford Country, so what better place to find a new Ford F150 truck in the Dallas Fort Worth area. The Sam Pack Auto Group includes dealerships in the following locations: North Richland Hills at ; Lewisville at ; Carrollton at ; Plano at .

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R. Smith10th Degree949 224-5620Email Information

Microsoft: BPOS Components Average 99.9-plus Percent Uptime

The hosted applications in Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) have averaged uptime of 99.9 percent or better in the past year, according to the company.

BPOS, a collaboration and communications suite hosted by Microsoft and sold with partners, includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Communications Online and Live Meeting.

Last week,in 2010, for both individual account holders and people who use it as part of Google Apps, a BPOS rival. Google didn't provide the uptime rate for the other Apps suite components, like Docs and Calendar.

Google and Microsoft offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee for their Apps and BPOS suites, respectively. When that service level agreement (SLA) isn't met, Google offers affected customers credits and extends their subscriptions, while Microsoft offers cash reimbursement.

Google announced last week that it was modifying its SLA to count every instance of downtime; previously, it logged only outages of 10 minutes or more. It also tweaked its SLA to include outages due to planned maintenance work, which previously wasn't counted against the 99.9 percent uptime commitment.

According to a spokesman for Microsoft, the BPOS SLA counts "any service issue as downtime, from the minute it starts to resolution."

"We also count issues for any number of impacted users, not just if 'enough' users are impacted," he said via e-mail.

The competition between Google Apps and BPOS has been heating up in the past year. Google has been updating its suite with capabilities aimed at large enterprises and their CIOs. Google Apps has traditionally been aimed at small and medium-size businesses.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is beta testing a big upgrade to BPOS called Office 365, whose applications will be based on the latest 2010 versions of their on-premise counterparts. Office 365 will also include versions that come with Office Web Apps, a hosted version of Microsoft Office, and with the option of the full-featured Office suite itself.

Because BPOS and Google Apps are cloud-hosted suites, their performance and uptime are critical aspects to their respective customers, most of whom rely on the suites as their primary workplace e-mail service.

G-20 leaders: No competitive currency devaluation

SEOUL, South Korea – Leaders of the Group of 20 major economies have agreed to refrain from competitive devaluation of currencies.

Their joint statement at the end of a two-day summit Friday says the leaders have also agreed to move toward more market-determined exchange rates.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Leaders of the world's 20 biggest economies scrambled to reach a last-minute compromise Friday to resolve a U.S.-China currency dispute that has raised the specter of a global trade war.

A draft of the joint statement to be issued at the end of the Group of 20 summit — obtained by The Associated Press — indicated that huge differences remain. The main sticking point is how to deal with U.S. accusations that China deliberately undervalues its currency to gain a trade advantage while similar charges are being leveled against Washington.

After overnight negotiations by aides that lasted until daybreak, President Barack Obama, China's Hu Jintao and the other 18 leaders filed somberly into closed-door talks being held in a conference center in Seoul.

The leaders are still trying to make a "last-minute compromise" on the joint statement, the South Korean president's press secretary, Hong Sang-pyo, told reporters.

The situation will remain "fluid until the last minute because many countries have gathered here and are trying to resolve their differences," Hong said.

The dispute over whether China and the United States are manipulating their currencies is threatening to resurrect destructive protectionist policies like those that worsened the Great Depression in the 1930s. The biggest fear is that trade barriers will send the global economy back into recession. A law the United States passed in 1930 that raised tariffs on imports is widely thought to have deepened the Great Depression by stifling trade.

The dim prospect for a substantive agreement "is very dangerous for the world economy," said Richard Portes, president of the Center for Economic Policy Research in London.

Hopes that the G-20, which includes wealthy nations like Germany and the U.S. and rising giants like China and India, could be a forum to forge a lasting global economic recovery have taken a knock. After three days of negotiations, the G-20 countries have been unable to reach a consensus on some of the wording in their final statement, which is seen as their collective political will if not a formal pact.

A senior Obama administration official sought to counter perceptions of discord.

The official said leaders had agreed on a basic framework that aims to rebalance the world economy by establishing a set of risk indicators. If these indicators sound the alarm, countries would commit to take action to address the concerns. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the results of the leaders' meetings had not been publicly announced.

According to the draft statement obtained by the AP, the leaders agreed to "move towards more market determined exchange rate systems and enhance exchange rate flexibility to reflect underlying economic fundamentals."

But a sticking point is the statement's next line which would have the countries pledge to refrain from "competitive undervaluation" of currencies. The wording is a reference to China, which is accused by the United States of deliberately keeping its currency, the yuan, undervalued so that its exports remain cheap.

In his address to the summit, China's Hu urged others to "refrain from confrontation and step up dialogue and cooperation."

He said rich and developing countries should "have more mutual understanding and closer coordination, rather than follow the old path of trading accusations and public confrontation."

The U.S. says a higher-valued yuan would make Chinese exports costlier abroad and make U.S. imports cheaper for the Chinese to buy. It would shrink the U.S. trade deficit with China, which is on track this year to match its 2008 record of $268 billion, and encourage Chinese companies to sell more to their own consumers, rather than rely so much on the U.S. and others to buy low-priced Chinese goods.

Other countries are irate over the Federal Reserve's plans to pump $600 billion into the sluggish American economy. They see that move as a reckless and selfish scheme to flood markets with dollars, driving down the value of the U.S. currency and giving American exporters an advantage.

The summit "is now largely an exercise in damage limitation and papering over the huge cracks that exist between the positions of the deficit and surplus countries," the U.S. and China in particular, said Julian Jessop, an economist with consultancy Capital Economics in London.

For now, the G-20 countries are expected to agree on uncontroversial issues like an anti-corruption initiative, reaffirming support for free trade, stricter standards for large financial institutions and reform of the International Monetary Fund to give developing nations more say.

Yet even if the leaders agree on the statement's wording, it is not going to immediately resolve their most vexing problem: how to fix a global economy that's long been nourished by huge U.S. trade deficits with China, Germany and Japan.

Exports to the United States powered those countries' economies for years. But they've also produced enormous trade gaps for the U.S. because Americans consume far more in foreign goods and services than they sell abroad.

Obama told fellow leaders that the U.S. cannot just keep borrowing lavishly and sending its money overseas. It needs other countries to buy more exports from the United States and elsewhere so Americans can afford to buy other countries' goods, he said.

"The most important thing that the United States can do for the world economy is to grow, because we continue to be the world's largest market and a huge engine for all other countries to grow," Obama said at a news conference in Seoul on Thursday.

But Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, warned that the world would go "bankrupt" if rich countries reduced their consumption and tried to export their way to prosperity.

"There would be no one to buy," he told reporters.

Obama suggested the global economy will function best when countries let the markets set the value of their currencies, rather than trying to rig them. His message was aimed mainly at China, whose trade surplus with the U.S. exceeds that of any other country it trades with.

Some critics warn that U.S. interest rates kept too low for too long could inflate new bubbles in the prices of commodities, stocks and other assets. Developing countries like Thailand and Indonesia fear that falling yields on U.S. government bonds will send money flooding their way in search of higher returns. Such emerging markets could be left vulnerable to a crash if investors later decide to pull out and move their money elsewhere.

Many of the leaders at the summit, including Obama and Hu, will travel to Yokohama, Japan for the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this weekend.

Foreign and trade ministers of the 21 member economies have already held preliminary talks in Yokohama, pledging to shun protectionism. But APEC commitments are non-binding and there is no guarantee that members will not pull back on their pledges if the leaders fail to reach an agreement in Seoul.

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Associated Press writers Paul Wiseman in Washington; Jean H. Lee, Kelly Olsen, Foster Klug, Greg Keller and Hyung-jin Kim in Seoul; Charles Hutzler and Joe McDonald in Beijing, and David Stringer in London contributed to this report.

Karzai wants U.S. to cut back Afghan military operations

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Afghan President Hamid Karzai wants the U.S. military to scale back the visibility and intensity of its operations in Afghanistan and end night raids that he said incited people to join the Taliban insurgency, The Washington Post reported on Saturday.

"The time has come to reduce military operations," Karzai told the Post in an interview. "The time has come to reduce the presence of, you know, boots in Afghanistan ... to reduce the intrusiveness into the daily Afghan life."

The Post said his comments put him at odds with General David Petraeus, who has made "capture-and-kill" missions a central part of counterinsurgency strategy.

In the past three months, such night raids of Afghan homes by U.S. Special Operations forces had killed or captured 368 insurgency leaders, the Post said.

Karzai was quoted as saying his comments were not meant as criticism of Washington, adding that candor could improve what he termed a "grudging" relationship between the two countries.

A senior Afghan official was quoted by the newspaper as saying that Karzai had repeatedly criticized the night raids in meetings with Petraeus and was seeking veto power over the operations.

"The raids are a problem always. They were a problem then, they are a problem now. They have to go away," Karzai said inthe interview.

"The Afghan people don't like these raids, if there is any raid it has to be done by the Afghan government within the Afghan laws. This is a continuing disagreement between us," he said.

The comments came as the Obama administration has begun to play down President Barack Obama's July 2011 deadline for beginning to hand over security to Afghan forces and withdraw U.S. troops as conditions merit.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this week they viewed Karzai's plan to assume full responsibility for the country's security by 2014 as a realistic goal NATO should endorse at its summit this month.

An independent U.S. task force cautioned Obama on Friday about the high cost of the Afghanistan war and said he should consider a narrow military mission if his December review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan finds the current strategy is not working.

Karzai told the Post the United States "should and could" draw down its forces next year and that U.S. soldiers should confine themselves more to their bases and to necessary operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

(Writing by Peter Cooney; Editing by Anthony Boadle)

Cardstore.com, Holiday Cards Retailer, Introduces New Personalized Notebooks

Cardstore.com releases new line of customizable 5”x 7” notebooks with options for photos and text on both covers.

(Vocus) September 1, 2010 --and thank you cards retailer Cardstore.com recently announced a brand new personalized notebook product including photo notebook patterns and customized notebook designs. Made from recycled materials, the notebooks have 50 lined pages, steel wire binding, and sturdy, scratch resistant covers.

The collection includes over 40 stylish designs from stationery designer Milo Paper, as well as blank photo notebook layouts. Each Milo Paper notebook has a matching back cover design with the option of adding a photo and message.

“Our personalized notebooks are the perfect way to take notes in a way that suits your individual style,” says Robin Stevens, Cardstore.com Director of Marketing, adding, “they’re ideal for work, school, and home, and they make great gifts for friends and family!”

The 5” x 7” personalized notebooks are sized to fit in a backpack for back to school, or slip in a purse and take notes on the go. Notebooks start as low as $12 after the 10% discount taken with coupon code NEWNOTEBOOK, (expires 10/31/2010). Cardstore.com’s personalized notebooks also allow customers the choice between 18 different font styles and 10 different color choices to emphasize their personal style.

About Cardstore.com Cardstore.com is a Berkeley, California-based greeting cards,, and wedding cards retailer that combines online customization with designs from over 70 independent artists. Since 1999, the company has printed over 50 million personalized cards, and uses 100% post-consumer recycled cardstock. Cardstore.com provides custom greeting cards and personalized stationery for all occasions including photo cards, birthday cards, holiday photo cards, graduation announcements, and wedding invitations.

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Cardstore.comLorna Khoo510-229-5246