Archive

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

In-Game Ad Company Gets $10 Million
In-game advertising firm double fusion Monday announced it had hired Geoff Graber, the former general manager of Yahoo! Games, as its CEO. The company, which intends to soon move its headquarters to New York City from Jerusalem, also announced that it had closed a $10 million financing round led by Accel Partners and Jerusalem Venture [...]
Source: www.technologybizdev.com

Walt Disney shores up European mobile gaming strategy
The Walt Disney Internet Group (WDIG) is acquiring Living Mobile, a European mobile game developer and publisher, as part of its ongoing strategy to expand its footprint in the mobile games category. Disney first entered the mobile market in Japan through a deal in August 2000 with NTT DoCoMo which propelled its to become the number [...]
Source: www.technologybizdev.com

Thèses récentes
Philippe Bornet - Rites et pratiques de l'hospitalité. Étude comparée de discours normatifs du judaïsme rabbinique et du brahmanisme. Judith Kogel, Un commentaire biblique anonyme du treizième siècle, édition et analyse. Élodie Attia - Le milieu intellectuel juif en Italie au XVIe siècle: les manuscrits de Raphaël Salomon ben Jacob ha-Cohen de Prato.
Source: poj.peeters-leuven.be

Qui est Ben Stada?
Ben Stada est un personnage connu des critiques qui s’intéressent aux textes talmudiques se rapportant à Jésus. Ce personnage, inconnu en dehors des sources rabbiniques, fait sa première apparition dans la Tosefta. Il est présenté comme un «séducteur», jugé, condamné à mort et exécuté pour ce crime. Des sources plus tardives relatent qu’il aurait rapporté des sortilèges d’Égypte. Selon les Amoraïm de Babylone, Ben Stada n’est autre que Jésus: il serait, comme lui, mort par pendaison la veille de la Pâque. Cette thèse, qui a prévalu pendant des siècles, est aujourd’hui très critiquée mais a toujours ses défenseurs. Cependant plusieurs chercheurs ont proposé de voir en Ben Stada un personnage connu par ailleurs sous une autre dénomination: le faux prophète égyptien (resté anonyme) mentionné et par Josèphe, et par les Actes des Apôtres, Simon le magicien, l’apôtre Pierre… L’auteur de cet article critique ces différentes hypothèses qui, selon lui, ne reposent sur aucun fondement solide. Il estime que dans ce dossier seules les informations les plus anciennes doivent être prises en compte et arrive à la conclusion que si Ben Stada ne doit en aucun cas être confondu avec Jésus, il demeure encore, faute de nouvelles découvertes, un personnage inconnu en dehors des sources rabbiniques.

Ben Stada is a character well-known by the scholars who are interested in the talmudic texts dealing with Jesus. This character, unknown apart from the rabbinical literature, appears for the first time in the Tosefta. He is presented as a deceiver, judged, sentenced to death and executed for this crime. Later documents report that he would have brought back magic spells from Egypt. According to Amoraïm of Babylon, Ben Stada is no one other than Jesus: he, like him, would have died by hanging the day before Passover. This thesis, which prevailed during centuries, is widely criticized today but still has its defenders. But several researchers proposed to see another character as Ben Stada, known elsewhere under another denomination: the Egyptian false prophet (remained anonymous) mentioned by Josephus as well as by the Acts of the Apostles, Simon the magician, the apostle Peter… The author of this article criticizes these various assumptions which, according to him, do not rest on any solid base. He estimates that in this file only the oldest information must be taken into account and concludes that if Ben Stada should not, on no account, be confused with Jesus, he still remains, for lack of new discoveries, an unknown character apart from the rabbinical material.
Source: poj.peeters-leuven.be

Digital Content Firm Navio Raises $25.4 Million In Second Round Of Funding
Navio Systems has closed its second round of funding with $25.4 million of venture funding. Navio sells multimedia networking software to media companies that allows subscribers to buy, share, download, store and access content while protecting the content. Their technology can be integrated into customers’ storefronts through the internet, mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks. It also allows customers access and redownload their purchased content when they lose or upgrade their devices. Lead participants in this round were the WK Technology Fund and VantagePoint Venture Partners.
Source: www.technologybizdev.com


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Urgently Required Internship Admin (AI) PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia
PT Panasonic Gobel Indonesia
Urgently Required


PT. Panasonic Gobel Indonesia is a joint venture
sales company, looking for qualified students with high
motivation and initiative. If you can work in a team and are
willing to work hard in a highly dynamic and demanding
situations, we invite you to fill our vacant position
as:

Internship Admin (AI)
(Jakarta Raya)



Requirements:

Candidate must possess at least a SMU, Associate Degree or Bachelor's Degree in any field.
Required language(s): English, Bahasa Indonesia
Preferred language(s): Japanese.
Fresh graduates/Entry level applicants are encouraged to apply.
Applicants should be Indonesian citizens or hold relevant residence status.
Able to follow Internship Program for 3 months
Able to work full time (Monday to Friday from 08:30 AM to 05:15 PM)

Please send your comprehensive application (CV, a
recent photograph, copy of diploma and academic transcript)
and indicate position code on top-left of the envelope or as a
subject not later than 14 days after this advertisement to :

PT. Panasonic Gobel Indonesia
Jl. Dewi Sartika no 14, Cawang II
Jakarta Timur 13630
or
recruitment.hrs@id.panasonic.com

Advertised: 23-4-09 | Closing Date: 22-5-09.



Source: feedproxy.google.com

Custom Software Application Development

Source: itoutsourcing-development.blogspot.com

PT Semi Accounting Staff
We are looking for a dedicated candidates to join our company as a leader in the
servicing industry. We offer competitive pay, benefits and an opportunity to grow with an industry leader.


Accounting Staff
(Jakarta Raya - Jakarta)





Requirements:







Honest and good attitude
Responsible and hard working

Advertised: 7-5-09 | Closing Date: 5-6-09




Source: feedproxy.google.com

Zen and the Art of Computer Backup

Walter Stevens is a contributor at Free-backup.info -- the home of the popular tool for personal online backup -- Back2zip. This article can be found at http://free-backup.info/zen-and-the-art-of-computer-backup.html

Computer Backup

Computer backup involves the process of storing data in a location apart from your hard drive, on any possible medium in order to ensure that you always have a copy of that file. We all know that damage can come to a computer resulting in a loss of data, and having proper backups can greatly ease the pressure off of us in the event that such a thing does occur. If you have a loss of data on your machine for any reason, you can easily restore these files through the use of your previously made backups.

Zen and the Art of Computer Backup

Zen is an ancient Asian philosophical system which arose in China and then traveled to Japan. It is a combination of the teachings of Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha (enlightened one) from India and the Taoist philosophies which had grown up in China from the teachings of Lao Tzu and the Tao Te Ching.

One might wonder how Zen could play any part in the modern technological world of computers, especially such a seemingly mundane task as computer backup. However, zen can play a great part in computer backup. Zen is the art of becoming one with that which you are doing. It is a form of meditation that puts you in a state where you are sure of exactly what is going on around you. It is a way of life, and can become a part of all aspects of your life, especially something as essential as computer backup.

Practicing Zen and the Art of Computer Backup

When you are backing up your computer, do not just consider it a mundane task that must be performed. Allow yourself to become one with your data, and with your computer. There are many different methods of computer backup, and you can practice zen with any different method of computer backup.

Traditionally, floppy disks were used in the performance of computer backup. However, floppy disks are becoming increasingly obsolete. After all, a floppy disk can only hold 1.4 megabytes, while a CD-R can hold 800 megabytes. It is easy to see why such a method would be seen as ineffective.

Zen is all about effectiveness, and living properly. While computer backup is a very important thing, and a practice that should be performed often, it merits us nothing to take much more time and disks to backup on floppy disks than to backup on a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM or other medium which holds a great deal more data.

Another form of backup that is becoming very popular is the use of what are called key drives. Key drives are tiny drives which can fit on your key chain but can still hold up to a gigabyte or more of data. You then plug these drives into your computer, and on most newer machines your key drive will automatically be read by your computer, without the need for any device drivers, the perfect conception of plug and play technology.

Oooommmmmm....




Source: free-backup.info


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Try Railo hosting for free
Alurium's Peter Amiri just announced 60-day free trial accounts that offer Railo with full Web Administrator capability, so you can see how Railo works for you without even need...
Source: corfield.org


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Security Benefits
Security Benefits from Working with online Applications. Data is constantly backed up and is secured behind firewalls and encrypted.
Source: www.winweb.com

Software Development India

Source: itoutsourcing-development.blogspot.com

Small Business & Entrepreneurial Business
Although small and entrepreneurial businesses may be referred to as one and the same, the terms stand for different concepts. The objectives are quite different for both of them.
Source: www.winweb.com

How to Make Offshore Software Development Work for You

Source: itoutsourcing-development.blogspot.com

Myth 5 - You cannot capture "knowledge" - it's too intangible
Myth 5 - You cannot capture "knowledge" - it's too intangible
Source: www.winweb.com


Labels:
The Age of Autism: 'A pretty big secret'
By DAN OLMSTED
UPI Senior Editor


CHICAGO, Dec. 7 (UPI) -- It's a far piece from the horse-and-buggies of
Lancaster County, Pa., to the cars and freeways of Cook County, Ill.

But thousands of children cared for by Homefirst Health Services in
metropolitan Chicago have at least two things in common with thousands of
Amish children in rural Lancaster: They have never been vaccinated. And
they don't have autism.

"We have a fairly large practice. We have about 30, 000 or 35, 000 children
that we've taken care of over the years, and I don't think we have a single
case of autism in children delivered by us who never received vaccines, "
said Dr. Mayer Eisenstein, Homefirst's medical director who founded the
practice in 1973. Homefirst doctors have delivered more than 15, 000 babies
at home, and thousands of them have never been vaccinated.

The few autistic children Homefirst sees were vaccinated before their
families became patients, Eisenstein said. "I can think of two or three
autistic children who we've delivered their mother's next baby, and we
aren't really totally taking care of that child -- they have special care
needs. But they bring the younger children to us. I don't have a single
case that I can think of that wasn't vaccinated."

The autism rate in Illinois public schools is 38 per 10, 000, according to
state Education Department data; the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention puts the national rate of autism spectrum disorders at 1 in 166
-- 60 per 10, 000.

"We do have enough of a sample, " Eisenstein said. "The numbers are too
large to not see it. We would absolutely know. We're all family doctors. If
I have a child with autism come in, there's no communication. It's
frightening. You can't touch them. It's not something that anyone would
miss."

No one knows what causes autism, but federal health authorities say it
isn't childhood immunizations. Some parents and a small minority of doctors
and scientists, however, assert vaccines are responsible.

This column has been looking for autism in never-vaccinated U.S. children
in an effort to shed light on the issue. We went to Chicago to meet with
Eisenstein at the suggestion of a reader, and we also visited Homefirst's
office in northwest suburban Rolling Meadows. Homefirst has four other
offices in the Chicago area and a total of six doctors.

Eisenstein stresses his observations are not scientific. "The trouble is
this is just anecdotal in a sense, because what if every autistic child
goes somewhere else and (their family) never calls us or they moved out of
state?"

In practice, that's unlikely to account for the pronounced absence of
autism, says Eisenstein, who also has a bachelor's degree in statistics, a
master's degree in public health and a law degree.

Homefirst follows state immunization mandates, but Illinois allows
religious exemptions if parents object based either on tenets of their
faith or specific personal religious views. Homefirst does not exclude or
discourage such families. Eisenstein, in fact, is author of the book "Don't
Vaccinate Before You Educate!" and is critical of the CDC's vaccination
policy in the 1990s, when several new immunizations were added to the
schedule, including Hepatitis B as early as the day of birth. Several of
the vaccines -- HepB included -- contained a mercury-based preservative
that has since been phased out of most childhood vaccines in the United
States.

Medical practices with Homefirst's approach to immunizations are rare.
"Because of that, we tend to attract families that have questions about
that issue, " said Dr. Paul Schattauer, who has been with Homefirst for 20
years and treats "at least" 100 children a week.

Schattauer seconded Eisenstein's observations. "All I know is in my
practice I don't see autism. There is no striking 1-in-166, " he said.

Earlier this year we reported the same phenomenon in the mostly
unvaccinated Amish. CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding told us the Amish
"have genetic connectivity that would make them different from populations
that are in other sectors of the United States." Gerberding said, however,
studies "could and should be done" in more representative unvaccinated
groups -- if they could be found and their autism rate documented.

Chicago is America's prototypical "City of Big Shoulders, " to quote Carl
Sandburg, and Homefirst's mostly middle-class families seem fairly
representative. A substantial number are conservative Christians who
home-school their children. They are mostly white, but the Homefirst
practice also includes black and Hispanic families and non-home-schooling
Jews, Catholics and Muslims.

They tend to be better educated, follow healthier diets and breast-feed
their children much longer than the norm -- half of Homefirst's mothers are
still breast-feeding at two years. Also, because Homefirst relies less on
prescription drugs including antibiotics as a first line of treatment,
these children have less exposure to other medicines, not just vaccines.

Schattauer, interviewed at the Rolling Meadows office, said his caseload is
too limited to draw conclusions about a possible link between vaccines and
autism. "With these numbers you'd have a hard time proving or disproving
anything, " he said. "You can only get a feeling about it.

"In no way would I be an advocate to stand up and say we need to look at
vaccines, because I don't have the science to say that, " Schattauer said.
"But I don't think the science is there to say that it's not."

Schattauer said Homefirst's patients also have significantly less childhood
asthma and juvenile diabetes compared to national rates. An office manager
who has been with Homefirst for 17 years said she is aware of only one case
of severe asthma in an unvaccinated child.

"Sometimes you feel frustrated because you feel like you've got a pretty
big secret, " Schattauer said. He argues for more research on all those
disorders, independent of political or business pressures.

The asthma rate among Homefirst patients is so low it was noticed by the
Blue Cross group with which Homefirst is affiliated, according to Eisenstein.

"In the alternative-medicine network which Homefirst is part of, there are
virtually no cases of childhood asthma, in contrast to the overall Blue
Cross rate of childhood asthma which is approximately 10 percent, " he said.
"At first I thought it was because they (Homefirst's children) were
breast-fed, but even among the breast-fed we've had asthma. We have
virtually no asthma if you're breast-fed and not vaccinated."

Because the diagnosis of asthma is based on emergency-room visits and
hospital admissions, Eisenstein said, Homefirst's low rate is hard to
dispute. "It's quantifiable -- the definition is not reliant on the
doctor's perception of asthma."

Several studies have found a risk of asthma from vaccination; others have
not. Studies that include never-vaccinated children generally find little
or no asthma in that group.

Earlier this year Florida pediatrician Dr. Jeff Bradstreet said there is
virtually no autism in home-schooling families who decline to vaccinate for
religious reasons -- lending credence to Eisenstein's observations.

"It's largely non-existent, " said Bradstreet, who treats children with
autism from around the country. "It's an extremely rare event."

Bradstreet has a son whose autism he attributes to a vaccine reaction at 15
months. His daughter has been home-schooled, he describes himself as a
"Christian family physician, " and he knows many of the leaders in the
home-school movement.

"There was this whole subculture of folks who went into home-schooling so
they would never have to vaccinate their kids, " he said. "There's this
whole cadre who were never vaccinated for religious reasons."

In that subset, he said, "unless they were massively exposed to mercury
through lots of amalgams (mercury dental fillings in the mother) and/or
big-time fish eating, I've not had a single case."

Federal health authorities and mainstream medical groups emphatically
dismiss any link between autism and vaccines, including the mercury-based
preservative thimerosal. Last year a panel of the Institute of Medicine,
part of the National Academies, said there is no evidence of such a link,
and funding should henceforth go to "promising" research.

Thimerosal, which is 49.6 percent ethyl mercury by weight, was phased out
of most U.S. childhood immunizations beginning in 1999, but the CDC
recommends flu shots for pregnant women and last year began recommending
them for children 6 to 23 months old. Most of those shots contain thimerosal.

Thimerosal-preserved vaccines are currently being injected into millions of
children in developing countries around the world. "My mandate ... is to
make sure at the end of the day that 100, 000, 000 are immunized ... this
year, next year and for many years to come ... and that will have to be
with thimerosal-containing vaccines, " said John Clements of the World
Health Organization at a June 2000 meeting called by the CDC.

That meeting was held to review data that thimerosal might be linked with
autism and other neurological problems. But in 2004 the Institute of
Medicine panel said evidence against a link is so strong that health
authorities, "whether in the United States or other countries, should not
include autism as a potential risk" when formulating immunization policies.

But where is the simple, straightforward study of autism in
never-vaccinated U.S. children? Based on our admittedly anecdotal and
limited reporting among the Amish, the home-schooled and now Chicago's
Homefirst, that may prove to be a significant omission.

--

This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism welcomes comment.
E-mail: dolmsted@upi.com

Source: aboutautism.blogspot.com

Mercury in vaccine poses a danger
Journal Standard.com
Opinions

Dr. Amy Johnson's comments in The Journal-Standard on the mercury-containing flu vaccine for children contain serious flaws.

Dr. Johnson may say that "there is no evidence of harm, " but she's basing that on the CDC's easily flawed and manipulated population studies to "prove" mercury is safe when injected into babies. What about the government's own testing of thimerosal?

Introduced by Eli Lilly in 1930, thimerosal was tested only once, on 22 adult patients suffering from meningitis. There was no chance for follow-up to observe long-term effects, as all of the patients in this "study" died. Even if follow-up had been possible, damage to the developing brains of very young children would have remained an unknown. Thimerosal was pronounced "safe" and later grandfathered in when the FDA was created.

Starting in the late 1980s more and more vaccines with mercury were added to our children's list of required vaccines, without any regard for the total mercury exposure children were receiving. Finally in 1999, the federal health agencies and the American Academy of Pediatrics added up all the mercury children were receiving and realized it was over 100 times EPA limits for mercury exposure. They then urged vaccine makers to stop using it. In 2004, the AAP put out an "autism alarm" because of the epidemic increase in autism.

In 20 years, the rate has gone from one in 10, 000 to one in every 166 children. Furthermore, one in every six schoolchildren now has a diagnosis of attention deficit or some other learning disability.

The medical community seems to focus on denying that this is in any way related to mercury in vaccines.

The first 11 cases of autism ever documented, in 1943, were in children who were among the first to be vaccinated with mercury. The federal government has never conducted specific tests on the neurotoxicity of thimerosal, although hundreds of published studies and documents attest to its extreme toxicity. Our CDC and FDA should be utterly embarrassed to make safety claims based on such a pathetic history of oversight.

Our federal health agencies are also the ones whose members have over 700 conflict-of-interest waivers for direct financial ties to the vaccine makers.

Evidence of Harm is the new book by David Kirby on the autism controversy. Mr. Kirby spent two years researching the history of thimerosal use and its relationship to thimerosal. He writes, "... many research) documents dating back to the 1930s, each raising a red flag about thimerosal." (EOH 207-209). Mr. Kirby chronologically lists over 70 years of scientific research on the damaging and deadly effects of thimerosal that was willfully ignored by Eli Lilly and the CDC. http://www.evidenceofharm.com/

We need to take a serious look at the generation of American children exposed to mercury. A person would need to weigh 275 pounds by the EPA's own standards to be able to eliminate the 12.5 mcg of mercury in the children's flu vaccine for this year.

This is hardly a "low dose" of mercury. By anyone's standards, it is unconscionable to inject a known neurotoxin into babies and toddlers.

Anne McElroy Dachel
Chippewa Falls, WI
Source: aboutautism.blogspot.com


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Insularity and Island Society in the Ottoman Context
The paper investigates the island society of Andros, in the Aegean Sea, under the impact of the development and transformation of Ottoman maritime networks of communication, administration, war and commerce in the Mediterranean, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The research focuses, through the study of the Ottoman tax registers of 1670/71 from the Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, on the formation of new social powers on the island, a class of Christian Orthodox landowners, who succeeded under the Ottomans the former Frankish feudal lords in the top of the social hierarchy, together with the development of communal and ecclesiastical administration. In the same vein, the Ottoman documents from the local kadı court, which have been preserved on the island’s archives, are studied here as evidence of the interaction between Ottoman administration and local society, through the active involvement of the island’s powerful social actors in the local Ottoman administration of law.

L’article examine la société insulaire d’Andros, île de la mer Égée, entre le XVIe et le XVIIIe siècles, à une époque où en Méditerranée se développent et se transforment les réseaux maritimes ottomans de communication, d’administration, de guerre et de commerce. La recherche, à l’aide des registres fiscaux ottomans de 1670/71 conservés au Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, explore la formation de nouvelles forces sociales sur l’île — notamment d’une classe de propriétaires terriens chrétiens orthodoxes, qui, sous les Ottomans, ont occupé la place des anciens chefs féodaux Francs au sommet de la hiérarchie sociale — en parallèle avec le développement de l’administration communale et ecclésiastique. Par ailleurs, les documents ottomans du tribunal local du kadı, conservés aux archives d’Andros et étudiés ici, témoignent de l’interaction entre l’administration ottomane et la société locale, à travers la participation active des puissants acteurs sociaux de l’île au fonctionnement du système juridique ottoman local.
Source: poj.peeters-leuven.be

How to Earn Money Free Online

Though it is true that you can earn money free online, most advertisements and sites promoting products that promises people that they can earn money online almost overnight and without breaking a sweat is most probably exaggerating. The problem with the Internet is that it is a favorite medium of many hype-makers, those who blow up, and sometimes twist, facts in order to take advantage of unsuspecting and naive Internet newbies. The reason why the Internet is prone to abuse is that people can operate a business in it without being known or seen. Some unscrupulous individuals abuse the anonymity that the Internet provides in order to earn quick cash.

The truth is, doing business on the Internet is not much different from doing business in the outside world. This means that, in order to make money online, you still need the virtues that make a successful traditional entrepreneur such as hard work and patience. Indeed, succeeding online takes time, effort and, of course, determination and the will to succeed.

In order to be truly successful in earning money online, it is best to stay away from so-called gurus that sell nothing but hype-filled products. More often than not, the products offered by these gurus contain wrong information that can even jeopardize your Internet business. For example, there are Internet marketers that prescribe methods that are considered as “black hat, ” or those that are bordering on the illegal and unethical. Using this methods is dangerous since they can get you banned from certain sites.Then there are other marketers who sell nothing but fluff, products that are so overladen with useless information you get drowned in jargon just reading it. These products can cause what is known as paralysis from analysis, or the state of being unable to act because of too much information.

When it comes to earning money for free online there are just some simple, easy to follow guidelines that have been tested over time by many successful Internet marketers. The first thing you need to have, of course, is a good product, either your own or by another merchant. Next you must have a defined niche market to whom you will sell your product. Then, you must be able to present your product or service to your market in an efficient and cost-effective manner. After that, you will need an effective sales processor and an effective delivery system.

If you have all these basics covered then you don’t need anymore hype to succeed and earn money free online.
Source: one-week-marketing-works.blogspot.com

The Armenian Commercial Houses and Merchant Networks in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire
The aim of this article is to provide a synopsis of the Armenian merchant networks and commercials houses in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century with a specific concentration on Istanbul. It will discuss some factors that led to the proliferation and the decline of the Armenian merchant networks and commercial houses in the Empire. It will also argue that it is impossible to discuss geographic representations of merchant networks and commercial houses in the Empire as separate entities. On the contrary all were interconnected, not only economically, but also through kinship bonds. Other factors ranging from development of commercial education, mechanization, morality and deteriorating ethnic relationships will be discussed as important factors in the proliferation of these networks and commercial houses and their subsequent decline.

Le but de cet article est de fournir une vue générale des réseaux marchands et des maisons commerciales arméniens dans l'Empire ottoman au XIXe siècle, et plus spécifiquement à Istanbul. Il examinera quelques facteurs qui ont causé la multiplication et le déclin des réseaux marchands arméniens et des maisons commerciales dans l'Empire. Il soutiendra aussi qu'il est impossible de considérer les représentations géographiques des réseaux marchands et des maisons commerciales dans l'Empire comme des entités séparées. Au contraire tous ont été étroitement liés, non seulement économiquement, mais aussi par des liens de parenté. D'autres facteurs comme le développement de l'éducation commerciale, la mécanisation, la moralité et la détérioration des rapports ethniques seront examinés comme des facteurs importants de la multiplication de ces réseaux et maisons commerciales et de leur déclin ultérieur.
Source: poj.peeters-leuven.be

Virtualization: Green and Cloudy

-by Steve Carl, Senior Technologist, R&D Support

 

BMC is one of the largest VMware shops anywhere. We have nearly 9000 Virtual Machines running in our ESX server farms alone. Our growth trajectory will have us break 10, 000 VM's before the end of the summer. The is just VMware, which is not the only virtual player in our shop. We are even bigger users of virtualization than that, with the granddaddy-of-all-virtualization VM on the mainframe, Virtualbox, Parallels, AIX LPARS, Sun LDOMs, HP's VSE (not to be confused with IBM's DOS/VSE...) and so forth.

 

Not all that long ago, our worldwide "real" server count for R&D was a large number: well north of 10, 000 real, physical computers. BMC grew, more products came online: entire product categories even... and the real hardware footprint has shrunk to about half what it was three years ago. Ditto the data center space. The current R&D DC move I am working on has us taking over 7000 jam packed square feet down to 5000 square feet... and leaving room to absorb another 1000 square foot lab later. In this one lab, we have leveraged virtualization to more than halve the number of real servers.

 

Converting real, physical machines to the virtual world (P2V) of older gear is part of that virtual growth, but so are new requests for new environments. Think of those latter as "Real Server Avoidance". The impact is huge in terms of BMC becoming, among other things, a greener company. It is not just real coffee mugs in the kitchen (rather than Styrofoam cups) and recycling the Diet Dr Pepper cans (Contrary to popular belief, not all software development is powered by Mountain Dew.). We use less power than we did before. Much less power.

 

Conservatively speaking, if we used 100 less watts per virtualized server than for a real computer doing the same things, then that alone would be 900, 000 watts! 900k watts here, 900k watts there, pretty soon we are talking real carbon footprint reduction. 100 watts is a very lowball figure: Even new computers with high efficiency power supplies like a Dell 1950 use well more the 200 watts at static, post booted load. The 1950's  power supply is max rated (Nameplate rating)  at 670 watts. Depending on your local code, when planning a data center, it is assumed that somewhere between 40% and 60% of the Nameplate rating is the amount of wattage used once the server has settled down after booting.

 

At some point I'll probably develop a tighter number than 100 watts per server savings, but it will do for now. I'll have to go add up the real wattages of every server we decommissioned, and then add up the wattages of the all the virtual servers in order to get a better estimate, and that would take a while, given the number of servers we are talking about here!

 

I talked about this saving power with virtualization topic a while back ("Virtually Greener") and in that post I was focused only on what we had done in Houston. This is company wide, and clearly we have come pretty far down the road from where we were only 1.5 years ago. Here is what I noted about Houston's power savings back then:

 

"That means 80 Kilowatts or 80, 000 Watts have "left the building". 80 KW reduction is 160 pounds of CO2 reduction each and every hour they are off (assuming Coal as the power feedstock). 3, 840 pounds per day. 1, 401, 600 pounds per year. Half those numbers for natural gas as the power generation feedstock"

 

So, using those same numbers, and expanding the scope from Houston to all of the R&D data centers world wide, we are now talking about 11.25 times those amounts. 5625 pounds of CO2 an hour, 135, 000 pounds of CO2 a day, and 49, 275, 000 pounds of CO2 a year that we are now *not* adding to our shared atmosphere. Remember that is *low* because of the estimate: the numbers are really better than that. Maybe twice as good even.

 

Call me corny, but this makes me happy. I am visiting our corporate headquarters in Houston as I write this, and it is early in April. Just barely Spring. It is hot. I am glad we are doing what we can to not make it hotter.

 

P2C

 

With all this virtualization, and the addition of Bladelogic to our corporate tool chest, we have created quite a change in our internal R&D compute capabilities. We have a compute cloud. We have gone Physical to Cloud (P2C: TM) . While

 

  • Virtualization is not a Cloud, and
  • Provisioning is not a Cloud, and
  • Image Management is not a cloud, and
  • Performance and Capacity Planning (PCP) is not a cloud and
  • Configuration Management is not a cloud, and
  • Service Request Management is not a cloud ....

 

.... add all these things together and put them in the service in fewer, more regionally consolidated data centers connected with point to point network clouds and you pretty much have, by any definition of Cloud Computing, an internal Compute Cloud. One with more OS images than before, more capabilities than before, faster turn around than ever, and that is using far less of our planets shared resources.

 

In my list above I noted some of the common Cloud Computing building blocks. In particular, I think the key enablers for the Cloud concept are Virtualization and Provisioning. You could reasonably argue that neither are required: That is is about having a computing resource available via the network only, and I would not argue with you. That in fact has been an underlying theme of my last few posts.A good example of a Computing Cloud that is not virtualized is the recent information we just got about how Google designs their data centers. Fascinating stuff. No virtualization is sight, but clearly a Compute Cloud.

 

Virtualization and Provisioning are tools that make delivery faster. Make availability easier. In point of fact, you would not need many of the things on my list to build a cloud, as long as you were keeping the operations fairly small.

 

The bigger it gets (ignoring cases like Google where a single task scales beyond the size of a single computer), the more important each of those tools become, and if you are planning ahead, you will be ready with the tool set *before* you actually need it. Performance and Capacity Planning is a great example of tool that gets more important as the virtual server farm goes. I was recently using our BPA / CME tools set to create standard configurations for our next set of server purchases, for example. I am ready with data from BPA to show that we need to put more memory into our configs than we have to date. When you are talking about a server farm with hundreds of servers, even if they replaced thousands of servers and you are already saving serious CO2 emissions and expense money, it is still a serious investment.

 

The other thing one has to be careful of when building one of these Compute Clouds is virtual server sprawl of course. When it is cheap and easy to deploy new vservers to meet new requirements, the tendency is to leave servers running till someone tells you they don't need it anymore. More often than not, no one will tell you that. Everyone is looking at the next project, not the last one. One does not want to undo the goodness of P2C by having way more server farm than current plus part of peak plus growth demands.

 

The Linux Connection


I have not felt particularly constrained recently to keep my blog just about Linux. Partly this is because as a technologist my role is much wider than just Linux. Partly it is because my biggest project recently has been designing, building, and getting ready to consolidate five R&D data centers down into one, smaller data center.

 

This does not mean "Adventures" will never have Linux stuff in it again. In fact, the next post I am planning is pretty much pure Linux, with an update about where MAPI is in Evolution.

 

The other part of it is just that Linux is not something people think about anymore and ask "Will it make it?". Redhat's last quarter alone should be proof of that. Linux is ubiqutous. It's at the core of VMware. It's embedded in the lights out management cards. its in the netbooks, fast boot BIOS's and the SaaS bits of Cloud Computing. It is where virtualization is often first developed, and first deployed. It is the core of supercomputing, The "L" in the LAMP stack, which provides so much of the Internet. It is seriously challanging OS.X in the Smartphone market. It is making inroads in Real-Time, where VMS has been king for so long. No one ever asks me if BMC supports Linux anymore. They just assume we do.

 

It's everywhere and now we are starting to just assume its presence. My wife, long a hold out because of her love of OS.X, runs Ubuntu 9.04 on her Dell Mini 9 even. It is everywhere, and in every thing. The question becomes not "Should we run this on Linux?" but "Is there any reason *not* to run this on Linux?"

 

At some point, "Adventures" is going to probably be, at least in part, about finding Linux in all the places it is hiding around us.

 

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.


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