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2003-04 Women's Basketball
capital 65, bc 50
Schaller ties her own single game block record, posts second career double-double
By Ben Risinger, SID
December 3, 2003
BLUFFTON , OHIO - The Bluffton College women's basketball team (0-4) was defeated 65-50 by the Capital Crusaders (3-2) on Wednesday night. The Beavers led 27-25 going into halftime, but a 12-1 run by Capital to start the second half was too much for Bluffton.
The Beavers found themselves down by as much as 17 points in the second half and pulled back to tighten the Crusaders lead to 9, 57-48. Bluffton just could not close the gap in the second half as every attempt fell short.
Sophomore Karin Schaller (Jenera/Arlington) tied her single game block record with 8 and posted 10 points and 14 rebounds for her second career double-double. Leading the Beavers in scoring was senior Lindsay Bacon (Troy/Troy) with 13 points for the contest. Rounding off the double figure scoring was freshman Tanya Rickenberg (Defiance/Paulding) with 10 points, she also posted a team high 6 assists. All three players for Bluffton in double figure scoring played the entire 40 minutes of the contest.
Senior Kelsey Studer (Delta/Delta) posted a career high 8 points. Sophomore Michelle DeVault (Fostoria/Hopewell-Loudon) also had a career high in points with 8 for the night.
Bluffton shot 35 percent for the game compared to Capital's 31 percent. The Beavers will be back in action on December 13 at Denison . Tip off is scheduled


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from ARGENTINA : +54 115 252 1423
from ITALY : +39 024 032 6417
from MEXICO : +52 554 628 2555
from USA : +1 866 376 7831
from UK : +44 203 318 6993
from SPAIN : +34 911878153
- VIP roundtrip airport transfer - Cappadocian Wine wellcoming during check – in - Early check – in and upgrade depending on availibility - Bottle of wine, fruit basket, nuts, chocolate to the room on check – in day - VIP honeymoon set – up room - If requested Turn - down service - Daily newspaper service - Once during the stay In – room romantic breakfast - Once during the stay at Padishah Restaurant restaurant candle light romantic dinner - Once Special mini skin treatment and foot care - A plate of "Turkish Desserts" in your room every night of your stay - Late check – out depending on availibility - Love Tree Planting Ceremony. Planting on your own 'Love Tree' which will remain to grow in the Hotel's special garden, as a reminder of your memorable honeymoon. * Package is for min 3 nights reservations.And prices from 1190€.
* The price is an average of the daily rate. It does not mean that is the lowest rate available. The deals are subject to availability. Please refer to the promo description when you are booking to find its terms and conditions.
The Cappadocia Cave Resort and Spa aims to exceed every expectation and provides its guests with long lasting memories. Step back in time and find yourself dwelling on the edge of a hill in the centre of Anatolia with magnificent views across this mystical land. Take your time and relax, spoil yourself in the pool or on the sun terrace, sit down and treat yourself to a delicious meal in the restaurant or enjoy fabulous drinks at the intimate bar: friendly and discreet staff will take care of every need making your vacation special. A striking boutique hotel in Cappadocia.

subset: commoncrawl


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Cancer Is So Limited..
Cancer is so limited...
It cannot cripple love.
It cannot shatter hope.
It cannot corrode faith.
It cannot destroy confidence.
It cannot kill friendship.
It cannot shut out memories.
It cannot silence courage.
It cannot reduce eternal life.
It cannot quench the Spirit.
This beautiful poem that can bring tears to the eyes, but yet so hopeful. A local Victoria mother and daughter recently both were diagnosed with breast cancer within a week apart. Linda Amaro and Dionne Amaro Vela have stayed strong during this battle. Please support them by attending their Bar-B-Que Fundraiser this Sunday June 23rd at VFW Hall 2001 Lova Drive in Victoria. The fundraiser is from 11 till 2. You can dine in or get plates to go. Plates are only $7.00. Auction starts at 12:30. If you would like to donate please call Linda at 652-0721 or Dionne at 212-0028. We thank you in advance for your support and please keep this mother and daughter in your thoughts and prayers.


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A newly outspoken casino opponent, attorney general candidate Maura Healey has reveled in the pushback she has received from the industry, though not long ago Healey highlighted tough regulation, as opposed to repeal, when asked if she supported the casino gambling law.
A newly outspoken casino opponent, attorney general candidate Maura Healey has reveled in the pushback she has received from the industry, though not long ago Healey highlighted tough regulation, as opposed to repeal, when asked if she supported the casino gambling law.
In November, voters could be asked to decide whether to continue with the law or repeal it.
State Solicitor Peter Sacks, an official in the AG's office, last year ruled a referendum seeking to repeal the law is ineligible for the ballot, but petitioners were allowed to gather signatures and the Supreme Judicial Court is hearing arguments on the ballot access issue May 5.
Asked by Rep. Jay Kaufman at an April 1 Lexington forum whether she supports giving voters a say and whether she supports the gaming law, Healey spoke about protections against predatory lending and other potentialities and said she would be a "vigorous enforcer of those laws" while making no endorsement of a repeal.
"It's before the SJC now. We'll know shortly what'll happen. As a general matter, my view is it's good to let things go to the people, it's good to let people vote and decide issues, particularly issues so important to their communities, and so I think we'll just have to see what happens," Healey said at the forum.
At that same forum, Healey's Democratic primary opponent Warren Tolman said he liked that the law allows individual cities and towns to vote on whether to allow a casino within their borders and said he would vote against repeal.
"The people of Springfield are very, very excited and enthusiastic about having a casino and the infusion of money for economic development in their backyard," Tolman said. "It's not a decision I would make for my own hometown of Watertown, but it's one they've made."
John Miller, the Republican nominee for attorney general, said in a statement, "Martha Coakley's decision seems wrong-headed to me. The ballot initiative process is one of the few ways for hard-working citizens to directly express their views on policies passed by the Legislature and signed into law by the governor." The statement did not say whether Miller supports a repeal.
Healey said that she has been consistent on the campaign trail, including at the Lexington forum, and that she publicized her stance in favor of a repeal this week because, "I wanted to be really clear about where I was on this issue."
"The court's going to make a decision. I hope they decide that this should go forward on the ballot because that's my belief, and that's where I'm at with this, and that's what I said when I was at the forum in terms of letting the voters be heard on this," Healey told the News Service. "If they make a different decision, I as attorney general will make sure that we hold casino operators' feet to the fire on this."
Healey ran the Public Protection & Advocacy and Business & Labor bureaus within the attorney general's office, and Sacks did not consult with either of those bureaus while making his ballot question determination, according to the AG's office. Healey left the AG's office on Oct. 11, 2013, about 10 days before launching her bid for elected office.
This week, Healey announced her support of the ballot question that would once again outlaw casinos and slot parlors, drawing a rebuttal from an industry lobbying group.
"Ms. Healey's comments demonstrate an alarming lack of awareness about an industry that will create thousands of jobs paying well above the minimum wage, help small businesses grow and contribute millions of dollars to support education, public safety and infrastructure improvements," American Gaming Association President Geoff Freeman said in a statement.
"The decision of whether the question will be on the ballot is in the hands of the SJC and the next attorney general has no role in this decision," Tolman said in a statement. "But if it is on the ballot I will vote against repeal. I support the Legislature's decision to allow individual towns and cities like Springfield and Plainville to decide if they want a casino in their backyard."
Healey has touted the pushback, issuing a statement Wednesday that said, "In campaigns, like in life, you can tell a lot by the company you keep – and the criticism you attract. So it's with some pride that I heard the casino industry's top lobbyists are now attacking me and my statement in opposition to casinos in Massachusetts."
Tolman has made much of the vilification he received for his work against the interests of the tobacco industry.
The differing opinions on the gaming law repeal mark a policy split between the two Democrats, who are generally aligned, with differences in priorities and approaches. Healey said it is "a fundamental difference."
Gubernatorial candidate Don Berwick, who has staked out liberal ground by backing a Medicare-for-all health care system, also distinguished himself from his four primary opponents by backing a repeal of the casino law. Casinos can be a potent political issue, as demonstrated by the legislative debates leading up to passage of the 2011 gaming law, and the various municipal contests approving and denying specific proposals. Republican gubernatorial nominee Charlie Baker is in favor of putting the question to voters.
The firm that provides public relations for Healey, Melwood Global, also runs publicity for Repeal the Casino Deal. Tolman signed on with the consultancy Northwind, which also represents gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley, the attorney general whose office determines the eligibility of ballot questions. Suffolk Downs, which is seeking to bring a casino to Revere, is a Northwind client.
Former Attorney General Scott Harshbarger is both a supporter of Tolman and an advocate for repealing the casino law.


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The Victorian Fire Services Commissioner says "significant work" has taken place to improve the Country Fire Authority's website, after it malfunctioned during Friday's heatwave.
Fire Services Commissioner Craig Lapsley said he was confident the website would suitably handle high volumes of traffic this week, with temperatures tipped to soar and severe fire danger warnings predicted.
The CFA's website and smartphone app received more than 12 million hits during a 12-hour period on Friday, causing it to slow down and freeze.
"Lessons learned from Friday are significant and have not gone un-noticed," Mr Lapsley said.
"We've done technical work-arounds and [found] solutions to increase the capability of our website to give Victoria what it deserves."
Emergency Services Minister Peter Ryan denied claims by the opposition that the website's struggles were due to CFA budget cuts. He labelled the claims as a "lazy, slack, irrelevant, cheap political point" and said there was no proof the two issues were linked.
And despite no digital radio network for emergency services, Mr Ryan said fire authorities were coping "very well" this summer with 11,500 new digital radios for crew members.
"The development of the total system is continuing and that will be ongoing," he said.
Meanwhile, 64 Victorian fire services personnel have flown to Tasmania to help local crews battle Australia's worst bushfires since Black Saturday in 2009.
Tasmania's Acting Premier, Bryan Green, contacted the Victorian government on Saturday to make a formal request for assistance.
Mr Ryan said members from the CFA, Metropolitan Fire Brigade, State Emergency Service, Department of Sustainability and Environment and Parks Victoria will return home on Friday.
"In the weeks following the devastation of the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, Tasmania, along with other states, answered our request for assistance by sending personnel to help with the aftermath. As Tasmania now faces serious bushfires, we are ready to help them in their time of need,'' Mr Ryan said.
Mr Lapsley said the deployment won't impact potential firefighting efforts in Victoria this week, with only members from lower-risk fire districts sent to Tasmania.
"We don't have fires of any significance in the state at this point in time," Mr Lapsley said.
"It was a calculated decision … we have up to 8000 people on any one day able to fight fires, so it's a small percentage of our crews that are leaving the state.''


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Now more than ever, people are buying or leasing property for recreation. Recreation is directly related to wildlife, and the more wildlife you have on your property, the more valuable your land is.
Tools to Make the Sale
If you have land to lease or sell for hunting, the number and the quality of the wildlife on your property will help determine the property's value. Therefore, if you're thinking of selling or leasing your hunting property, two of your best tools to help you make the sale will be a Moultrie feeder and Moultrie game camera.
Food for Thought: Getting Wildlife to Cooperate
One major problem with selling hunting property is that often the wildlife does not show up when the buyers do. Moultrie feeders and cameras can help you show exactly what is on your land. Moultrie feeders can be set to go off at specific times. When the feeders go off, the wildlife appears. Simply set the feeders to go off when potential buyers are viewing the property. They will be able to see the game at the feeder and know what type of wildlife they'll have on the property if they buy or lease.Photographs Still Worth a Thousand Words
Since pictures speak a thousand words, also be prepared with photographs of your property's wildlife. Set up a game camera facing the feeder. When the feeder goes off, wildlife will be attracted to the food and the film or digital camera will photograph all of the activity.
One advantage to using Moultrie game cameras is that you can set the pictures to be time and date stamped. The time and date on the photograph will show the buyer that there is still wildlife after hunting season has ended and game will be available for harvest next season.Sell This Hunting Land the Quick and Easy Way
By scouting the property with the feeders and cameras, you're providing another huge advantage to your hunters. You can show the hunters interested in leasing your property:
- Buck-to-doe ratio of the herd.
- Where most of the deer are concentrated.
- The health of the herd.
- What time of day or night the deer are appearing.
- The size and number of deer on the property.
A Moultrie game feeder and game camera are the two most efficient tools a landowner can use to sell or lease property for a fair price.
To learn more about Moultrie's line of products, click here.


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What my memory sees -- the door opens, and there stands Billy Flynn, facing the dark street of the pavement cul-de-sac. His curly black hair, lit yellow by the street lamp, shines bright as he turns to face us; shapely lips grow into a smile. A sparse cover of facial hair dots his upper lip, but the curly hair of his head is bounding and abundant. With hands in leather jacket, his soft but muscular thighs shake in his grey sweatpants as he plants his feet from turning. His brown eyes look me over as mine do to him. His waistband is protruding.
He had come to my apartment late that Saturday night. I remember, as he walked over, I waited in my bedroom, pacing. A knock had finally come -- he was here. My hands began to sweat profusely; part of me hoped he wouldn't show.
Without hesitating, he entered and went directly to my room with a charismatic 'Hey.' His sense of ease surprised me. I had never felt so comfortable in a situation like this; his normalcy was refreshing. I walked behind him to my own bedroom, where we had understood was the only place to meet. I had needed to meet late at night after my roommates went to sleep. Now they were in bed, and Billy Flynn was draped across my desk chair.
To explain all of my past is impossible, but let it suffice to tell you that I am a young man now, a student at university; a writer, thinker, and a homosexual. Whether the last attribute listed has a place among the rest, I don't know. How much of what excites me, defines me?
I spent years and years scouring the stalls of shopping malls and bookstores just to find another man who felt like I did. I found them; they treated me as an adult, though I was a child. Sex, as they say, is the heat of the moment; so the moment passed, lukewarmly. I was disappointed, I was sad.
I decided, from then on, never to release myself wholly to this overwhelming world. Certainly, there are men who enjoy this lifestyle; to them it is freedom. If, in their independence, they can safeguard against loneliness, may they be free to remain in their ways. But in the vein of old prudes and maidens, I preserved my virginity. I surrendered to the cyber lure only when my young blood cried so badly for it that my very body ached.
So it came to pass that I entered university as a closeted young man. I denied it all, desperately. My unwhole body cried for a masculine section to complete it, yet I daydreamed of finding love with women.
The first time I had let myself feel for a man was in the back row of a playhouse. I had gone to a performance of 'Chicago' at my university, and I sat in the nose bleed seats, unimpressed but entertained. The porcelain-faced actors strutted the stage to music and rhythm. Whether his talent or his spirit stirred me, I can't say -- A young man stepped onstage; his stentorian voice soared high above the seats as he sung. 'All I care about is love,' sang Billy Flynn, crowded by an ensemble of giggling girls, fanning with a fringe of large feathers. But the feathers lowered, finally, and standing center stage -- there he was. I wanted to kiss him as I had never wanted to kiss anyone. I wanted to kiss him to be close to him.
Later that night, when the show had finished, I found his Facebook and sent him a message. I told him how he had impressed me, how he'd caused me to miss my own theatre days. I felt freed by his song, but still I reread my message countless times, ensuring it was untinged by the tone of homosexuality. I wanted to admire him -- but in quiet, insecure words, though in my mind I saw his naked body on mine, his broad singing voice warbling out his lyrics of love.
He never wrote back to me. I thought about him often as I sat in class, often in my bedroom, late at night, wishing to capture his attention, but still wanting to do the exact opposite. We passed each other on our way to classes, spoke in close proximity at the dining hall, but never said a word to each other. So much time passed that I forgot about him, and I became lonely without ever realizing it. Perhaps that was why I returned to that other, exotic world of the internet; of immediacy and plenty. Online, I sought out others like myself, but had the courage to meet only with older men, fearing that I might find someone who knew me, who would tell the world what I was. I hadn't even admitted it to myself yet. My sense of worth plummeted as months passed, when people touched me only in those five minutes it took him to release the day's urges. Night after night, it happened again and again, rarely with the same person. I felt so wretched about what I was doing that I stopped enjoying myself altogether. Even while I watched the dark shape of a brown-haired head bobbing hungrily up and down on the shadow of my crotch, I regretted it all.
It was a day like this that I went online in rueful search of a night's partner. I pulled up a section of craigslist advertisements where men merchandised their needs and sat erectly in their offices in wait. I found something different on this day, however: a personal ad listed at my university. I was excited and afraid to see that, somewhere, another student like myself was seeing what was out there. I responded to his ad, which included a description of himself; his wishes not to be a 'daddy's boy,' that he was looking for someone wanting a relationship, but that if 'fun' happened to come his way, he wouldn't say no outright.
I wrote to him, and he responded. We typed messages back and forth under our anonymous avatars, until finally he wanted to see what I looked like. That was how I came to find Billy Flynn sitting in my computer chair one night.
'It's nice in here,' said, contentedly.
'Thanks. It's a little empty,' I said. 'Needs a poster or something.'
'Mm. Your roommate's gone for the night?'
I nodded. He rested his legs up, parted, on the edge of my bed.
'So -- when did you --,' his drew circles with his hands, he searching for a word, '--when did this whole -- man thing -- start?'
'Man thing -- you mean, like --'
'Your interest -- you know -- when did your -- I don't know -- your attraction start?'
'I guess it's always been there.'
He nodded in understanding.
'That's what pretty much everyone says... I always thought you were straight.'
'You've seen me around, then?'
'Passing by... You read a lot, I imagine?'
'Is it obvious?'
'You have more books than anyone I've met.' He laughed and picked one up. 'Book of the Dead.... What?'
'It's a Buddhist text -- it's interesting.'
'You like Buddhism?'
'I do.'
'That's interesting. That's cool.' He began flipping through the pages as he spoke. 'Were you raised religiously?'
'No, not at all.'
'My parents tried to raise me as a Christian.'
'How'd that go?'
'Pretty terribly! It's just a -- I don't know. It's not worth talking about. I'm an Atheist.'
'So you believe in nothing?'
'I guess.'
'I always find that strange... that someone can just -- believe in nothing.'
'Well, why do you believe in Buddhism?'
'It just makes common sense to me.'
'How so?'
'I don't know. There's no laws, no dogma. It's about being who you are, completely. That's the point of it. Becoming fully yourself.'
'That's beautiful.'
He stood up and wandered round the room, looking at my things and my roommate's bed. When he sat down again, he sat beside me on my mattress.
'It's raining. Can you hear it?'
'I love the sound of the rain at night.'
'I love laying in bed while I listen to it.'
He laid down in my bed, head on my pillow, with his arms behind his head The rain picked up; I laid beside him. We both stared at the ceiling, quiet.
'Maybe instead of posters you can get those glow-in-the-dark stars you stick to your ceiling.'
'I had those as a kid!'
'Me too!'
He looked over at me. I faced him. Our noses were close together and I felt his warm breath on my lips. I was unsure whether I should kiss him or keep speaking; we said nothing. Our eyes darted around, wasting time, though it was obvious what we both wanted. I wanted it, too. It's always the first kiss that's the hardest to initiate
I pushed my lips onto his -- felt the oily prickling of his unshaven lip -- felt his hands on my shoulders -- his hands on my arms, on my biceps, my triceps -- on my back, my waist, my ass. He tore his lips away suddenly, rising above me, grabbing my shoulders and spinning me over so I lay on top of him. We rolled around, kissing, while our hands travelled -- becoming more and more adventurous -- his hands on my thighs, mine sneaking into his waistband. I slipped my hand inside -- felt the warmth of his crotch -- his thick, curly pubic hair -- but again he tore his lips away. My hand slipped out. I looked at him.
'The lights,' he whispered.
I hopped out of bed and switched the lights off, banging my head against his as I dove back onto the mattress. We both recoiled from the bump -- we began to laugh. He brought a hand to my forehead and rubbed where our heads had knocked.
I smiled -- found his lips in the dark - fell flat with him on our backs -- kicked the blankets away -- began unbuttoning each other's shirts -- button by button. I felt his bare skin for the first time, and he mine; my chest was not hairy, but fuzzy. He remarked how I felt like a teddy bear. I laughed and dove my hand into his sweatpants, felt the stiff rod press against the cotton. It was thick, was a large but well-proportioned. I let it breathe air, and clenched it tightly in my fist. He let out a stifled moan -- a moan like an actor makes when he is onstage.
We had finally shucked our clothes off when he began kissing my neck, my shoulders and my chest, finally my stomach and my waist. His wet, warm tongue found the head of my penis and licked it gently. Holding it with his left hand, he slowly took my head into his mouth, moistening it, spending time on it, before he finally brought the mass of it into his mouth and wet my scrotum entirely. I pulled his head off my dick and threw him to his back.
His limbs spread out and open playfully; my eyes had an appetite to merely stare at him for a time. He was thin, but meaty, slightly rounded where other men were bones, but still compact. He was soft and hairless. I threw myself on him, kissed him again, touched him with my hands and brought my mouth to his crotch and tasted him, licking his balls and wetting his dick as I massaged his head with a moistened hand. We were both so excited by each other that we often had to stop. He brought my head away from his dick now, as I had done to him, pulling me in close to his face for a whisper -- 'Can we get into the shower?'
I savor it still: the way he looked, ambling to the bathroom, his naked body sneaking in the hall, listening, looking round to ensure that nobody was there. As he swerved into the bathroom, I started the water and kissed him on the bathmat, waiting for the water to heat. When we stepped inside, he began to wash me, guiding me beneath the stream of water and running a hand through my straight, black hair. I had never been in a shower with anyone before. He bent to his knees and took me into his mouth again. I threw my head back in quiet pleasure, gently thrusting my hips back and fourth to guide my dick in and out of his open mouth. After a while, he lay flat across the bottom of my shower, pulling me down so that I lay on top of him. The stream of hot water hit hard against my chest, but I did not move. We lay like that for a while, quietly. I listened to the sound of his breathing while his shaking hand traced the outline of my body.
When we returned to my bedroom, we hopped excitedly onto the bed in the dark, throwing the blankets over us; the room was cold with winter. Our wet, naked bodies rubbed smoothly over one another, our hands working fast to memorize our every curve. We kept our heads pressed close together, and my whole body warmed up as he began to breath into my ear canal. I came minutes after he did, in his hand, having listened to his tremulous sighs and feeling his body shaking, half out of pleasure, half out of show, as a white thread of hot cum shot from the head of his deck, falling upon his chest in a long rope. Our bodies lay on each other, hot like two overworked furnaces, and breathing deeply in an hour.
I leaned up in bed to watch him hobbled on one foot in the dark, pulling on his jeans.
'I'd have you stay if my roommate wasn't coming back so early,' I said.
'It's fine, I understand,' he said. 'How do you feel?'
I thought for a moment. 'Good... And how do you feel?'
'Me? I feel great.'
He walked over to my bed, wrapped a hand around my head and kissed me.
'Text me, will you?'
I nodded, and he left.
The story, if anyone is interested in hearing more, would be one of three parts. I wrote this section in one sitting tonight, on a whim.


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AGIMO's final cloud guidance released
Urges modest pilots when first vaporising IT
The Australian Government Information Management Office has released its final Guide to Implementing Cloud Services (PDF).
The document advises caution, suggesting that when considering cloud government agencies need to remember that "Like any new delivery model, a first step is to target low risk, low value applications or pilots from which the organisation can measure actual costs and benefits, gain insights and draw lessons for future endeavours."
Other than that exhortation, the Guide appears largely uncontroversial and seldom if ever goes beyond common sense.
The section on risk, for example, offers the following checklist to consider:
- Quality – does the cloud solution meet stakeholder needs;
- Financial – does the cloud solution provide value for money;
- Organisational – does the cloud solution work within the agency's culture;
- Integration – can the cloud solution meet objectives without business or technical integration difficulties;
- Compliance – does the cloud solution comply with agency's legal, regulatory and policy obligations;
- Business Continuity – can the cloud solution recover from outages or disaster situation; and
- External – is the Cloud Service Provider performance adequate.
Much of the Guide is filled with similarly anodyne advice, which AGIMO says is intended "as an aid for experienced business strategists, architects, project managers, business analysts and IT staff to realise the benefits of cloud computing technology."
To be fair, the Guide does point out that AGIMO and other agencies have published more detailed guidance on the nuances needed to ensure cloud usage is secure and sensible. Those other sources of guidance are linked to within the complete Guide. ®
Sponsored: Minds Mastering Machines - Call for papers now open


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The Third Claw of God (Mass Market Paperback)
Andrea Cort became a "war criminal" at the age of eight when an unexplained darkness invaded her soul.
Now, decades later, the Devil is calling her.
Employed by the Diplomatic Corps but secretly aiding the AI masters of the universe, Counselor Andrea Cort despises the powerful Bettelhines—unrepentant death merchants who have prospered from the annihilation of civilizations. Now curiosity compels her to answer a cryptic summons to their home world, where the only law is Bettelhine law. But a murder attempt greets her arrival at Xana's orbital entry port—and far graver peril awaits aboard the elevator transport meant to carry Andrea to the planet's surface.
Trapped miles above Xana—surrounded by suspicious Bettelhines, their slavishly loyal retainers . . . and a corpse liquefied by a 15,000-year-old weapon—Andrea must unmask an assassin or die an equally hideous death. But the true reason for her summons—and sordid secrets weaving through her own dark past—threaten to destroy Andrea Cort more completely than the Claw of God.
Praise For…
"SF at its best… A clever, thought-provoking page-turner. Bravo!"
-Robert J. Sawyer
"Adam-Troy Castro has given us the ultimate high-wire thriller."
-Jack McDevitt
"A brilliantly executed novel, fully successful as both science fiction and murder mystery. … Emissaries is a dark and moody novel, featuring a disturbed and misanthropic protagonist with a tragic past … Powerfully compelling … One of the best science fiction novels of the year so far."
-Science Fiction Weekly
"With its creepy background and complex plot, Emissaries from the Dead offers an intriguing combination of SF and detective story, spiced with moments of danger that raise the perils of cliff-hanging an exponential level."
"The most powerful science fiction novel of the year."
-Michael A. Burstein


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Are you looking for a blacktop driveway paving contractor in Park Ridge, NJ? McFarlane Paving has been a blacktop driveway paving contractor in Park Ridge, NJ since 1959.
McFarlane Paving understands that a well-constructed driveway plays an important role in the overall appearance and value of your home. For this reason, we provide excellent driveway installation in Park Ridge, NJ.
For more than 56 years, McFarlane Paving has provided its customers with a commitment to high quality driveway paving construction in Park Ridge, NJ. Our skilled craftsmen create sidewalks and patios that will enhance your home and express your personal style. At McFarlane Paving, We have the experience to build a solid driveways that can be manicured for a formal look, or left more rugged for a country motif.
At McFarlane Paving, we build unique and customizable driveways to suit your personal preference and compliment your home. We build driveways in Bergen County of all styles, shapes and colors.
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McFarlane Paving - Your professional driveway paving installer in Park Ridge, NJ.


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1. Not enough free soda pop.
*cue Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra to play something catchy*
Company leadership would like people to think that the company has no failures. Ridiculous, of course, but there you have it.
Company leadership would like people to think that the company has no failures. Ridiculous, of course, but there you have it.
I wonder if it has more to do with the sale to Oracle that has not been finalized.
If you're selling your car, you don't want your wife coming out and telling the guy why you're getting rid of it before he hands you the cash.
I have my own theories on why Sun had to sell [rackserverdeals.com] and surprisingly it had to do with Notes.
Sun had to sell and surprisingly it had to do with Notes.
Yuck, yuck yuck.
He means notes as in debt, folks. It's not a bad article, but he could have just said "debt" instead of making us think he meant Lotus Notes.
Company leadership would like people to think that the company has no failures. Ridiculous, of course, but there you have it.
More importantly, company leadership would like people to forget the past and believe there will be no glaring errors moving forward. It's a bit hard to do that if many of the people who made those decisions are still making decisions at the company and their bad choices are being highlighted.
You would have thought in their decline from 200 billion to 7 billion someone would have said at some point - hey what the heck is going on here?
As the original article says, "There may be Securities and Exchange-related reasons for shuttering the posts."
And our number one failure of Sun:
I still can't get Sun. They killed the product they would eventually try to use to save the company. They killed their current flagship product and then ran scared back to it when they found out their servers were being replaced by Linux on X86. How did they think they were going to justify a proprietary system (SPARC, Solaris) when there was a perfectly reasonable replacement at a great price point (Linux, X86)? Java is nice, but it won't get them far, and what else do they have? Really? Cloud computing and redundant NAS using COTS parts have eaten any lunch they had. Maybe they are just the most current buggy whip maker... I would hate to see them go, but at least any good parts of Sun are GPL'ed. Sorry to see you go, but maybe it's just time.
http://www.save-solaris.org/schwartz-2006-08-18.html [save-solaris.org]
What happened is it was a short sighted save our jobs not their jobs issue. The suits in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale saw that cuts were coming. They were able to convince people including Zander that a great way to save money was to kill Solaris/x86, it had been suffering for years already due to limited staff and budget. Again the reason was that the people doing sparc and asic were afraid so that is why solaris/x86 was kept in such a sorry state. Heck they even had the people doing a large chunk of the x86 work in LA away from the rest of ON in Menlo Park.
Anyway solaris/x86 was EOLed and almost everyone in LA working on it lost their jobs or got reassigned. But at almost the moment that solaris/x86 was EOLed there was quite a strong grassroots uprising outside of Sun about this, and it simply became impossible to not take notice. When Zander left, the correct direction was taken by embracing amd64.
When I was there I did some x86 work. Hammer was announced. I voiced an opinion that we should get involved, and boy did that open a can of worms. Eventually through a contact at AMD in the UK I was able to get a person in Sun and a person at AMD to get in touch and we were sent three prototype Hammer boxes. What did those rascals at Sun do? They had them transferred to the SUNWpro (compilers) people instead. No they did not get one to them, one to ON (OS/Networking), and one to the x86 people in LA. The compiler group just sat on them. That infuriated me at the time and shortly after that I started looking for a new job pretty much entirely due to my disgust with how that was handled.
Here is another nugget, a second level manager told me to distance myself as much as possible from x86 just before it was announced that solaris/x86 was EOLed.
That is the sort of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd level managerial thinking that was the root cause of all of Suns poor decisions over the last ten years. They were always thinking about how best to serve their own group dept div instead of what was best long term.
Open Source would have saved Sun, if they had thought of it 18 years ago. But they spent so long fighting it, when they finally flipped no one cared.
Open Source would have saved Sun, if they had thought of it 18 years ago. But they spent so long fighting it, when they finally flipped no one cared.
Worse yet, when you spend that long fighting it and you flip, people don't trust you or your commitment. They'll go with the people who had already been promoting and supporting it for years.
Worse yet, when you spend that long fighting it and you flip, people don't trust you or your commitment. They'll go with the people who had already been promoting and supporting it for years.
Throughout Sun's history they have been involved in Open Source projects.
They didn't back Linux as much as they did their own OS, with good reason. But Linux and the GPL are not the only words in Open Source.
Open Source would have saved Sun, if they had thought of it 18 years ago. But they spent so long fighting it, when they finally flipped no one cared.
They still haven't flipped though. They created a license in the CDDL that is was needlessly GPL incompatible and years later if you want to bootsrap an 'OpenSolaris' system you will need some binary bits and have to do it from Nevada - Sun's blessed OpenSolaris distribution. They wanted the appearance of being open source so they could go to people and say "H
I hate how someone always brings this up. It was because of patents and that it needed to be based per file that the CDDL was made. There was no anti Linux conspiracy. It is not incompatible with the GPL, the GPL is incompatible with the CDDL because of demands that the GPL makes in its text. I was there at the time working down the hall from a person very involved with CDDL and open sourcing solaris. There was another person at Sun that made some comments that were frankly lies when no longer an employee and all the FUD about that stems from that.
Indirectly the government did give them billions through prosecuting MS.
I just made the mistake I've been complaining about with others - it wasn't a prosecution because it wasn't a criminal case.
It's rarely the engineers who screw things up like that.
It's the suits who don't understand something and then write press releases / marketting material on their lack of understanding.
I fondly remember my (then) boss at my first job out of university going, in one day, down to marketting to explain to them how they'd just killed a two million dollar product line because they couldn't be arsed to call first, and then down to HR to explain that they couldn't shorten a job listing to "five years programming experience in [2 year old web technology]" from "five years programming experience and one year in [2 year old web technology]".
Of course, this was the same man who would go fishing in the middle of a lake (and cell dead zone) during every customer live date, so he didn't have to listen to them complain about the fonts or colors.
I remember in 1996 seeing a job posting requiring "5 years Java experience"... I wonder if it is the same job posting you are referring to.
Sadly, stuff like that is quite common in job postings, for the reasons stated above - the hiring manager's requirements get filtered by HR.
In 1985, I'd spent about a year and a half doing contract PC work with various versions of Lattice C (2.0 bad, 2.01 better, 2.10 really bad, 2.11 bad, 2.12 good) and was looking for a new contract.
Two local shops were advertising for "DOS based C programmers" at the time, so I applied.
The first one rejected me because they were an Microsoft C shop, and all my experience was with Lattice. The fact that Microsoft was simply reselling Lattice C under their own name seemed to be a revelation to them.
The second
My own marketing story: I used to work for Windows Magazine. We were a pretty successful publication, or so we thought. One day, everyone was called into a meeting (never a good sign) by our corporate marketing department. They literally told us: "You guys have a great product. Wonderful writing and content. Phenomenal staff. But we don't know how to sell your magazine. So we're killing it." Yes, because *they* couldn't figure out what to do with *our* great content, *they* decided that we needed to be fired.
Luckily, I survived that as the shut-down magazine went Dot-Com-only (WinMag.com). We figured we were pretty safe since we were the biggest traffic draw our company had. But then came an impromptu phone meeting (again, never a good sign) during which our corporate overlords told us that they had come to a decision. Instead of producing their own content, they would pull other people's content and show that. How successful were they? Well, when's the last time you visited Techweb.com? Personally, I never visit it and even had to Google it to make sure I had the name right!
so he didn't have to listen to them complain about the fonts or colors.
Didn't the software support personal configuration files so that users could select their own default fonts and colors? There is nothing more annoying that having fonts that constantly
change between updates according to the personal preferences of whoever put together this months bug-fix update. A font like "Battlestar Galactica" may look cool when rendered with a chrome finish, but it doesn't go down to well when sending this months pro
If Sun's marketing were so bad, then Java wouldn't be the worlds most used programming language today. I think they have done a bang up job with that. Remember all those job ads from 97-99 sometime requiring 5+ years of Java experience? That's successful marketing.
Java wasn't and isn't something revolutionary but they managed to convince every PHB in the world to believe that. From a technical perspective, there is nothing special about the language. In almost all situations where it is used there are bette
Dan Baigent was senior director of corporate development with Sun Microsystems.
I don't see why people would think that Sun, or Oracle for that matter, would want their ineptness broadcast to the world, when the only benefit from doing so would be for others (their competitors especially) to learn from said mistakes. It would be like them saying "Hey IBM, here is a list of what NOT to do in the future." I seriously doubt Oracle would enjoy giving people a play book of things to avoid, as opposed to hoping those mistakes WERE repeated. If anything they should create a list of "mistakes" that they've invented that would help them in regards to their competition reading it, as opposed to hurting themselves.
You say this as if there is no one as smart as the blogger employed at IBM... I think they know all of Sun's mistakes already. Sun is the only one who doesn't yet...
http://www.save-solaris.org/schwartz-2006-08-18.html [save-solaris.org]
How long will it take corporate overlords until they finally realize that broad level censorship and trying to control the message are far more harmful than just becoming part of the discourse?
Until it's demonstrably true?
There's a reason so many large institutions want to "control the message", and despite our best wishes to the contrary, it's because controlling the message works. Yes, there are downsides, such as the risk of Streisand effect, but quashing off-message discussion is a proven strategy.
Managing public relations, and managing your brand, is a useful tool. You're living in a dream world if you think it isn't. That's not to say it's not important to be aware of, and to learn from, institutional shortcomings... but to allow employees to broadcast them far and wide is doing nothing but hurting your brand.
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000.
So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
exactly. in fairness, the buyout price is in the neighborhood of 1/2 of it's post-crash valuation. and pretty much all of that loss in valuation came in 2008, hardly a banner year for equities. as for the business missteps, well who can say how long those have been festering. Sun probably was drinking the kool-aid and believing itself to be the $200bn infallible titan of industry that it was reported to be in 2000. pride commeth before the fall.
The summary makes a leap of logic. The company was never really worth 200 billion except in the eyes of the guy that bought his shares at $253.88 back in September of 2000. So the loss of value isn't strictly due to mistakes the company made. The stock market crash accounts for most of that drop.
This is akin to people going "OMG! I lost 30% of my pension" or "I just lost £30,000 on my house's value" or whatever; yes, if you measure it from the ridiculous high of the market you "lost" that much, but really, what was it over the medium to long term? The only people who genuinely lose out are those who bought in at the peak of the market.
Post dot-com failure Scott McNealy said: [businessweek.com]
But two years ago we were selling at 10 times revenues when we were at $64. At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders. That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees. That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal. And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate. Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are? You don't need any transparency. You don't need any footnotes. What were you thinking?
Wall St was unrealistic during the dot-com era, at least in their advice to others.
Unfortunately McNealy didn't seem to realize there was a bubble either and didn't react to the crash quick enough. Sun might have borrowed too much during the dot com era [rackserverdeals.com] too.
Apple did manage to overtake its dot.com peak. I believe it was the only tech company that did. I guess that is because it was a pretty lousy company back in 2000, and in a much better shape now.
Apple didn't have any significant bump [yahoo.com] during the dot-com years compared to other tech companies.
If you use a logarithmic scale [yahoo.com], they had as much of a bump as anyone else.
On the linear scale it looks flatter because of the huge pre-dot.com slump when they lost their market leading position to Microsoft and the PC manufacturers.
At the peak of the dot-com era, AAPL was trading about 5 times pre bubble price, Sun was more than 20x, Oracle was about 10x. Yahoo about 30x. Dell around 50x
Throw in all the IPOs that went nowhere and that little bump AAPL had is not significant.
> I think Schwartz was not a good choice to lead Sun after McNealy left.
> There is one good thing that came out of Sun in the last couple years, though: open-sourcing of Solaris.
I think Schwartz is a closet hippie (witness the pony-tail). He snuck into Sun pretending to be an MBA-bearing preppie, and when he got there, he looked around and said, "SHIT! We'd better open source everything we can before somebody buys us and locks all this great software up forever!"
I think you've got Schwartz exactly backwards. He's pretending to be a cool open-source tech/hippie sort, but in fact is another two-faced incompetent middle-manager who should be left to shuffle paperwork (or alternatively, pick bottles in the alleys).
That pony tail is a desperate attempt to fit in with the tech staff of Sun's customers. It never worked.
I think Schwartz is a closet hippie (witness the pony-tail). He snuck into Sun pretending to be an MBA-bearing preppie...
Actually he came as part of the purchase of "Lighthouse Design" (?) which wrote some GUI tools that Sun liked enough to buy (and then obviously to kill). He was in Engineering
Uhm, IBM has boatloads of CPU options (POWER, PowerPC, x86, Itanium) and they've been doing pretty well.
Well, ego.
But, really, who cares? Any right thinking person knows some mistakes were made. The deal with Oracle is done.
But, really, who cares? Any right thinking person knows some mistakes were made. The deal with Oracle is done.
Those in the proverbial crosshair of potential litigation from Oracle?
I worked at Sun briefly. My office was across the corridor from a corner office CTO type. One day I overheard him ranting to someone, wondering 'why anyone would want to use Linux when they could be using Solaris -- that has everything -- instead.'
I swear the guy was channeling Ken Olsen, when he said: "...the beauty of UNIX is it's simple, and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there."
If I did the same thing at my company I would have simply been terminated.
Maybe, maybe not. It depends on your contract, and the rules around using the company's "blog space." (wow, that's a terrible expression!)
Sun has encouraged employees to speak their mind on blogs.sun.com. This is the sort of thing that should be (and was) tolerated.
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray [wikipedia.org] (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' [tbray.org] blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
It was all in vain, of course -- caches and copies will beat redactions every time. Here's one copy:
Us and Them [acm.org]
Interesting stuff!
This isn't the only Sun censorship going on. Tim Bray [wikipedia.org] (of XML fame, now Sun's Director of Web Tech) had a very insightful post on his 'ongoing' [tbray.org] blog comparing Sun's strengths and weaknesses with Oracle's. It was up for all of a day before the lawyers stepped in and made him take it down.
Well, yeah. Bray should have the good sense to wait until the f'in merger closes.
Ironically, a couple of decades ago they were sitting there with literally the keys to the realm in their hands, and they threw them away. Back in the late 80's they introduced the Sun386i workstation, featuring (drumroll..) Intel's 386 processor and a 386 port of SunOS. This was a proper preemptive multitasking OS with 32-bit virtual memory and a decent GUI, far ahead of Windows 2.x at the time. Not only that, it also had a functioning DOS emulator, allowing the machine to run MS-DOS programs. By focusing on x86, and selling SunOS/x86 for $50 or so they could have become the Microsoft of today.
But, they weren't interested in playing the massive volumes with razor thin margins game of the PC world, thinking that the unix workstation market was insulated from the PC market. After all, PC's were for chumps running 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. So they introduced their own hardware, SPARC, and discontinued SunOS/x86. Of course, as TFA says, they re-entered the x86 game in 2002, but by then it was too little, too late.
The failure to see the cost effectiveness afforded by the massive volumes of x86 chips Intel was turning out is all the more damning considering the main reason they had become the dominant unix workstation vendor wasn't that their hardware or software was leagues ahead of their competitors, but rather that they were cheaper.
But, they weren't interested in playing the massive volumes with razor thin margins game of the PC world, thinking that the unix workstation market was insulated from the PC market. After all, PC's were for chumps running 1-2-3 and Wordperfect. So they introduced their own hardware, SPARC, and discontinued SunOS/x86.
Yet another example that any large, established, company will never knowingly introduce a new product that might damage the market for an existing product. That is why giving billions to one or two large companies to develop TECHNOLOGY X never seems to work. If you gave the same amount of money to companies with less than 50 people, you would have 12 different versions of TECHNOLOGY X within a year.
End rant.
Ironically, a couple of decades ago they were sitting there with literally the keys to the realm in their hands, and they threw them away. Back in the late 80's they introduced the Sun386i workstation, featuring (drumroll..) Intel's 386 processor and a 386 port of SunOS. This was a proper preemptive multitasking OS with 32-bit virtual memory and a decent GUI, far ahead of Windows 2.x at the time. Not only that, it also had a functioning DOS emulator, allowing the machine to run MS-DOS programs. By focusing on x86, and selling SunOS/x86 for $50 or so they could have become the Microsoft of today.
The Sun386i product line was what got Sun onto huge quantities of financial market desktops, and got Sun beyond Engineering/Server markets in a major way.
And they were set to be the first to market with (drumroll) the Sun486i workstation, which worked even better. In fact it out-performed the first SPARC generation... can't have that! They invested in SPARC to get founder Andy Bechtolsheim to come back! (He wanted to design CPU chips, and that wasn't really practical at a company making primo commodity-based systems.)
But, they weren't interested in playing the massive volumes with razor thin margins game of the PC world, thinking that the unix workstation market was insulated from the PC market. After all, PC's were for chumps running 1-2-3 and Wordperfect.
But the Sun386i was a workstation, not a PC. The big apps were CAD tools and financial analysis packages. One reason it was popular at customer sites was however that if you had one, you didn't need TWO honking big pieces of computer hardware at your desk. The same one could handle all that PC stuff (which you needed regularly) as well as the hefty stuff (which you needed constantly).
The real issues with x86 were political
So they introduced their own hardware, SPARC, and discontinued SunOS/x86.
They gave the Sun386i product line a nice lingering death, though, then more or less excised it from their corporate histories. That all the wood behind one arrow buzz-phrase, widely used inside Sun for a while, was all about getting rid of non-SPARC product lines. And stifling dissent.
Another factor was that the Sun386i products had a different -- and more Apple-influenced -- design approach. Maybe it was realistic to focus on higher margins for a while. But the level of internal censorchip it took to ignore everything the '386i stood for (and Sun itself once stood for)
We used Sun386i's for commodity trading workstations. They were fantastic. You could run multiple MS-DPS instances with all the MS-DOS applications. You could even use PC hardware with box DOS and SunOS simultaneously. All while running large trading apps in SunOSin Sunview or X11. (But you had to build your own X11.)
Adding a parallel printer interface to a Sun386i was a $50 card at Fry's. It cost at least $800 on any other Sun product at the time. Almost any ISA hardware could be made to work if you could
But the Sun386i was a workstation, not a PC.
Sure, I agree. My point was that by taking x86 as the strategic platform rather than SPARC they could have taken advantage of the economies of scale of x86, and thanks to the DOS compatibility they even had a window of opportunity to take on Microsoft on the desktop before MS got their act together with NT.
Of course, ultimately the x86 commodification of the workstation, low-end, and mid-range server markets would have forced them to reduce HW prices in ord
With one minor problem - it cost almost $8000 as I recall.
How long will it take corporate overlords until they finally realize that broad level censorship and trying to control the message are far more harmful than just becoming part of the discourse?
Apple begs to differ.
Sun apparently didn't do their job *to the very end* at various points.
1. x86 - they entered the market, but not quite (no desktops, no laptops, no low-cost servers, only big machines). You can run Solaris on x86 but not quite. You can even run it on a laptop and have NVidia accelerator running, but for most people it's still a dream, urban legend as they can't do it at home with their own hardware. Maybe they shouldn't enter x86 at all?
2. Java cross-platform myth. Write once - run anywhere... not quite. It's very very popular as "enterprise" solution, but most people don't use any Java desktop apps, applets were disaster and JavaFX... later about that!
3. Open source and their products. We all know Java is open source now (finally, and obviously with large amount of work done by RedHat!), but Solaris? Binary blobs must be included in any build to make it work. Incompatible with GPL libenses, and also not a BSD model - what was that all about? It was like: "yeah we want to be part of open source movement. but you can't fork our code too much".
4. Failure on building community. This IS a big deal. Linux has got great large community of users/developers/fans. Apple has got it's army of zombie fanboys. Sun tried to build community around OpenSolaris and failed. "Project Kenai", "Zembly" look like half-finished sites. Just compare it with Github (I know it's a bit different usage but hey). The only successful one is Netbeans.org IMHO, but still - could be more successful if they didn't require signing agreement before submitting patches. Hell, I love Netbeans but I won't send them my code so they can use it in closed-source Sun Studio.
5. Not allowing interested users to use their innovative products. I am a software developer. I write software using Linux. I wanted to try out JavaFX... and you know what? It doesn't run on Linux. I wanted to write widgets on desktop using cutting-edge JVM drag-from-firefox-to-desktop feature, and expected my browser not to crash. I finally wanted x64 Java plugin for years, and once it got here - most people already use OpenJDK.
6. Desktop Java. Swing could be most popular GUI toolkit today if it integrated nicely with Gnome desktop for years now, if Java could be distributed easily with Debian, and people wrote software for it. No, let's keep Java close till it becomes obsolete on desktop and release it then. Crazy.
7. Trying to be service provider. OK, sun's hardware is great. Service providers buy Sun's hardware, say data centers. Now, one day, Sun becomes services provider, direct competitor of people who buy hardware from this company. Isn't there a conflict of interests?
8. No one mainline software. Yeah, sun has Solaris. But also had Linux distro. Bought MySQL, but also had flirted with PostgreSQL, Apache derby. It obviously confuses people, and look at IBM: "Go run Linux and DB2 on our servers".
9. Bunch of outdated, obsolete software that no one use. Some basic software like shells that come with Solaris were totally out of date till recently. And they still run "innovative" projects that failed many years ago: Project Looking Glass as best example.
10. Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here? Maybe they should license chips for third-parties? Maybe they should build and push desktop/mobile versions? Maybe they should abandon it for PowerPC to provide better compatibility with IBM? I really don't know, but they did something wrong, and giving it's own customers alternative as AMD servers didn't help.
They did too much things wrong, and maybe too much things in general at the same time rather than concentrate on what brings them profit - their hardware.
2. Java cross-platform myth. Write once - run anywhere... not quite. It's very very popular as "enterprise" solution, but most people don't use any Java desktop apps, applets were disaster and JavaFX... later about that!
I think this one is interesting. They came out guns a blazin' about cross-platform in 1994. So many folks got burned, but now, with Java 5 and Java 6, it is remarkable. Probably not perfect but it's far far better than it was back then. The bitter taste people got sort of overwhelm
It sort of seems really really dated and just clueless to me that ZFS and dtrace were somehow supposed to light the world on fire and make it a Sun planet. What percentage of users even know or care what filesystem they are using? How ever small it is, it's probably too many as it is.
And the sad thing is that both DTrace and ZFS are amazing products. ZFS with it's snapshots and other features would work great not only in data centres, but also in cheap home backup boxes - an alternative to apple TimeMachine thing. DTrace is like a candy, amazing, powerful tracing framework that I'd love to see more widely used.
Sparc failure. Maybe not exactly a failure. I know it's really great processor family. It has got potential. It's fast, multi-core, modern. Probably made them loose lots of money recently. What went wrong here?
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
A fairly nice 16-core Core i7 motherboard/CPUs/RAM config will cost around $1000. Sure, you'll have to add disks, a case to put it in, etc., but those costs are essentially the same regardless of what CPU architecture is being used. And, you can get the Intel system from a variety of vendors (HP, Dell, etc.).
The SPARC version will cost closer to $4000 (tough to call, because you can't get the raw motherboard), and run at 1.4GHz instead of 2.66GHz.
Then there's virtualization, which Sun uses to claim SPARC is lower cost because it comes free while you must pay $4000+ for x86 virtualization on an equivalent system. One problem with this claim is that SPARC only allows you to virtualize Solaris, while x86 virtualization allows you to virtualize Windows, BSD, Linux, etc. The second problem is that there are many free hypervisors for x86 that are as good as the one included with Solaris...it's only the enterprise-class easy-to-manage ones that cost money.
One problem is that the very latest SPARC chips ("CoolThreads") are outperformed on a per-core basis by the much cheaper Intel Core i7.
The point of the coolthreads servers aren't to go core to core with other CPUs. The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores. The CoolThreads servers also the number of threads. A 4 socket Core i7 server only has 32 threads while a T5440 has 256.
The Core i7 is also not a server class processor, it is meant for the desktop and gaming market. It doesn't support ECC memory.
The Nehalem based Xeon processors will be coming out this year will support up to 8 cores 16 threads per socket.
That might be closer, but the Niagara line of processors are still quite different. I think the Nehalem Xeon processors will be more like Rock so it will be interesting to see head to head comparisons of those systems when they eventually come out.
But that's besides the point. Niagara based servers have been shipping for years and other than the Mac Pro workstation that came out recently, the Nehalem Xeon systems haven't started shipping yet.
The point of the coolthreads servers aren't to go core to core with other CPUs. The strength of those systems is the number of cores you can get in a single system. A T5440 supports 4 T2 Plus prcoessors which gives you 32 cores.
And even with the "32 cores", the Niagara was beaten out by cheaper x86 servers.
http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/cache/280124-0-0-0-121.html [hp.com]
Sun basically killed themselves by canceling the Sparc line. They never ramped the clocks on cores, and the multi-threaded model that they designed towards was a fringe case at best.
Sun basically killed themselves by canceling the Sparc line. They never ramped the clocks on cores, and the multi-threaded model that they designed towards was a fringe case at best.
Another way of seeing it, their volume*margin for SPARC was so low that they couldn't afford to keep up in the single-thread performance race with Intel, AMD and IBM. Short of completely getting rid of SPARC, cookie-cutter copying many simple and slow cores on a die was a cheap choice their budget did allow. And it does wel
Sun didn't cancel the SPARC line.
That article you link to is years old and is about a the first generation of Niagara processors, T1, sun has addressed some of the issues with the T1 in the T2 and T2 plus.
Sun's mistakes go back a ways. They explored display Postscript, and discarded it in favor of X11. While X11 was open source, display Postscript was much faster and easier to program in, and gave cleaner displays. But they then screwed up X11, proprietizing it and making it incompatible.
Sun's marketing plans have also failed miserably by refusing to admit that people wanted better versions of what already worked, rather than the "next big marketing plan". The switch to from SunOS to Solaris for the sun4m ar
It's the nature of large organizations. Brandybuck's law states that the collective intelligence of an organization is inversely proportional to its size. That applies to chess clubs, corporations, and governments. The larger the company, the dumber they are.
It's even been shown to be true via economic analysis. The top down control of a firm hinders the natural distribution of localized information. This affects all firms, but with small organizations it's just background noise. But above a certain size firms will become so bogged down in process that they cease to operate. Which is why large companies artificially divide themselves up into smaller semi-autonomous divisions. And why huge multinationals only exist only in an environment where government hands out special privileges and subsidies like candy. Leftists like to bitch about businesses running government, and the right about governments running businesses. But they're both the same thing, shielding businesses from the natural market mechanisms that would otherwise limit their size.
Yeah, it's sad that Sun is squashing openness, and sad that they can't see it's ultimately bad for them. But you can't expect much else from a corporation of their size.
Have you read Confederates in the Boardroom? It's about how decentralizing can make things more efficient.
Interview Tip #1: Don't B*tch about your previous company during an interview! Wait until you get the job first.
so somebody better post them here for posterity, and I guess that will be me.
End of an Icon
It's been quite a while since I've written anything in my blog. Having worked for the Corporate Development group at Sun for the past 3 1/2 years, I've had to be very careful about what I posted on a public blog. I felt it was better to be safe than sorry, so I've left it to the many other prolific bloggers at Sun to tell our story.
But with the recent announcement that Sun will become part of Oracle, I feel able for the first time to talk about how we got here. Not about the Oracle acquisition itself, but rather how we as a company came to the point where seeking an acquirer was the best way forward. Granted, 2009 is one of the most challenging years in decades and many companies are struggling, but when I joined Sun in 1997, we had the technology world by the tail and were poised to become as influential and lucrative as our more famous rivals (Microsoft, IBM, Intel, HP and even Oracle). So as excited as I am about becoming part of Oracle (there were many far worse options in my opinion), it still feels a little anti-climatic.
So as a sort of "post mortem" on the company, I'd like to examine where I think Sun really missed its opportunities. Some things are only obvious in hind sight, but many of these things are things I've spent my career at Sun advocating and attempting to drive forward. Maybe this is a bit of sour grapes on my part, but mostly this is just an attempt to say externally some of what I've been saying internally at Sun for most of my tenure, now that our future as a Corporation is moving out of our hands.
I will call this my "Top 10 Reasons Sun is Setting". In typical Top 10 fashion, I will start with the #10 Reason Sun is Setting and work my way up to the #1 reason. I know there is a lot of opinion on this topic out there, so feel free to comment as you see fit. I think we may all find this cathartic.
Posted on: Apr 23, 2009
Posted by: dbaigent
Category: Sun
Don't blame employees. Just look back at the Sun very recent history. December 2008 : Southeastern Asset Management enter the board. April 20, Southeastern Asset Management sells all its stocks : http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN2150514720090421?rpc=44 [reuters.com].
Think about that.
Posted by Dominique on April 23, 2009 at 09:36 AM PDT #
I have a question for you Sir
When you hear that Oracle wants to make 15% profit in the first year, are you embarressed? I mean you (and the other managers) could have cut all those useless projects that Oracle will cut now years ago, couln't you? Does it really need Larry Ellison to make a company with 13bn revenue and 55% gross margin profitable?
Posted by Mista on April 23, 2009 at 10:36 AM PDT #
I don't blame employees - at least not the rank-and-file. Sun is full of great, dedicated, energetic people who have done some incredible things with technology. Better than our rivals. My comments will be more on missed opportunities and poor strategies, not on the failure of any specific employees.
Posted by dbaigent on April 23, 2009 at 11:43 AM PDT #
No, I am not embarrassed by the idea that Oracle might turn a profit when Sun alone could not. It's easy to turn a profit by slashing jobs. Sun has been trying to turn a profit through increasing revenues, which is much harder.
Posted by dbaigent on April 23, 2009 at 11:50 AM PDT #
Increase revenue? With what?
- with Looking Glass? Darkstar? Wonderland?
- with a webserver?
- with support fees of 1000$/socket for an application server or a database while direct competitors charge at least 20x that much?
- with cutting prices for products (Openstorage or Niagara) ?
Posted by Mista on April 23, 2009 at 12:31 PM PDT #
The strategy for increased revenue depended on increasing the attach rate for existing products by leveraging communities of customers who
We failed to understand the x86 Market
It often gets mentioned by the press and certain analysts that Sun didn't get into the x86 market soon enough, or strong enough, or didn't drop SPARC when it should have, or some other such criticism. I believe Sun entered the x86 market when it had to (our first foray into the market was the oft-lamented LX50 server back in 2002) and has done a decent job (with the help of Andy Bechtolsheim) at differentiating our offerings while maintaining a competitive price (although margins are another matter altogether).
The problem is we didn't understand the x86 market. We approached the market in the only way we knew how - as an extension of our high-end, low-volume, high-value approach to network computing. And not just in terms of product features and capabilities, but in terms of sales, partnerships, channel programs and supply chain management. We've been improving over the years, but we still have a channel strategy that leverages our traditional partners and programs and does not effectively take our volume products to volume customers.
Our other mistake was to allow our strategy for proliferating Solaris on x86 to overshadow our need to drive volume for our x86 business. Although Sun has been offering Linux on our x86 systems since 2003 and has recently entered into OEM agreements with both Microsoft and VMWare, our focus as a company has been exclusively on Solaris. It is the only OS we pre-install on our hardware. The key to gaining momentum in the channel is to provide the environments that customers want, which for x86 is still predominantly Linux and Windows. We needed to focus on Solaris, but in the area of ISV recruitment and creating solutions that uniquely leverage Solaris and add value to customers, thereby creating demand. By failing to promote other OS offerings and solutions within the channel, we became a niche player in their mind and ultimately became an after thought in their sales to end users. Volume drives the channel, the channel drives volume and volume is the only way to make money in the x86 market.
We've been getting smarter about this lately and over time we would have eventually gotten this right. And we've made progress on the Solaris side, so overall this was not going to bankrupt the company. But it has stunted one of the key growth markets for us and helped to keep us in the "expensive, proprietary system" box that our competitors painted for us, so it has contributed to our lackluster stock performance. For this and other reasons, it is my #10 Reason for Sun to be Setting.
Posted on: Apr 24, 2009
Posted by: dbaigent
Category: Sun
No, the LX50 was not the first. Sun386i was - yes, off your main point here, but it's nice to know your past.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun386i [wikipedia.org]
Posted by RNC on April 24, 2009 at 09:34 AM PDT #
You're right RNC. Thanks for keeping me honest.
Posted by dbaigent on April 24, 2009 at 10:14 AM PDT #
Can you comment a bit, how x86 affected your SPARC sales? Did you loose a lot of SPARC64 or Niagara customers because of your x64 offerings?
Posted by Dennis on April 25, 2009 at 01:10 AM PDT #
There have clearly been circumstances where a customer who would otherwise have purchased a SPARC-based system instead chose to buy an x64-based system, but that was rarely because Sun offered one. In other words, it was rare for Sun to "lose" a SPARC-based system sale because of our own x64 offerings. More often, a customer would show a preference for x64 (for real or imagined benefits of that system architecture) and by having an x64-based offering, Sun could keep that customer. The problem in my mind was that our x64 strategy prevented us from truly leveraging x64 to gain new customers, nit that it cost us any existing customers.
Posted by dbaigent on April 25, 2009 at 05:43 PM PDT #
I had a 386i, it was 20 grand list, but I bought it for 500 quid. It cam
Messing with the Java Brand
Much has been said and will be said about how Sun "blew it" with Java - mostly around the lack of contribution by the technology to Sun's bottom line. But this #9 reason for the Setting Sun is not so much about lack of Java revenue (that's actually a rather complicated story), but rather about the numerous attempts by well-meaning marketing folks at Sun to try exploit the value of the Java brand itself and how that ultimately reduced the very value they tried to exploit. To some degree, this is as much about the lack of value in the Sun brand (at least outside our loyal customer base) as it is about Java. After all, if we had sufficient value in the Sun brand there would be no need to try to leverage the Java brand in other areas. But I believe our attempts to leverage the hard-fought value of the Java brand ultimately back-fired, diminishing both the Sun brand and the Java brand.
In the earlier days of Java, the technology was managed by an independent "operating company" called JavaSoft, with its own marketing, sales, products and brand management. There were numerous discussions and debates within JavaSoft about the use of the Java brand and for the most part there was a strong focus on associating the brand with the promise of the technology - that old idea of "write once, run anywhere". There were several brand campaigns around Java - there was the concept of "Java Compatible" for licensees of the technology, "100% Pure Java" for application providers, "Java Powered" for devices, etc. - some of which were very successful, others were branding duds. But there was always a careful consideration of the term "Java" and how we would allow it to be used - both internally and externally.
Fast forward to around 2003 and Sun is struggling to regain its former dot-com glory. We're coming off the painful Netscape-AOL alliance (more on that later) and we're struggling to find a way to express our remarkably robust software assets through a brand. We'd abandoned the confused "iPlanet" brand (which suffered from under-promotion and a "who's your daddy" syndrome between Sun and AOL) and were struggling with the equally confusing and under-promoted "Sun ONE" brand. We were also in one of our many post-dot-com-bubble austerity programs, so heavy investment in any brand was not likely to get funded. I can only assume that the branding discussion (which I was not part of) went something like this:
What's the answer to our branding problem? Java! It's already one of the most recognizable brands in the world and we own it outright. Confused about what Sun ONE Application Server is? Call it the Java Application Server and problem solved! Well, wait - not quite. We can't really call it Java Application Server - that's already an industry standard term for Java EE implementations like IBM's Websphere and BEA's Weblogic and we don't want to further promote them. So let's call it Sun Java Application Server! Wait - hold on. That's likely to get confused with Sun's Java Application Server, which isn't very "brandy" and would be like saying "Sun's Operating System" for Solaris. Not good. Okay - how about Sun Java System Application Server! Yeah! That means it's not just an Application Server, but it is part of a system! Great! All our software is part of a "system"! Now we have a convention for all our software assets! The Sun Java System (fill in your product function here)!
This lead to a proliferation of product names like Sun Java System Access Manager, Sun Java System Identity Manager, Sun Java System Directory Proxy Server, Sun Java System Web Proxy Server and on and on. The problem was not only was this a messy and cumbersome branding campaign, it was diluting the Java brand both within it's own convoluted convention and the broader technology market. Did Sun Java System Web Proxy Server have any Java in it at all? Did it manage the proxies of a Java web server or any web server? And if Sun was not going to use the Java brand to describe Java technologies, why would anyone els
Fumbling Jini
Just an aside...
Before I go any further, let me just admit up front that I have a specific software bias in my perspective. Most bean-counter analysts will rightly say that the primary reason for Sun to be setting is that we didn't keep our stock price up and that we could have through a variety of financial measures, most notably more lay-offs. But in my opinion, the ability to keep the stock price up is directly related to how a company exploits all its market advantages over time, and I believe that the primary failures for Sun are in the areas of exploiting its software assets, not in a lack of aggressive job cuts.
Building to the "Next Big Thing"
When I joined Sun in January of 1997, Java technology had already transformed Sun from a technical workstation and server company into a software powerhouse. The 1997 JavaONE conference was the largest software developer conference ever held at the time. And Sun was charting an aggressive course for the technology, introducing Java Beans, JDBC, Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), PersonalJava, EmbeddedJava, JavaCard, Enterprise Java Beans, Java Naming and Directory Interfaces, and on and on. And we quietly introduced something called Remote Method Invocation, or RMI. Interestingly, RMI, (along with another interface called Java Native Interface, or JNI), was one of the two aspects of Java 1.1 that Microsoft found so threatening that they refused to implement them in their Java 1.1.4 runtime, causing Sun to sue Microsoft over breach of contract.
RMI is actually a relatively innocuous technology that allows the Java software components (called "objects") in one Java environment (called a "virtual machine", or VM) to talk to Java objects running in another VM. This type of process enables something called "distributed computing", a concept that had been around for years in various forms (some of the more common ones were Common Object Request Broker Architecture, or CORBA, and Microsoft's own Component Object Model Plus, or COM+). Distributed computing enabled software systems to become distributed around a network and still cooperate in solving a given compute task. RMI introduced a Java-specific way to accomplish this and it turns out that by having the same type of objects on both sides of a distributed computing model, the whole process became much simpler and more powerful (CORBA and COM+ allowed objects of different types, like Visual Basic and COBOL, to talk to one another and required a complex set of request brokers and foreknowledge of the application in order to work). What was needed was some form of dynamic finding service where Java objects could register themselves and, using Java-specific capabilities like Reflection and Introspection, determine how to interact with one another at run-time.
Jini Jumps out of the Wrong Bottle
In 1998, Sun introduced something we called Jini. According to and interview with Bill Joy in Wired Magazine, "The Net made it possible. Java made it doable. Jini might just make it happen". What was "it"? It was the idea that the Network really could become the Computer, making Sun's long quoted catch phrase a reality. It was the idea that if every computing device in a network could run Java and RMI, then creating networks of applications that could easily describe themselves, broadcast their capabilities to the network and join up with other devices to create distributed compute networks would be greatly simplified. And by doing it all in Java, it could be programmatic and automated. Jini was the architecture that made the value of Java running everywhere leveragable. And don't forget that Bill Joy was Sun's resident genius and a strong proponent of both the idea of Jini and its development.
So what happened? How could a technology that was the brain child of Sun's resident genius and part of what Microsoft considered to be such a threat end up as a barely noticed project run by Apache? One obvious answer is that, like so many Sun products and technologies, it was a solution
Air is water with holes in it.


text:
About us
Top Real Estate Agents in Chennai, Tamil Nadu - JS Consultants
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JS CONSULTANTS grew into a trustworthy company with an impeccable record of deliverance. JS CONSULTANTS imparts services related to the sale purchase of properties, documentation, renting and leasing, investment advisory services, property valuation etc. JS CONSULTANTS�s expertise is unchallenged towards complete customer Satisfaction. JS CONSULTANTS has an impeccable record of performance in Indian States; JS CONSULTANTS�s vision of tomorrow is exhilarating. the group is vigilant towards the vibrant changes and modernization. �
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The information displayed in sichermove.com about the properties comprises a property advertisement only. Sichermove.com makes no guaranty or warranty as to the accuracy or entirety of the advertisement or any linked or associated information, and sichermove.com has no control over the content. This property advertisement does not constitute Property particulars. The information is provided and maintained by " JOSEPH WASHINGTON " . Please contact the owner or selling agent or developer directly to obtain any information which may be available.Sichermove.com has no liability for the information displayed. Sichermove.com is not liable or responsible for the delay or any other complication in the business transactions for the Real Estate Agents registered with the Sichermove.com.
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text:
Blog entry Groups - The Why, How And Where
One of the most exciting features of the new Freerice is the ability to create a group. By creating a group, not only will you officially be able to claim that you have groupies, you will also be able to track the amount of rice that you and your group have raised.
Groups can be open or by invitation only. Any player on Freerice can join open groups, whereas the "Invite Only" groups are closed and players are only able to join if they have been sent an invitation. You can send an invite through Facebook, or by sharing the invitation link.
To create a group:
- Sign up for a Freerice account and log in
- Select "Groups"/"Create Group" in the top navigation area
- Select "Invite your Facebook Friends" if it is a closed group to allow your friends to join
- Choose a group name (note: this cannot be changed later on)
- Add a picture to represent your group (note: this cannot be changed later on. Maximum of 50x50px)
- Add a description
- Adding an external url is optional
- Choose between "Open" and "Invite Only"
- Choose a category, several categories or select "All Categories"
- Select "Create"
And that's all there is to it.
Let the race begin!
You can keep track of your group's total by visiting your "My Groups"
Other ways to use groups? Compare your group to others, hold a school tournament with each classroom creating its own group, find like-minded individuals, promote your brand/cause/idea, play with other subject specialists, etc.
How Do I Get A Photo In My File??
To publish a photo to your group, simply go to your group profile (you can find a list of your created and joined groups, when logged in, on http://freerice.com/groups/my My Groups List) and click "edit". Then
1. Click the "upload" button next to "Picture" field
2. Browse to where the image file is stored on your computer
3. Ensure the file name does not include any unusual characters
4. Either double click the file or click "Open"
5. Click "save" at the bottom of the Freerice page, or continue editing the page
To invite friends to join your group, you simply need to share you group profile link with them. Once they've registered and logged into Freerice, they will see a "Join" option on your group profile.
omg i agree HOW DO I UPLOAD A PIC PLEASEEEE HELP MEEEEE!!!!!!!!
how do i invite someone to my group
How do o upload a picture for my group?
help me put a picture on
help me how do u put a picture on and join my groups redwings and cookiemonzters
Do you like pokemon? Are you registered for freerice? Then join PLAH (Pokemon Lovers Against Hunger)
-Dakota B., Leader of PLAH
How do you make a picture for yourself?!?!?!?!?!?!
how do you publish a picture for yourself? not for a group. PLEASE JOIN MY GROUP! it is called: Make a Difference!!
How do you put a picture on your own profile? not a group. p.s- PLEASE JOIN MY GROUP: Make a Difference!!
how do you make a picture for youreself
How do you change your own picture, for yourself?
SURE!!! I'm a new joiner to freerice, and I'd like to join some groups:):):):)
Please join my group, United. I aim to make a change. Won't you join me?
@MrBaseballWorld - to upload an image when you create a group, click on the button "Upload" next to the field for Picture. You will be given the chance to browse your computer and select your image.
Type in your Group Name into the Group Name field, and enter the other details for your group.
Then click "Create" at the bottom of the page, and away you go!
Can't figure out how to upload ae picture or I would start a group :(
So much fun to help people who really need it! :-)
Happy over the developments...
Wow this tottaly awesome and a lot better than the old Freerice. I cant stop donating rice!!!!
I love this website! It makes me and my brother feel good that by doing something small, we help out big. :)
Great news Goodnews! :)
This new feature of freerice is actually pretty cool.
I really like the idea of a school tournament. If a bunch of teachers got together and did that, a lot of rice could be donated, even from just one school.
my group is in first place today
This is so great! Well done!
Recent FAQs
Cada vez que respondas incorrectamente,...
Has clic en Temas,...
Pues de muchas maneras y aquí te listamos...
Sí. El arroz que dones beneficiará a la...
Programa Mundial de Alimentos
El Programa Mundial de Alimentos mantiene y apoya a Freerice.
Más información: WFP.org/es
|El PMA es financiado completamente por donaciones voluntarias


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First Year Career Awareness Program
The First Year Career Awareness Program (FY CAP)
In the summer before they enroll at Washington College, first-year students complete Focus 2, a strengths and skills self-assessment. At New Student Orientation, they meet in groups with the center for Career Development staff to learn about the CAP's objectives and expectations. They can also meet with Career Development staff to discuss their individual Focus 2 results. Later in the year, there is a Career Development presentation for first-year students to further explore career awareness. An important outcome of the CAP is for students to produce a draft resume while developing a professional online profile.
Link to First Year Programs & Orientation
First Year Student Focus 2 Requirement
Steps To Complete Focus 2 Survey
- Click the Focus 2 box at the top right of the page.
- Click on "New User Click Here To Get Started."
- Use shoremen as your access code.
- Use your Washington College email or Net ID (Net ID example: jsmith2) as your username.
- Create a unique password and confirm that.
- Then complete the 5-part Self-Assessment under "Learn Something about Yourself."
- The Self-Assessment battery consists of 5 mini-assessments (Work Interest, Personality, Skills, Values and Leisure). This is the requirement for all new students and total completion time is approximately 10-12 minutes.
- You can complete more sections or modules on this page, if you wish.
- Once completed, make sure and submit/save your results. Results can also be downloaded and/or printed.
- Once logged out, existing users can log back in at any time to manage accounts, review results, re-take assessments and use other modules.
Please contact the Center for Career Development at 410-778-7890 with any questions
- Start the First Year Career Awareness Program (FY CAP)
- Complete Focus 2 Interest/Skills Assessment
- Meet with Career Center staff
- Develop your online profile and resume


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School News
Books donated to Mount Vernon Elementary School library
- Details
- Category: School News
- Published on 11 May 2013
- Written by Mount Vernon Optic-Herald
Peter Mayhew, best known for playing Chewbacca in the Star Wars franchise, recently donated copies of his books, Growing Up Giant and My Favorite Giant to the Mount Vernon Elementary School. Payton Ford and Caden Rogers of Mount Vernon were invited to attend a news interview with Mr. Mayhew for a Dallas station. For more information, see the May 9 edition of the Mount Vernon Optic-Herald.


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The Owen County Parks & Recreation youth competitive football teams recently completed games against Pendleton County and Grant County. The Mighty Pro and Power House teams both came away victorious against both rivals, while the Midget team suffered losses in both of their contests. The following is a recap of the action:
Midget Division
Pendleton Co. – 27
Owen County – 0
The Panthers jumped on the young Rebels from the opening play and never looked back to capture the victory.
Grant Blue – 33
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