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Hotspots Analytics is the most advanced analytics plugin for WordPress websites including heatmaps, user activity and custom event tracking. It can be a great compliment to Google Analytics and provides support for responsive web design and touchscreen devices.
The key features of the plugin are:
- Heatmaps of mouse clicks and touch screen taps overlayed on your webpage (You can launch the heatmap for a page from wp-admin or simply add ?drawHeatmap=true to the URL)
- Different heatmaps are drawn to cater for responsive web design
- Each page on your website has it's own heatmap
- Track user activity including page views, AJAX actions, mouse clicks, touchscreen taps and custom JavaScript events
- It's free and there's no sign up or registration required!
- All data is stored on your own WordPress database
- All data is viewed in your WordPress admin. No need to go to a third party website.
- To be able to view the heatmaps, your WordPress theme must be HTML5 compliant and you need to use an Internet browser which supports HTML5 canvas.
Here's a demo in debug mode: http://danielpowney.com/hotspots-analytics?drawHeatmap=true
The plugin should not be used where performance is critical as an additional server request is made for each mouse click, touch screen tap, AJAX action, page view and custom event.
Github Repo: https://github.com/danielpowney/hotspots-analytics
There are two types of heatmaps, a confetti heatmap with spots and heatmap.js. Each heatmap shows the density heat of mouse clicks and or touch screen taps from green which is cool to red which is hot. Heatmap.js is an open source JavaScript library for drawing heatmaps using HTML5 canvas.
Heatmaps can be launched from the WordPress admin plugin page by clicking on the "View Heatmap" button or by adding the query string parameter drawHeatmap=true to your website URL ( i.e. http://danielpowney.com?drawHeatmap=true). There are different heatmaps for each page, page widht, browser, operating system and device to cater for responsive web design and for filtering.
When the heatmap is displayed, a HTML5 canvas drawing is overlayed on the website. An additional information panel is also provided at the bottom right of the screen which provides the current page width, browser, device etc… If you resize the page width, a different heatmap will be displayed. A width allowance setting can be changed to allow for some overlap in page widths.
User Activity
A comprehensive summary of all user activity on your website can be viewed including a sequence list of mouse clicks, touch screen taps, page views, AJAX actions and custom defined events. Additional information is provided such as time elapsed since previous event and the individual mouse clicks and or touch screen taps can viewed overlayed on the web page to show you exactly what was clicked or tapped.
There are various reports which provide statistics and graphs of all user activity on your website. Each report can be filtered for different devices, browsers, operating systems, page widths and within a period of time (today, yesterday, last week, last 30 days or last 60 days). The following reports are available:
- Event comparison line graph which compares selected events over time
- Event line graph which details events over time
- Event statistics table which shows the total counts, averages per user and averages per page for all event types
- Events total bar graph which shows the total counts of events
Custom Events
Custom events can be added for mouse clicks, touch screen taps or form submits on any HTML element selected using a jQuery selector. Alternatively you can use JavaScript to save custom events using the saveEvent function of the global hotspots object
i.e. hotspots.saveEvent('my_event','My description', 'My misc data');
- Download the plugin and put it in the WordPress plugins directory
- Activate the plugin through the Plugins page in WordPress
- Go to the Hotspots Analytics plugin page
- Why can't I see the heatmap when adding URL query parameter drawHeatmap=true.
You cannot view the heatmaps if your theme is not HTML5 compliant and you need to use an Internet browser which supports HTML5 canvas. Most modern browsers support HTML5 canvas now. Your theme also needs to be HTML5 compliant. Make sure the Enable drawing heatmap option is checked on in the General options tab. An information panel should be displayed at the bottom right overlayed on your website when the heatmap is displayed. Try resizing your page widths as per the page widths in the heatmaps table in the plugin page.
- I just updated the plugin and it does not seem to be working
- Does the plugin impact performance?
The free plugin may have a small impact on your website performance as an additional server request is made for each mouse click, touch screen tap, AJAX action, page view and custom event. For websites with a low usage, this performance impact is negligable to the user. However you can purchase two plugins which allow you to direct all user activity events to be saved on a remote host and database to reduce load on your server. For more information, visit http://danielpowney.com/downloads/hotspots-analytics-remote-bundle/
- Can I make the plugin only work on certain pages?
Yes. There are settings to setup URL filters for enabling or disabling saving events on different pages.
- Can I clear all of the data?
Yes, there is an option to clear all data from the database
- Why aren't all of my mouse clicks or touchscreen taps being saved?
- Why is the page width not the same as when I view the heatmap via the WordPress admin
Sometimes the browser adds a vertical scrollbar which is subtracted from the page width. E.g. 17px for Firefox. So if you wanted to view 1600px and when viewing the hea map the expanded browser window is 1583px with a vertical scrollbar of 17px, change the width allowance option in the heatmap settings tab to allow the mouse clicks and touchscreen taps to be displayed for 17px difference.
- Do I have to resize the window to the exact page width?
No. There is an setting called width allowance which allows up to 20 pixels each side of your target page width to display the heatmap. This amount can be changed and is defaulted to 6 pixels.
- How do I add a custom event?
You will need to understand jQuery selectors first here: http://api.jquery.com/category/selectors/. You can bind a mouse click, touchscreen tap, or form submit event to any HTML elements on the pahe by using jQuery selectors.
Contributors & Developers
"Hotspots Analytics" is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
ContributorsTranslate "Hotspots Analytics" into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
4.0.12 (16/07/2016)
- Tweak: Added filters to ignore custom URL query parameters and also to modify the normalized URL
- Bug: Fixed activation error in dbdelta when creating indexes
4.0.11 (05/04/2016)
- Bug: Fixed extra space in relative root path when loading admin assets which is causing some issues
- Bug: Removed usage of mysql_real_escape_string() in admin tables
4.0.10 (07/07/2015)
- Bug: Fixed unable to create custom events db table due to stray comma in SQL statement
4.0.9 (15/06/2015)
- Removed modernizer check in JS
- Optimized db index performance
- Make jQuery UI calls protocol agnostic
4.0.8 (11/04/2014)
- Replaced deprecated jQuery live with on
4.0.7 (25/01/2014)
- Added event_type filters to users table
4.0.6 (25/01/2014)
- Fixed report bug with query filters
4.0.5 (22/01/2014)
- Fixed page width retrieve events bug
4.0.4 (22/01/2014)
- Improved reports
- Added event types as a query filter
4.0.3 (14/01/2014)
- Improved and refactored calls to data services
- Removed remote settings view
4.0.2 (12/01/2014)
- Fixed plugin prefix bug
4.0.1 (11/01/2014)
- Fixed custom event bug for binding form submits
4.0 (08/01/2014)
- Major release
- Refactored code to use a new data model. Old data will not be migrated to the new data model.
- Removed device pixel ratio and zoom level logic due to compatibility issues
- Improved admin UI
- Added more reports
- Added function to manually create custom events in JavaScript
- Added remote client settings


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subset: commoncrawl


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This tour explores connections and "dialogues" between modern and contemporary works of art on view in the reinstalled East Building. Participants will look closely at selected works and have an opportunity to engage in open-ended discussion to discover multiple levels of meaning in modern paintings and sculpture.
Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday at 2:30 p.m.


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Kohler Co. Unveiled as Principal Partner of Manchester United
Kohler will be the first shirt sleeve partner for both Manchester United men's and women's teams
MANCHESTER, ENGLAND--(Business Wire / Korea Newswire)--(NYSE: MANU) Manchester United and Kohler, a global lifestyle brand headquartered in Kohler, Wisconsin-USA, have agreed to a multi-year global partnership. The KOHLER brand logo will feature on the sleeve of the most iconic and best selling club shirt, for both the men's and women's teams. The partnership also includes joint participation on game day activities, innovative improvements to club facilities, global sustainability and social responsibility projects and other partner collaborations with Manchester United fans and Kohler customers and associates.
Kohler Co. is a leader in the design and innovation of kitchen and bath products and one of the largest manufacturers of power systems in the world. Founded in 1873, the two organisations have been in existence for over 140 years, sharing a long history steeped in tradition, excellence and innovation, as well as a common vision to make a positive impact on the world.
Manchester United and Kohler will celebrate the partnership with United fans around the world on 19th July when the new 2018/19 home shirt, to be unveiled next week, is worn for the first time by the men's team in the opening fixture of its Tour 2018 against Club America in Phoenix, Arizona.
Manchester United's Group Managing Director, Richard Arnold comments:
"It is a pleasure to welcome Kohler to the Manchester United family as a principal partner and our first shirt sleeve sponsor for both the men's and women's teams. Our shirt is much more than what we wear, it embodies the passion of our fans and their allegiance to the club."
"Kohler is known around the world not only for its cutting-edge design and luxury products but also a genuine commitment to stewardship and sustainability and is an exciting addition to our family of commercial partners."
David Kohler, President and CEO of Kohler Co. comments:
"Our partnership with Manchester United provides new opportunities to showcase the quality of Kohler products and services with passionate fans of the most far-reaching and revered sports team on the planet. We are excited to help build our global brand among people who align themselves and their lifestyles, with leading-edge innovation and a desire to make the world a better place."
"An essential component of the relationship is our support of the new professional women's team, and we look forward to their debut and our ongoing support. Manchester United embodies sustained excellence in everything they do and our shared values are a perfect match as we expand our fast-growing international presence into new regions with purpose and a meaningful presence."
About Manchester United
Manchester United is one of the most popular and successful sports teams in the world, playing one of the most popular spectator sports on Earth. Through our 140-year heritage we have won 66 trophies, enabling us to develop the world's leading sports brand and a global community of 659 million followers. Our large, passionate community provides Manchester United with a worldwide platform to generate significant revenue from multiple sources, including sponsorship, merchandising, product licensing, new media & mobile, broadcasting and match day.
About Kohler Co.
Founded in 1873 and headquartered in Kohler, Wisconsin, Kohler Co. is one of America's oldest and largest privately held companies comprised of nearly 37,000 associates. With more than 50 manufacturing locations worldwide, Kohler is a global leader in the design, innovation and manufacture of kitchen and bath products; engines and power systems; luxury cabinetry and tile; and owner/operator of two of the world's finest five-star hospitality and golf resort destinations in Kohler, Wisconsin, and St. Andrews, Scotland. Kohler's Whistling Straits golf course will host the 2020 Ryder Cup. For more details, please visit www.KohlerUnited.com
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180712005392/en
Website: https://www.manutd.com/
Manchester United
Kate Lowe
+44 (0) 161 868 8427
Kohler Co.
Stephen Maliszewski
This is a news release distributed by Korea Newswire on behalf of this company.


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Desert aquaponics
May 13, 2013Jabber Al Mazroui peers over the edge of a massive cylinder full of tea-brown water and hundreds of tilapia fish.The 55-year-old entrepreneur manages one of the world's largest aquaponics farms.
The facility relies on a relatively new agricultural method that uses the water in which fish are bred to provide irrigation and nutrition to a wide array of plants. This process saves a lot of water – making it especially relevant in arid regions like the United Arab Emitates where Al Mazroui's 4,000 square meter farm is based.
His manmade oasis is located off of a quiet desert road about 20 minutes from Abu Dhabi's city center. Al Mazroui developed the site just last year, but he has already begun to reap the fruits of his labor.
Fruit and fish
He proudly points to the wide variety of produce that's grown inside the facility: "We even have watermelon here. It's almost ripe, but not quite yet. Otherwise we could have tried some."
Al Mazroui also grows broccoli, lettuce, aubergine, cabbage and cucumber and he is even experimenting with a papaya tree.
"This system can produce about 1,200 lettuce heads per day," he says. "As for tomatoes, at the moment we have only one system working out of four, and still we are harvesting between 180-220 kilograms everyday."
The vegetables are sold in big supermarkets across Abu Dhabi, and Al Mazroui says some five-star restaurants have approached him about buying produce from his aquaponics farm too. The crops are lush and Al Mazroui proudly proclaims them to be all-natural and pesticide-free.
What makes this system even more remarkable is the fact that it's fully self-contained. After the water becomes too dirty for the fish, it's moved on and broken down. The plants act as a natural filter for the water, while at the same time extracting the nutrients they need. At the end of it all, clean water moves back to the fish tanks to complete the cycle.
Looking for alternatives
When asked why he became interested in aquaponics, Al Mazroui says it's because he "never liked chemical-based agriculture and just started looking for alternatives."
It takes some prodding to get the rest of the story, but the small man, dressed all in white, admits that his interest in supplying sustainably-grown food did not take root during his formal schooling.
"In my youth I finished seventh grade and stopped studying, believe it or not," Al Mazroui says with a smile spreading above his long white beard. "I'm proud of what I've been able to achieve, studying on my own, learning a lot of things."
"Sometimes I go to the university and they call me Doctor Jabber and I say no, no stop there! I'm not a doctor of anything!" he adds with a chuckle.
Al-Mazroui sees himself more as an entrepreneur, than a scientist. But, his hunch about the potential of aquaponics is supported by experts in the region.
Minimising environmental impact
Jean Yves Mervel is a professor of aquaculture at UAEU College of Food and Agriculture in the United Arab Emirates. He believes that the impact of aquaponics on the environment is very minimal.
"There are no chemicals, no artificial fertilization, and you are re-using the water and re-using the fish waste," he told DW.
Mervel specializes in agricultural solutions in desert areas. He says that aquaponics may offer an environmentally-sound source of food for a place like Abu Dhabi which currently imports nearly 90% of its food produce.
"We are using the waste of one system to produce the other one, and I think it's a win-win situation, where we have a very reduced problem with pollution," he says.
But, while aquaponics may seem to offer a fool-proof, seemingly never-ending, food source, Mervel warns that success on a large-scale has yet to be seen.
"I think there is no real very, very large system yet," he says. "There are some small systems, but it's more like they are run as a hobby, rather than the industrial production like we see in agriculture."
"Another issue here is that a lot of traditional farmers already have their tractors and other equipment to produce vegetables in soil. They don't want to change to a new system where they have to reinvest in infrastructure."
"I think the traditional agriculture is slowing down the development of this activity," Mervel says.
Potential for the Gulf
Still, Mervel believes that if a shift to aquaponics does occur, it will most likely begin in a place like the United Arab Emirates, which doesn't have much of a traditional farming industry already in place.
Back on his farm, Jabber Al Mazroui says he truly believes that aquaponics facilities like his are the future of agriculture for his country.
"You can use this system anywhere in the world," he says. "You can use it in the desert, you can use it in the most severe areas of the world, because you are re-using the water. And, you are producing fish and plants together."
Al Mazroui hopes farms like his will develop at the same speed as the business center of Abu Dhabi, which, at the moment at least, seems to be sprouting more skyscrapers than leafy greens.


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Choosing the right blog software for your new blog requires that you ask yourself some questions and make a list of all of the features and tools you need as well as your budget. Once you have this information written down you will be prepared to start shopping for blog software. However, keep in mind the following seven tips for choosing the best software for you.
Tip #1 Ping Updates
These allow you to update your blog and are very important in blog software. Make sure the blog software you are interested in provides automatic ping updates.
Tip #2 Comments
Whatever blog software you choose, you'll want to make sure that it has an area for comments from visitors. This will help you understand what is successful in your blog and what is not, as well as guide you in future blogs. This is a really great tool and should be part of your blog software.
Tip #3 Trackback
If you are discussing your blog on another blog, or simply adding information to another blog, trackback will allow you to update this information. This is a little confusing, but trackback allows you to talk on your blog about information on another blog and ping the writer of the other blog to let them know what is going on. Trackback is certainly a feature you want in your blog software.
Tip #4 Pingback
Pingback is similar to trackback, but it just sends a URL to the other blog to let them know you are talking about their blog on your blog. This is not used as much as trackback, but you will want a blog software that has at least one of these two functions.
Tip #5 Web-based
The point of a blog is you can post information instantly online, so you want your blog software to be similar to a word processor and web based without a shadow of a doubt.
Tip #6 Archiving
You want a blog software that supports archiving, and most of them do. The reason for this is you will want to save all of your past blogs by the date they were published and archiving allows you to do that.
Tip #7 Categorize
Another great tool you will want in your blog software is the ability to categorize. You want to keep your blogs organized and in categories, if you have them, so this option is really a great one for most bloggers.
There are lots of types of blog software available. You just need to do the research and compare what you find with what you need and then… start blogging!
About the author:
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Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that's it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we'd be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger's potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger's potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.
Then there's the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don't constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that's as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn't work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn't both lethal and easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don't do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I'm looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don't carry it because I'm afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn't limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation … and that's why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
Reposted from JPFO
Enjoy more high-quality content at JPFO


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Bloglines is Back(ish)
November 9th, 2010 Brian HerzogAfter it was announced in September that Bloglines was shutting down (although Chris knew better), I sadly and reluctantly started testing replacements. So you'd think that the recent announcement that Bloglines will continue after all would send me tearing back, right?
The answer, actually, is no - and I think there's a lesson in there for libraries.
When Ask.com announced they were ending Bloglines, that's what they said - service will be terminated. They didn't say they were looking to spin it off, or really give its users any obvious signs of hope. The deadline extensions implied they were exploring ways to continue the service, but my feeds were too important to me to sit around and hope.
After evaluating a few alternatives, I switched to Netvibes. And now that I've invested a month tweaking it and getting comfortable with it, the idea of switching again - even back to something "familiar" - is just not appealing and I'm not going to do it.
I say "familiar" after reading about the future plan for Bloglines - fewer features and more ads. To me, this indicates a shift in focus, from "user as customer" to "user as product" (meaning, "what's good for me" versus "what's good for them") - which gives me zero incentive to use it anymore*.
So, I think the moral of the story also applies to libraries:
- If you have something successful (like a storytime, newspaper column, podcast, Sunday hours**, book group, etc.) that has to be temporarily interrupted, make sure people know they can count on it coming back
- Don't be gone too long, because in the meantime people will find alternatives and might not be there when you're ready to welcome them back (communicating reminders and updates is a good idea)
- Don't open up room for doubt - say what's going to happen, and then do it. If anything changes, let people know (again, communication is key). Once trust is lost it's tough to recover, and it's far easier to keep supporters than it is to win them back
- And when you do come back, make sure you're still offering what it is that people liked in the first place, and not just something that suits you better
My gosh, why is this all sounding so bitter? I'm really not, I promise. I just think this is a good cautionary tale on how easy it is to lose support - and support is everything to libraries.
*Incidentally, this is, as I see it, exactly the business model Facebook uses (and exactly why I don't use Facebook). All the ways Facebook's users' privacy is violated can be traced back to it - the more information about you they sell to advertisers, the more money they make. Facebook's customers are its advertisers, and Facebook users are the product.
**Sunday hours might be a bad example - we could be open only even-numbered Sundays in odd-numbered years when the temperature is greater than the square root of 1764, and we'd still be busy.


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Velvet printed upper featuring collaged print. In-socks feature purple quilted satin inner linings with gold embossed 'Donhall & Bell' quilted leather in-sock. Outsole is polished black leather which also features branded rubber heal block, gold metal trim and oversize feather engrave.
Uppers – Velvet
Inners – Quilted satin / Leather sock
Outsole – Leather
Take your normal size if slim foot.
Take next half size up if wide foot.
Take next full size up if high instep or large size
Always use a shoe horn when fitting!


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Pesachim 65 - 71
"A person who is haughty — if he is wise, his wisdom will depart from him; and if he is a prophet then his power of prophecy will depart from him."
This statement taught by Rav Yehuda in the name of Rav is brought on our daf as an example of what transpired with Hillel when he was appointed leader of the Sanhedrin and spoke with a degree of haughtiness to the previous leaders, the sons of Ben Betera. He was subsequently punished by Heaven by forgetting what he had learned from his teachers Shamaya and Avtalyon regarding transporting the knife for the Korban Pesach when the eve of Pesach occurred on Shabbat.
- Pesachim 66b
"Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish said: Any person who becomes angry — if he is wise, his wisdom will depart from him; if he is a prophet then his power of prophecy will depart from him."
Our gemara explains that the Sage learns the first part of his teaching from Moshe Rabbeinu. When the Jewish army came back victorious from their battle with Midian, Moshe expressed anger with them for not precisely carrying out his orders. As a result, he was punished from Above and the laws of "tevillat keilim" — ritual immersion of the vessels taken as spoils of the war — were forgotten by him and were taught to the Jewish People by Elazar the Kohen instead of by Moshe.
- Pesachim 66b


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In order to participate in the collective effort to fight the epidemic, and in accordance with government directives, our team is complying with government instructions and will close its agency to the public. However, we can still be reached via the contact details on our website.


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Is the course approved by the state of New Jersey? Yes! Our course is approved by the state of New Jersey to remove points from your driving record and for a discount on your auto insurance.
Can I take this course to remove points from my driving record? Yes. By completing a defensive driving course, you can remove two points from your driving record.
How many points can I remove from my driving record? By completing a defensive driving course, you can remove two points from your driving record.
Can I take this course for an insurance discount? Yes. Check with your insurance provider for the exact discount you are eligible to receive. Typically, it ranges from 5-15%.
How much does the course cost? The cost of the course is $13.95 plus a $0.95 processing fee. This includes a copy of your certificate mailed via USPS First Class shipping. Expedited shipping is available to purchase.
How long does the course take? The state of New Jersey requires you to spend a minimum of six hours on the course. However, you don't have to complete all at once. You can log in and out as much as you'd like, and your progress is saved as you go.


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LOS ANGELES, California –
Yoko Ono shocked reporters yesterday when she responded to a question concerning the presidential run of Hillary Clinton and the possibility that she could become the first woman President of the United States in American history.
The artist and widow of John Lennon, who is in Los Angeles to present a collection of cups and saucers she is exhibiting at the Museum of Modern Art, totally took reporters by surprise by admitting she had not only met the former First Lady at various times during a series of protests against the Vietnam War in New York in the 1970s but also knew her "intimately".
The celebrity admitted laughingly to having "a fling" with her at the time and acknowledged her election "would be a great advancement for LGBT and Women rights in America" she added.
Yoko Ono when asked about her thoughts about Hillary's run for the presidency completely took reporters by surprise.
"We met many times during the New York Vietnam War protests in the 1970s, and became very intimate. We shared many of the same values about sexual equality, fighting against the authoritarian, patriarchal, male-dominated society we were raised in" she explained.
"We had a brief romantic fling when I lived with John in Manhattan and Hillary was studying at Yale, but eventually we lost touch. I am amazed how things are going well for her and wish her the best for her campaign" she told reporters during the press conference.
Experts believe the statement could affect the presidential candidates bid for the presidency but previous allegations of Hillary Clinton's lesbian past have not seemed to play against the front runner for the 2016 Democratic presidential race yet.


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NVIDIA Updates GPU Roadmap; Announces Volta Family For Beyond 2014
by Ryan Smith on March 19, 2013 7:15 PM ESTAs we covered briefly in our live blog of this morning's keynote, NVIDIA has publically updated their roadmap with the announcement of the GPU family that will follow 2014's Maxwell family. That new family is Volta, named after Alessandro Volta, the physicist credited with the invention of the battery.
At this point we know very little about Volta other than a name and one of its marque features, but with how NVIDIA operates that's consistent with how they've done things before. NVIDIA has for the last couple of years operated on an N+2 schedule for their public GPU roadmap, so with the launch of Kepler behind them we had been expecting a formal announcement of what was to follow Maxwell.
In any case, Volta's marque feature will be stacked DRAM, which sees DRAM placed very close to the GPU by placing it on the same package, and connected to the GPU using through-silicon vias (TSVs). Having high bandwidth, on-package RAM is not new technology, but it is still relatively exotic. In the GPU world the most notable shipping product using it would be the PS Vita, which has 128MB of RAM in a wide-IO (but not TSV) manner. Meanwhile NVIDIA competitor Intel will be using a form of embedded DRAM for their highest-performance GT3e iGPU for their forthcoming Haswell generation CPUs.
The advantage of stacked DRAM for a GPU is that its locality brings with it both bandwidth and latency benefits. In terms of bandwidth the memory bus can be both faster and wider than an external memory bus, depending on how it's configured. Specifically the close location of the DRAM to the GPU makes it practical to run a wide bus, while the short traces can allow for higher clockspeeds. Meanwhile the proximity of the two devices means that latency should be a bit lower – a lot of the latency is in the RAM fetching the required cells, but at the clockspeeds GDDR5 already operates at the memory buses on a GPU are relatively long, so there are some savings to be gained.
NVIDIA is targeting a 1TB/sec bandwidth rate for Volta, which to put things in perspective is over 3x what GeForce GTX Titan currently achieves with its 384bit, 6Gbps/pin memory bus (288GB/sec). This would imply that Volta is shooting for something along the lines of a 1024bit bus operating at 8Gbps/pin, or possibly an even larger 2048bit bus operating at 4Gbps/pin. Volta s still years off, but this at least gives us an idea of what NVIDIA needs to achieve to hit their 1TB/sec target.
What will be interesting to see is how NVIDIA handles the capacity issues brought on by on-chip RAM. It's no secret that DRAM is rather big, and especially so for GDDR. Moving all of that RAM on-chip seems unlikely, especially when consumer video cards are already pushing 6GB (Titan). For high-end GPUs this may mean NVIDIA is looking at a split RAM configuration, with the on-chip RAM acting as a cache or small pool of shared memory, while a much larger pool of slower memory is attached via an external bus.
At this point Volta does not have a date attached to it, which is unlike Maxwell which originally had a 2013 date attached to it when first named. That date of course slipped to 2014, and while it's never been made clear why, the fact that Kepler slipped from 2011 to 2012 is a reminder that NVIDIA is still tied to TSMC's production schedule due to their preference to launch new architectures on new nodes. Volta in turn will have some desired node attached to its development, but we don't know what at this time.
With TSMC shaking up its schedule in an attempt to catch up to Intel on both nodes and technology, the lack of a date ultimately is not surprising since it's difficult at best to predict when the appropriate node will be ready 3 years out. On that note it's interesting to note that while NVIDIA has specifically mentioned FinFET transistors will be used on their Parker SoC, they have not mentioned FinFET for Volta. Coming from their investor meeting the question came up, and while it wasn't specifically denied we were also left with no reason to expect Volta to be using FinFET, so make of that what you will.
Meanwhile, in NVIDIA tradition they've also thrown out a very rough estimate of Volta's performance by plotting their GPUs against a chart of FP64 performance per watt. Today Kepler is already at roughly 5.5 GFLOPS/watt for K20X, while Volta is plotted at 24ish. Like the rest of the GPU industry NVIDIA remains to be power constrained, so at equal TDPs we'd expect roughly four times the performance of K20X, which would put total FP64 performance at around 5 TFLOPS. But again, all of this is early into a GPU that will not be released for years.
Finally, while Volta is capturing the majority of the press due to the fact that it's the newest GPU coming out of NVIDIA, this latest roadmap does also offer a bit more on Maxwell. Maxwell's marque feature as it turns out is unified virtual memory. CUDA already has a unified virtual address space available, so this would seemingly go beyond that. In practice such a technology is important for devices integrating a GPU and a CPU onto the same package, which is what the AMD-led Heterogeneous System Architecture seeks to exploit. For NVIDIA their Parker SoC will be based on Maxwell for the GPU and Denver for the CPU, so this looks to be a feature specifically setup for Parker and Parker-like products, where NVIDIA can offer their own CPU integrated with a Maxwell GPU.
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jjj - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link
Pretty sure you messed up on Volta.
The DRAM is stacked and it uses TSV, so you got DRAM over DRAM and they should be able to put quite a bit around the GPU ( they might as well use Micron's Hybrid Memory Cube since that's advertised at 1TB too but that one is a bit different having the logic layer at the base).
The GPU should be connected to the RAM through the silicon substrate , don't think they ever said "silicon interposer" but i imagine that's what they are doing.
Wish they would use it in mobile for NAND and RAM, maybe we they go there when the industry goes with RRAM , shouldn't be that far , we should get 3D NAND in 2015-2016 and RRAM not too long after. -
MrSpadge - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
You're right: from nVidias picture it looks like the die-stacked DRAM will be placed on-package. This solves the capacity issue directly :)
Stacking GPU and DRAM would create serious cooling problems: the heat would have to flow through all DRAM dies before it could reach the cooler, in return the chip would run much hotter for a given cooler. I guess that's why Intel reserves the tier 3 GPU with embedded DRAM for mobile Haswell, where there's not as much heat to get rid off. -
warezme - Monday, April 1, 2013 - link
If you 3D stack your die with DRAM on one side and the core on the other side (visualize a chip design that has an opening on the die to both the front and back of the card motherboard). You could the cool both the DRAM side and the GPU side independently and even with the same cooler if you offset the board to center on your slot better. It would be a new design but not that exotic really. -
Kevin G - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link
The question for Maxwell is what architecture is its virtual memory schema tuned? The obvious answer for the desktop is x86 but if nVida wants to scale this technology into the mobile arena they'll also have to support ARM's memory management.
The other thing worth pondering in that context is how closely tied Project Denver is to Maxwell. -
spigzone - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link
So when Nvidia finally releases it's first HSA style architecture, AMD will be releasing it's 3rd generation, massively supported, HSA APUs? -
TheJian - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
Considering they're losing 1.18 Billion last year and on track to produce another loss this year I'm not sure what your point is? NV made 725mil during the same time and added ~300mil to their cash, while buying back $100mil in stock AND paying a dividend. Until AMD makes money or tops the supercomputer list (where NV dominates now with Titan) it would appear bragging rights over who beat who to HSA means nothing correct? It wouldn't matter if AMD was on their 10th gen if they still can't top their competition with it. NV hired ~800 people over the last ~2years. AMD laid off 30% of their workforce. How does that help you vault to #1 in the future? What's worse? No ARM soc from AMD until next year and probably late next year for any revenue. But even worse, NV will be on Rev5 of socs by then which as with T4 will have a modem (and T5 will surely include cdma etc thus serving everyone, where T4 is limited). Being in the SOC race NOW is more important than the HSA race or all the numbers would be in AMD's favor right?
Then again, their HSA isn't really due to be used until 2014 when memory is fully shared & a unified address space (kaveri) :) Currently copying the data twice/to and from cpu/gpu makes HSA useless. They will get nothing from this until 2014 at the earliest. Sometimes, being 1st isn't really being ahead at all ;) We still have die shrinks working also, which slows this progression to HSA type stuff (we haven't hit the nm wall yet), and you need software to take advantage of all this anyway (that's a few years off).
If consoles don't pay off in a big way AMD will go further into debt as their recent 164mil renting of their Austin land won't do squat vs. another Billion loss this year. I expect consoles to suck this time (dev support dropping already for Vita, wiiu/3ds sucking wind shows this already), and when sales at xmas suck they'll just cancel projects and head further to mobile. They need to quit giving away top games which directly steals from their gpu profits when a card sells. Not to mention the IDEA that if you have to give that much crap away to sell your cards you must suck (no matter what the perf REALLY is of your cards - it looks desperate to a lot of people or they'd own more market share right?) vs. the competition who practically gives nothing (free to play crap? costing them next to nothing also). Market share of discrete gpu's shows this as NV controls ~65% of it and has for years (up from 53% in 2011).
AMD is currently funding R&D with more debt and selling or renting everything they have, while NV funds it with profits and Intel payments. The last Intel payment is 2016. So they'll be using some free money to do R&D for the next few years on top of whatever they profit (which shows no sign of slowing down, they just set records for revenue, margins and cash). The employee reduction cost is shown by how long it took AMD to get a decent driver to compete in gpus (never settle driver, pre this driver they got smacked all year as hardocp recently discussed). Another sign is the delay in Kaveri into 2014 most likely which of course allows NV to put maxwell later (both look Q1 now). They couldn't afford to R&D for consoles and discrete gpu updates at the same time (unfortunately). You can't outfox your enemy on a visa card forever if at all. No answer to Titan doesn't look good either (no matter how overpriced someone thinks it is).
Finally, AMD isn't in the top ten supercomputers (feeding the K20x in titan doesn't count, amd isn't doing the work here). NV is in TWO of them and I'm sure more to follow as others add K20x machines and tegra starts to feed the gpus for a green machine though Italy just claimed per/watt lead with K20x supposedly and piz daint just got announced:
So again, what evidence is there that being on HSA early is working so far? Your comment insinuates NV is behind. I think it's quite the opposite based on all the data. This may have been a totally different story if AMD had taken the time/money they spent on consoles and devoted it instead to Socs and discrete gpus. Not much money will be made on 35mil units of consoles this year (if they even sell that total together) vs. a billion unit market in tablets/phones and growing every year. NV is moving ~20% of their revenue via tegra already and will grow that this year with T4/T4i. AMD spent their wad on a dying market (consoles/handhelds) and are losing badly in the two markets they have now (cpu/gpu, cpu's lost ~325mil, and gpus only made ~22mil...OUCH). They seem to keep repeating this losing formula and it doesn't look to change for FY2013. -
Kevin G - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
AMD's lead for HSA is going to be measured in months, not full generations of hardware. It'll be arriving in 2013 at the very least with the PS4. Dev kits are currently in the hands of developers with early prototype hardware. Kaveri and Maxwell are both 2014 parts and without further details it is difficult to determine which will arrive first. The other wild card for 2013/2014 are discrete HSA GPU's from AMD. All indications point toward AMD arriving first with a unified address space but it won't ultimately be a significant lead.
As for AMD's position in the Top500, they've been there before. Tianhe-1A, the other nVidia based system referenced, used to use AMD GPU's prior to an upgrade. Though I wouldn't use the Top500 as a good metric as both nVidia's and AMD's GPGPU boards are not seen as viable options by many due to the lack of key RAS features (ECC etc.). Performance of these cards are good given an extremely parallel workload but if scientists cannot trust the integrity of the results, they're worthless. -
Ktracho - Wednesday, March 20, 2013 - link
NVIDIA's Tesla boards have had ECC since at least the last generation (Fermi). That's one reason why Cray is willing to use these boards in their supercomputers. -
Kevin G - Thursday, March 21, 2013 - link
EDC, not traditional ECC. The memory bus width is not explicitly widened to support the extra parity bits for ECC. Conceptually nVidia's EDC is uses a technique similar to RAID5 which utilizes existing memory channels and reduces overall memory capacity by shuffles parts of the parity across all of them. This does allow for protection from common soft errors like ECC.
The downside is that memory transaction involved the entire width of the memory bus where as previously each channel could operate autonomously depending on requests. nVidia tacked on EDC on Fermi with a hardware/software mix which significantly decreases memory bandwidth. EDC on GK110 and Tahiti have a bit more hardware support for EDC so bandwidth impact isn't as dire but still present.
EDC with hard errors is an interesting case for GPU's. Modern ECC implementations can work around a single DRAM chip failure on a DIMM and safely move the data to another DIMM (and a few high end servers will even allow memory hot swapping). Fermi had no means of recovering from a hard memory error due to its partial use of software. I'm unsure if GK110 and Tahiti would be able to migrate data off of the card in the advent of a hard memory failure and I'm certain that they cannot continue to operate normally.
Still GPU's have relatively weak RAS compared to traditional server hardware and it is a reason why some are currently waiting for GPU's to mature a bit further. -
Winterblade - Tuesday, March 19, 2013 - link
I wonder what kind of CPU will denver be, a customized ARM A57/A53 big.LITTLE setup maybe?? Will they finally get a x86 license?? or maybe a fully new architecture??
Honestly I cannot stop marvelling every time I see this kind of roadmaps, we live in great times for tech junkies :D


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Flu widespread across United States for third straight week
NEW YORK (AP) - Sick with the flu? You've got a lot of company.
The flu blanketed the U.S. again last week for the third straight week. Only Hawaii has been spared.
Last week, 1 in 15 doctor visits were for symptoms of the flu. That's the highest level since the swine flu pandemic in 2009. The government doesn't track every flu case but comes up with estimates; one measure is how many people seek medical care for fever, cough, aches and other flu symptoms.
Flu is widespread in every state except Hawaii, and 39 states reported high flu traffic for doctors last week, up from 32.
At this rate, by the end of the season somewhere around 34 million Americans will have gotten sick from the flu, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
Some good news: Hospital stays and deaths from the flu among the elderly so far haven't been as high as in some other recent flu seasons. However, hospitalization rates for people 50 to 64 - baby boomers, mostly - has been unusually high, CDC officials said in the report, which covers the week ending Jan. 20.
This year's flu shot targets the strains that are making Americans sick, mostly the H3N2 flu virus. But exactly how well it is working won't be known until next month. It's the same main bug from last winter, when the flu season wasn't so bad. It's not clear why this season - with the same bug - is worse, some experts said.
"That's the kicker. This virus really doesn't look that different from what we saw last year," said Richard Webby, a flu researcher at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis.
It may be that many of the people getting sick this year managed to avoid infection last year. Or there may be some change in the virus that hasn't been detected yet, said the CDC's Dr. Dan Jernigan, in a call with reporters Friday.
Based on patterns from past seasons, it's likely the flu season will start to wane soon, experts say. There are some places, like California, where the season already seems to be easing, CDC officials said.
"If I was a betting man, I'd put money on it going down," Webby said. "But I've lost money on bets before."
The season usually peaks in February, but this season started early and took off in December.
Flu is a contagious respiratory illness. It can cause a miserable but relatively mild illness in many people, but more a more severe illness in others. Young children and the elderly are at greatest risk from flu and its complications. In a bad season, there as many as 56,000 deaths connected to the flu.
In the U.S., annual flu shots are recommended for everyone age 6 months or older. Last seasons, about 47 percent of Americans got vaccinated, according to CDC figures.


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The Office of Probation and Correctional Alternatives' (OPCA) Interstate Compact Unit manages the movement of adult and juvenile probationers into and out of New York State in accordance with relevant Interstate Compacts, for the purpose of maintaining continuous and uninterrupted supervision in the interest of public safety. OPCA's Interstate Compact processes transfer of probation supervision requests and related correspondence, monitors transfer activities as necessary, provides technical assistance to local probation staff in New York State, and serves as the liaison between our local jurisdictions and other State Compact Offices. Special attention is focused on more serious transfers such as sex offenders, domestic violence cases, violent felons, high profile and child victim cases.
What is the Interstate Transfer Process?
When a probationer requests, through their probation officer, a transfer of supervision to another state (Receiving State), the probation officer in the current state (Sending State) reviews the case to determine whether the probationer meets the necessary criteria for transfer. That criteria includes having an established residence and/or immediate family and employment or visible means of support in the Receiving State. It is important to note that a transfer to another state is a privilege provided to probationers who are currently complying with their terms and conditions of probation. If the probation officer agrees to pursue a transfer, the probationer must execute a waiver of extradition and must agree to abide by the terms and conditions set by both the Sending and Receiving States.
What are the Reporting Instructions Process?
A probationer is not allowed to move to another state to live without contacting that Receiving State. Permission is required FIRST from the Receiving State in most cases. The Sending State must complete a form that presents a snapshot of the case and forward it to the Receiving State. The Receiving State reviews the information and decides whether it will provide reporting instructions, then returns the information back to the Sending State. If a probationer is found to be in another state, without prior notification and or permission, the probationer may face legal action in that state, such as an arrest or be ordered to pay a fine.
Important Information Regarding Transfers:
- In New York State, all INTERstate - transfers and related correspondence and communication must go through the Interstate Compact Office in Albany.
- In New York State, all INTRAstate - transfers are handled directly between the two county probation departments.
Custody and Adoption Investigation requests should not be forwarded through the Interstate Compact. These requests should be handled through the local courts.


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QE is just a huge open market operation. The Fed buys Treasury securities and issues bank reserves instead. Why does this do anything? Why isn't this like trading some red M&Ms for some green M&Ms and expecting it to affect your weight? (M&M of course stands for "Modigliani Miller" if you didn't get the joke.)
The usual thinking is that bank reserves are "special." They are connected to GDP in a way that Treasuries are not. In the conventional monetary view, MV = PY. Bank reserves, through a multiplier, control M. The bank or credit channel view says that bank reserves control lending and lending affects PY. The red M&Ms, though superficially identical, have more calories.
In Andy's view (my interpretation), that is turned around now. Now, Treasuries supply more "liquidity" needs than bank reserves, and (more importantly) the supply of treasuries is more connected to nominal GDP than is the supply of bank reserves.
Part of this inversion of roles is supply. In place of the usual $50 billion, we have $3 trillion or so bank reserves. Bank reserves can only be used by banks, so they don't do much good for the rest of us. Now, they just sit as bank assets in place of mortgages or treasuries and don't make a difference to anything. More treasuries, according to Andy, we can do something with.
More deeply, constraints only go one way. Normally, the banking system is up against a constraint. Reserves pay less interest than other assets, so banks use as little as possible. Now, they are awash in liquidity. You can't push on a string, as the saying goes. Much "constraint" economics forgets that once the constraint is off, the relationship doesn't hold any more.
Andy describes the repo market and the sense in which Treasuries are "special" in providing low-haircut collateral. Lots of academic research is now viewing Treasuries as special or liquidity-providing in the shadow banking system.
So, this is at least a gorgeous possibility: In a frictionless world, open-market operations, buying one kind of government debt (Treasuries) and issuing another (reserves) have zero effect on anything, by the M&M theorem. Monetary economics thinks the M&M theorem is violated, because one kind of government debt (M) is connected to nominal GDP and the other is not.
But financial systems change. When the textbooks were written, banks mattered a lot, so bank reserves, leveraged to loans and checking accounts, were the "special" asset. In today's market, and given today's glut of reserves, Treasuries, leveraged to mortgage backed securities and money market funds through the repo market and "shadow banking system," might be the "special" asset connected to nominal GDP. In that case, the effects of open market operations might have the opposite sign. As Andy says,
... the Federal Reserve's policy—to stimulate lending and the economy by buying Treasurys..—is creating a shortage of safe collateral, the very thing needed to create credit in the shadow banking system for the private economy. The quantitative easing policy appears self-defeating, perversely keeping economic growth slower and jobs scarcer.I'm not totally convinced, though this story and the alleged enormous demand for Treasuries is being bandied around as established fact. I'm also not convinced that this is all a good idea. Maybe the Fed should starve the shadow banking system.
You repo a security so that you can borrow against it. For example, you might buy a mortgage-backed security, then leave (repo, really) that security as collateral for a loan, which you used to buy the security in the first place. But what sense does it make to repo-finance a Treasury? You can't borrow at lower interest rate to make money on a Treasury! You could, possibly, if it's a long term Treasury and you're borrowing short, betting that interest rates don't rise. But I would think an interest rate swap or future would be a cheaper way to make that bet, and anyway betting on the slope of Treasury yield curve doesn't add up to the necessary GDP-linked lending that Andy has in mind.
In short, if you have money to buy a Treasury, why do you need to borrow? For any of this to get off the ground, you have to have some other, not totally rational, reason for buying the Treasury, and then you want to borrow against the Treasury so you can buy the risky asset that you really wanted all along. Who is that? Why is this such a necessary part of our financial system? Can't we fix things so they just buy the MBS with their initial cash?
Andy points out that repos are re-hypothecated. You use your Treasury as collateral against a loan, then the guy you gave it to uses it again as collateral to get the money to give to you. So one Treasury is used as collateral against two or three loans. Hmm. As the money multiplier creates run-prone structures, so using the same thing as collateral two or three times is a lot of what makes banks "too big to fail." If we all go down, who has the collateral?
A system awash in all kinds of liquidity, following the Freidman optimal quantity of money, seems a lot safer to me. I'd rather we expand the "bank reserve" concept -- fixed-value, floating-rate, electronically-transferable Treasury debt, and lots of it, washing the shadow banking system in liquidity and putting the run-prone structures out of business. Of course, open market operations would then have no effect in my world either, as I have removed the liquidity constraint in the shadow banking system just as Mr. Bernanke has removed it in the conventional banking system. But violations of M&M always mean the system can be made better.
If you want to comment and explain shadow banking, please use little words that the rest of us can understand.


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No New Nukes in the UK
This story a highlight from my daily reading of the b5media blogs:
No New Nukes in the UK Petition at the Unplugged Living Blog and I couldn't help but thinking its a good idea. I mean, Her Majesty's Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could export their nuclear plants to Iran, after all they are in the market for them, in the same way that France exports weapons to just about anyone and Australia sold wheat with a 10% cut to Saddam Hussein… I wonder if I can sell blogs to North Korea?
(PS there are a lot of wheat farmers in Western Australia who need your help now they've lost the Iraq contract. If you need some wheat and have a couple of spare billion to spend, contact AWB Ltd. Offer is open to dictators as well, and "trucking fees" are always great!).


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European space scientists have strongly recommended a mission equipped with a Rover as the next scientific mission to Mars as part of the European Space Agency's [ESA] Aurora programme of planetary exploration.
The mission would conduct a detailed analysis of the Martian environment and search for traces of past or present life. A launch in June 2011, followed by a two year journey, would arrive on the Red Planet in June 2013. A detailed proposal will be prepared for consideration by ESA member states at the agency's Council Meeting at Ministerial Level in December 2005.
The recommendation was made by European scientists at an international space workshop held at Aston University, Birmingham, England on the 6th and 7th April 2005. The ESA workshop, hosted by the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council [PPARC], brought together space scientists and agency officials from Europe, Canada, North America and the international space community in order to debate robotic mission options up to 2013 in the first phase of the Aurora programme.
Three candidate missions were considered: BeagleNet, ExoMars and its variant ExoMars-Lite. Consideration was also given to the preparatory activities needed to develop a sustainable, long-term Mars Exploration programme and how efforts to 2011 address the requirements of a Mars Sample Return [MSR] mission within an overall Aurora roadmap.
Following scientific and technology presentations of each candidate mission an evaluation process was undertaken by the scientists measured against key criteria. The outcome and consensus of the workshop recommended a mission which blended key technologies and objectives from each of the candidate missions as the first robotic mission in the Aurora programme. This recommendation will form the basis of a detailed proposal by the scientific community to be considered at the ESA's Council Meeting at Ministerial Level in December 2005.
The recommended mission will consist of a Soyuz launcher to deliver a probe which includes at least one Rover for scientific exploration of the Martian environment. Telecommunications [data relay] between the probe and Earth will be achieved via NASA orbiting spacecraft. The Rover would be equipped with a suite of scientific instruments designed to search for traces of past or present life on Mars; to characterise the shallow subsurface water/geochemical composition and its vertical distribution profile; and to identify surface and environmental hazards to future human missions. Taking into account the exciting and scientifically intriguing results from ESA's Mars Express orbiter the recommended mission will also incorporate instruments to specifically measure seismic phenomena which could be caused by volcanoes, hydrothermal activity or Marsquakes. The Rover will also contain a drill capable of penetrating the surface to a depth of 2m and a Beagle 2 type life marker experiment such as a Gas Analysis Package [GAP] capable of studying stable isotopes in the atmosphere, rocks, and soil. The entry, descent and landing system [EDLS] will utilise key technologies involving airbags and possibly retrorockets. To be launched by a Soyuz Fregat 2b vehicle in June 2011 from ESA's spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana the probe and Rover would arrive on the surface of Mars in June 2013 after a two year voyage.
Looking beyond 2011 the scientists confirmed their commitment to collaborating in an international Sample Return Mission in 2016 [which would include sample acquisition and handling, mobility and planetary protection], as a logical sequence to the recommended mission in the future roll out of ESA's Aurora programme.
Commenting on the workshop Prof. Jean Pierre Swings, Chair of ESA's Exploration Programme Advisory Committee, said," This workshop has brought an extremely wide range of scientists together from a diverse range of disciplines to recommend what will be a tremendously exciting mission for European space. It builds upon the success of ESA's Mars Express whilst driving new technologies that will form the foundation for the future development of the Aurora programme".
In terms of UK involvement Dr. Mark Sims, University of Leicester and Chair of PPARC's Aurora Advisory Committee was buoyant," This is a great result for European planetary exploration with significant involvement for the UK. The UK community has worked hard to ensure that the Aurora programme reflects the scientific and industrial expertise we have in the UK and the recommended mission builds upon the heritage of Beagle 2 and Huygens. We look forward to making major contributions to this scientific mission of discovery to the Red Planet".
Notes to Editors
- The scientific merit of the proposed mission in relation to the Aurora Exploration Programme goals.
- The relative scientific excellence of the mission itself versus cost.
- The timeliness [time criticality] of the mission science in the international context ESA launches as complementary to planned NASA launches.
- The importance of the mission's technology to a long-term European [both Mars and the rest of the solar system] and international programme of planetary exploration.


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Prepare your network for the future without sacrificing bandwidth or speed with GS750E Switch offering advanced L2 features and easy web-based management
SAN JOSE, California — August 29, 2017 — NETGEAR®, Inc. (NASDAQ: NTGR), a leading provider of networking devices that power today's smart home and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), has introduced the NETGEAR 48-port Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS750E) which supports VLAN, QoS, LAG and IGMP management capabilities and two SFP uplink ports. This new switch provides easy, reliable and affordable connectivity through its intuitive web interface to quickly expand your network for workstations/servers, Network Attached Storage (NAS), and PCs. Designed to meet current and future needs of any IP network, GS750E enables network optimization and eliminates bottlenecks with the best speed/affordability ratio.
As part of the NETGEAR Smart Managed Plus Switch product family, the GS750E includes a full set of advanced L2 features such as traffic prioritization and link aggregation that are configurable through the web GUI. Easily deployed, it can be used as a desktop switch, mounted in a rack or even in small IT closet cabinets. With a fan-less design, it operates silently in noise-sensitive environments such as classrooms, conference rooms, doctor's offices, or open-plan offices.
Today's growing businesses demand and rely more on their network to carry out mission-critical business activities. Companies need network intelligence to separate and prioritize voice and video traffic from data to support applications such as VoIP phones and IP cameras on their Ethernet infrastructure. However, many small companies do not necessarily have the budget or advanced training to deal with complex managed switches. NETGEAR Smart Managed Plus Switches such as the GS750E meet this growing need by providing fundamental network features that will help optimize the performance of business networks.
"With our industry-first 48-Port Smart Managed Plus Switch, businesses that need more ports without sacrificing bandwidth or speed deploy 48 ports at once to avoid congestion from stacking lower port count switches," said Richard Jonker, vice president of product line management for SMB products at NETGEAR.
"Our expertise in engineering high-performance networks derives from over two decades of working with SMBs," Jonker added. "This history gives us an unequaled understanding of how to adapt networks to the unique needs of growing organizations, especially in small business, hospitality, catering, education and retail domains."
The GS750E goes beyond basic network connectivity with enhanced controls to improve network performance, visibility into abnormal traffic behavior, cable test functionality and security against possible threats.
Key features of the GS750E Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switch include:
- Easy-to-use web interface for browser-based management
- No noise (fan less design)
- Maximum throughput at wire speed with 100Gbps non-blocking switching architecture
- VLAN, QoS and port mirroring for segmenting and prioritizing voice, data and video traffic
- Auto "denial-of-service" (DoS) prevention
- Link Aggregation and Loop Prevention to add redundancy and increase your speed in your connections
- 2 extra active SFP ports to be used as fiber uplinks
- IGMP snooping support for multicast optimization
- Rate limiting and priority queuing for better bandwidth allocation
- Energy Efficient Ethernet (IEEE 802.3az) for maximum power savings
- ProSAFE® Lifetime Hardware Warranty with Lifetime Next Business Day shipping for replacement and Lifetime Technical Support options
Pricing and Availability
The NETGEAR 48-Port Gigabit Smart Managed Plus Switch (GS750E) has an MSRP in the U.S. of $349.99 (USD). It is available worldwide through authorized NETGEAR partners and other reseller channels and ecommerce sites. Regional variance may apply to the final pricing for end customers depending on the reseller and bundled offerings.
About NETGEAR, Inc.
NETGEAR (NASDAQ: NTGR) is a global networking company that delivers innovative products to consumers, businesses and service providers. The Company's products are built on a variety of proven technologies such as wireless (WiFi and LTE), Ethernet and powerline, with a focus on reliability and ease-of-use. The product line consists of wired and wireless devices that enable networking, broadband access and network connectivity. These products are available in multiple configurations to address the needs of the end-users in each geographic region in which the Company's products are sold. NETGEAR products are sold in approximately 31,000 retail locations around the globe, and through approximately 25,000 value-added resellers, as well as multiple major cable, mobile and wireline service providers around the world. The company's headquarters are in San Jose, Calif., with additional offices in approximately 25 countries. More information is available from the NETGEAR investor page or by calling (408) 907-8000. Connect with NETGEAR on Twitter, Facebook and our blog.
©2017 NETGEAR, Inc. NETGEAR, the NETGEAR logo, and ProSAFE are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NETGEAR, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Other brand and product names are for identification purposes only and may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holder(s). The information contained herein is subject to change without notice. NETGEAR shall not be liable for technical or editorial errors or omissions contained herein. All rights reserved.
Safe Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 for NETGEAR, Inc.: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Specifically, statements concerning NETGEAR's business and the expected performance characteristics, specifications, reliability, market acceptance, market growth, specific uses, user feedback and market position of NETGEAR's products and technology are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor. These statements are based on management's current expectations and are subject to certain risks and uncertainties, including, without limitation, the following: the actual price, performance and ease-of-use of NETGEAR's products may not meet the price, performance and ease-of-use requirements of customers; product performance may be adversely affected by real world operating conditions; failure of products may under certain circumstances cause permanent loss of end user data; new viruses or Internet threats may develop that challenge the effectiveness of security features in NETGEAR's products; the ability of NETGEAR to market and sell its products and technology; the impact and pricing of competing products; and the introduction of alternative technological solutions. Further information on potential risk factors that could affect NETGEAR and its business are detailed in the Company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NETGEAR undertakes no obligation to release publicly any revisions to any forward-looking statements contained herein to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
Source: NETGEAR-G
U.S. Media Contact: Nathan Papadopulos, (408) 890-3889, email@example.com
U.S. Sales Inquiries: (408) 907-8000, email@example.com
U.S. Customer Inquiries: (888) NETGEAR


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Protesters in Iran, Iraq burn Israel, US flags on 'Quds Day'
TEHRAN, Iran — Iranians in the capital Tehran set fire to effigies of U.S. President Donald Trump, while in the Iraqi capital, Iran-backed militiamen marched over a large Israeli flag as part of rallies Friday marking Quds, or Jerusalem Day. The annual protests come as the Trump administration tries to market its long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan.
Held each year on the last Friday of the Muslim holy fasting month of Ramadan, Iran has marked Quds Day since the start of its 1979 Islamic Revolution by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Al-Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem, and Iran says the day is an occasion to express support for the Palestinians.
Israel views Iran as its archenemy in the Mideast. Iran does not recognize Israel and supports the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.
This year's protests took place as the White House is promoting the June 25-26 meeting in the Gulf state of Bahrain as the first phase of its Mideast peace plan. That plan, whose specifics have yet to be released, supposedly includes large-scale investment and infrastructure work in the Palestinian territories, much of it funded by wealthy Arab countries. The plan's political vision has not been outlined, but glimpses of the plan suggest it sidelines or ignores the longstanding goal of independence and has already been rejected by Palestinian leaders and much of the Arab world.
Palestinian leaders say they won't attend the summit in Bahrain. American officials say the Bahrain conference will not include the core political issues of the conflict: borders of a Palestinian state, the status of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees or Israeli security demands.
As rallies began across the Iranian capital, demonstrators set fire to American and Israeli flags, as well as effigies of President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The rallies all headed to Tehran University, where the ceremony ended at Friday's noon prayers. Similar rallies took place in 950 cities and towns across the country.
Many high-ranking Iranian officials attending the rally in Tehran, including President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Both men derided the Trump administration's so-called "Deal of the Century" peace plan, saying it would end in failure.
During the rally in Tehran, Zarif said: "It is unfortunate that some Arab leaders have this illusion that if they stand beside Netanyahu, they can reach their goals." The remarks were carried by a Telegram channel affiliated with Iran's state TV.
In Iraq, hundreds of Shiite militiamen held a military parade on Palestine Street in the center of Baghdad, some of them setting fire to Israeli and U.S. flags.
"The people in our region and the world are harassed by Trump's and the United States' polices, which are trying to dominate the will of the people. Today, there is a broad rejection of Trump's decision to annex Jerusalem and consider it the capital of Israel," said Moin al-Kazemi, leader of the Iranian-backed Badr movement.
The rally was organized by Iranian-backed militias collectively known as the Popular Mobilization Forces. Militiamen in uniform marched with yellow flags, escorted by Iraqi federal police cars. "We will pray in Quds," read some of the banners.
In the Syrian capital Damascus, a few hundred Syrians and Palestinians marked Quds Day by marching from the Hamidiyeh bazar in the old city to the landmark Umayyad Mosque, some of them shouting anti-Israel slogans and waving Syrian and Palestinian flags.
"No to the deal of the century," a banner read. "Our Palestinian people and the freemen of the Arab nation will thwart the deal of the century."
Associated Press writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra in Baghdad and Albert Aji in Damascus contributed reporting.
Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.


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I'm not the type of person to make New Year's resolutions because why should a person pick just one time of the year to say that they are going to evaluate how they are going to live their life or run their business. This philosophy comes from my grandmother that use to say, "Why should I wait until your birthday to give you a present to show my love? I love you all of the time so anytime is a good time to give you a gift." So while I tend to evaluate my plans and life on a continual basis, the beginning of a new year is a psychological new beginning for many people. More importantly for most of us in the business world it the beginning of a new fiscal year for many of our customers.
The start of a new fiscal year is my motivator for implementing the plans that I made last year. I previously lamented about the malaise in the telecommunications industry. My assertion was that all of the excitement was in the equipment attached to the network. Looking at the excitement surrounding the CES that just ended, one could agree with my statement. Instead of an either/or option for intelligent network/intelligent CPE, the truth is that they have to operate synergistically to achieve their desired aim. There is a tremendous amount of heavy lifting behind returning your "OK Google" request or bringing you a Uber car. It may be the application developers that appear to create magic on smartphones and tablets, but it is that work of thousands of telecom network professionals like us to make it look like magic.
Although today's mobile device has more computing power than a supercomputer from 1980, that device cannot do everything necessary to deliver information or intelligence from the far-flung reaches of the Earth. There are thousands of protocols and API designed to allow systems to interact with each other to assemble disparate pieces of information into a simple result displayed on a screen. We use catchy marketing terms like Big Data and Internet of Things to make these interactions understandable by the layperson and to sell products and services to our customers. Although I cringe every time I hear buzzwords like these or cloud, I know that they are euphemisms for a complex set of interactions taking place in the network on the user's behalf.
So there are exciting things left to do in telecommunications afterall. They may not be as straightforward as the creation of DSL or SDH/SONET technology, but we have built that layer of the network and it is mature. We are in the phase of more complex interactions between different layers of the network to automate and simplify how services are delivered. For those veterans that built the foundation of today's broadband optical network, it may appear that there is not much left to do, but that is not the case.
The industry will continue to develop the SDN-based network and take advantage of powerful inexpensive computing to virtualize more functionality (NFV) into the cloud (ouch that hurt). As we continue to optimize the transport network to add more connected devices like doorbells (Ring), lights (LIFX), and cars, we will need the added sophistication that the network provides to provide near real time interactions with us.
There are still plenty of problems to solve such as ubiquitous connectivity. With only 40% of U.S. rural population having access to wired broadband and much less connectivity in many other parts of the world, there is still a tremendous effort needed to make broadband universal worldwide.
Security of data and information is another significant concern. Up to now, everything that we have done is just treating the symptom. Personal information is being stolen and sold every day from governments and private enterprises. No organization is immune to a data breach. Privacy goes right along with data security. Privacy is a basic human right that is constantly being violated globally by governments, corporations, and individuals. I question why my identity was compromised by a company that I never did business and used against me by the government. This situation is inexcusable, and it demonstrates the fact that security has not been a priority in our industry. Our liberty depends on these two tenants which is why the industry's brightest minds must develop a holistic solution that includes end-to-end encryption of all information on devices and traversing across the network. There can be no backdoors for any reason.
Millions of new devices being connected to the network monthly requires scalability. With increased scalability comes increased power consumption. We need to put our minds on how to grow these networks without exponentially increasing power consumption. Actually power consumption should be decreasing.
I could go on and on but those are the big three topics that I see the industry addressing in 2016 and beyond. Closer to home, I will continue to be involved in the larger trends in the industry while solving some of the more tactical problems to get us there. ComTech Sales and myself can be relied upon to work with service providers to develop and implement solutions to expanding broadband penetration, security, and power consumption. We will continue to grow our business on the telecom side of the industry that we started in the fall of 2015. Please rely on us for solutions to your equipment needs.