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IBM's potential x86 server sale to Lenovo highlights oncoming train | ZDNet
Wow! Interesting analysis - and crazy implications.
IBM is reportedly talking to Lenovo about selling its x86-based server business to Lenovo and the move would make a lot of sense.
If the talks, flagged in the Wall Street Journal and CRN, sound familiar that's because Big Blue famously unloaded its PC business to Lenovo in a win-win deal. Lenovo went on to be one of the premier PC makers and IBM focused on software and services and got ahead of trends such as analytics.
To say the IBM's PC situation then and today's server state of affairs rhyme would be an understatement. You could argue the situations are the same thing. When IBM offloaded its PC unit, no one saw tablets coming. All IBM knew is that the margins stunk and it wanted higher value wares. The post-PC era was years away.
Fast forward to the server market, which is ripe for disruption. Server sales are doing ok. Companies will have to buy servers right? Of course they will—-for about another three to five years. The reality is servers are going in the following directions:
Specialization by workload. Think IBM's PureSystems and Oracle's Exadata efforts.
- Commodity-ville on the x86 front. You can't ignore that companies like Google and Facebook go right to white box makers for servers. That reality isn't so hot for HP, Dell and IBM.
- You need to own the silicon and intellectual property to really work the server business. IBM's Power systems won't go anywhere. Oracle has SPARC. Hewlett-Packard is going processor agnostic with Moonshot, a server line that appears to be innovative.
- Fewer server buyers. As companies move to the cloud, demand for compute will only increase. The problem. Server makers will be selling in bulk to fewer customers and cloud computing farms. There will only be so many cloud providers. Enterprises large enough to roll their own data centers will be few and far between.
Now let's talk timing here. The server market won't unravel tomorrow. It won't unravel in a few years. But Armageddon will occur and the clock starts ticking right about now.
Why? An enterprise that buys a server right now will start a tax depreciation clock that will run about three years. Once those three years are up and those assets depreciate, the CXO in charge will weigh the costs and benefits of the cloud vs. running a data center, server cluster or whatever. I'll bet that in three years the cloud will win by a wide margin. Let's face it—-the cloud is already starting to win and all you have to do is show up at one of Amazon Web Services' customer powwows to know the writing is on the server rack.
On Thursday, I caught up with Cycle Computing CEO Jason Stowe. There's a lot to like about Cycle Computing. First, the company is bootstrapped so there's instant respect. Second, Cycle Computing is at the forefront of making high performance computing clusters for the masses. And third, Cycle Computing has top insurance and pharmaceutical companies as customers. Cycle Computing had massive customers from day one. In other words, Cycle Computing is the real deal, hooked up with Amazon Web Services and will enable a lot of science to happen just by democratizing HPC for smaller companies.
Stowe noted that Cycle Computing is starting to land manufacturing and engineering customers now for its HPC management software and cloud connections. In other words, this HPC for the masses is catching on. If you play this out, there will be fewer servers sold because folks will be using Rackspace, AWS or some other former hardware focused vendor.
Today, it's big data and research compute driving Cycle Computing demand. Tomorrow every company will have the mathematic models and horsepower to simulate just about anything. You won't buy your own servers for that computing power.
Stowe said servers will become like wheat fields not things you name. "Today servers are hugged, named and managers know their quirks. There's an attachment. In the future server clusters will be more like wheat fields. You grow the wheat, reap and sow, eat and replant the seeds. There's no attachment to the wheat," said Stowe.
In other words, Stowe's excellent analogy on servers and meeting compute demand translates into cloud farms and fields. Most companies are going to hit the brakes on new server buying as soon as the depreciation ends and new compute demand has to be met. Play this out and the profit margins on servers aren't going to look so hot.
IBM sees all of the servergeddon scenarios developing and that's why it's ditching its commodity server business now. Let Lenovo, which has the scale and ambition to do the commodity server game, carry the ball from here and duke it out with HP and Dell.
HP Announces Gen8 Servers – Focus On Opex And Improving SLAs Sets A High Bar For Competitors | Forrester Blogs
Another good run-down of the HP ProLiant Gen8 - this time from Forrester. They seem to believe this is a pretty significant announcement.
On Monday, February 13, HP announced its next turn of the great wheel for servers with the announcement of its Gen8 family of servers. Interestingly, since the announcement was ahead of Intel's official announcement of the supporting E5 server CPUs, HP had absolutely nothing to say about the CPUs or performance of these systems. But even if the CPU information had been available, it would have been a sideshow to the main thrust of the Gen8 launch — improving the overall TCO (particularly Opex) of servers by making them more automated, more manageable, and easier to remediate when there is a problem, along with enhancements to storage, data center infrastructure management (DCIM) capabilities, and a fundamental change in the way that services and support are delivered.
With a little more granularity, the major components of the Gen8 server technology announcement included:
- Onboard Automation – A suite of capabilities and tools that provide improved agentless local intelligence to allow quicker and lower labor cost provisioning, including faster boot cycles, "one click" firmware updates of single or multiple systems, intelligent and greatly improved boot-time diagnostics, and run-time diagnostics. This is apparently implemented by more powerful onboard management controllers and pre-provisioning a lot of software on built-in flash memory, which is used by the onboard controller. HP claims that the combination of these tools can increase operator productivity by up to 65%. One of the eye-catching features is an iPhone app that will scan a code printed on the server and go back through the Insight Management Environment stack and trigger the appropriate script to provision the server.[i]Possibly a bit of a gimmick, but a cool-looking one.
- Smart Storage – More of a roadmap than a single product, Smart Storage starts with the introduction of Advanced Data Mirroring, a triple-redundant striping technology that provides a claimed 1000X (I have no way to verify this number, but logic says that three stripes will be much more reliable than two by a large margin if you replace the failed disk promptly). Also announced were intelligent flash caching for improved performance and a combination of faster memory and PCIe 3 I/O.[ii]
- Location-Aware Infrastructure Technology – Introduced under the rather opaque term "3D Sea of Sensors" (the sensors are not particularly 3D and there is no obvious "sea"), HP has introduced some extremely powerful infrastructure management capabilities that provide immediate benefit and can also work as part of a comprehensive DCIM solution. The constituent parts included location-aware racks and servers, intelligent PDUs, and rack-level power capping. Combined with other unspecified tools, these are the core capabilities to implement comprehensive intelligent power and cooling management, visualization, and workload-aware scheduling. Note that in order to fully utilize these capabilities you have to buy into a complete HP infrastructure stack of racks, and PDUs and their associated software, as well as the servers themselves. Looking into my crystal ball, it's pretty obvious that HP has serious designs on the DCIM space, and current vendors with whom it is in "co-opetition" should be looking over their shoulders.
- Insight Online – This was in many ways the most significant piece part of the announcement, comprising as it does a complete online portal for the delivery ("cloud-based" of course as is everything from Kleenex[iii]to tractor parts) of diagnostic, maintenance, and other services to HP customers. These services include reactive diagnostic and remediation as well as an escalating menu of proactive services and additional operational assistance, and the portal serves as a central integrator of all information about a given asset, including lifecycle and contractual details as well as technical information. HP makes claims that this facility will reduce time to problem resolution by up to two-thirds and improve first-call resolution rates. Obviously it is impossible to judge the real operational quality of a complex service like this from a presentation and staged demo, but on the face of it, HP has really moved the needle in terms of service delivery with this capability.
My net take is that this is a significantly more important announcement than the last several from HP or any other mainstream server vendor, and it sets a high bar for competitors. In the coming month or two we can expect other competitive announcements, and I think that some pieces of hardware, such as PCIe-3, improved memory reliability and performance, and increased integration of flash memory into storage, will be replicated wholly or in part by competitors. What will probably set HP apart is the cumulative impact of their intelligent provisioning, diagnostics and update capabilities, along with the potentials of their service portal and associated services.
For HP customers this is unmitigated good news. For competitors it is a challenge, and we anxiously await their responses. Any HP customers are welcome to weigh in on their impressions of these announcements.
HP's ProLiant Gen8 control freakery • The Register
A detailed run-down of HP's new ProLiant Gen8 servers.
Look out system administrators: Hewlett-Packard wants to give you more time to play video games or polish up your resumes – or both – with the forthcoming launch of its ProLiant Gen8 servers. .
As part of its annual shindig with partners and resellers, which was hosted in Las Vegas a week ago, the biggest server shipper in the world previewed its next generation of ProLiant x86 servers. The Gen8 machines will be based on the also impending "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon E5 processors from Intel, which are due for their own launch before March comes to an end. Because these Xeon E5 chips are not out yet, HP was limited in talking about the feeds and speeds of the Gen8 machines, and as El Reg previously reported, the company's top server brass talked generally about the improved I/O and storage scalability of the boxes and how this was critical in data centers where storage capacity needs are far outpacing the need for more CPU capacity. We glossed over the management capabilities HP talked about in our initial story, and now we will drill down into it.
During the webcast previewing the Gen8 boxes, Mark Potter, general manager of the Industry Standard Servers and Software division at HP, explained that HP set out to re-architect its machines, systems management tools, and back-end support systems as part of the "Project Voyager" initiative, a two-year, $300m effort by the company to revamp its server businesses. (The companion projects in this $300m effort are Project Moonshot, the low-energy server effort that HP announced back in early November with ARM-based servers. Project Odyssey, also debuted last November and will bring the Xeon processors from Intel to the Integrity and Superdome 2 classes of Itanium-based machines and make Linux and Windows more like HP-UX in terms of scalability and reliability for mission-critical workloads.)
"This is about re-architecting the server so it is ready for the scale that the cloud needs," said Potter, saying that the current way of doing manual operations on servers was "unsustainable." He said that in a typical data center, weighing in at 10,000 ft2, manual operations cost an average of $24m over three years, and that running the facilities manually (rather than automatically) adds another $29m in higher energy costs over the same three years. He cited statistics that this class of data center typically has a downtime cost of around $10m an hour.
With the system management tools that HP is rolling out with the ProLiant Gen8 boxes, the tools would give back another 30 days a year (that's six weeks if you work a five-day week) per system administrator and would also allow companies to double the capacity in their data centers because of easier and more automated management and more sophisticated power capping and load balancing across machines in the data center.
"These servers are so smart that they are going to virtually take care of themselves," said Potter. That may not be music to the ears of system administrators, but it probably is to the beancounters. (Right up to the moment where something really awful goes wrong and no one on staff has any idea how to fix it because the CEO used the sysadmin budget to buy a corporate jet.)
The system software that HP has cooked up is agentless, and the system now boots up in under three seconds. The servers have over 1,600 parameters that are tracked inside the box through what HP calls Active Health, which not only allows for problems to be resolved around five times faster than with the predecessor ProLiant Gen7 machines, but also allows for Insight management tools to work with HP's support systems (now branded Insight Remote) to do proactive fixes before something goes wrong. So if a disk drive is getting wobbly, the system notifies HP, which ships a new drive. Simple stuff like that. The ProLiant G6 servers from several years ago had a "sea of sensors" that were dedicated to monitoring power and cooling to try to optimize the servers for power efficiency. But with the Gen8 machines, the idea is to focus on the health of the system.
"We have richer information, and we can get at it five times faster," John Gromala, director of marketing for the ISSS division at HP, tells El Reg. "And that information can flow back to HP to help the company to improve its support operations."
In early tests, the new Insight Online and Insight Remote services working through all those new sensors helped system administrators attain a 95 per cent first-time fix rate on problems and fix problems 40 per cent faster, too.
The new ProLiant Gen8 tools also include Smart Update, which allows the provisioning and updating of thousands of servers with the click of a mouse. On a single server, Smart Update runs on the Integrated Lights Out (iLO) service processor in the box, but if you are managing a large number of machines, you plunk it onto a Windows or Linux machine and it can then sequence updates across hundreds or thousands of machines, both for updating the firmware on the ProLiant machines and any drivers that are running to link peripherals to the server.
"This is the single biggest thing that IT shops have to deal with," says Gromala.
Potter, his boss, said that on a rack of 32 PowerEdge servers from Dell, it took 295 minutes to provision the machines, but with the Gen8 machines and Smart Update tools, 32 machines could be provisioned in 10 minutes. Presumably the ProLiant G6 and G7 machines were no more or less pokie than the PowerEdgies.
Smart Update does not provision and patch hypervisors, operating systems, or application software. It does link into the new HP tech support portal, called Insight Online.
Stack 'em and rack 'em
HP is thinking more than across a bunch of servers in a rack, but across all the racks in the data center. In conjunction with the ProLiant Gen8 preview, HP trotted out Location Discovery Services and Thermal Discovery Services, two bits of software from HP's Technology Services unit, which worked in conjunction with the ProLiant server group to cook up these extensions to the Insight Control v7 management tools. These Insight tools are one of the reasons why HP needed to buy Compaq a decade ago.
The ProLiant Gen8 machines will come with Platinum Plus-rated power supplies, which have a 94 per cent efficiency rating. But this is not enough to make the data center itself more power efficient. The location and thermal discovery services will allow a server to figure out where it is in the data center racks and rows, what power distribution units it is feeding off of, and what the thermal and power conditions are like around it. Then, having assessed its thermal and power environment, the server can use data from these tools to automatically configure its power capping settings so it doesn't cause an overheating situation. All of this data is automatically captured by the PDUs – yup, you need to buy HP PDUs – and sysadmins don't have to try to keep their server power cap and location data in a spreadsheet.What HP did not talk about during its preview is what all of the add-ons for its Insight Control v7 software, as well as Insight Online, would cost IT shops. One thing for sure: You can bet it will not be free.
Whitman says HP turnaround will not happen overnight • The Register
The latest quarterly report from HP reveals continuing issues… no surprise…
Five months into the role as HP CEO, Meg Whitman is finally detailing the tech titan's turnaround plan that involves "fixing execution" and cutting costs to save cash before it ups investments in R&D.
In a tough fiscal first quarter, HP ironically saw an upturn in the software and to a much lesser extent the services businesses – the strategic areas of focus for Whitman's hapless predecessor – but declining sales across all core hardware divisions again.
Sales in the three months ended 31 January fell 7 per cent to $30bn, while operating and net profits sank 41 per cent and 44 per cent to $2bn and 1.46bn respectively.
"Frankly, it was a tough quarter, and every business had its challenges," said Whitman in a call with analysts last night.
Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) revenues declined 10 per cent to $5bn: networking revenues were flat; Industry Standard Servers fell 11 per cent, Business Critical Servers dropped 27 per cent and storage was down 6 per cent.
Whitman described this segment as a "highly competitive environment that was compounded by the hard disk shortage. in our broader storage business, we're still working through a product transition".
So that leaves Software and Services, the units that were a core part of Apotheker's vision which were thrust into the foreground as he mulled over options for the future of the PC biz, killed of WebOS hardware and splashed the cash on Autonomy.
Services revenues hardly provided reasons for investors to cheer - sales grew one per cent to $8.5bn, with Technology Services turnover up 2 per cent, Application and Business Services flat and IT Outsourcing grew 2 per cent.
The Software division pushed up revenues by 30 per cent to $946m including numbers from Autonomy, fuelled by 12 per cent growth in licensing, 2 per cent growth in support sales and 108 per cent in services.
Whitman has been on a tour of duty since the own goals HP scored last summer, attending 80 customer visits in the US and Europe and meeting staff and channel partners.
"We've been working hard to set the right tone, calm the waters and reassure our stakeholders that HP is the same reliable company … So what have I found? Certainly, I found some skepticism. But I have also found that we have incredible support."
She said HP is on the right trajectory "but we have a long road ahead of us" and its recovery plans are not helped by continued cautious spending in US commercial, weak demand in consumer and the challenges in Europe.
Whitman said the major issues to overcome include "fixing our execution" by reducing SKUs to remove supply chain complexities; upgrading sales tools and systems to react more quickly to punters; and upping sales productivity by "rationalising our go-to-market".
The second major hurdle has roots in the strategy devised by disgraced former CEO Mark Hurd, who slashed R&D. HP said its businesses were under "intense competitive pressure" and that it was feeling the strain from "tectonic [industry] shifts".
"We didn't make the investments we should have [made] during the past few years to stay ahead of customer expectations and market trends. As a result, we see eroding revenue and profits today. We need to invest now as a market leader from a position of strength."
The final issue pulled up by Whitman is how HP reacts to emerging "delivery, consumption and business model[s]" for tech areas including cloud, security and information management.
Whitman said there was a "once-in-a-generation" chance to define the future of tech – clearly she can still draw upon cliches learned in her brief political career – but she said HP needs to "stabilise financial performance" and generate profits to invest.
"And it's clear, from both our revenue and margin profile, that our current cost base just isn't affordable. On the current trajectory, we just won't have the capacity that we need to invest," she said.
"For years, we've been basically running our business in silos. And under that model, we built some of the leading franchises in technology, but it's also made us too complex and too slow," she said.
HP has been through years of pain with a series of redundancy programmes hitting morale, but more can be done to "streamline operations" such as tackling business processes by standardising and automating workloads.
"We can also take a ton of complexity out of the system, improve our effectiveness and significantly reduce costs," said Whitman.
"It's not easy work and it's not a quick fix, but it holds the potential to improve the way we operate and execute, and it simply has to be done. We have got to save to invest. We have got to save to grow … I have no doubt that we'll turn HP around."Turnaround strategies take time to bed in but with the founders' families and an incredibly political board to contend with, Whitman will be looking over her shoulder for some time yet.
HP gives sysadmins a little mobility • The Register
HP is upping their game in the mobile administration department. Worth noting.
HP is embracing mobility with apps to allow sysadmins to receive alerts, manage systems and even shut down servers, all from the comfort of their booth seats at the pub.
HP already provides SiteScope, with which one can monitor servers and receive alerts on Android and iOS devices. But in a presentation at the HP Global Partner event in Las Vegas the company promised a good deal more functionality would be coming to mobile clients.
The new mobile management apps will be designed to show off the capabilities of HP's just-announced Gen8 servers. Those servers apparently monitor 1,600 systems parameters, data which will be available on the mobile app.
But mobile users will also be able to create management scripts, PC World reports, allowing the user to automate common management tasks even if those tasks are unique to their environment. The app will even report the physical location of a failing server, which can only help.
It's not clear when the app will be available for download, but the Gen8 servers will be available next month and HP will likely want to show off the mobile clients with them.So there's still a few weeks to convince the company that an Android (or iOS) device is essential to modern system administration… if that's not already obvious.
A CTO's take on cloud — Cloud Computing News
Great article on how the CTO of Capgemini is looking at recent developments in enterprise adoption of the cloud. Good stuff.
As Capgemini's CTO for North America, Joe Coyle hears an awful lot about cloud computing. He hears it from customers that want to evaluate cloud solutions and from vendors that want to win that business. Capgemini, a $12 billion global systems integrator, has relationships with all the major vendors and many enterprise customers, so it's interesting to hear what Coyle has to say about the current state of the market.
Here are my main takeaways from a recent conversation with him.
1: IBM is cloudier than you think.
Big Blue has a pretty potent set of cloud options but it's going about its business very cleverly. Given it's big-iron heritage, IBM rarely talks about the hardware component of its cloud portfolio, Coyle said.
"They're attacking this from a software perspective. They've taken Tivoli and are building this software umbrella so that you can take whatever you're running in your data center now and put all or part of it in a public or private cloud," he noted. IBM's 2010 acquisition of Cast Iron also give it a slick appliance that lets customers integrate in-house apps with SaaS applications running outside.
He doesn't see IBM cloud penetrating a ton of new smaller businesses, but for many existing IBM shops — and there are a ton of them — IBM cloud is a no brainer.
2: Microsoft Azure has a tough row to hoe
Coyle is of two minds on Windows Azure, the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) underlying Microsoft's cloud strategy.
"Azure's been a bit of a disappointment," he said. "When Microsoft briefed us on it years ago, all the national [systems integrators] were chomping at the bit. But then it stumbled."
"Then the message was the software would only run on Azure. That' s fine, but by that point, the world had moved on, companies were already using Amazon," he said. The usual argument that Azure is a PaaS while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) simply doesn't matter to most customers. The big AWS draw is they know they can deploy their applications on AWS now and move them to another hosted or in-house data center, later.
On the plus side, the Azure technology is solid and, unlike previous Microsoft development technologies, forces developers to follow the rules — they can't design software services that misbehave. "Azure is extremely powerful and if [Microsoft] can get its act together people will try it," Coyle said.
But overshadowing all that technical mastery is the perception of Azure as a closed platform — despite its multi-language support. Microsoft's single biggest problem is customer suspicion that it will use Azure to lock them into the next wave of Microsoft technologies, essentially replacing the Windows/Office upgrade cycle.
"I'm not saying it's true, but it's what people think," Coyle said.
3: Amazon is Amazon
Amazon Web Services are what they are: extremely flexible and leading the league in public cloud. AWS suffered a couple black eyes in 2011 with an embarrassing four-day outage in April and then a widespread reboot glitch later in the year.
Coyle is pretty forgiving of these miscues. The April outage, he said, was largely due to people implementing their work incorrectly, something that AWS tried to fix manually. There are things you can do now in AWS to prevent this stuff, to build in more reliability and redundancy, although users will have to pay for it, he said.
The bottom line? Glitches and all, Amazon is the incumbent public cloud power and will stay that way, he said.
4: OpenStack as big-time cloud disruptor
Coyle is also bullish on the OpenStack movement, which is building a standard cloud foundation out of open-source tools. Initiated by Rackspace and NASA, it's achieved critical mass with nearly every IT provider — from Dell, to HP, to Cisco, to Citrix — aboard and Rackspace offloading management to a more neutral OpenStack Foundation.
"OpenStack will change the world of cloud computing. As a lot of smaller companies look to build their own clouds, this will be a natural choice," Coyle said.
Who stands to lose if that's the case? Ironically, the Dells and HPs of the world — all of which are building their own clouds. "Why do you think they joined?" His feeling is these hardware companies — many of which were building their own more vendor-specific clouds — are hedging their bets.
Will OpenStack affect Amazon? "No. Amazon is Amazon," he said.
5: CIOs are getting over cloud phobia
It's taken time, but the economics of cloud computing are too good for CIOs to ignore, Coyle said. Any doubts they had about moving at least some corporate data to an outside cloud storage provider, for instance, have evaporated in recent months.
And they're getting emboldened to do more than storage. The advent of Hadoop and NoSQL technologies means that companies could actually get some use out of all that old stuff sitting on tape or in platters, he said. Uploading that information, and massaging it with the latest analytics means that historical data can be used to test assumptions and new models, for example, seeing what a price change means to sales over time.
Wringing real value out of old data is a pretty good proposition for most CIOs.
Oracle fires Itanium countersuit at HP • The Register
More legal shenanigans from HP and Oracle over Itanium. Oracle claims that HP is paying Intel to continue developing Itanium.
Late Friday, Oracle filed a countersuit against HP, which sued Oracle back in June because Oracle said in March that it would not be developing future releases of its database, middleware, and application software on future Itanium processors.
It's hard to tell who is stretching the truth more it in the ongoing lawsuit, and now countersuit, between Hewlett-Packard and Oracle over the fate of the Itanium processor from Intel. The reason is that the court documents coming out describing the situation are heavily redacted, with all the juicy bits that might offer some clarity being blacked out.
In the amended cross-complaint filed last Friday, which was posted on the Scribed document sharing site here, Ellison & Co's lawyers are slapping back at HP with seven counts, including charges of fraud, defamation, intentional interference with contractual relations, intentional interference with prospective economic advantage, as well as violation of the Lanham Act and two violations of the California Business and Professional Code.
"HP engaged in a multi-year campaign of secrecy and deception designed to conceal the truth about Intel Corporation's commitment to the Itanium microprocessor in order to extend its Itanium server business at Oracle's expense and reap large profits from its own unsuspecting installed base of Itanium users," Oracle lawyers wrote in the brief sent to Judge James Kleinberg of the California Supreme Court in Santa Clara.
"When Oracle announced the truth about Itanium – that Intel's strategic focus was not on Itanium but on its competing Xeon line of microprocessors, and that Itanium was nearing its end of life – HP reacted with a ferocious effort to foment false customer outrage and to vilify and defame Oracle, all to buy itself more time to milk its customer base and falsely blame Oracle for Itanium's demise."
Oracle says that in the process of document discovery in the Itanium case, it stumbled upon an agreement whereby HP is paying Intel to keep the Itanium processor alive – something Oracle says it did not know when it made the decision to pull software support from the future Itanium processors back in March. Oracle's beef is that this revised "Itanium Collaboration Agreement" was done secretly, without partners or customers being told what the deal is.
"There is, of course, nothing wrong with entering into a contract with a supplier to ensure the supply of a key input," Oracle said in its countersuit. "Had HP simply entered into the Intel deal and revealed it – perhaps taken credit for it – Oracle would have nothing to complain about." Oracle contends that "Intel desperately wanted out of Itanium" and that this as well as the HP agreement to essentially pay Intel to keep the Itanium roadmap alive was something that it was entitled to as an HP and Intel partner and that HP's customers (who are often users of Oracle's software as it turns out) are similarly entitled to.
By torpedoing the Itanium platform, Oracle can sink a big portion of HP's enterprise systems profits, which come from HP-UX system sales and support contracts. Oracle has shown no love to HP since it acquired the Sun Microsystems hardware and operating system business and it got worse when HP fired Larry Ellison's tennis buddy, Mark Hurd, as CEO.
It got even worse when HP hired former SAP CEO Leo Apotheker to replace him and former Oracle president Ray Lane to be its chairman. Once Hurd came into Oracle as co-president, it was a matter of months before the gloves were off. Whatever the legal, technical, or market merits of Oracle's moves with regard to Itanium, the intended effect has been realized: HP's Unix business is shrinking. Then again, so is Oracle's Unix business, as the latest Gartner server figures show. So far, IBM seems to be the big winner in the tit-for-tat legal spat between these two companies.
Oracle is also filing its countersuit against HP because it says that it was fraudulently induced into entering in an agreement that allowed it to hired Hurd after he had been let go from HP. It claims that HP concealed and misrepresented the "truth about Itanium" and concealed "material information" that it was about to hire Apotheker and Lane to run the company.
Oracle also reminded everyone that HP tried to add clauses to the Hurd agreement that would guarantee HP's access to Java, its ability to sell Solaris on x86 platforms, and ongoing support from Oracle for its software stack on HP-UX. This language was struck from the commitment reaffirmation portion of the Hurd agreement, and in a draft supplied by Oracle, all that was left was this:
"Oracle and HP reaffirm their commitment to their longstanding strategic relationship and their mutual desire to continue to support their mutual customers. Oracle will continue to offer its product suite on HP platforms and HP will continue to support Oracle products (including Oracle Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM) on its hardware in a manner consistent with that partnership."
The actual Hurd agreement remains under seal, so we don't know what it says. But this portion of the agreement, however it was worded, is the clause in the agreement that HP's lawyers are arguing is a commitment by Oracle to continue to support its software on HP-UX/Itanium machines made by HP. Oracle is seeking a recission of the Hurd hiring agreement in its countersuit.
Incidentally, Oracle's countersuit says that HP's allegations in its lawsuit from June that Oracle is withholding support to current Itanium customers on current Oracle software is "utterly false" and that "Oracle is fully supporting the current (and many past) versions of its software on Itanium servers, by issuing bug-fixes per its standard policies."
In the wake of Oracle's countersuit, HP put out a lengthy statement of its own.
Interestingly, in the week before the Hurd hiring agreement was signed on September 20, HP says that Oracle's general counsel wrote in an email that this provision was "an agreement to continue to work together as the companies have – with Oracle porting products to HP's platform and HP supporting the ported products and the parties engaging in joint marketing opportunities – for the mutual benefit of customers."
While much remains murky in this suit and countersuit, what seems clear at this point is that we are going to have a Bill Clinton verb definition moment like that during the ex-President's impeachment. It will all depend on what the definition of the word "support" is.
Oracle will no doubt argue that it is continuing to support HP-UX and Itanium with current and prior releases of its database, middleware, and application software. HP will no doubt argue that what the clause meant was that Oracle would continue to port future releases to future Itanium chips and HP-UX releases.
HP continues to contend, and reiterated in its statement, that Oracle wants to move Itanium server customers to its own Sun systems and that the "tactics employed by Oracle in support of this purpose included pricing misconduct, withholding of benchmarking scores for HP servers run on Oracle software, and abusing customers on support issues."The HP-Oracle lawsuit is scheduled for trial on April 2, 2012, and will also probably have both sides arguing about how long a proper server chip roadmap needs to be so it is not at "end of life," and what it means if HP is indeed paying Intel to keep the Itanium chip alive. It will be interesting to see what that is costing HP and how long that commitment term is for, if it turns out to be true.
Micron's glass memory monster chews up slowcoach flash • The Register
Micron makes the case for phase-change memory performance in the post-NAND world. This is a direct competitor to HP's vision for memristor memory.
Micron has demonstrated Phase-Change Memory (PCM), enabling an app to run around 50 times faster than it would on NOR memory.
PCM is a post-NAND and post-NOR contender in the non-volatile memory arena; it's said to combine the speed and simple data access of DRAM and the non-volatility of NAND and NOR flash memory. It stores binary values by altering the physical state of a chalcogenide glass to be either poly-crystalline or amorphous. The state, which dictates the material's electrical resistance, is changed by running current through the material.
PCM is one of several candidates posited to replace both NAND and NOR flash as these technologies run into read and write performance and endurance walls as the underlying process shrinks…
With HP stating that Memristor product could hit the market in 2013, targeting DRAM initially, the post-NAND and NOR stakes are hotting up and technology productisation is key. Micron is serving notice that its PCM efforts are continuing.We also note that Micron has announced details of its 3D DRAM memory cube technology and it is going to competing against Memristor if its 3D cubes are ready in 2013. It also has irons in the spin-transfer torque-MRAM fire, as it is determined to be a force to be reckoned with in the post-NAND market.
Cloudy servers find their niches • The Register
A breakdown of the latest IDC and Gartner server numbers for the quarter. Two things of note - IBM continues its dominance of the UNIX space, growing its worldwide marketshare by 5% in the quarter; and stripped down "cookie-sheet" servers, modeled on the bare-bones servers that Google uses in their datacenters, are becoming a sizable part of the server business.
The cookie-sheet servers created by Google for its own use – recently commercialized by all the top-tier vendors in one form or another as hybrid rack-blade boxes – have become a sizeable and important part of the server business.
In the third quarter ended in September, the box counters at IDC reckon that end users snapped up 2.07 million machines from server makers and their channel partners, an increase of 8.7 per cent compared to the year-ago period. Revenues increased a more modest 4.2 per cent, to $12.74bn. The market is cooling a bit thanks to tough compares, and as fellow box counter Gartner pointed out earlier this week, shipment and revenue levels on a global basis have more or less recovered to the levels prevailing ahead of the server crash in the wake of the Great Recession three years ago.
Blade servers, which have been around for a little more than a decade, are in essence racks in miniature with integrated backplanes for linking servers to integrated switching and system management processors in the chassis, seemed poised to become a dominant server architecture based on the hockey-stick uptake of rack servers during the dot-com boom, but blades are a high-end product that is a tougher sell than many server-makers had expected. Still, blades are the best option for many customers, and at $2bn in sales for the quarter (16 per cent of revenues) and just under 280,000 units (13.5 per cent of machines sold) they are an important system option even if they have not knocked out rack servers, as many expected.
Blade servers are full of system management and resiliency features that most supercomputer and hyperscale cloud operators simple won't pay for. That's why over the past several years the cookie sheet server – which jams multiple server nodes into a rack chassis on metal trays – has become popular. These nodes are all about low-cost and ripping out any extraneous stuff in a blade box – such as service processors, integrated node management, and switching. The assumption with hyperscale servers is that compute and local storage are all that matter and the application environment itself will provide the resilience. And hence these hyperscale servers, as IDC calls them, have come into their own.
In some cases, such as those of Google and Amazon, the company is building all or some of their own hyperscale machines, and even while Facebook has designed its own servers, it still farms out the manufacturing and thus those servers get counted as commercial boxes in IDC's numbers.
In the third quarter, the hyperscale server segment accounted for 118,888 shipments and $428.5m in revenues, which is an increase of 8.7 per cent in terms of sales and 4.3 per cent in terms of shipments. So hyperscale machines now account for 3.4 per cent of revenue and 5.7 per cent of shipments and have much lower average selling prices per node.
How much lower? If you do the math across the whole server market in the third quarter, the average server cost $6,149. There were a few thousand mainframes and high-end RISC/Itanium boxes in there to raise the class average, but x86 machines account for the lion's share of shipments in any quarter these days. (All but about 70,000 machines in this case.) The average rack or tower server cost $6,163, and the average blade server cost $7,151. You can see now why blades have had limited appeal: they offer operational cost advantages, but you pay a premium for the hardware. The average hyperscale server cost a mere $3.604 according to IDC's data, which shows you why you might want to build resiliency in your software stack instead of on any particular server node.
Dicing and slicing server sales
In addition to casing server sales by form factor, IDC takes a stab at estimating the shipments of servers based on the primary operating system that gets installed on the boxes as well as by price band. The System zEnterprise 196 mainframes announced a little more than a year ago gave Big Blue a big bump in sales, but that refresh cycle is starting to slow; the company only booked $970m in sales of mainframes in the third quarter, according to IDC. Windows server sales also cooled a bit, with revenues up 5.3 per cent to $6.3bn against shipment increases of only 2 per cent. That said, Windows-based machines are by far the dominant server platform in the world in terms of shipments.
Unix machines showed some life, with sales up 1.6 per cent to $2.6bn, thanks mainly to IBM pushing its AIX boxes like crazy. "IBM is really starting to dominate this market," Jed Scaramella, research manager of enterprise servers at IDC, tells El Reg, adding that IBM accounted for 46 per cent of all Unix revenues in the third quarter and gaining five points of revenue market share.
Hewlett-Packard lost 5 points of share and Oracle lost 1.5 points, and they were in a statistical tie for second place in Unix system sales in the quarter. Linux systems saw a very nice 12.3 per cent revenue jump in Q3, to $2.3bn and now account for 18.6 per cent of total server revenues. If you want to be generous, you could say that the combined Unix and Linux markets – call it Unilinux – experienced a 6.4 per cent revenue bump to $4.9bn.
Various proprietary platforms from Unisys, Fujitsu, Bull, NEC, IBM, and HP (not including IBM System z mainframes) accounted for a mere $570m in sales, down 8.8 per cent over last year's third quarter.
Server sales were not uniform around the world, as you might expect given the differences in regional economies and the state of IT infrastructure in different regions.
"After nearly two years of steady revenue growth, the server market began to decelerate in Q3 2011 as demand stabilized for many system categories," explained Matt Eastwood, general manager of enterprise platforms at IDC, in a statement accompanying the server stats. "Asia/Pacific and Japan exhibited strong revenue growth while server demand in EMEA, North America, and Latin America was flat to slightly down year over year. IDC continues to believe that weakening macroeconomic conditions around the world will serve to further moderate demand for new servers in 2012."
By segment, IDC calculates that volume servers (machines that cost under $25,000) had a 5 per cent increase in revenues as a group in the quarter. The high-end segment, which covers machines that cost more than $250,000, had a 1.1 per cent revenue bump (despite the System z decline and because of improving Unix system sales), and the midrange machines between these two bookends had a 4.7 per cent revenue increase as a group.
If you look at the server business by vendor, IBM and Hewlett-Packard were in a dead heat in Q3 as far as IDC can tell, with IBM and HP both getting $3.79bn in sales. (Technically, IDC believes Big Blue had $3m more in sales, but declares a tie when the difference between the vendors is less than one per cent.) IBM grew 3.5 per cent and HP dropped 3.8 per cent.Dell was the number three server seller, with $1.93bn in sales, and grew at a pace that was nearly three times as fast as the market at large. Another way of saying that is this: If you take Dell out of the numbers, the other vendors only grew their sales by 2.7 per cent, so Dell accounted for two-thirds of the growth of the overall market. Oracle's server sales declined by 3.2 per cent to $764m, and Fujitsu shrank four-tenths of a per cent to $605m. Other vendors – helped by supercomputer-makers Silicon Graphics and Cray as well as upstarts Lenovo and Cisco Systems – grew as a group by 22 per cent to $1.86bn.
HP Embraces Calxeda ARM Architecture With "Project Moonshot" - New Hyperscale Business Unit Program | Forrester Blogs
HP has just announced the creation of a new hyperscale computing business unit. They are partnering with Calxeda to build an ecosystem around low-energy computing platforms composed of hundreds of ARM-based processing cores. These platforms will support emerging high-volume web and cloud workloads.
Emerging ARM server Calxeda has been hinting for some time that they had a significant partnership announcement in the works, and while we didn't necessarily not believe them, we hear a lot of claims from startups telling us to "stay tuned" for something big. Sometimes they pan out, sometimes they simply go away. But this morning Calxeda surpassed our expectations by unveiling just one major systems partner – but it just happens to be Hewlett Packard, which dominates the WW market for x86 servers.
At its core (unintended but not bad pun), the HP Hyperscale business unit Project Moonshot and Calxeda's server technology are about improving the efficiency of web and cloud workloads, and promises improvements in excess of 90% in power efficiency and similar improvements in physical density compared with current x86 solutions. As I noted in my first post on ARM servers and other documents, even if these estimates turn out to be exaggerated, there is still a generous window within which to do much, much, better than current technologies. And workloads (such as memcache, Hadoop, static web servers) will be selected for their fit to this new platform, so the workloads that run on these new platforms will potentially come close to the cases quoted by HP and Calxeda.
The Program And New HP Business Unit
Officially, the announcement was HP announcing their new hyperscale business unit, based on the premise that very high-volume data centers will continue to proliferate, driven by massive continued increases in demand for web and cloud-based applications handling massive amounts of data, and that the trajectory of current systems technology with respect to power, cooling and density may be inadequate for emerging requirements.
HP's hyperscale initiative consists of three major components:
- Discovery centers – Facilities where potential partners and customers can experiment with HP's new hyperscale products. These centers are a vital component of this initiative because for the most part the workloads are new to this new platform, and both potential users, HP, Calxeda and other partners have a lot of learning to do to about which applications really fit and how to tune them. In effect a learning lab for both customers and suppliers. In many ways the knowledge gained in these centers is more valuable in the early phases than any product revenues that flow from them.
- Partner ecosystem – The usual suspects, software and hardware partners needed to facilitate the success of the new business unit. While HP was clear in their statements that they will be looking at multiple technologies, the entire announcement is centered around Calxeda, who is simultaneously announcing their EnergyCore server architecture and their accompanying EnergyCard reference architecture. In addition to a number of cloud-centric partners, the initial partnership roster includes Cannonical (Ubuntu Linux), putting a fully functional Linux distribution in the plus column for the nascent ARM ecosystem.
- A product – The HP "Redstone" development system, based on the existing SL6500 system enclosure and Calxeda's EnergyCore servers. The SL6500 is HP's current dense rack offering for HPC and hyperscale web computing. Redstone swaps out the current x86 servers and substitutes modules with 18 Calxeda EnergyCard servers, cute little 10" x 3" cards that contain four complete SOC quad-core server nodes with integrated memory, management processor, scalable fabric and integrated switch and all network and SATA interfaces, with a 5W per server/20W per card maximum power draw. In total, each server tray packs 72 quad-core ARM servers in 1 RU equivalent of space. If you read my last post on Calxeda's reference architecture, you can guess that the basic Calxeda architecture is indeed the core of the HP offering, but in keeping with Calxeda's OEM business model, HP has added value around packaging, extending the SOC fabric topology & I/O, management and power/cooling technology, and will add further value as the line matures.
What Does It Mean
Reduced to its essence, this means that ARM servers are on the industry road map. Among the major effected constituents:
- System vendors - HP is clearly placing its bets on an emerging segment of the server market that cannot be met with current CPU x86 CPU technology and current server designs. As the dominant x86 server vendor, HP is making an intelligent bet, and is now well positioned, with a solid first-mover advantage over its competitors, to capture new opportunities among its existing customer base as well as to capture others who might have gone away and patronized a new ARM server startup in search of ultimate energy efficiency. We might suspect that ARM has had discussions with Dell and IBM. More news to come?
- Customers – Now have (or will have in 2012 when HP officially ships the Redstone) a viable alternative CPU architecture to deploy for appropriate workloads, and I expect a lot of demand for evaluation units and access to the discovery centers. The potential to improve throughput per watt by such huge factors is incentive enough to seriously evaluate the new alternative, and my recommendation is to take a look and see how it works with your own applications.
- Intel and AMD – How about a giant wakeup call? I seriously doubt that this has caught them totally by surprise – the studied silence and nonchalance over the past year with which they responded to any inquiries about the impact of ARM competition had me convinced that they were actually quite worried. But being concerned in the abstract and having your No. 1 customer endorse not only your competition but an entirely new architecture are two different things entirely. Will this destroy Intel and AMD as server vendors? The thought is absolute nonsense. Aside from the large number of workloads that will not particularly benefit from the ARM model, both will respond with further focused R&D to continue to improve their power efficiency, leveraging their strengths in software compatibility and in Intel's case, their market dominance.
My Takeaway
Not that it was exactly boring before, but the server world just got a whole lot more interesting, and customers just got a major early Christmas present – a whole new technology platform for emerging high-volume web and cloud workloads. All in all a very positive event for the industry and for us, the eventual beneficiaries of this technology.


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The Revo Guide S Sunglasses is just one small part of our vast listing of products from Revo ... product knowledge make us your best option for buying the Revo Guide S Sunglasses online. We've got ... the products you want at pricing that can't be beat - so why would you buy the Revo Guide S ... Sunglasses anywhere else? Revo RE4070-01-BL: Guide S Sunglasses, Black Frame, Blue Water Lens Revo ... RE4070-01-BR: Guide S Sunglasses, Black Frame, Terra Lens Revo RE4070-01-GN: Guide S Sunglasses, Black ... Frame, Green Water Lens Revo RE4070-01-GY: Guide S Sunglasses, Black Frame, Graphite Lens Revo ... RE4070-02-BL: Guide S Sunglasses, Tortoise Frame, Blue Water Lens Revo RE4070-02-BR: Guide S Sunglasses,...
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Jackson announced his candidacy for Illinois' Congressional seat in September of 1995. He easily won the primary with the highest voter turnout as the favored candidate in the special general election.
If the first debate is any indication, the 2nd District special election will be about biographies and personalities, not issues. Everyone agrees the south suburbs need an airport. Everyone agrees the Red Line needs to be extended to 130th Street. The question is who's best qualified to make those projects happen -- and who's least likely to engage in the kind of corruption that brought down Jesse Jackson Jr.


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* Prices may differ from that shown
I would recommend this Flash for beginners and intermediate users. Many EOS cameras now incorporate a small flash head into the top of the camera attached which is often sufficient enough for most tasks. But if you are feeling that your options are becoming a bit limited then using this Flash gun is not a bad place to start for EOS users. If you really want to be ambitious you can also link up this Flash to other Canon flashes for multiple flash lighting effects.
I think I got a good deal for my flash unit that was purchased in Amazon for just short of £130
Technical Summary
* Product Description: Canon Speedlite 220EX - hot-shoe clip-on flash
* Camera Flash: Hot-shoe clip-on flash
* Dimensions (WxDxH): 6.5 cm x 9.2 cm x 6.1 cm
* Weight: 160 g
* Guide Number (m / ISO 100): 22
* Lens Coverage: 28mm
* Supported Exposure Control: TTL, E-TTL
* Colour Temperature: Daylight
* Features: AF illuminator
* Required Battery: 4 x battery - AA type
* Carrying Case: Soft case
* Manufacturer Warranty: 1 year warranty
This supurb flash is made by Canon a name you can trust in the field of photography. It is small enough to fit in virtually any camera bag. Its very easy connection makes it simple to connect to your camera and when needed will give a bright flash to obtain a perfectly bright photograph. This flash will not let you down as it is very reliable.It also looks nice. Can be used by amatuer or professionable alike.
Designed for automatic operation only, the 220EX flash unit excels at providing natural-looking balanced flash exposures. When attached to the advanced cameras, such as EOS IX, EOS Elan II/Elan IIe, or EOS Rebel G, the 220EX delivers the benefits of the Canon's superior technology. These include Canon's unique E-TTL evaluative pre-stored flash exposure control system, FE Lock for a new dimension of creative control and FP Flash (high-speed sync) for flash photography up to maximum shutter speed. When used with other cameras, it operates as a TTL autoflash (off-the-film flash metering).
When in E-TTL operation, flash exposure is measured and controlled by the camera in combination with Canon's AIM system. Subject position, ambient light level, evaluative metering and pre-flash data are instantly analyzed, including heavy backlighting or reflections from background windows or mirrors.
|Product Description:
|Canon Speedlite 220EX - hot-shoe clip-on flash
|Camera Flash:
|Hot-shoe clip-on flash
|Dimensions (WxDxH):
|6.5 cm x 9.2 cm x 6.1 cm
|160 g
|Guide Number (m / ISO 100):
|Lens Coverage:
|Supported Exposure Control:
|Colour Temperature:
|AF illuminator
|Required Battery:
|4 x battery - AA type
|Manufacturer Warranty:
|1 year warranty
|Designed For:
|Canon T90; EOS 100, 1000, 1D, 1Ds, 300, 3000, 40, 450, 50, 500, 550, 5D, 60, 650, 66, 7D, Kiss 7, Kiss Digital N, Kiss Digital X, Kiss F, Kiss X2, Kiss X3, Kiss X4, Rebel SII QD, Rebel T1i, Rebel T2i, Rebel T4i, Rebel XS, Rebel XS N Date, Rebel XSi; PowerShot G10, G11, G12, G9, SX1, SX10, SX20, SX30


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KNOXVILLE (WATE) – People of faith gathered Thursday night in Krutch Park and prayed for Governor Haslam and other state leaders.
It was one of five vigils held across Tennessee.
The group wants an agreement to be made to protect rural hospitals, expand TennCare, and make sure everyone who needs healthcare gets it.
"It is not a political issue," said Rev. Dr. Valentino J. McNeal, from Mt. Olive Baptist Church. "It is a people issue because the Bible teaches us to take care of our brothers and sisters."
Haslam has said he's not too keen on the idea of expanding traditional Medicaid.
He's drafting a proposal to use funds from the Affordable Care Act to provide insurance subsidies.
1306 N. Broadway NE Knoxville, Tennessee 37917
Telephone: 865.637.NEWS(6397)
Fax: 865.525.4091
Email: email@example.com


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Worldwide Cellular Networks and Handsets Research Service
- Language: English
- Published: October 2014
- Region: Global
The Research Channel can best be described as Longhaus Live! It is home to the premium data and advisory content generated each year by their analysts. The Research Channel delivers the bottom line on industry movements, weekly updates, discussions on the latest market developments. As a monthly package, these programs are a 'must-see' for the well-connected ICT professional. Subscribers only.
IBM release the results of their 2010 Global CFO Study at a recent Cognos Finance Forum. Longhaus discussses the CIO - CFO relationship.
*Format: Online/Internet Television


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This Infiniti Q50 Eau Rouge Concept makes us wonder – what does "Eau Rouge" mean for Infiniti? Lets explorer this. Eau Rouge direct translation from French is "Red Water" and refers to blood. It's also the name of a historically significant river, but we will not go into further detail there. Infiniti chose this name […]Read More
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Page: JavaEE5Book
Personal web site of a senior software architect specialised in Java/Java EE.
Antonio Goncalves has written a book about Java EE 5. It explains, in a practical way, how to develop an e-commerce website using most of the Java EE 5 specifications. In this XWiki web site you will find more information about this book, be able to download the code that goes with it, and understand how to deploy and run the example.


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|Hilton Garden Inn Spicewood properties are provided below. Search for cheap and discount Hilton Garden Inn hotel rooms in Spicewood, TX for your personal or business trip. We list the best Hilton Garden Inn Spicewood hotels so you can review the Spicewood Hilton Garden Inn hotel list below to find the perfect place.
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Our Story/
A friend recommended Ideasbynet. We're still great friends
The statement above reflects our ethos. We like our customers, we appreciate their business and we want them to keep coming back to us.
We think the best way to do this is to continually provide great service. We take great pride in the fact that a high percentage of our business comes from repeat custom, and we are delighted by the amount of favourable, unsponsored testimonials we receive. That's how we measure whether we are doing our job right.
It's what's behind us that keeps us out in front
We are an online promotional gifts distributor, providing organisations up and down the country with branded 'promotables', such as pens, mugs, mousemats and umbrellas.
Formed from a creative marketing agency, we launched our first website in the year 2000, and have built up an enviable client base including the biggest names in UK business, local authorities, government departments, universities, new startups and social enterprises. Out staff are our biggest assets, as they are the ones that put this experience to good use – helping you achieve your goals. We like to call them our 'Promofessionals' – they eat, sleep and drink promotional gifts.
We don't use a shopping cart. We use Promofessionals.
You may think it odd, but we don't offer a shopping cart system on our website.
That's because we think your business is more important than that – we'll give you 100% personal service from an experienced Promofessional, who will seek to understand your business goals and guide you towards the perfect solution.
Why are you buying promotional gifts in the first place?
Our Promofessionals will ask you this when they call you, and the root answer is always the same - because you want to solve a business goal.
You might be selling on merchandise to make money, providing your staff with incentives, promoting a re-brand or simply providing information – you always have a business reason. This is the most important piece of information you can tell us, and we will use it to come up with a bespoke solution for you. We'll create solutions that not only satisfy your business goal, but also... -Fit your budget -Complement your brand -Maximise exposure of your message -Tie-in with your promotional campaign -Avoid any elephant traps and pot-holes along the way You can't do this without experience, and you certainly can't do this through a shopping cart.
Introducing CAMsultants - It's just like a meeting, but without all the hassle.
Imagine a meeting where you didn't have to bother with the travel. Didn't have to bother with the room booking, the small talk, the cups of coffee...the hassle.
Well imagine no longer, because that's exactly what our CAMsultants deliver. We hook you up to a live video stream with one of our Promofessionals, who will show you product demonstrations, give you new ideas or just have a good old chinwag.It's really easy to set up a CAMsultancy, we'll just send you a download link and away you go. You don't need a webcam or any fancy technology, you just watch us on screen and talk to us over the phone as normal. -We'll be where you need us to be - on your computer, on your iPad, or even on your phone. -You get to see our lovely staff in 720p high definition (lucky you). -We can show you extreme close-ups for very fine detail. -You can decide when the meeting is, what you want to talk about and how long it lasts. -Don't worry – you can see us but we can't see you (unless you really want us to!). Head over to the Our Story page to find out more.
Find Us!
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text:
Yield: Makes 2 cocktails
- 1 lime
- 2 tablespoons coarse kosher salt
- 1/4 cup tequila
- 1/4 cup triple sec
- 1/4 cup fresh lime juice
- lime wedges
- 1. Rub rims of 2 glasses (8 oz. each) with lime wedge. Put salt in a shallow dish and dip rims in salt. Put several ice cubes in each glass.
- 2. In a pitcher, mix tequila, triple sec, and fresh lime juice. Pour into glasses, dividing equally. Garnish with lime wedges.
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Margarita Recipe at a Glance
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text: Go Back This event has passed. City Bakery July 20|Recurring Event (See all)Every day until July 25, 2014 Event Navigation « ArtEtude Gallery Mission for Temporal Art » Through SU (8/31) - Pop Gun, photography Sandlin Gaither. + Google Calendar+ iCal Import DetailsDate:July 20, 2014Event Categories: Art Galleries, CalendarVenueCity BakeryPhone:828-252-4426 60 Biltmore Ave., Asheville, + Google MapWebsite:citybakery.net Similar EventsFountainhead BookstoreAugust 12The Heart of Horse SenseOctober 1Green Sage Cafe - WestgateOctober 1Asheville Art MuseumOctober 1 Event Navigation Previous Events ArtEtude Gallery Upcoming Events Mission for Temporal Art


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Things are getting super serious between Lindsay Lohan and Wanted singer Max George --'cause TMZ has learned he just took her home to meet his parents in the U.K. ... and we're told it went off without a hitch.
Lindsay and Max have been (unofficially) seeing each other since that fateful night in November -- when she allegedly punched a fortune teller at an NYC nightclub -- but this week, they took their relationship to the next level.
Lindsay's been partying it up recently in London -- as we reported -- and sources close to the actress tell us, Max invited her out to his parents' house in Manchester while she was in the area.
Lindsay happily made the visit early this week -- and we're told Lindsay had a great time, hanging out with the whole George clan for an entire day ... and she felt very at home.
We're told Lindsay and Max have been in constant contact since the last Wanted concert Lindsay attended last month (in the U.S.) -- and Max was adamant about her meeting his family.
As of now, we're told Lindsay and Max are NOT officially GF and BF -- just friends who enjoy each other's company ... and probably bang each other a lot.
tmz bullcrap. lilo has been in nyc for a week. tmz post storys knowin they are fake, you can't trust tmz on anything these days.
lilo is a gorgeous woman but she ain't that into maxie boy, if she was she'd say so.
people sayin this is to distract from the court date on tuesday are wrong, tmz don't need to distract, they go ahead with their bullcrap anyways. they don't have anythin to say about lilo right now so they invent crap. wait until tuesday, eveythin on here will be about lilo,
i love lilo
Lindsay was crack tweeting last night, like she was at her own little GGA.
Lindsays cracked out mind, called TMZ to get this load of **** out. Its so untrue.
Keep trying Linds, you make Max run even futher and faster
Good Morning Everybody,
Dina this the best you can do....?
Written just like a 14 yrs old who's trying to cover for the fact she slipped out of the house all night......
And Harvey don't care ...he'll just take the money and print the story and set back and watch the hits come rolling in.......
Whats Next.? .................Oh I got it!
The pregancey announcment ! after all we know how Lindsay likes to be on top of the latest trends.....and having a baby in the bun by the Hollywood whores is the latest greatest thing....a baby and a "Baby Daddy's " not a husband seems they are not reguired.....
So when is the blessed event ? ......and Who's the Daddy.....now that would be the quessing game of the year......LOL
But the joke would be "Who's the Momma " cause your little bird is so eaten up inside a baby would never grow.....Ali........LOL
maybe she too can tell us she is pregnant now
just to piss off kim for stealing the baby headlines and britney for screaming wanting babies headlines.
like me lilo hates tmz fake storys, like me lilo is into girls. you should look at gavin doyle for this crap, he's an obsessed squirt, whoever lilo follows on twitter, he follows, he has most of the tmz ppl on his twitter list, gavin doyle is a mini me of michael lohan
I also DONT belive Ali is in Korea modeling. (Shes to UGLY for a callback) We all know Lindsay needs ababysitter 24/7.
Sam is in NY
Ali is with Lindsay!!!!
Why did he place her in the groupie category?
OH Sterling.....................You are UnZipping ! mustn't do that...sweetie.....
I like to put my saddle on a nice strong horse to ride.........instead of a shaved down sheep .....last a lot longer and rides a hell of a lot farther !!!!
wow dude, i didn't know you were into the four legged variety for kicks, ewwwww thats pretty perverted
A celebrity with more mugshots than headshots is not the kind of girl you take home to mother.
I don't know if the story is true or not, I don't care either way.
His parents better check their valuables.
Yea... This happened like two weeks ago. There was a pap on twitter from the UK who said she was at his house and another tweeter got pics with both of them and the pics were taken in a house.
I have a feeling this is just TMZ"s way of having a Bitcho story to lead up to her court date Tuesday. Haven't most reports have Bitcho back in the US? When would she have time in between her "dates" to spend an entire day with this loser singer and his family? Bitcho is usually going home the time that must are getting up for the day. Unless his family is a bunch of drug dealing, alcholics I doubt this story is even close to the truth.
That's right sweetie you got me pegged !.....BWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA !
"I got the horse and you got the saddle;
We can go ride , ride, ride, .................
Yea I'm got the horse you got a new saddle
And we can ride the whole night thru "
The late great Mel Tillis use to sing this it was his favorite song ...written for his wife...after she had surgery of the delicate kind....LOL
My favorite line of the whole song
"Come on a park that brand new saddle of yours up on my horse....So we can try it out" spoken in the middle of the song.....
LOL.....you really ought to listen to Classic Country songs......they are GOOD...........


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Tag Results
7 posts tagged painting
7 posts tagged painting
"Invisible Arrival" by Edwin Ushiro
I think the Champion Edition cabinet is out of service — I can't see any reason why you'd play the original version otherwise.
This mixed media artwork (17.4" x 17") is available to purchase at Giant Robot for $2,500. Ushiro has several other non-gaming pieces for sale at the shop.
BUY SSFIV 3D Edition, 25th Anniversary Collector's Set
These red guys are going to get so much XP.
BUY Dragon Quest games
Castlevania-customized Game Boy by Oskunk. Just in time for Halloween, and to remind you that while Castlevania: Mirror of Fate was delayed into 2013, Castlevania: The Adventure released to 3DS's Virtual Console last week.
Preorder: Castlevania: Mirror of Fate
See also: More Castlevania posts
[Via Oskunk]
Ghost Trick 3DS XL custom painted by Tish Aurafox with acrylic markers and black permanent liners (click for a larger image).
Buy: Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
See also: More Ghost Trick posts
[Via Tish Aurafox]
"The Notorious P.A.C." by Doctor Popular. This piece, which casts Pac-Man and Blinky as The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur, victims of the East Coast/West
Ghost Coast rap rivalry, was created as a commission for nerdcore rapper Beefy.
I'm going to have to remember to show this to Eric when he gets back. I think he's going to like this one.
[Via technabob]
"Castlevania Ghost" by podkaynestudios. This painting of a classic Castlevania sprite has an awesome color scheme and highlights a less commonly fan-arted creature.
I think it also has kind of an abstract appearance. Even more so if you're not totally familiar with vintage Castlevania! It's the combination of the somewhat out-of-context image and the fact that seriously, what the hell is the Ghost in Castlevania supposed to be? It's like a flaming, elongated skull or something? Kind of looks like those disgusting owl pellets we dissected in school.
See also: "Shanoa" by Jian Huang, Mansionvania: Vacuum of Sorrow
"Little Nemo's First Kiss" by 8bitartist (20x20, acrylic paint on stretched cotton canvas).
If you don't recognize the above scene, it's probably because, like me, you never made it to the end of Capcom's Little Nemo: The Dream Master.
Thankfully, someone who isn't terrible at video games recorded the NES platformer's ending and posted it on YouTube for the rest of us to watch for the first time.
I was thrilled when I stumbled on this image, not only because I love Little Nemo, but also because it looks so much like the GIF I use as my avatar for everything — a screenshot from the Love Hina anime series.
Hella nerdy, I know.
8bitartist has a lot of other great video game paintings:
See also: Masao's art, i am 8-bit pieces


text: WASHINGON, Jan. 28.--The War Depart ment to-day received official information from Gen. Crook of the death of Capt. Emmet Crawford, Third Cavalry, at the hands of Mexicans in Mexico and the probable surrender of the renegade Apaches. An accompanying report from Lieut. Maus, First Infantry, who was next in Command..Jan. 8, 1886 Capt. Crawford pushed 48 hours in pusuit of Geronimo.along with scouts and Tom Horn surrounde Geronimos camp resulting in surender.. Jan. 9th and10th Capt. Crawford along with scouts and Tom Horn surrounded Geronimo's camp resulting in surender.. Jan. 11, 1886, the American camp under Capt. Crawford was attacked through misunderstanding by Mexican irregular Indian troops, resulting in Crawford's death. By the following March the Apache became tired of the war and asked for a parley, which Crook granted as formerly, but before the time for the actual surrender of the entire force arrived the wily Geronimo changed his mind and with his immediate band again fled beyond reach. His escape led to censure of Crook's policy; he was consequently relieved at his own request in April, and to Gen. Nelson A. Miles was assigned the completion of the task.


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A backlash to 'Extreme Couponing'?
Stores are changing policies because too many extreme couponers are clearing the shelves.
You may find the obsessive shoppers in "Extreme Couponing" somewhat entertaining, if over-the-top, but it appears they've inspired so many wannabes that retailers are setting new limits on coupon use.
Some smart shoppers have seen this coming since the TLC show debuted. Karen, in a SavvyDollar forum last month, shared a conversation she'd had with a grocery cashier:
She said, "I wish they'd take that show and shove it!" because apparently they've had a lot of customers come in wanting to save like the shoppers on the show and they try to break the store's coupon policies with the limits, complain when they can't, etc. I really hope this backlash doesn't ruin it for the rest of us . . . sounds like it might be heading that direction.
The show has apparently sparked some illegal activity, according to Lesley Mitchell, who described the backlash in The Salt Lake Tribune: "Managers at several stores where I shop think the 'Extreme Couponing' show has increased the instances of coupon fraud, including the practice of photocopying coupons."
Other people have gotten way too clever with coupon tricks, stripping the entire supply of a discounted product from store shelves. That means stores are getting less generous with coupon deals. Post continues after video.
Among the changes:
Rite Aid
- A buy-one-get-one-free coupon can't be used with a BOGO promotion to get both items for free. You can find Rite Aid's coupon policy here (.pdf file).
- "The chain is also limiting the number of coupons a shopper can use per item to four, as long as there is enough stock," CBS MoneyWatch's Farnoosh Torabi said.
- Target no longer accepts online coupons "for free items with no purchase requirements," its coupon policy says.
- A BOGO store coupon can't be combined with a manufacturer's coupon to get both items for free.
- Target is "limiting the number of store coupons that can be printed off its website to two (there used to be no limit)," Mitchell wrote in the Tribune.
- The chain has banned triple stacking and "now formally allows, per item, one manufacturer's coupon and one from either Publix or a competing store," Kelli B. Grant wrote at SmartMoney.
Stores aren't alone in setting limits these days. Grant also wrote, "Procter & Gamble now limits consumers to four of the same coupon per shopping trip, a recommendation that industry group Coupon Information Corporation is preparing to add to its best-practices page for companies issuing manufacturers coupons."
Contrary to rumor, Catalinas will continue to be printed out at checkout along with your receipt. However, some stores have changed their policy for using Catalinas.
Also, Wal-Mart is headed in the other direction, dumping limits on coupons per transaction, for instance, Grant says. (Here is Wal-Mart's coupon policy.)
Do you feel cheated because some stores have imposed restrictions on coupon use? Or are you glad that extreme couponers won't be able to strip the shelves bare? Did the show set a bad example?
The Coupon Information Corporation thought so. It said:
Professionals in the coupon industry believe this show creates unrealistic expectations about how coupons work and promotes the misuse of coupons. . . . In real life, individuals attempting to use such large quantities of coupons or attempting to use them in violation of the terms stated on the coupons would most likely have their coupons refused at the register or, depending on the circumstances, be investigated by law enforcement.
And, as Mitchell points out, there are still plenty of coupons online if you know where to look.
Supermarket Guru Phil Lempert wrote that the season finale of "Extreme Couponing" recently aired, "and may I be the first to say . . . Good riddance!" He added:
Putting these manic shoppers up as role models for the average person, who has a full-time job, cooks, and takes care of their families, is wrong. If we do want to highlight how to save money on groceries, can we please do it in a way that empowers with realistic tips that won't take 30 to 50 hours a week of one's life?
More on MSN Money:
Let's face it, stores cannot have shoppers using coupons so that they leave with hundreds of dollars in groceries and do not pay a dime...this will come back to bite everyone when stores raise prices as well as curtail their coupon policies...and honestly these stores NEED to make a profit, or they will go under, putting people out of work, negatively affecting the community by lost tax revenue...
4 - those who have a coupon /expiration date & want a rain check. I had 1 customer awhile back who had coupon that expired end of May and we were out of product. She wanted a RC. No problem. She asked if when we got the product in, if she could use the coupon. Very nicely I told her as long as it was before the expiration date, she would be fine. She came in a few days ago and tried to use the RC and coupon. Guess what? It's nearly the end of June. The system no longer takes the coupon. She threw such a fit that I can't even describe it here politely. I will say that she told the manager that we refused to help her, when we were politely doing our best to explain to her that a raincheck only covers our store sales cost, not the manf. coupon.
All of this might not sound like too much to the average reader but, consider the clerk who has to deal with this type of scenario not once, but more like 3 to 5 times in one shift, multiple days of the week.
Consider the manager who keeps running to calm people down while trying to make sure what we are accepting is within the law, all while trying to calm down the district managers who are now wondering why the complaints have quadrupled and why cashiers are suddenly running out the door or to the bathroom because undisciplined, rude, and hostile customers have nearly jumped across the counter in anger at them. Imagine some customers behaving so badly that other customers just drop their items and run out the door. Or..blowing their tops to the extreme that managers are calling the cops to escort them out or threatening to.
All because of some dumb show that has shown managers in some stores using their key to over ride something that wasn't correct but did it anyhow so the customer could save a $1. All because these nuts see these people on tv cramming their garages full of deodorant and pop and shoving multiiple cereal boxes under their kids' bed in an effor to get free whatever.
The people on the show are tame when compared to those who come in to the stores. People who think because they watch the show or go to all of these websites that they are all more intelligent than the managers and clerks and who must be getting some kind of high off of this craziness. They assume that the store will automatically get their 8 cents or whatever from the manufacturer no matter what - when that is NOT always the case. They assume they can come in and get exactly what they want for what they want when it is a retail store, not a yard sale.
Don't get me wrong, I think coupons are great when used with respect and honesty. Maybe I'll go ahead and create a show about how to train customers to shop - with respect and honesty and intelligence and preparation ahead of time.
When it is all said and done, the store employees are people, the other customers are people and there should be a lot more respect and politeness going around than what has been just over the sake of a darn .50 cent coupon.
Maybe all high school students should be required to work behind a register for an entire summer, that way everyone would get a taste of what it is like and perhaps think twice before they go on these darned coupon addiction trips to their local store.
Or maybe we should go around filming the extreme nutcases and feature them on an extreme nutcase shopper show. Now that sounds like more fun than my job has been lately,
Good riddance extreme couponers!!!
My teenage son works at a grocery store and was just talking about this the other day. He said the store owner had just spent 15 minutes trying to nicely explain to a woman that just because Walmart honored all coupons doesn't mean the local store could. The woman went nuts, screaming and swearing.
I think extreme couponers are mostly just hoarders. Seriously, who needs 74 boxes of Fruit Loops unless you're going to donate them to a shelter or food shelf? These people have a room just to showcase what they've collected. It's not about saving money on things they need, it's about bragging rights.
I tried watching that show once and shut it off after 2 minutes. When I see a woman empty a shelf for herself and a customer walks up and wants just one of the item, which the couponer wouldn't let the him have since they were ALL in her cart already. Her attitude of telling the guy "you should have gotten here first" was so selfish and greedy I never watched the show since.
These couponer scumbag, POS's are starting to ruin it for the rest of us whom really use the values to save money putting food on the table for our families. I have to agree, they are greedy and selfish hoarders with no respect for other shoppers, only thinking of themselves.
If the people using coupons were doing it legally, and buying what they truly need, i'd have no issue with it! But seeing one buy 200 boxes of pasta when they already have 200 at home, clearing all the shelves, that is ridiculous!! Reminds me of trying to grocery shop after they say *hurricane*, you can forget it..
I use coupons for dog food, cleaning supplies, etc. I use what I get from a sunday paper, magazines. I do not clear shelves, I do not have closet full of crap.
Knew this show was going to cause problems! Good for the stores
You watch the show and some people do it for the good of humanity and donate it all to the local food banks and churches, this I have no problem with coupon until your brain falls out.
I have no respect for the guy and his wife I saw last week that had so much crap in their home that he cannot put a car in the garage and has stuff sitting against the walls. Sorry, but for people like this it has nothing to do with couponing it is a disease called hoarding. Expect to see many of these folks profiled on that show on A&E soon. If these people were not hoarding food, they would have 800 cats in their house.
Who in their right mind needs 80lbs of chicken, 500 sticks of Right Guard and enough spaghetti sauce to put Ragu and Prego out of business.
please explain how a store is losing money, having to layoff people, raise prices, etc..for accepting coupons? Is it the same for accepting WIC and food stamps? Since stores get their money plus about 7 cents for each one they process, I'm not seeing where it would cause any layoffs. I'm assuming the state picks up the tab for the WIC and food stamp customers. Surely the grocery stores are not stuck for that.
I would guess there are very few "extreme" couponers irl. And grocery stores have the right to limit or accept coupons at their discretion.
I'll save my disgust for the folks using foodstamps but driving an escalade or the mom with her 3rd WIC baby.
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The Miami-based SonicC has jumped back on the burner, dropping two unreleased originals for his fans on soundcloud. After joining Dim Mak with the widespread glory for the infamous Stickin', the young producer looks to strike back with his new original 'Amnesia.' A more progressive electro take for Sonic, this one is sure to get support from lovers of the mau5, Spencer & Hill, and Kaskade. There's also hints of another big genre right now in there… Check it out below, along with an acid-inspired high energy version of his Prodigy bootleg.
DOWNLOAD after the jump! Continue Reading


text:
October 1, 2014
March 9, 2014
Hundreds of new jobs are on the way to Gordonsville, but it isn't just the unemployed who could benefit from the boom.
Other businesses that were hit hard when a major employer closed up shop a few years ago are looking forward to the economic development.
On Friday, Governor Terry McAuliffe was in the small Orange County town to announce that New Jersey-based Green Applications, LLC is investing nearly $10 million to establish its first Virginia operation in Gordonsville.
Along with it, 323 new jobs.
That would restore more than twice the number of positions lost when American Press went out of business in 2011.
"When American Press went out of business, it was tough on everyone in Gordonsville," said Craig Hartman, owner of The Barbeque Exchange. "We're a small town. We have a small population, so a business the size of American Press makes a big dent when something happens like that."
After American Press closed its doors, Hartman said he saw a dip in his lunch business and had to say goodbye to some familiar faces.
"Losing a friend is probably worse, but economically, yes, we saw the impact -- definitely," he said.
It was the same story down the street at Tastee Freez.
"I had a couple of friends who worked there," said manager Christina Johnson. "When a place shuts down and you lose your job and you've worked there for years, you feel like all hope is lost."
Johnson says the restaurant is looking forward to the potential new customers thanks to the expected jobs.
Hartman says it'll do good for more than just the lunch shops.
"To have a business like this right down the street with 300 employees, this will be fine for us, but really for the whole town," he said.
"I think it's great." agreed The Barbeque Exchange customer Jamie Watkins. "My father worked [at American Press] when I was young until they closed down, so I'm glad to see more opportunity coming."
To learn more about the jobs openings with Green Applications, click HERE.
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