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On December 24, 2011, Mikhail Prokhorov—banking and mining billionaire, N.B.A. team owner, international playboy, and Russia's third-richest man—set out to be among the people. A crowd of about eighty thousand had come out to Moscow's Sakharov Avenue to demand free elections and to lambaste Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. It was a bitterly cold, gray day, but Prokhorov wore just a pair of light-washed jeans, a brown leather jacket, and leather gloves the size of skillets. Moving slowly among the protesters, Prokhorov chatted with friends and staffers, and pointed to the building where, in 1989, he began his finance career as a lowly data clerk at the Soviet International Bank for Economic Cooperation.
Prokhorov is running for President in an election that takes place on March 4th. Putin will surely win, and Gennady Zyuganov, a Communist, will likely come in second. The urban professionals who made up the core of the Moscow protests have come to despise Putin, and they generally dislike Communists. But they also don't have much love for Prokhorov. To most of them, he is a Kremlin stooge, taking orders from Putin, his ostensible opponent. According to this theory, which Prokhorov denies, his campaign is roughly equivalent to what would happen if Barack Obama persuaded T. Boone Pickens to run as an independent, in order to siphon votes from the actual Republican nominee.
As Prokhorov moved down Sakharov Avenue, rubberneckers and picture-takers eagerly elbowed their friends and pointed in disbelief at the oligarch. Prokhorov is six feet eight, and is not hard to locate in a crowd. Nearby, radical young Communists heckled, "One billionaire—a million hungry!"
"Come closer!" Prokhorov shouted back at them. "I can't hear you!"
Soon, he was so mobbed by the well-wishers, the critical, and the curious that he could no longer move. ("I can't believe he's not wearing a hat!" one woman, a retired librarian, said. "He's going to get sick!") He listened to people's grievances and nodded, accepted flyers and business cards, and gave snappy replies to questions; he even managed a couple of media interviews via cell phones passed to him across the cluster of heads buzzing around his torso.
"Can you please tell me, is it possible to earn a billion honestly?" an elderly man asked, echoing the sentiment, common in Russia, that the oligarchs earned their fortunes through deceit and government connections.
"I think you can," Prokhorov replied, his face radiating self-regard. "At the very least, I haven't broken any laws."
Someone else asked if he was a Putin patsy.
"I am not a Putin supporter," Prokhorov said. "I have my own views."
What was his election platform?
"Maximum freedom."
This is Prokhorov's second foray into politics, and he has admitted that he consulted with the Kremlin before embarking on the first. Did he get Kremlin approval to run this time, too?
"I think that, for any person, it's very important to be able to come to agreements," he said, adding that not all Kremlin employees are evil.
What of the fraudulent December 4th parliamentary vote in which Putin's United Russia Party narrowly held on to power, setting off a wave of protests?
"If I become President, I will dissolve this Duma"—the Russian parliament—"and have new elections."
What about the story, reported in the Russian press, that Putin called him and asked him to run as a decoy?
"I like these tall tales."
Will he ultimately give his support to Putin?
"I'm not going to give anything to anyone."
Nearby, a group of young protesters—members of a Web forum called the Leprosarium—jumped up and down, shouting, "Fuck, you're tall! Fuck, you're tall!" Prokhorov ignored them, and went off to attend a ceremony that officially opened his campaign office. The protest organizers had not invited him to speak.
The last time a Russian oligarch entered politics, he did not fare well. About a decade ago, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon and the richest man in Russia at the time, started working to get his allies into the Duma, angering Putin. In October, 2003, masked commandos stormed his private jet and arrested him. His assets were parcelled out to Putin's friends, and he was sentenced to nine years in jail. In December, 2010, he was given another, fourteen-year sentence. The harshness of the punishment sent a clear message to Russia's magnates: stay out of politics.
During Putin's rule, his éminence grise, Vladislav Surkov, built a system of what he has called "managed" democracy. Elections were rigged, and it seemed that Surkov allowed parties to exist only if they served a specific purpose or demographic. The statist, conservative United Russia supported Putin. The three opposition parties—the Communists, the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, and the left-leaning Just Russia Party—have opaque funding and generally toe the Kremlin line. (They are justly called "the loyal opposition.")
In early 2011, Surkov began working to create a new party for Russia's urban middle class, which had become increasingly hostile to the government's corruption and ineptitude. Rather than permit them to organize organically, however, Surkov resuscitated a moribund liberal party called Right Cause.
The project's curators approached at least three members of the Kremlin élite, with no success. Then, on May 16th, Prokhorov announced that he would lead the Party. He insists that the Kremlin didn't ask him to do so: he heard about Right Cause's search in the papers, and some friends suggested that he get involved. After contacting the Party, Prokhorov says that he then approached the Kremlin and was given approval. He told me directly that he sought the counsel of the President, Dmitry Medvedev, and the Prime Minister before making his announcement. Why, I asked, did he need to talk this over with them? "If you are the head of a big company, you cannot be involved in politics," he explained. But, unlike Khodorkovsky, he added, he had relinquished control of his business before taking up politics.
Whether the Kremlin had requested, or merely blessed, Prokhorov's campaign was an important distinction. If Prokhorov was to lead a party for the urban middle class, he had to be independent. But, from the beginning, few people believed that he was. He had funded various Kremlin initiatives, like a summer training camp for several of Surkov's pro-Kremlin youth groups. As a publicity stunt, he once spent a night in a tent at the camp. Worse, he completely avoided criticizing Putin after taking over the Party. And so the urban élite dismissed Right Cause as a "Kremlin project."
Surkov seemed to do everything in his power to help Right Cause succeed, thereby sending another signal about its lack of independence. In early summer, Prokhorov appeared on all the federal television channels, which blacklist genuine opponents. During one appearance, he demonstrated his basketball skills by sinking a three-point shot. Moscow was blanketed with tangerine-colored posters featuring Prokhorov's face, staring heavy-lidded at the city.
In August, Surkov began phoning Prokhorov to suggest people who would and wouldn't work for Right Cause. Prokhorov told me that he promised he would take the Kremlin's ideas into account, but he clearly chafed at the interference. Prokhorov had recently tapped Evgeny Roizman, a controversial anti-drug activist from Yekaterinburg, to join the Party. In early September, Surkov pressured Prokhorov to remove Roizman from the Party roster. When Prokhorov refused, Surkov organized a coup within Right Cause and had him voted out of power.
On September 15th, Prokhorov gathered a swarm of puzzled journalists and supporters at the Russian Academy of Sciences, the place where he had planned to hold a Party congress. When he rose to speak, everyone was sure that the public tension with Surkov in recent days was part of an elaborately staged show of independence. But Prokhorov delivered an uncharacteristically emotional speech about Surkov. "There is a puppeteer in this country who privatized the political system, who has misinformed the Russian leadership about what is going on in the political system, who pressures the media, plants candidates, and manipulates citizens' opinions," he said. "This puppeteer is named Vladislav Surkov." He then called for Surkov's dismissal. This was real. The project had clearly jumped the rails.
When I first met with Prokhorov, five days after the implosion of Right Cause, he was not his usual swaggering self. He looked pale, and he drooped over a white leather armchair in the rotunda of his Moscow office. A glass skylight flooded the room with the late-September sun. His desk was immaculate: a few stacks of paper and a tray of dried fruit. There was no computer in sight. Bookshelves were littered with mementos, statuettes, and a smattering of books. Tucked behind them was an old picture of him with Putin, who comes up to Prokhorov's chest.
"No, no, I'm not wilting," Prokhorov said, when I remarked on his posture. "I'm just catching up on sleep. I'm sleeping seven hours a night now! Before, it was four or five."
There were less than three months until the parliamentary elections, and liberals were intrigued by his unexpected show of independence. But Prokhorov had exited Right Cause at the very moment that he had become appealing. He seemed to relish the irony of his situation, as well as the skepticism he had encountered. "If one of my friends or colleagues did this, I would think exactly the same thing," he told me. "I'd have no illusions."
His independent stance also carried a potentially steep cost. When Prokhorov assailed Surkov at the Party convention, everyone in the auditorium was stunned. Such a confrontation was unprecedented, and it was not expected to go unpunished. This may be why Prokhorov was at pains to downplay the incident. "I don't really like to discuss what happened between two people," he demurred, before conceding that the clash had made public a growing rift between the modernizing and the conservative forces in the Russian élite. "He's inhibiting development," Prokhorov finally blurted out. "That's the essence of the conflict."
Five days after we talked, Prokhorov was unexpectedly excluded from a Presidential commission on technological modernization. A month later, Putin's office postponed the London I.P.O. of his gold-mining company, Polyus Gold. "It's just an administrative delay," Christophe Charlier, the deputy C.E.O. of Onexim, Prokhorov's holding company, said. He added quietly, "In Russia, because of lack of transparency, people don't believe in coincidences."
Prokhorov's parents, Dmitry and Tamara, were members of the Soviet upper middle class. Tamara was a materials engineer at the Institute for Chemical Machine-Building; Dmitry was trained as a lawyer. When Prokhorov was born, in May, 1965, Dmitry was handling international relations for the Soviet Committee of Physical Culture and Sport. As Prokhorov now puts it, his father "spoke for the red Soviet machine that beat everyone in sports." Athletes often visited their small Moscow apartment. "There were sports in my life from childhood," Prokhorov says. Like many Russian men of his generation, he spent most of his time outside "in the yard," where he learned the ways of the patsan, or guy code. (This is the code that Prokhorov upheld in sticking by Roizman—loyalty—and the code he broke in going against Surkov.)
Prokhorov was, until the eighth grade, a middling student. "Boys in the Soviet Union got to work on their brains later; it's a common story," Prokhorov explains. Reading also came to him in adolescence, though he says it is something he quickly outgrew. "I just don't like literature, because all of the experiences in it are redundant to me," he says, adding that he has read mostly "specialized literature," like books on chess tactics. "I have it all in my real life," he goes on. "Literature I just don't get at all. I've come to the conclusion that if someone has real-life experience, then he can't, by definition, like literature."
Eventually, Prokhorov's parents stopped chasing him out of the kitchen when friends gathered in the evening and discussed politics. Prokhorov remembers a wide range of topics, from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to Western culture and the ineffectiveness of a planned economy. "We weren't discussing any plot against the state," Prokhorov says. "We discussed mundane things."
His need to clarify that his family wasn't plotting against Brezhnev points to a key tenet of the Prokhorovs. Dmitry may have been discussing Solzhenitsyn in the kitchen, but during the day he worked in a highly sensitive branch of the Soviet apparatus: athletics were an important propaganda tool at home and abroad. He was allowed to travel, a rarity in those days. "He knew the Western world very well, and he would tell me about it, except very carefully, so that I didn't give voice to these thoughts in school," Prokhorov says, outlining a common Soviet public-private split. "At work, everyone was a strict Communist, but in the kitchen everyone was a dissident."
"Our parents were thoroughly Soviet people," says Prokhorov's bookish older sister, Irina. She runs his philanthropic organizations, an erudite literary magazine, and a publishing house, and lives in a wing of his mansion west of Moscow. "They never fought against the Soviet state." Dmitry and Tamara came of age during Stalin's rule and knew better.
Prokhorov credits his mother with providing him with his cool temperament. "I'm a boa constrictor," he says. "Calm, good mood. That's like my mom. She could listen to people for a long time, and I can also listen."
Prokhorov first made money as an undergraduate at the Moscow Finance Institute, which was a five-minute walk from home. He has developed a lofty mythology to explain his choice of profession. "Since childhood, money had a way of finding me," he says. "I always found something in the sandbox. We'd be at the beach, and I'd find money. Money just found me on its own. I didn't do anything for it." This power is gone now, says Prokhorov, who is the thirty-second-richest person in the world. "I guess I don't really need it."
In 1983, after his first year at the institute, he did a two-year stint in the Army. "You had to fight at the very beginning, because that was part of the survival," Prokhorov recalls. "People were always wanting to test you: are you real or not real? After a couple months, they understood that I was real, and no one bothered me anymore."
Afterward, he returned to school and got to work. He organized his Army buddies into brigades that unloaded freight cars—potatoes, frozen beef, cement—and they earned in a day what a professor might make in a month. He handed over most of his money to his family.
In 1988, just before Prokhorov's last year of college, Russians were allowed to own businesses for the first time in sixty years. He and another classmate rented a section of a laundromat near the institute and set up an operation for stonewashing jeans. The business was extremely successful, and soon all his friends—and their friends—were working for him. "I remember the last time I really got any pleasure out of money was when I bought a car, and I understood that I could take a girl to a café," Prokhorov recalls.
At about this time, both of his parents died of heart disease. Prokhorov remained in their flat, which he shared with his niece and Irina, who had divorced her husband several years earlier. He became the breadwinner of the family. According to Olga Romanova, an opposition activist who was friendly with Prokhorov in college, this explains why he has never married. "This is his family; he doesn't need another one," Romanova says of Irina and her daughter.
In college, Prokhorov met Alexander Khloponin, who became his best friend. "Khloponin was the ringleader," Romanova says. "Misha was the pensive serpent sitting next to the leader." Khloponin introduced Prokhorov to Vladimir Potanin, who became Prokhorov's business partner.
When he met Potanin, Prokhorov was working at the ailing International Bank for Economic Cooperation, where he had been assigned after college and where he'd quickly earned a series of promotions. In 1992, as Russia went through its first painful year as a fledgling market economy, Prokhorov and Potanin started their own bank, which they called MFK. That year, the management of the International Bank—whose fold Prokhorov had just left—sent a letter to its clients, encouraging them to transfer their holdings to MFK. Within six months, Potanin and Prokhorov had three hundred million dollars in assets. All the old debt was left at the International Bank.
The following year, Potanin and Prokhorov formed the United Export-Import Bank, or Uneximbank, for short. They divided their labor according to their talents. "He didn't like to dig through the technical stuff, and I loved it," Prokhorov says. "And he loved buttonholing people, being involved in politics, lobbying." (Potanin declined to discuss Prokhorov for this article. Khloponin, who went into business with the two, is now the Kremlin-appointed chief of the restive North Caucasus region.)
Uneximbank soon became the authorized bank for a number of state organizations, including the Finance Ministry, the federal tax service, the state arms-export agency, and the city of Moscow. At the end of 1994, the second year of the bank's existence, it had 2.1 billion dollars in assets, nearly seven times more than it did at the beginning of the year.
The partners' next coup came in 1995. A resurgent Communist Party threatened to take down an enfeebled Boris Yeltsin in the 1996 Presidential election. Potanin masterminded a plan wherein he and the other oligarchs offered loans to the government, which couldn't pay wages and pensions, and they asked for shares in state enterprises as collateral. After selecting the companies they wanted, Potanin, Prokhorov, and their compatriots bid on how much money they would lend the government for those shares. Should the government default on its loans, which was all but assured, Uneximbank and the others could sell the shares. When the government failed to repay the loans, the bankers kept the shares. Potanin and Prokhorov walked away with Norilsk Nickel, which was Russia's largest platinum and nickel producer. At the time, Norilsk had revenues of three and a half billion dollars. Potanin and Prokhorov had given the government a loan of a hundred and seventy million dollars.
The loans-for-shares transactions, which made billionaires of Potanin and Prokhorov, remain highly controversial, and helped draw a connection in the Russian imagination between the crook, the businessman, and the Kremlin official. When asked recently on national television whether he had ever participated in corrupt dealings, Prokhorov shrugged and replied, "Yes, of course I participated in them. What, don't I live in this country?"
In 2001, Prokhorov took over the management of Norilsk. He improved productivity, diversified the company, and, in the six years that he was in charge, Norilsk's value increased elevenfold, owing in large part to a global commodities boom. He set up the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation, run by Irina, which brought arts and culture to the icebound miners. He also took control of one of Norilsk's less valuable but, to Prokhorov, more interesting projects: Moscow's CSKA basketball team. Prokhorov gave the team a healthy budget, which allowed it to recruit top talent. The team won the European championships twice in three seasons.
In January, 2007, Prokhorov and twenty-five others—some of them young Russian women—were arrested at Courchevel, a French ski resort where Prokhorov has "a small house" and spends the Orthodox Christmas holiday. Prokhorov was detained for three days—which he spent shadowboxing and stretching in his cell—on suspicion of making prostitutes available to his guests. When I asked him about it, Prokhorov laughed off the incident and said that everything written about it was "absolute rubbish." One of the people he uses to book hotels and cars for his guests happened to have gone through customs with a binder containing pictures of twenty girls. "Girls travel with me, and he had pictures of them in his bag—you know, to meet them at the airport," Prokhorov explains. The French police got a different impression: that this man was a pimp. In general, Prokhorov is unapologetic about his predilections. ("How will I become president without a first lady?" he recently wrote on his Facebook page. "Let me tell you a secret: I had my first lady when I was seventeen.") He can often be spotted at Moscow's poshest clubs, surrounded by herds of young women from the city's modelling agencies. Because neither he nor his friends are married, he says that, in Courchevel, "we didn't even violate anyone's moral code."
Nevertheless, the arrests became an international incident. Potanin was scandalized, and Prokhorov was soon pushed out of Norilsk. In the spring of 2008, Prokhorov swapped his stake for a fourteen-per-cent share in Rusal, the world's largest producer of aluminum, and more than seven billion dollars. Five months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, sinking world markets and commodity prices. Prokhorov, whose assets were now mostly in cash, was affected far less than any of his peers. The French, in the meantime, apologized and awarded Prokhorov a Légion d'Honneur.
For a while, he was the richest man in Russia. He signed on to reënergize and fund the Russian Biathlon Union. He bought the New Jersey Nets and made plans to move the team to Brooklyn. (His wedding present to the Nets forward Kris Humphries and Kim Kardashian was a pair of his-and-hers Russian fur hats.) He created a glossy media empire. He began investing in high-tech and nanotechnology projects, which were being pushed by the Kremlin in its drive to diversify the Russian economy. One of these ventures is a Russian-made hybrid vehicle whose name, to the Russian ear, sounds like "Fuck-Mobile." Putin gave it a spin last spring and praised it as "a totally new product" with an "attention-grabbing" name.
When I met with Prokhorov last October, he had just got back from windsurfing at his private resort in Turkey, and celebrating the season-closing bacchanal at Ibiza. He had doubled his daily exercise regimen, from two hours to four. "Basically, everything's great," he said, beaming. He gulped down a large teacup of an orange vitamin broth. The rumor around Moscow was that he and Surkov had made up and the two of them had drunk on it. Prokhorov denied this, but in November Surkov told a Moscow newspaper that he had no issues with Prokhorov.
On December 4th, Russia held its parliamentary elections, and Putin's increasingly unpopular United Russia edged back into power. To many, this seemed a less than credible result, and video evidence of egregious voting violations circulated on the Web. People took to the streets, and the police cracked down, arresting a thousand protesters in two days. On December 8th, Prokhorov published a blog post in which he declared, "Like it or not, Putin is for now the only politician who can somehow manage to control the machine of state."
On December 10th, an estimated fifty thousand people gathered in Moscow's Bolotnaya, or Swampy, Square. Thousands of others protested in more than eighty cities across the country. Crowds of expats gathered at Russian embassies around the world. Russia hadn't seen anything like this since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Despite official warnings of violence, the protest had the feel of a block party. Muscovites, who can seem like the rudest people on the planet, smiled and struck up conversations with strangers. The President, however, was silent, and so was Putin.
Two days later, Prokhorov held a surprise press conference in the center of Moscow. "Honestly, I'm not sure what you're expecting of me, but I'll try not to disappoint you," he said, smiling. "This is probably the most serious decision of my life. I'm going to participate in the Presidential elections." This time, he said that he would do it as an independent. The people in the room gasped, and the old question arose immediately: was this another Kremlin project? That night, the main national channel broadcast a long, glowing report of his candidacy. Shots of the press conference were interspersed with footage of grinning protesters at Bolotnaya.
Whatever credibility Prokhorov had built up by turning on Surkov in the fall quickly dissipated, in part because of the fawning coverage on state television. To make matters worse, an article in the magazine New Times declared that, on the evening before the protest in Bolotnaya Square, Prokhorov had taken a call from Putin and then told the friends he was with that the President had asked him to run. The story was based on anonymous sources, and Prokhorov immediately denied it. He says that Putin and Medvedev found out about his intentions from the press conference. His spokeswoman adds that the New Times account was "total fiction." Nevertheless, given Prokhorov's past, and the nature of Russian politics, the damage was done.
When I met Prokhorov two weeks after he had announced his candidacy, he had just spent two hours in the cold at the protest on Sakharov Avenue, and another two organizing the drive to gain the two million signatures necessary to register for the Presidential election. He had clearly enjoyed himself.
He had an elaborate, and decidedly wobbly, story about his decision to run. For two months, he said, he had been building a national support network. Two days before the big protests, Prokhorov says he "quietly submitted" his application to the Central Election Commission. "I won't hide the fact that I have a friend, and I asked him not to leak anything," Prokhorov told me, declining to name this apparently influential person. His blog post, in which he appeared to endorse Putin, was, he said, a red herring.
A few weeks later, his election prospects, though not his credibility, were given an assist when the Central Election Commission disqualified Grigory Yavlinsky, the traditional liberal candidate: nearly a quarter of his petition signatures were deemed fakes. Prokhorov, who had gathered two and a half million signatures in a mere two weeks—one of which was a national holiday—remained on the ballot.
Regardless of its origins, Prokhorov's second political intervention seemed more promising than his first. In his parliamentary campaign, he had avoided even the slightest criticism of Putin. This time, he has attacked the Prime Minister, however mildly. "I have my own economic views," he said, on NTV, shortly after his announcement. Putin's economic program, he said, is "leading to economic catastrophe."
Perhaps most promising for Prokhorov, Surkov was promoted out of his position three days after the protest on Sakharov Avenue. Instead of curating internal politics, he will now oversee the state's modernization push. In a farewell interview, he scoffed, "I am too odious for this brave new world."
Running for President is not a bad deal for Prokhorov, whose name is still associated with Courchevel. (A popular joke has him choosing his first lady, his second lady, his third lady, "and some whores.") Sated and successful in business, he gets to try something new. "The fact that I'm useful to the government is obvious," he said in a television appearance. "But why don't we use the government, too?" Meanwhile, he seems to have grown even smoother as a candidate. He jokes with the press; he laughs. He has even got better at answering the same question—is he a "Kremlin project"?—over and over. "There's nothing I can tell you that will convince you," he's said. "The only way is to keep working, calmly, and prove it with action."
Prokhorov seems to relish the role of being the one man who's allowed to speak truth to power. His platform, which he published in January, is full of commonsense proposals, like shortening the Presidential term of office from six years to four, and limiting the number of terms a President can serve. He proposes to force the government to sell its controlling stakes in media organizations. He wants to eliminate the Draconian registration procedures that Surkov invented to keep opposition parties out of the Duma. He has detailed economic proposals designed to boost competition and remove the state's influence from the economy. Prokhorov's first campaign promise was to free Khodorkovsky. He has also become bolder. When asked in a recent television interview about that infamous online comment that only Putin could run the current Russian state, he stuck by it. "But I don't want to live in a country like that," he added.
"I'm playing a long-term game," he said on the evening of December 24th, after the protest. It was already dark, and a butler brought in tea and a tray of sweets. Prokhorov seemed energized by what he had seen that afternoon, and spoke of building a political party after the election. "The only thing is if people don't support me at all," he said of the coming election. "In that case, you can't fool yourself. You have to tell yourself, 'Apparently you have no political talent and you should do something else.' I've only done things at which I'm at least somewhat better than others. The Presidential elections are a great test."
On February 4th, with a month left before the election, some hundred thousand Muscovites came out for the largest protest to date, a march down Yakimanka Street to Bolotnaya Square. The temperature was ten degrees below zero. Prokhorov had been gaining in the polls, with twenty per cent of the protesters supporting him. But his national share of the vote was still only about five per cent.
This time, Prokhorov was seasonably dressed, in ski pants and heavy-duty boots. A blue down jacket filled out his svelte frame, and a white fleece hat with a red zigzag on the forehead made him easy to spot in the crowd. Roizman, on whose behalf Prokhorov had abandoned Right Cause, was there with a delegation from the Ural Mountains. (He is now an adviser to Prokhorov's campaign.) So was Prokhorov's sister, Irina. She wore a leopard-print fur hat and clung to his arm in the crush of supporters wearing white scarves that said "Prokhorov." They were a diverse but largely middle-class crowd, and they didn't care whether Prokhorov had negotiated his run with Putin. "I agree with his platform, that's it," a middle-aged small-business owner from the Ivanovo region told me as we walked. Others said that it would be a good thing if Prokhorov were indeed a "Kremlin project": at least he'd be able to get things done.
The tightly packed cluster around Prokhorov moved aimlessly through the larger crowd until Prokhorov took control.
"Right!" he called out over everyone's heads. "We're moving to the right!"
"Right!" his supporters echoed.
"Curb!" he called, stepping up over a pile of dirty snow.
Soon, the pack started chanting behind him: "Prokhorov for President! Prokhorov for President!"
"What are they saying?" he asked Irina.
He craned his head to catch what she whispered in his ear. Then he looked up and smiled. ♦


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Dennis started on the foredeck this morning and he appears to be well setup as a mobile welding provider.
I like the tidy interior of his van. My experience has been a tidy work area is an indicator for a high quality end product.
That's a rather large arc welder!
I was rather surprised when Dennis informed me he intended to remove the existing welds with a special attachment he had. I had assumed he would gas cut out the deck and grind back the rough edges.
He got straight into the task and the sparks were soon flying
I decided not to peer over the gunwale in case I received a face full of hot sparks.
An hour later and the welds had been removed.
The deck is now free. Dennis is going to trim it and weld the same piece 12" lower down.


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Every day the headlines from the Arab world get worse: An Al Qaeda affiliate group, aided by foreign fighters, battles with seven different homegrown Syrian rebel groups for control of the region around Aleppo, Syria. The Iranian Embassy in Beirut is bombed. Mohamad Chatah, an enormously decent former Lebanese finance minister, is blown up after criticizing Hezbollah's brutish tactics. Another pro-Al Qaeda group takes control of Fallujah, Iraq. Explosions rock Egypt, where the army is now jailing Islamists and secular activists. Libya is a mess of competing militias.
What's going on? Some say it's all because of the "power vacuum" — America has absented itself from the region. But this is not just about us. There's also a huge "values vacuum." The Middle East is a highly pluralistic region — Shiites, Sunnis, Kurds, Christians, Druze and various tribes — that for centuries was held together from above by iron-fisted colonial powers, kings and dictators. But now that vertical control has broken down, before this pluralistic region has developed any true bottom-up pluralism — a broad ethic of tolerance — that might enable its people to live together as equal citizens, without an iron fist from above.
For the Arab awakening to have any future, the ideology that is most needed now is the one being promoted least: Pluralism. Until that changes, argues Marwan Muasher, in his extremely relevant new book — "The Second Arab Awakening and the Battle for Pluralism" — none of the Arab uprisings will succeed.
Again, President Obama could have done more to restrain leaders in Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran or Syria from going to extremes. But, ultimately, argues Muasher, this is the Arabs' fight for their political future. If 500,000 American troops in Iraq, and $1 trillion, could not implant lasting pluralism in the cultural soil there, no outsider can, said Muasher. There also has to be a will from within. Why is it that some 15,000 Arabs and Muslims have flocked to Syria to fight and die for jihadism and zero have flocked to Syria to fight and die for pluralism? Is it only because we didn't give the "good guys" big enough guns?
As Muasher, a former Jordanian foreign minister and now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, put it in an interview: "Three years of the Arab uprising have shown the bankruptcy of all the old political forces in the Arab world." The corrupt secular autocrats who failed to give their young people the tools to thrive — and, as a result, triggered these uprisings — are still locked in a struggle with Islamists, who also have no clue how to deliver jobs, services, security and economic growth. (Tunisia may be an exception.) "As long as we're in the this zero-sum game, the sum will be zero," says Muasher.
No sustainable progress will be possible, argues Muasher, without the ethic of pluralism permeating all aspects of Arab society — pluralism of thought, pluralism in gender opportunities, pluralism in respect to other religions, pluralism in education, pluralism toward minorities, pluralism of political parties rotating in power and pluralism in the sense of everyone's right to think differently from the collective.
The first Arab awakening in the 20th century was a fight for independence from colonial powers, says Muasher. It never continued as a fight for democracy and pluralism. That war of ideas, he insists, is what "the second Arab awakening" has to be about. Neither the autocrats nor the Islamists can deliver progress. "Pluralism is the operating system we need to solve all our problems, and as long as that operating system is not in place, we will not get there. This is an internal battle. Let's stop hoping for delivery from the outside." This will take time.
Naïve? No. Naïve is thinking that everything is about the absence or presence of American power, and that the people of the region have no agency. That's wrong: Iraq is splintering because Prime Minister Maliki behaved like a Shiite militiaman, not an Iraqi Mandela. Arab youths took their future in their own hands, motivated largely by pluralistic impulses. But the old order proved to be too stubborn, yet these youth aspirations have not gone away, and will not.
"The Arab world will go through a period of turmoil in which exclusionist forces will attempt to dominate the landscape with absolute truths and new dictatorships," writes Muasher. But "these forces will also fade, because, in the end, the exclusionist, authoritarian discourses cannot answer the people's needs for better quality of life. ... As history has demonstrated overwhelmingly, where there is respect for diversity, there is prosperity. Contrary to what Arab societies have been taught for decades by their governments to believe — that tolerance, acceptance of different points of view, and critical thinking are destructive to national unity and economic growth — experience proves that societies cannot keep renewing themselves and thereby thrive except through diversity."
Muasher, who is returning to Jordan to participate in this struggle for diversity, dedicated his book to: "The youth of the Arab World — who revolted, not against their parents, but on their behalf."


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Bret Michaels' brain hemorrhage may have been the scariest moment of his life, but it strengthened his relationship with girlfriend Kristi Gibson.
"In most of our world, Bret's the hero, but in this situation, Kristi was the hero -- she saved his life," Pete Evick, the Poison frontman's guitarist and friend, told People. Gibson's ability to handle a health scare without panicking -- thanks to years of living with Michaels' diabetes -- may have helped the rock star through his crisis.
"I'm used to being calm, because of the times when his blood sugar has gone low, and if I freak out, he freaks out," said Gibson, 39.
U.S. & World
She stayed with him throughout the April 21 ordeal, riding in the ambulance from an emergency room in Scottsdale, Ariz. to St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix after a CAT scan revealed bleeding in 47-year-old Michaels' brain.
"I said, 'I'm not leaving his side,'" said Gibson. "I held his hand and told him, 'It's going to be okay.' Just from his eyes, you could tell how much pain he was in. I wanted to take away that pain so bad."
Michaels has called their 16-year on-and-off relationship "a positive work in progress." The couple has two daughters, Raine, 9, and Jorja, 5. Gibson said that, even as he fought for his life, all her boyfriend could think about was his family.
"He was just worried about me and the girls -- that's all he cared about," she said. "I was like don't worry about us, we'll be fine."
It's not yet clear if Michaels' renewed affection for Gibson will change his rock star lifestyle. The musician hosted three seasons of his dating reality show "Rock of Love" from 2007 to 2009, where scores of women competed for his affections. Michaels and Gibson were together from 1994 to 2005, and reportedly reunited some time after the last season of "Rock of Love," according to JAM! Music.
Michaels, who is out of the hospital and in a rehab facility, is expected to make a full recovery, but while he was in the emergency room, a doctor recommended he have his daughters brought to visit him.
"I said in these exact words, 'Am I dying? If I'm dying, I want to see my kids, but if I have a chance, I don't want them to see me in this condition,'" the singer said.


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BittyLabs Offensive Tweets to Breastfeeding Moms
Do Men Want to "Reclaim" Their Breastfeeding Wives? A Bottle Company Says So!
Oops, someone's done it again! This time it's not a store or a restaurant offending breastfeeding mamas, but a new baby bottle company that has moms and dads manning their battleships. This weekend BittyLab, maker of the soon-to-be released BARE bottle, launched a social media campaign insinuating that men feel pushed aside and sexually deprived when the mother of their child is breastfeeding. According to their tweets, this new bottle will help men "reclaim your wife." See if for yourself here:
The company's Twitter feed and Facebook page immediately lit up with both moms and dad expressing their disgrace and the company issued an apology this morning saying the "messages had nothing to do with putting a [husband's] needs before the baby's needs, it was more about having a little extra time for the rest of the family." What do you think — was it just a very poorly executed campaign, or was the insinuation meant to draw up controversy?


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Between the credit crunch and weak economy, the past few years have tough ones for growing corporate profits. With sales flat or shrinking, many companies have had to take a long, close look at operations to improve the bottom line. Whether its cost-cutting or operational streamlining, companies have had to make some quick changes to improve productivity and efficiency. Take our quiz and see how much you know about operational side of business.
Posted 3 October 2011


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No ifs, ands, or buts! These are the six to skip during each week of the 2012 Whole Living Challenge.Read More
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A Very Dutch Addiction
I knew it was something I wanted to do even before I moved to the Netherlands. It's such a part of life there. Sure, people do in Canada too, but not nearly as much or as openly. It's not nearly as easy to do in Canada. Once I finally arrived in the Netherlands, I was surrounded by people doing it; I was hard-pressed to find someone who wasn't.Commentary, Culture


text: What a coincidence that "religious experience" always reflects the sociocultural context of those having it... If he had come back spouting off about Allah, Muhammad and infidel-killing then I'd be impressed. Never underestimate the power of suggestion; it's altogether unsurprising that this would happen to a pastor's son, and the rest can be accounted for by one or more of the following on the part of the adults involved: fraud, self-deception, and projection of their own expectations onto ambiguous parts of his story. People with faulty epistemic standards (e.g. those who think that propositions can be believed on "faith" rather than evidence) can be convinced, and convince themselves, of anything.


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News Round-up, 30 January 2009
30 January 2009
It's Friday! The week is almost over, and two days of relaxation are imminent. But not before the weekly IYA2009 news round-up!
The big news story this week was NASA announcing that members of the public can vote for an object to be imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope during 100 Hours of Astronomy. Predictably this story has been picked up by many sites, including Discovery, Fox News, About.com, Aero-News, Examiner, iTWire, and countless others. Even more coverage can be expected during 100 Hours.
Our very own New Media Task Group Chair Pamela Gay was the subject of a story on DenNews.com. Pamela gave an amateur astronomy lecture titled "The Once and Future Role of Citizen Science: The Great Discoveries of Public Astronomers Across History" and impressed those in attendance.
MSNBC.com contributor Dan Roach has put together an informative article about From Earth To The Universe. Spanning ten pages, it shows a healthy sample of FETTU images, along with captions. It's a good taster of FETTU. Seed Magazine have done something similar, albeit with a snazzier interface.
GizMag mentions IYA2009 in the very first sentence of its article about the work of Thomas Harriot and Galileo Galilei. It describes how some historians believe that Harriot may have beaten Galileo by observing sights through a telescope first, and even created excellent maps of the Moon.
The ever-popular Astronomy Picture of the Day adopted an IYA2009-themed image this week. It was mentioned on the Cosmic Diary, and everything.
And finally, a quick plug for the excellent (and free) Communicating Astronomy with the Public Journal, which has just released issue five. Read, and be impressed. That's an order.
Lee Pullen
IYA2009 Staff Writer
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The Aldrich Alert
A Publication of the Patrick Henry Center for Individual Liberty
by Gary Aldrich - Volume 2, Issue 12
This article appeared at Townhall.com on Tuesday, March 5, 2002.
It's nice to know that once in a while my mind works like "the Great One!" When I first heard of the Shadow Government, what stood out for me was the magic number "100." When Rush Limbaugh made the point that the entire federal government could provide basic services with just 100 people in charge, I thought, "Yes!" At last, it appeared that somebody else understood just how grossly bloated and inefficient the three-million-person federal government had become.
But, having an "off-site" emergency location for the federal government is nothing new in spite of Senator Daschle's claims to the contrary. When the FBI hired me in 1964, I was told that there was a place within driving distance of Washington, D.C. where federal employees would go in the event of a nuclear attack.
We knew that in case of a national emergency somebody would be in touch with us, and we might be ordered to drive to the secret location so the business of government could go on. That call never came, and eventually my career took me away from "ground zero." But if a mere FBI clerk knew about this secret Shadow Government, I would suggest that a seasoned U.S. Senator knew a lot more.
Speaking of "more," the very size of the federal government may be one of the biggest threats to national security that we currently face. The size and diverse missions of our intelligence agencies, including the FBI, make them incredibly difficult to manage. The U.S. Congress and the White House have used the FBI as a catch-all law enforcement agency for every Tom, deadbeat-Dick and Harry legislative fix - from peaceful protests of right to lifers at abortion clinics, to piles of dirt investigated because of their threat to the environment, to deadbeat dads who run out on child support. Whatever politically correct agenda that could be turned into a federal case was made that much more important if you could turn it into an FBI case, and so they did.
FBI Agents who had been looking into the activities of real terrorists were improperly used to interview Christian churchgoers because they had shown up on some list of those who thought abortion was murder. Imagine two burly FBI agents showing up at your door because you simply exercised your constitutional rights. But Janet Reno thought this was just fine, as long as she could assist the White House in demonizing those citizens whose opinions differed from their radical-left political agenda.
The agencies and their leaders are not blameless. In Washington, the name of the game is not the real mission of the agency. No, the name of the game is how many budget enhancements you can get out of the present administration and the Congress.
Each Washington manager understands that to grow is to provide more management slots. The higher you go, the more you can get paid and the more power you can accumulate. Careerism is rampant in the federal government, and why is that? Because there are too many federal employees falling all over themselves trying to find something meaningful, important or satisfying to do. Since there is such incredible redundancy, they turn to the only mission that makes any sense to them anymore - getting ahead.
Somewhere lost in all of this is the real reason for the existence of these various federal agencies. On September 11, our federal government got a wake up call of the most extreme kind, but those of us who have been posting warnings were not surprised - except maybe at the size and scope of it. Consider though, in the case of real cynics, that there is significant surprise that it was not a nuclear device set off in the middle of mid-town Manhattan.
Some critics of America say we got what was coming to us. I say that just isn't true. We have the most wonderful form of government yet to be conceived on this planet. But what is true is that those who wanted to "give it to us" were given everything but a red carpet to bomb the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and they could have done a lot more to us because of the idiocy and waste of time of investigating "Big Tobacco" and peaceful abortion clinic protesters.
The Left's obsession with Bill Gates and Microsoft brought us more than the fall of NASDAQ and an early entry into a mild recession. Misusing the assets of agencies like the FBI detracted from more important work. And, as we all know, it's very difficult to run a good foot race when your own obesity is weighing you down. The federal government has become fat and petulant.
Somewhere between the magic number of "100" and the three million federal employees we currently have on the roster is the correct and most efficient number we need to get us what we want. Maybe 9-11 will serve some good purpose if it causes us to reconsider the role and size of the federal government. After all, isn't the first job of government to protect its own citizens?


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'The Croods' hunts down humor, gathers great talent
The Croods are no modern Stone Age family.
Led by the fearful, closed-minded patriarch Grug, they're an animated version of early Homo sapiens, but they don't drive rough-hewn vehicles, work at prehistoric factories or use bones for hair ornaments.
In fact, this clan of cave-dwellers tends to cower within stone walls. Fear has kept them alive, insists Grug (voiced by Nicolas Cage).
As depicted in The Croods (* * ½ out of four; rated PG; opens Friday nationwide), these folks are a close-knit family. Too close-knit for Grug's resourceful teenage daughter, Eep (Emma Stone), who chafes at the strict limitations imposed by her father. And frankly, Grug is a bit of a Neanderthal dunderhead. Cage plays the overprotective lunk with just the right notes — it's his best performance in a long time.
STORY:Nicolas Cage's roles are as eclectic as his tastes
VIDEO:Ryan and Blake attend 'The Croods' premiere
MORE:Latest movie reviews from USA TODAY
"Never not be afraid" is Grug's double-negative reminder to Eep, as well as his wife, Ugga (Catherine Keener), son Thunk (Clark Duke) and mother-in-law Gran (Cloris Leachman). The couple also have a baby girl who just grunts, growls and groans.
The spunky Eep longs to see more of the world. As well she should, since the landscape they inhabit can be quite visually stunning. But she's forbidden from leaving the cave after sundown.
Eep slips out one night and inadvertently meets fellow teen Guy (Ryan Reynolds), who's roaming the world solo with a fearlessness that Eep admires. Reynolds gives Guy a lively, likable personality, and a PG-rated flirtation blossoms. Guy's look is reminiscent of Hiccup, the young creature whisperer in How to Train Your Dragon, the charming 2010 animated feature also helmed by Croods co-director Chris Sanders. (He shares that duty here with Kirk De Micco.)
Eep is chastised by her dad for running off, but soon, Grug and the family have bigger problems. When continents shift and their cave is destroyed, the Croods must take off, covering strange and wondrous turf in search of a new home.
Along the way they encounter colorful hybrids of prehistoric animals. Their circle soon incorporates the nomadic Guy, whose bold ideas and more evolved brain threaten Grug's limited worldview.
The plot suffers from an occasional formlessness and includes well-worn cartoon staples such as the cranky granny, the doofus younger brother and an adorable furry sidekick, Guy's pet sloth, Belt (Sanders). The creature's recurring singsong line will likely elicit the most giggles from the youngest viewers.
Grug and his Crood brood face up to their fears and learn to tackle the unknown and embrace uncertainty. The message of harnessing your courage, while still looking out for family, is a worthy one.
The family's name may indeed be pronounced "crude," but gross-out humor is thankfully kept to a minimum. Yes, they're simple, strong and primitive, but not vulgar.
The use of 3-D has its imaginative moments, along with its more prosaic ones. The pace is brisk and occasionally slapstick, and some amusing situations stem from the cavemen displaying brawn over brains.
More than anything, the striking spectacle of primordial flora and one-of-a-kind fauna makes it easy for audiences to get pleasantly lost in the adventure.
The Croods clip: Shoes


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Posted by Steve McKinley on Friday, November 01, 2013 12:40 AM
There is usually nothing overtly thrilling about the day to day life of the average pastor or intern, unless your threshold of thrilling is low enough to include committee meetings. But every now and then...
I got an e-mail the other day urging me to buy a particular book. I haven't done it yet, but I might.
The book is a thriller about a Lutheran pastor. The blurb in the e-mail describes the central character as "a Lutheran minister with a past quite different from that of a typical cleric: special forces, CIA, a man who packs heat as well as packaging the gospel. Oh, and he's also married to the ex-wife of a sleazy U.S. Senator." Well, that could describe any number of Lutheran pastors I know, so I could certainly identify with him.
The next night I was watching a post-season baseball game, and during one of the innumerable pitching changes I pushed the "guide" button on my TV remote just to see what else was on, and noticed that one of the other stations was about to begin a new series, a reality show about the lives of six pastors in Southern California. Of course, they were from Southern California. They must be from churches big on conflict. Very loud conflict. Also sex. I will leave it at that.
Where did I go wrong? The only heat I ever packed during my years as a parish pastor was a tube of Ben-gay when I had an aching back. My wife is terrific, but there is no sleazy U.S. senator in her past. And the stuff of a reality show? A reality show about my life would be about as exciting as "Survivor: International Falls."
I'm sure a creative mind can dream some stuff up, but to the naked (good word for reality shows) eye, there is usually nothing overtly thrilling about the day to day life of the average pastor or intern, unless your threshold of thrilling is low enough to include committee meetings. But every now and then you see the Gospel grab hold of somebody. You see somebody you had given up for dead remarkably healed; not instantly but over a long period of time. You see a couple seriously at odds with each other and about ready to throw in the marital towel, all of a sudden fall in love with each other again. You see a congregation moved to some act of generosity they didn't even know they had in them. You see wine turned into water in a life that rebounds from a long slide in the wrong direction to capture a little hope on a day to day basis.
It's not the stuff of thrillers or reality shows, but as far as ordinary life goes, it's pretty terrific. I hope our interns are learning that.
I'll let you know about the book.
Tags: Steve McKinley
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Kibale's most popular activity is the Kanyanchu Primate Walk. Thirteen species can be sought, and a good variety of diurnal monkeys invariably encountered, but the stars of this twice-daily show are chimpanzees.
Bird watching tours start at 7am at Kanyanchu. Bigodi Wetland Sanctuary, located just outside the park, is home to 138 bird species which may be seen during guided walks along the boardwalk trail and viewing platforms.
Join a local guide on a walk through the Magombe swamp wetlands to enjoy the local wildlife, birds and vegetation. The daily life of the Batooro can be discovered during village walks, including stops at the village's primary school, church and traditional healer.
When chimpanzees and other forest residents rest up at dusk, a nighttime shift of rarely seen creatures becomes active. Night walks though the darkened forest use powerful torches to seek nocturnal creatures.


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The American Anthropological Association (AAA) is pleased to announce that the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) has merged with the AAA. The merger of the two groups became official on March 13 of this year, and former SEA members will now form a new section within the AAA, the Society for Economic Anthropology.
In December, 2012, the membership of the American Anthropological Association voted to incorporate the Society for Economic Anthropology. In May of last year, SEA President, Katherine Browne formally proposed a merger of the two organizations by which SEA would cease to exist as a separate corporation and be folded into AAA as an unincorporated section of the association.
The SEA is a group of anthropologists, economists and other scholars who are interested in the connections between social and economic life.. In presenting the vote to with members, AAA President Leith Mullings noted, "This merger presents an opportunity for the AAA to expand its reach across an interdisciplinary and international spectrum, affirming the unique insights of a four field tradition". Other benefits include the acquisition of a highly respected publication
The merger converts the highly respected SEA monograph series into a peer-reviewed journal, Economic Anthropology, to launch in January 2014 as the newest publication in the AAA publishing portfolio. Economic Anthropology expands the AAA's coverage of issues that connect social and economic anthropology. The journal is devoted to publishing scholarship concerned with economic aspects of local and global life such as "urbanization", "inequality" and "social change." Economic Anthropology will also publish scholarship that addresses interconnections between scales of micro and macro study, and transformations in domains that include economic realities.
As a new AAA section, SEA will continue to offer its three prizes, the Halperin Memorial Fund, the Harold Schneider Prize, and the SEA Book Prize. The SEA Rhoda Halperin Memorial Fund is a competitive annual prize awarded to three Ph.D. students in anthropology who demonstrate the late Dr. Halperin's love of economic anthropology and her concern for people living on the margins. Students engaged in economic research focused on social exclusion and poverty are provided small dissertation research grants ($1,000) to help them develop their topics and proposals, and subsequent travel money ($500) to present their findings at the Society for Economic Anthropology annual spring conference. The Harold K. Schneider Prize Competition is an annual student paper competition established by the Society for Economic Anthropology to honor its first president and to encourage new scholars in the field of economic anthropology. The SEA Book Prize is awarded every two years to recognize the single best publication in the field of economic anthropology.
This new AAA section will also continue to hold an annual conference each spring. The 2013 SEA Annual Meeting will be held at Washington University in St. Louis, MO from April 11-14. This year's conference brings together researchers from all fields of anthropology as well as other social sciences to present and discuss research that engages with the broad theme of inequality.
SEA President Browne, a professor of anthropology at Colorado State University, is excited for this shift within the society. "Thanks to the support and resources of the AAA, this merger prepares the way for our beloved SEA to expand its scholarly reach and visibility, and to connect to a broader public. We could not be more pleased about our new status" Browne notes.
AAA is pleased to welcome the Society for Economic Anthropology as one of its 40 sections.


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|By Jian Zhen
Article Rating:
|November 16, 2008 09:30 AM EST
In the past month or so I have talked to a lot of people in the cloud computing and virtualization space. Many of these folks are working at/on startups that solves one of the many challenges for Enterprise cloud computing. What are these challenges? I have tried to summarize them here (in no particular order).
Data Governance
I've written extensively about the need for data governance in previous posts. In essence, enterprises have a ton of sensitive data that requires access monitoring and protection. Data (and information generated from the data) is the life blood of many enterprises, the loss of control will not be acceptable. Whole markets (read: DLP) are created to protect the enterprise data and information. On top of all that, enterprises must comply with many of the regulations that require data governance. By moving the data into the cloud, enterprise, for now, will lose some capabilities to govern their own data set. They would have to rely on the service providers to guarantee the safety of their data.
I hate to invoke the ILM acronym but much of data governance is about
- Creation and Receipt
- Distribution
- Use
- Maintenance
- Disposition
So who's tackling this problem? As far as I know, nobody is and nobody really can except for the service providers themselves. It is really up to the service providers such as Amazon, Google and Salesforce to provide guarantees that customer data are safe and access to data are restricted and protected.
There are some great IaaS/PaaS out there, including Amazon's web services (S3, EC2, EBS, etc), Google's App Engine, Salesforce's Force.com, Joyent, etc. However, most of these are raw infrastructures and platforms that do not have great management capabilities. This is not unusual. Throughout computing history, raw capabilities will generally appear on the market first, then management of these raw capabilities become a differentiator when competition heats up. Just look at the blade server and virtualization spaces as these are great examples of that trend. The hypervisor was the key technology that enabled enterprise virtualization; however, that piece is now being given away (see VMware's ESXi) and management capabilities becomes the main differentiator.
Cloud computing is no different. An example of missing management capabilities for cloud infrastructures is auto-scaling. Amazon EC2 claims to be elastic; however, it really means that it has the potential to be elastic. Amazon EC2 will not automatically scale your application as your server becomes heavily loaded. It is still up to the developer to manage that scalability problem.
So who's tackling this problem? Many startups have recognized the need for management early on and have built management capabilities on top of the existing cloud infrastructure/platforms. RightScale is one of the early pioneers in this space. Their solution solves many of the management issues such as auto-scaling and load balancing.
Monitoring, whether is for performance or availability, is critical to any IT shop. We are not talking about just how much CPU or memory the machines are using. We are talking about performance of transactions and disk IO and others. CPU and memory usage are misleading most of the time in virtual environments. The only real measurement is how long your transactions are taking and how much latency there are. According to High Availability's article on latency:
Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.
So who's tackling this problem? Hypernic's CloudStatus is one of the first to recognize this issue and developed a solution for it. They started with monitoring of Amazon's web services, then recently added monitoring for Google App Engine. In addition, RightScale's solution can also provide monitoring for the virtual machines under their management.
Reliability and Availability
I won't beat the dead "Gmail down, EC2 down, etc down" horse here. But the truth of the matter is enterprises today cannot reasonably rely on the cloud infrastructures/platforms to run their business. There's almost no SLAs provided by the cloud providers today. Even Jeff Barr from Amazon said that AWS only provides SLA for their S3 service. I haven't researched the SLA issue so not sure how true that is. But if it's true, I think this will be one of the biggest factor, if not the biggest factor, in enterprise adoption. Can you imagine enterprises signing up cloud computing contracts without SLAs clearly defined? It's like going to host their business critical infrastructure in a data center that doesn't have clearly defined SLA.
We all know that SLAs really doesn't buy you much. In most cases, enterprises get refunded for the amount of time that the network was down. No SLA will cover business loss. However, as one of the CSOs I met said, it's about risk transfer. As long as there's a defined SLA on paper, when the network/site goes down, they can go after somebody. If there's no SLA, it will be the CIO/CSO's head that's on the chopping block.
So who's tackling this problem? Well, again, no one is today as far as I know. Maybe some startup will come up with clever idea to provide SLA as a third party vendor (read: cloud insurance.) Or maybe the cloud providers will grow/wake up and actually do something to encourage the enterprise adoption.
Virtualization Security
Security is a huge area that encompasses many different things, including the standard enterprise security policies on access control, activity monitoring, patch management, etc. On top of that, virtualization security is something that most enterprises are just starting to grasp but don't fully understand. Many IT people still believe that the hypervisor and virtual machines are safe. Recent presentations from Blackhat has demonstrate that we shouldn't sleep so tight at night. As IT shops get more educated on the virtualization security issues, it will become one of the factors they will consider when they move into the cloud. Access control and monitoring of the virtual infrastructure will be on top of their mind.
So who's tackling this problem? There are quite a few startups like Reflex, Blue Lane and Catbird that are creating privileged VAs that claim to protect the VAs running on VMware's ESX servers. However, ensure you do your research on the performance of these solutions first before adopting one of them. Other startups (unnamed) are creating interesting solutions in protecting the actual virtual infrastructure themselves, e.g., how do you protect and monitor access to the ESX servers? how do you control and monitor the movement of virtual machines using live migration or VMotion.
Cloud computing is here to stay. It will be the next big wave and will be adopted by enterprises. However, the industry as a whole needs to answer some of these challenges and ease the enterprises' concerns.
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