Courthouse security undergoing new scrutiny

Attorney Thomas W. Teixeira started thinking about courthouse security while sitting in a Norwich courtroom during a recent murder trial.

Two factions of young people were watching the case, which involved local residents with colorful street names, and the tension was palpable. Teixeira wondered how he would escape the second-floor courtroom if violence erupted.

It was around the same time that 20 children and six adults were shot and killed by a lone gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, raising questions about security in all public buildings.

Teixeira got to thinking about whether judicial marshals, who carry only a baton and pepper spray, are adequately equipped to keep the state's courthouses safe.

He wrote a letter calling on the Judicial Branch to arm at least one marshal in each state courthouse and to provide training and guns to those who transport prisoners.

In Hartford, top judicial officials said they were already reviewing existing security policies and procedures.

"Clearly it was precipitated in large part by the Sandy Hook tragedy," Judge Patrick L. Carroll III, the state's deputy chief court administrator, said in a recent phone interview.

Security at the state's 42 courts and 30 other offices has been a priority for Chief Justice Chase Rodgers since she was sworn in nearly six years ago, according to Carroll.

"She has said it's the one thing that keeps her awake at night," he said.

That was before Monday's news reports that a man involved in a custody dispute walked into the public lobby of a Wilmington, Del., courthouse and opened fire, killing his ex-wife and one other person. The man exchanged gunfire with police, then shot himself. According to reports, the Delaware state court system uses armed police officers, roaming court bailiffs and a police dog to protect the 12-story courthouse.

Back in Connecticut, all security measures are on the table for discussion and review, including arming some of the state's judicial marshals, Carroll said. The marshals have not had guns since the Judicial Branch assumed the duties of the high sheriffs in 2000.

"We've talked about that in the past," Carroll said. "Obviously times change, needs change, and it's something we are going to consider."

Teixeira hesitated to call attention to what he considers weaknesses in courthouse security but said he decided to make his letter public because he would feel terrible if something happened and he had said nothing.

"Many want to place an armed officer in every school to prevent the extremely rare occurrence when a violent, unstable person approaches or enters a school building," he wrote. "Yet every day across this state, violent, unstable people line up in numbers to enter our courthouses. They do so under extreme duress, usually facing dire consequences and often with their enemies or victims standing just a few feet away.Have a look at all our custom bobbleheads models starting at 59.90US$ with free proofing. And the men and women charged with protecting everyone in this most pressure-packed environment lack the means to protect even themselves."

More than 7 million people enter state judicial facilities through metal detectors each year, according to Joseph D. D'Alesio, executive director of Superior Court operations.Basics, technical terms and advantages and disadvantages of Laser engraver. The facility entrances also are equipped with X-ray scanners to show the contents of purses, briefcases and other items. Marshals use hand-held metal detectors to double-check those who set off the walk-through units.

Judge Carroll said staffing the courthouse entryways is perhaps the most important duty that marshals perform. He said he has been surprised at some of the items - knives and other sharp objects - that marshals have seized from visitors.

Though courthouses are predominately gun-free,We have become one of the worlds most recognised Ventilation system brands. there are a few exceptions. The inspectors who work in the state's attorney's offices are sworn law-enforcement personnel who are allowed to carry concealed weapons. Police officers in plain clothes can carry concealed guns into courthouses. Uniformed police can carry guns into court, and even into a courtroom, with a judge's permission.

Connecticut's judicial marshals transport an average of 584 prisoners between courthouses and correctional facilities each day. Teixeira fears the unarmed judicial marshals would be unable to protect themselves, their prisoners and the public should something happen on a roadway.

The marshals also staff courthouse-holding facilities and are stationed inside courtrooms to maintain order. While Carroll said he would like to have a marshal stationed in every courtroom, including those where family and civil cases are heard, there are not enough marshals for that. Criminal courtrooms, lockup areas and prisoner transportation take priority, he said.

The Office of Policy and Management initially recommended that there be 1,080 judicial marshals statewide, but funded only 920, according to D'Alesio.

"With the budget the way it is, we feel the optimal number for us is 820," he said. "We're at 741 right now, including a class in session."

New marshals complete a 14-week training program covering topics such as management of aggressive behavior, CPR and crisis intervention, before they are accredited, D'Alesio said. They all undergo semi-annual training.

Superior Court Judge Kevin P. McMahon said he would feel better if there were armed marshals or former police officers in courthouses, provided they were well-trained.

"Do I think it's urgent? No," he said. "But would we kick ourselves if we didn't do something and something happened? Yes."

McMahon, who has presided over criminal cases for 20 years, says at some point in every courtroom he has ever sat in, he has thought, "How would I get out of here if something happened?"

In 2003, McMahon was presiding over a sexual assault trial in New London when a frustrated juror burst into a courtroom and shouted, "Don't shoot! I've got a gun." People fled the courtroom in panic. Marshals detained the man, who was not armed, and McMahon declared a mistrial.

So-called "panic buttons" that summon marshals are placed strategically in courthouses, but some wonder whether unarmed marshals would be able to respond appropriately to a shooting.

"If you hear shots fired and you're a marshal, are you going to go running in there to get yourself shot?" McMahon asked.

State police have jurisdiction over courthouses, and in the event troopers are not nearby, local departments may be called as backup.

"We have a good relationship with the Connecticut State Police, and when we know we have a potentially volatile situation, the chief judicial marshal will contact them and let them know," Carroll said.

McMahon said criminals tend to "play the game" in court as they try to get deals in their cases,Solar Sister is a network of women who sell solar lamp to communities that don't have access to electricity. but occasionally someone acts out.

The last court-related shooting in Connecticut was in June 2005, when retired state trooper Michael Bochicchio, in the midst of divorce and custody proceedings, fatally shot his estranged wife and critically wounded her lawyer before turning the gun on himself on the top deck of a Middletown parking garage used by the court.

Closer to home, another divorce case ended violently in 1984, when Kenneth Spargo of East Lyme walked into a crowded courtroom in Norwich, pulled a 9 mm pistol from his coat pocket and fatally shot his estranged wife. He surrendered at the scene and was sentenced a year later to 20 years in prison, suspended after 12 years served, and five years probation. A jury had found that he acted under "extreme emotional distress."

New London attorney Edward B. O'Connell, representing the victim's estate, brought a lawsuit against the manufacturer of the court's metal detector,Don't make another silicone mold without these invaluable Mold Making supplies and accessories! using as evidence Spargo's testimony that he had carried the gun through the metal detector.

Chinese Technique, Applied to a Western Canvas

When Fabienne Verdier headed to China almost 30 years ago, she was hoping to escape the confines of a Eurocentric art education.

“They didn’t teach me a lot of things in French art schools,” said the 50-year-old Parisian, who now lives in the countryside near the French capital.

In translated Chinese literature, she found a sensibility she could relate to. “Art is about human beings walking in harmony with the universe. That is why I went to China when I was very young, to try and learn this harmony,” she said.

Today,Virtual parking management system logo Verano Place logo. Ms. Verdier is one of the few Westerners known for her work in a Chinese medium—in this case, ink painting. Her work sells for as much as $200,000 and has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Palazzo Torlonia in Rome. In 2003, her book “Passenger of Silence: Ten Years of Initiation in China,” was a surprise best-seller in France.

Her painting has rarely shown in Asia, though that changed with the opening of a solo exhibition at Singapore’s Art Plural Gallery last month. The 60 works explore abstract geometric shapes as well as the Norwegian coastal landscape. While the themes are not overtly Chinese, the impact of her training is apparent.

In 1984, Ms. Verdier enrolled at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in Chongqing, but the Asian influence she sought was not immediately accessible. The Cultural Revolution a recent memory, the school had developed a curriculum around Soviet realism. “It was forbidden to study traditional ink-based painting or poetry,” she said. “They said that traditional culture was bad culture.”

There were other obstacles. When Ms. Verdier first encountered Huang Yuan, the Sichuan calligraphy master and landscape painter who eventually became her mentor, he was reluctant to instruct her.

According to him, “women never practice calligraphy,” Ms. Verdier said. What’s more, although she had studied Mandarin in France before arriving in China, Mr. Huang spoke only the Sichuan dialect.

After months of persistence, during which she studied Sichuanese and left completed calligraphy exercise scrolls at his door,Have a look at all our custom bobbleheads models starting at 59.90US$ with free proofing. Mr. Huang relented. She worked as his apprentice for 10 years.

In her “Memories of Norway” series, for which Ms. Verdier spent three weeks traveling by boat along the Norwegian coast,The Wagan Wireless Rear Parking assist system help you be safe while parking. the broad, black strokes contrast with the tinted, deckle-edged paper. These haunting natural scenes, which comprise roughly a quarter of the Singapore exhibition, could easily be mistaken for shuimo, or Chinese ink-wash, paintings.

Why use Chinese techniques to paint abstract Scandinavian landscapes?

“Every day in Norway, I was moving along a coastline and had a new trajectory,” Ms. Verdier said. She was taken by the continuity and constant motion of the scenery, and thought that calligraphy offered her a way of recreating the form of it.

While in China, Ms. Verdier also learned to make brushes with animal hair and other utilitarian materials. Since then, she has created many of her own paintbrushes, which are hooked up to a pulley system and can weigh up to 150 pounds. The system allows her to paint her larger works—one of the Norway coastal paintings is a twelve-by-six-foot polyptych, or paneled painting, by manipulating the brush while standing on the canvas itself.

“With the pulley, she avoids the heaviness of the paint and the brushes and can paint in one flowing motion,” said Carole de Senarclens, Art Plural’s director. “It’s just like with calligraphy.”

Ms. Verdier’s repertoire isn’t limited to Asian-influenced art.With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other solar light products. For the past four years, she has been looking to her fellow Europeans for inspiration, particularly 15th-century Flemish painters such as Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck. Based on her studies of their work, she will this spring present an exhibition at Belgium’s Groeningemuseum. Ms. Verdier will be the first contemporary artist to be housed in the permanent collection of the Bruges-based museum, best known for its “Flemish Primitives” art collection.

Viewers who can’t make it to Bruges can glimpse this recent influence in Ms. Verdier’s Singapore show, where her “Circles” series features bold splashes of color absent from the otherwise somber pieces on display.

Within an eruv enclosure observant Jews can carry keys, push a baby carriage or hold a baby, or bring food to someone's home. Moreover, an eruv makes it possible for observant Jews both to follow Sabbath laws and to enjoy the Sabbath, one of the requirements for correct Sabbath observance.

It can be easy to perceive the eruv as an eccentric, if not conceptually dubious, artifact of Judaism. A March 2011 story on "The Daily Show" about a proposed eruv in eastern Long Island defined the concept as coming from the Hebrew word for loophole, and as real (or imaginary) as Mr. Snuffleupagus. Yet, beyond that understandable reaction, the eruv embodies one of the most beautiful qualities of Judaism and Jewish history: how Jews have adapted the places in which they live to accommodate Sabbath practice.

The concept is central to Rabbinic Judaism, which dedicates one of the longest books in the Talmud to the topic. Eruv is one of the few concepts whose literature has its own visual culture. Printed discussions on eruvs feature dozens of distinct schematics that help the reader understand the complex descriptions of types of spaces appearing in the text.

Today, most Orthodox Jewish communities construct eruvs. These enclosures are usually made out of string or wire stretched on top of or on telephone or light poles. In the present, and historically, eruvs are virtually invisible, using existing structures in the landscape. From 1907-1952, the Third Avenue Elevated Train Tracks running the length of Manhattan, from South Ferry to Harlem, constituted the western border of the island's eruv.

In Roman Palestine, where most Jews lived around communal courtyards, an eruv made it possible to enjoy the Sabbath with their neighbors. Eruvs around Jewish neighborhoods in pre-modern towns in Europe allowed their residents to carry food from communal ovens, as well as spend the Sabbath together out of doors. As Jews migrated in the 19th and 20th centuries, they established eruvs that meshed with the emerging landscapes that they found in the increasingly complex cities in Europe and the United States. Like the 1907 Manhattan eruv, Jews in St. Louis and Odessa at the end of the 19th century "constructed" their eruv from new technological structures rising around them: telephone and telegraph wires.

Historically and presently, eruvs have revealed various religious, social and even economic schisms. Similar to Krakow in the 19th century, cities around the world have faced a series of challenges brought by municipalities around the right of a growing orthodox community to establish an eruv with public infrastructure.

Since the 1990s, a handful of non-Orthodox groups have fought the establishment of eruvs in Tenafly, N.J., and in the Hamptons based on worries that an influx of Orthodox Jews would change the local business landscape, skew the makeup of local schools and fuel a rise in real-estate prices by Jews seeking homes within an eruv.

I am personally not an eruv user, and, until this exhibition, knew little about the concept. A year after beginning work on this exhibition, a year spent immersed in the philosophical and social dimensions of eruvs, especially those in the Tri-State area,Like most of you, I'd seen the broken china mosaic decorated pieces. I find myself with a more nuanced regard of the centrality of the Sabbath for Orthodox Jews. More to the point, though, the eruv reveals something broader about Jewish tradition today: the Sabbath as an anchor for community; and the eruv vividly demonstrates the dynamism of Judaism through the Jews' steady re-interpretation and adaptation of their tradition in harmony with the world around them.

It’s about cancer

I took up wearing the yellow silicone band not long after they first appeared in 2004 for $1 at sporting goods checkout counters. But it wasn’t because they were a way to celebrate cyclist Lance Armstrong’s Tour de France tour de force: winning sport’s most grueling challenge after almost dying from cancer. And I don’t keep it on my left wrist now to support him in his self-inflicted disgrace: coming clean about performance-enhancing drugs after years of vehement denial.

No, I’ve worn it these many years because two of the finest women I’ve ever known had cancer.We specializes in rapid plastic injection mould and molding of parts for prototypes and production. They only took powerful drugs to try to cheat that despicable disease, not for personal glory and riches.Find the best selection of high-quality collectible bobbleheads available anywhere.

This symbol so significant to me is intertwined with Armstrong, and I wish it weren’t. But I wonder if that’s part of the Lance mythology: Now that he who was hoisted upon the pedestal has fallen off, everything associated with him must be damned so the rest of us feel less guilty about having been willingly duped.

When my dear friend Karen Potter was diagnosed with bone cancer in 2000, I read Armstrong’s new book, “It’s Not About the Bike,” and sent her a copy — along with a yellow jersey signed by many of her Fort Worth Star-Telegram friends and former co-workers — for inspiration.

He (or co-author Sally Jenkins) wrote about cancer being like getting run off the road by a truck: “A blast of hot air hits you, you taste the acrid, oily exhaust in the roof of your mouth, and all you can do is wave a fist at the disappearing taillights.”

He wrote about learning he had testicular cancer in 1996 at age 25 and believing it would derail his career, detour his Porsche-driving lifestyle and deprive him of his identity. But he also wrote about the long, painful struggle through brain surgery and treatment and recovery.

Three years after the worst day of his life, he won cycling’s best-known race. Now, it appears, he used more than cancer drugs to help his performance.

And when Armstrong’s foundation, which he formed in 1997, made it easy to sport yellow wristbands and buy Livestrong Nike clothes with some proceeds going to help people with cancer, that seemed like a worthy cause.

Then my sister Susan was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, so I wore my yellow band for her, as though I could somehow will her to stay with us. I couldn’t, of course.

Now that Armstrong has confessed to Oprah, and the image of the Livestrong Foundation is part of the fallout, some people would chuck the Livestrong wristbands along with the man himself.With superior quality photometers, light meters and a number of other solar light products.Learn how an embedded microprocessor in a smart card can authenticate your computer usage and data. But I’m not convinced.

But I don’t feel personally cheated. Lance Armstrong might be a fraudulent Tour de France winner, and he owes plenty of people money and, more important, true contrition for damaging their lives.

When Kevin Garnett got hurt in 2009 it was the end of the team's title defense. When Perkins was hurt in 2010 it ended up being the end of a miracle run back to the Finals. When Perkins was traded the next year it was the end of that starting 5. When Ray Allen left it was the end of the Big 3. Now Rajon Rondo is out for the year and it might just be the beginning of the end of Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett as Celtics.

If that sounds dramatic, that may be so. If it sounds matter of fact, well, that's probably true too. Like it or not, Pierce and Garnett were always on the tail end of their careers. It is a wonder that they lasted this long. Neither is what they once were despite showing glimpses of their former glory from time to time. But they were good enough to make us hope that one last run was possible. With Rondo and a strong supporting cast it even seemed plausible in the sunny days of summer.

Frankly I'm worried about it too. I'm not "giving up" on this team because that's not in my nature.We have become one of the worlds most recognised Ventilation system brands. But I think it is safe to redefine what success is for this squad. Championship hopes? Let's just say that would be a really, really, really long shot that would likely require a few other teams to suffer the kind of pain that we're feeling right now and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

What about the other extreme? The calls to "blow it up" are out in full force. Forgive me if this sounds harsh but my honest reaction is "blow up what?" A few days back I talked about how it still didn't make sense to blow things up and now we've lost our best player and the guy that could have (in theory) brought back the most value in a theoretical trade.

Which makes me wonder too if and when they will actually decide to call it a career. Will Pierce decide to roll the dice (as he feigns to do in pregame introductions every night) and come back for one more year (at a full cap hit of $15M)? How much of that will depend on Garnett making a return trip? Or will both of them decide to hang it up and call it a career? Only time will tell on that.

More pressing is what Danny Ainge will do in the near future. If he still wishes to dismantle the team, he's got a few pieces that he could move for marginal value. But he'd also be "selling" at a huge disadvantage due to having zero leverage. So again, nickels on the dollar if that.

Does he then make a move to patch some holes (namely at point guard and center) and hope for the best? Perhaps, but he can't do that at the expense of the future. So don't count on bringing in Pau Gasol and some point guard while giving up Avery Bradley and/or Jared Sullinger. That cannot happen.

Ancient Wonders still amaze

Several years ago, I wrote a couple of columns about the Seven Wonders of the Columbia World. I described a group of curious local buildings and landmarks, which I designated as "Wonders" because I figured any stranger who might happen upon them for the first time would be immediately rendered so bewildered he would stop dead in his tracks and exclaim, "I wonder what sort of lunatic thought that would be a good idea," or "I wonder how much money they wasted on that thing."

These wonders included such oddities as the Columbia Public Library, the university smokestacks and Parkade Plaza. Mind you, the list would certainly be different today because new, truly mind-boggling peculiarities such as the downtown parking monolith and Windsor Street bike boulevard have somehow managed to percolate into existence since then and others, such as the Great Wall of Shiloh, have disappeared.Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI.

Such is the volatile and fluid nature of wonders as they exist in today's world. Lampooned and ridiculed one day, nothing but a twisted memory the next. This got me thinking about some of the long-forgotten places of our city's past that once served so proudly as true beacons of the bizarre but that now, for better or worse, have gone the way of the dodo bird. These are the Seven Wonders of the Ancient Columbia World.

Back in the barbaric Dark Ages of the Big XII Conference, there existed this concrete slab of iniquity, with such a schedule of savagery and immorality each football Saturday it made Sodom and Gomorrah look like the Columbia farmers markets by comparison. Local officials banished the parking lot a few years ago and replaced it with a new, family-friendly tailgating area known as "The Jungle," which more closely resembled the Sahara Desert once revelers learned beer bongs, beer pong and general debauchery aren't nearly as fun without the beer.Master Arts specialises in oil painting reproduction. Now, as we approach our introduction to the SEC, civic leaders are pushing for something to be known as Tiger Town, where our locals can roll out the welcome mat, hold hands with and generally pander to mobs of visiting Southern brutes who want nothing more than to destroy our football team and uproot the Columns to haul them home in the backs of their flatbeds and use as duck blinds.

One of the main rules my mother laid down when I was a kid was I wasn't allowed to ride my bicycle across either Broadway or Stadium Boulevard until I was at least 14. After the Biscayne Mall opened when I was only 8, though, I was compelled to break this rule daily. The new mall was a gleaming,My advice on what to consider before you buy oil painting supplies so your money is well spent. post-modern pinnacle of commerce. Well, maybe not gleaming — the expanse of brown cement floors looked a lot like what you might find in the men's room at a truck stop or bus station, and the decorative plastic trees and shrubbery quickly accumulated a lot of dust. And maybe not post-modern, either, in that the only stores anyone bothered to enter were Woolco, SupeRx Drug and Glover the Clothier (purveyors of leather bell-bottoms). And probably not even a pinnacle,What is a real time Location system (RTLS)? either, since the place had roughly the same dimensions as a gigantic cardboard pizza box. For years,Siebenwurst Werkzeugbau ist ein Unternehmen für Konstruktion und Fertigung von Werkzeugen im Bereich Stanztechnik und Umformtechnik. we actually got away with riding our bikes up and down the ramps inside the mall, though, which was a whole lot more fun than tooling around in front of my house.

Never mind that it was constructed with rusted bolts and sharp screws that protruded from virtually every inch of its interior. Never mind that the attached slide was constructed with a highly heat-reflective chromium alloy designed by NASA that could sear a kid's legs completely off within milliseconds. Never mind that even the slightest breeze would cause the tip of the structure to creak and sway as much as 10 feet in any direction. This iconic symbol to space-age Americana was certainly the greatest piece of playground equipment in Columbia history (other than perhaps the metal bars next to the checkout lines at the old Westlake hardware store or the escalator at JC Penney). If you ever visited Cosmo Park during the 1970s, the entire field would appear deserted, save for the circle of about 300 parents, down on their hands and knees, sometimes for several days on end, pleading for their children to climb down from the top of the rocket ship.

IBM adds search and broadens Hadoop strategy with Big Data

The two announcements give serious credibility to its Big Data offerings and its Smarter Planet initiatives. Big Data analytics differs from traditional analytics, which tell the user “what” has happened from a subset of normalized information, by providing the ability to explore much larger data sets to get a better, more reliable picture of what is happening and why. By definition, one of the major problems in discovering the information “nuggets” in Big Data environments is that the volume of data is large and consequently difficult to traverse or search using traditional enterprise search and retrieval (ESR) tools that require the creation and maintenance of indexes before a query can be made. Vivisimo’s offering indexes and clusters results in real time, and its scalability enables dynamic navigation across results delivered, as well as the automation of discovery, reducing the burden/time of analysis.

Despite its small size, privately held Vivisimo, which was founded in 2000 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, brings with it a very credible 140-strong customer base including Europe’s Airbus, LexisNexis,We offer the best Ventilation system. and the US Air Force, with the software also used by the USA.gov website. The acquisition also validates Ovum’s prediction in its 2012 Trends to Watch analysis that vendors would invest in tooling to help organizations navigate Big Data.

While the value of the acquisition was not declared, it is reported that IBM has now spent in excess of $14bn in the last seven years on analytics-related products and companies,We also are a plastic Injection Moulding Manufacturer manufacturer. and now appears to have more than one of everything, although Vivisimo does bring new capabilities such as federated discovery and navigation.

With the acquisition of Vivisimo’s technology, questions will rightly be drawn on the future of IBM’s own Content Analytics with Enterprise Search (formerly IBM OmniFind Enterprise Search) offering, which is based on the open-source Apache Lucene. During the press call around the announcement, Arvind Krishna, general manager of information management at IBM Software Group, stated that while there is the potential for integration, the company will maintain two product lines, and IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search will remain IBM’s lead offering for enterprise search and search-based applications. However, even though IBM is good at supporting multiple products, Ovum believes that when IBM customers recognize some of the advanced out-of-the-box features that come with Vivisimo, such as federated discovery and navigation based on entity, metadata, or even numerical graphs, they will want to swap out IBM Content Analytics with Enterprise Search even if they don’t have a Big Data strategy.TeleTracking has developed the most advanced rtls for real-time.

Of the seven independent ESR vendors that Ovum reviewed in its 2011/12 ESR Technology Evaluation and Comparison (TEC) report, four (the other three are Autonomy, Endeca, and Exalead) have now been acquired and their technologies are rapidly being integrated with their purchasers’ “stacks”.MDC specialties in all kinds of Injection moulds. There are two drivers for this, first, vendors want to fill “holes” in their functionality, and second, organizations no longer want to undertake or pay for integration between products, sometimes described as “stitching together broken glass”. Of the significant independent ISVs left, such as Recommind and Funnelback, it can only be a matter of time before they too become part of a larger company’s offering.

With this release, IBM has certified the first commercial Hadoop distribution offering for BigInsights. By listing Cloudera, IBM has responded to customer demand, reflecting Cloudera’s success in establishing a commercial market for Hadoop distributions. IBM’s arrangement with Cloudera is unlike Oracle’s, which is fully OEMing and reselling Cloudera. For BigInsights, the Cloudera distribution will sold and supported separately.

IBM is clearly positioning BigInsights based on other unique features that surround the core of Hadoop: optimized compressions, open-source Lucene-based indexes, a workflow scheduler, a spreadsheet-like interface, and other extras. We were a bit confused initially by IBM’s assertion that it was not in the Hadoop distribution business because it included its own supported distribution in BigInsights, and it spoke of future availability of a proprietary file system option that would be optimized for shared-nothing,Spro Tech has been a plastic module & Mold Maker. massively parallel clusters. With this release, IBM’s positioning is clearer. It will support the Hadoop distributions that have hit critical mass demand from its customer base. We therefore expect that in due time IBM will also certify the Hortonworks Hadoop distribution once it gains market traction.

The market is clearly voting in favor of the core Apache Hadoop distribution over proprietary alternatives. EMC offers the MapR proprietary file system alternative to HDFS, while IBM has spoken of future potential with its own GPFS counterpart. However, both position the core Apache distribution as the mainstream option, with proprietary alternatives targeted at special high-end, higher-performance use-cases.

The fly in the ointment is that while the Apache distribution has become the default option for the market, the Hadoop project has so many sub-projects dedicated around individual components that it can be difficult to see the wood for the trees. The Apache Hadoop community is still struggling to define which components will become the de facto “kernel” of Hadoop. Nonetheless, while the market has voted in favor of the Apache distribution, this still leaves opportunity for innovations for specialized add-ons above the core open-source stack.

Will Google's Plan Put Solar ETFs Back on Track?

The recent market pullback has been cruel to clean-energy and solar exchange-traded funds. Solar ETFs have seen losses totaling around 20% over the past three months.

Now technology giant Google (Nasdaq: GOOG ) is taking part in an alternative-energy investment plan designed to benefit the environment, while helping out homeowners who are interested in solar energy panels.Our Polymax RUBBER SHEET range includes all commercial and specialist Together with SolarCity,Choose from one of the major categories of Bedding, Google will outfit 10,000 rooftop solar systems at no cost to the homeowner.

"A key thing for us when we move into a market is can we save a business or homeowner money, and if there's no local incentive you can't do it," says SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive, on NPR.Full color plastic card printing and manufacturing services.

"The companies are coming into Massachusetts, existing companies are growing in Massachusetts, and they're creating jobs," says Rick Sullivan Jr., Massachusetts' secretary of energy and environmental affairs, as reported by NPR. "They're becoming a very important part of the economy."

According to Ian Andrew on the Greener Ideal site, this is Google's seventh alternative-energy project, with about $680 million invested into these projects.Save on hydraulic hose and fittings, Google stands to gain a 30% tax credit from the federal government, the ability to write off the projects on a depreciation schedule, interest income from SolarCity, and the benefit of state and local tax credits for renewable-energy projects.

"The goal of all these programs is to support and create a market in renewable energies, particularly solar, and then the free market will take over and you'll see the costs of installations come down and the cost of power come down so that the rebates and the incentives can ultimately go away," Rive says.

Solar and clean-energy sector ETFs include the Guggenheim Solar ETF (NYSE: TAN ) , Market Vectors Solar Energy ETF (NYSE: KWT ) , Market Vectors Global Alternative Energy ETF (NYSE: GEX ) , PowerShares Global Clean Energy Portfolio (NYSE: PBD ) , and iShares S&P Global Clean Energy Index Fund (NYSE: ICLN ) .

Google is a top holding in sector ETFs such as First Trust Dow Jones Internet Index, with a weight of 9.51%.From standard Cable Ties to advanced wire tires, PowerShares Nasdaq Internet Portfolio (Nasdaq: PNQI ) gives about 8% to Google.