position:dealer

  • #Netflix finishes its massive migration to the Amazon cloud | Ars Technica (article de février 2016)
    https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/netflix-finishes-its-massive-migration-to-the-amazon-cloud

    Netflix declined to say how much it pays Amazon, but says it expects to “spend over $800 million on technology and development in 2016,” up from $651 million in 2015. Netflix spends less on technology than it does on marketing, according to its latest earnings report.

    Netflix’s Simian Army

    The big question on your mind might be this: What happens if the #Amazon cloud fails?

    That’s one reason it took Netflix seven years to make the shift to Amazon. Instead of moving existing systems intact to the cloud, Netflix rebuilt nearly all of its software to take advantage of a cloud network that “allows one to build highly reliable services out of fundamentally unreliable but redundant components,” the company says. To minimize the risk of disruption, Netflix has built a series of tools with names like “Chaos Monkey,” which randomly takes virtual machines offline to make sure Netflix can survive failures without harming customers. Netflix’s “Simian Army” ramped up with Chaos Gorilla (which disables an entire Amazon availability zone) and Chaos Kong (which simulates an outage affecting an entire Amazon region and shifts workloads to other regions).

    Amazon’s cloud network is spread across 12 regions worldwide, each of which has availability zones consisting of one or more data centers. Netflix operates primarily in the Northern Virginia, Oregon, and Dublin regions, but if an entire region goes down, “we can instantaneously redirect the traffic to the other available ones,” Izrailevsky said. “It’s not that uncommon for us to fail over across regions for various reasons.”

    Years ago, Netflix wasn’t able to do that, and the company suffered a streaming failure on Christmas Eve in 2012, when it was operating in just one Amazon region. “We’ve invested a lot of effort in disaster recovery and making sure no matter how big a failure that we’re able to bring things back from backups,” he said.

    Netflix has multiple backups of all data within Amazon.

    “Customer data or production data of any sort, we put it in distributed databases such as Cassandra, where each data element is replicated multiple times in production, and then we generate primary backups of all the data into S3 [Amazon’s Simple Storage Service],” he said. “All the logical errors, operator errors, or software bugs, many kinds of corruptions—we would be able to deal with them just from those S3 backups.”

    What if all of Netflix’s systems in Amazon went down? Netflix keeps backups of everything in Google Cloud Storage in case of a natural disaster, a self-inflicted failure that somehow takes all of Netflix’s systems down, or a “catastrophic security breach that might affect our entire AWS deployment,” Izrailevsky said. “We’ve never seen a situation like this and we hope we never will.”

    But Netflix would be ready in part thanks to a system it calls “Armageddon Monkey,” which simulates failure of all of Netflix’s systems on Amazon. It could take hours or even a few days to recover from an Amazon-wide failure, but Netflix says it can do it. Netflix pointed out that Amazon isolates its regions from each other, making it difficult for all of them to go out simultaneously.

    “So that’s not the scenario we’re planning for. Rather it’s a catastrophic bug or data corruption that would cause us to wipe the slate clean and start fresh from the latest good back-up,” a Netflix spokesperson said. “We hope we will never need to rely on Armageddon Monkey in real life, but going through the drill helps us ensure we back up all of our production data, manage dependencies properly, and have a clean, modular architecture; all this puts us in a better position to deal with smaller outages as well.”

    Netflix declined to say where it would operate its systems during an emergency that forced it to move off Amazon. “From a security perspective, it’d be better not to say,” a spokesperson said.

    Netflix has released a lot of its software as open source, saying it prefers to collaborate with other companies than keep secret the methods for making cloud networks more reliable. “While of course cloud is important for us, we’re not very protective of the technology and the best practices, we really hope to build the community,” Izrailevsky said.

  • Smart Contracts For Connected Vehicles
    https://hackernoon.com/smart-contracts-for-connected-vehicles-3f69c13e70db?source=rss----3a8144

    “Blockchain and related trust enhancing technologies are poised to redefine the automotive industry and how consumers purchase, insure and use vehicles.” — Chris Ballinger, former CFO and Director of Mobility Services at Toyota Research Institute and current CEO and Chairman of Mobility Open #blockchain Initiative (MOBI).When it comes to vehicles, one of the most common consumer complaints is the lack of transparency. From uncertainties about whether a dealer is offering a fair purchase price to mistrust about rising insurance costs and questions about recalls and service requirements, car owners are largely kept out of the loop when it comes to the details about their vehicle.One of the many benefits derived from adopting blockchain in the auto industry is the potential to make everything (...)

    #internet-of-things #iot #cars #smart-contracts

  • #Hassan_Soliman - Art Talks

    http://arttalks.com/artist/hassan-soliman

    Le site dédié à cet artiste : http://hassansoliman.com

    Born in 1928, Hassan Soliman graduated from Cairo’s School of Fine Arts in 1951. However, even before his graduation, Soliman’s skill as a draughtsman had drawn the attention of art critics and dealers, to the extent that one dealer offered him generous patronage in return for exclusive rights over what he produced.

    In the Cairo art circles of the late 1940s and 50s there was a rumour that this patron dealt in fakes, and that Soliman had been asked to imitate the works of minor French impressionists on his behalf. When I asked Soliman about this ten years ago, he said he had only produced one fake Pissarro, though he also told me and colleague Fayza Hassan, who was interviewing him for the Weekly in 1998, that he had been barely 20 years old when a rich Jewish businessman in Cairo provided him with a generous stipend, an atelier in Qasr El-Nil St., and an Italian housekeeper in return for his services.

    As Fayza Hassan wrote in her 1998 interview, “It is perhaps one of Soliman’s minor eccentricities to insist upon his debt to Cairo’s foreign communities, the Jews in particular, who, according to him, guided his first steps towards eminence. Without their attentive patronage, says Soliman, he would never have become a known painter overnight when he was barely in his twenties.”

    #égypte #art #peinture

  • Uber Knowingly Leased Unsafe Cars To Its Drivers In Singapore, Report Says : The Two-Way : NPR
    http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/04/541692151/uber-knowingly-leased-unsafe-cars-to-its-drivers-in-singapore-report-says

    It was a good market to enter: In addition to all the rain you might expect in a tropical climate with two monsoon seasons, owning a car in Singapore is extremely expensive. The government requires owners to buy a certificate of entitlement, which represents “a right to vehicle ownership and use of the limited road space for 10 years.” The certificates are released through competitive bidding, and recently they’ve fetched prices from $44,000 and up.

    That kind of expense made it hard for Uber to find drivers, the Journal reports, and so the company created a unit, Lion City Rentals, that would lease cars to drivers. It represented a new approach for the company, which avoids owning assets.

    Instead of buying cars from authorized Honda and Toyota dealers, the company reportedly began importing hundreds of used cars a month from small dealers in the “gray market”, where safety standards are hard to enforce. At least one of those dealers didn’t get the Vezels fixed before selling them to Uber. While Uber was aware of the problem and asked the dealer to hasten its repairs, the company continued to lease the defective vehicles to drivers without warning them of the safety issue.

    Even after the fire, Uber told drivers that the Vezels needed “immediate precautionary servicing” — without mentioning the risk of fire and overheating.

    #Uber #disruption #Singapur

  • Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go To Die | Zero Hedge
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die

    In the past several years, one of the topics covered in detail on these pages has been the surge in such gimmicks designed to disguise lack of demand and end customer sales, used extensively by US automotive manufacturers, better known as “channel stuffing”, of which General Motors is particularly guilty and whose inventory at dealer lots just hit a new record high. But did you know that when it comes to flat or declining sales and stagnant end demand, channel stuffing is merely the beginning?

    Presenting...

    Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go To Die (courtesy of Vincent Lewis’ Unsold Cars)

  • Fiat Chrysler ‘cooperating’ with federal investigators
    http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/chrysler/2016/07/18/fca-investigation/87253660

    The investigations apparently stem from two Fiat Chrysler dealerships owned by Illinois-based Napleton Automotive Group. They filed a civil racketeering suit against the automaker in January, alleging the company, among other claims, offered dealers money to report unsold vehicles as sold. That complaint was amended in March to include additional Napleton-owned dealerships and to amend and add other details, according to court records.
    […]
    The amended federal lawsuit alleges that the automaker’s North American-based operation “knowingly endorses and encourages the false reporting of motor vehicle sales by directly rewarding its district managers and business center directors with monetary and quarterly bonuses which are directly related to reported vehicle sales numbers.

    The civil racketeering suit alleges that dealership principal Edward Napleton was asked to falsely report sales of 40 vehicles in exchange for $20,000 in incentives by Fiat Chrysler to the dealer. It says that would have been distributed to him “as a credit under the disguise as cooperative (‘Co-Op’) advertising support.” Napleton, the suit says, “immediately rejected” the alleged proposal.

  • AIPAC Is Destroying Israel, Not Safeguarding It
    AIPAC corrupted Israel, teaching it that everything is permissible: The day AIPAC weakens, Israel will grow stronger, forced to stand on its own two feet and be more moral.

    Gideon Levy (Washington DC) Mar 19, 2016

    http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.709751

    WASHINGTON – The enemies of Israel will gather here Sunday for their annual conference. Almost 20,000 people will flock to the city’s Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Almost all are Jews, and almost all are not friends of Israel, despite their organization’s name and pretensions.
    The American Israel Public Affairs Committee may be the organization that has caused the greatest damage to Israel. It corrupted Israel, taught it that everything is permissible to it. It made sure America would cover up and restrain itself over everything. That it would never demand anything in exchange. That Uncle Sam would pay – and keep mum. That the supply of intoxicating drugs would continue. America is the dealer, and AIPAC the pusher.
    America’s second most powerful lobby, after the National Rifle Association, is considered pro-Israel. But it is pro an evil, aggressive, occupying, right-wing and nationalist Israel. With friends like these, Israel doesn’t need enemies in the United States. The day AIPAC weakens, Israel will grow stronger. It will be forced to stand on its own two feet and be more moral.
    This is an annual parade of toadying to Israel. Only the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces is a more embarrassing and ridiculous organization (there, they also put disabled IDF veterans on the dais to expose their stumps and beg for donations). And in an election year, this embarrassing toadying reaches its peak.
    There’s no rational explanation for it. I’ve never met anyone who could provide a comprehensive explanation for the enormous and destructive power AIPAC has accumulated. I’ve never met anyone who could explain America’s blind, automatic policy toward Israel, for which AIPAC is to a large extent responsible, and which contradicts both America’s interests and its declared values.
    A belated snowfall is expected to hit the city on Sunday. The cherry trees actually flowered early this year, and this isn’t the only contradiction. At the conference center, presidential candidates will vie over who can be more fawning.
    This isn’t a good situation for Israel. Behind this fawning, which more and more Americans are beginning to try to get to the root of, hides suppressed thoughts that will eventually burst forth. Not all of those who fawn over Israel in the Senate and House of Representatives do so willingly. The fear of AIPAC silences them. It also silences the media. This can’t go on forever. It’s also liable to spark anti-Semitic sentiment.
    An organization whose achievements include getting Congress to pass a resolution congratulating Israel on the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War can’t continue to congratulate Israel on the 50th anniversary of that cursed war without more Americans starting to ask why. They’re already beginning to ask where their money is going, and for what purpose. Why to Israel, of all places? Why so much for Israel?
    After all, residents of the world’s most financially supported state, which is also the best at whining and playing the victim, live in a country that is ranked 11th in the UN’s World Happiness Report – four places above the country of its funders. Is Israel the neediest country in the world? After all, it’s also a military power, in a region where there are virtually no real armies left, so why should all that weaponry go to Israel, of all countries? And what does it do with it: bomb children in their sleep in Beit Lahia? Kill knife-wielding children of the same age at the Damascus Gate?
    Conference participants will wallow in a great deal of self-satisfaction: Look how strong we are. Only Bernie Sanders dared not to come. And if he hadn’t been Jewish, he never would have dared. Qassam rockets, cherry tomatoes and the “gay-friendly” slogan will once again star here to the applause and tears of the masses, together with praise for the Mideast’s only democracy.
    Very few will cast doubt on it, even though the cracks on its facade are already gaping and apartheid lies in its backyard. Look at Syria, the Israeli propagandists who will arrive here en masse from Ben-Gurion International Airport will say. And nobody will respond that America doesn’t fund Syria, that nobody says Syria is America’s greatest ally.
    Therefore, thank you very much, dear brothers from AIPAC, for bringing us to this point. Without your efforts, we would be in a different and much better place today.

  • Intérieurs soviétiques reconstitués dans l’appartement d’un antiquaire à St-Pétersbourg
    Collection de Serguey Bobovnikov, 2013

    Квартира Сергея Бобовникова
    http://www.sobaka.ru/fashion/heroes/10469

    Интерьер. Парк советского периода Сергея Бобовникова

    Un autre article, des points de vue différents
    Стильный дом - Парк советского периода Сергея Бобовникова
    http://home-and-garden.livejournal.com/257577.html

    Парк советского периода Сергея Бобовникова


    (pour @Reka, le même motif sur l’horloge…)

    L’article du NYT
    Red Rooms - Slide Show - NYTimes.com
    http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/05/30/greathomesanddestinations/20130530-LOCATION.html

    When Sergei Bobovnikov, a St. Petersburg antiques dealer, decided to renovate his stately old top-floor apartment in one of the city’s fashionable neighborhoods, a modern comfortable style was his plan. But the building had been home to a number of influential Stalinist-era officials. 

    I decided I wanted to design the apartment in the style of a senior bureaucrat of the early Stalin period,” said Mr. Bobovnikov, shown here.

  • Where the World’s Unsold Cars Go To Die | Zero Hedge
    http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-05-16/where-worlds-unsold-cars-go-die

    In the past several years, one of the topics covered in detail on these pages has been the surge in such gimmicks designed to disguise lack of demand and end customer sales, used extensively by US automotive manufacturers, better known as “channel stuffing”, of which General Motors is particularly guilty and whose inventory at dealer lots just hit a new record high. But did you know that when it comes to flat or declining sales and stagnant end demand, channel stuffing is merely the beginning?

  • Russian arms dealer targeted over #Syria

    Russian arms dealer targeted over Syria
    Published: June 11, 2012 at 11:51 AM
    PARIS, June 11 (UPI) — Human Rights Watch objected to a French arms expo featuring a Russian military company thought to be a major supplier to Syrian government forces.

    The Eurosatory arms show gets under way in France this week, featuring more than 1,000 exhibitors from 70 countries.

    Human Rights Watch said it objected to the participation of Russian arms supplier Rosoboronexport at the event.

    Jean-Marie Fardeau, French director for Human Rights Watch, said it’s duplicitous for the French government to both condemn the Syrian government for the ongoing bloodshed and host one of Syria’s largest arms suppliers.

    http://m.upi.com/m/story/UPI-99441339429863

    “It’s not acceptable to do business as usual with a company arming a government engaged in atrocities against its people,” he said in a statement.

    The rights organization says that providing weapons to Syria while the government there is suspected of committing crimes against humanity may by a violation of international law.

    U.N. officials last week said they suspected Syria had committed atrocities against its people during a series of massacres the government in Damascus blames on terrorists.

    Russia and China are among the leading critics of formal action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

    British Foreign Secretary William Hague told Sky News he would continue to pressure Russian officials to get in line behind the peace plan brokered by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

    “Every other solution of any kind to the Syrian crisis involves a lot more deaths,” he said.

  • Russian arms dealer targeted over #Syria

    Russian arms dealer targeted over Syria
    Published: June 11, 2012 at 11:51 AM
    PARIS, June 11 (UPI) — Human Rights Watch objected to a French arms expo featuring a Russian military company thought to be a major supplier to Syrian government forces.

    The Eurosatory arms show gets under way in France this week, featuring more than 1,000 exhibitors from 70 countries.

    Human Rights Watch said it objected to the participation of Russian arms supplier Rosoboronexport at the event.

    Jean-Marie Fardeau, French director for Human Rights Watch, said it’s duplicitous for the French government to both condemn the Syrian government for the ongoing bloodshed and host one of Syria’s largest arms suppliers.

    http://m.upi.com/m/story/UPI-99441339429863

    “It’s not acceptable to do business as usual with a company arming a government engaged in atrocities against its people,” he said in a statement.

    The rights organization says that providing weapons to Syria while the government there is suspected of committing crimes against humanity may by a violation of international law.

    U.N. officials last week said they suspected Syria had committed atrocities against its people during a series of massacres the government in Damascus blames on terrorists.

    Russia and China are among the leading critics of formal action against Syria at the U.N. Security Council.

    British Foreign Secretary William Hague told Sky News he would continue to pressure Russian officials to get in line behind the peace plan brokered by former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

    “Every other solution of any kind to the Syrian crisis involves a lot more deaths,” he said.

  • ARF !! Les 1% une minorité persécutée si si
    Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1% - Bloomberg
    http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-20/bankers-join-billionaires-to-debunk-imbecile-attack-on-top-1-.html

    ‘Persecuted Minority’

    Peter Schiff, CEO of Westport, Connecticut-based broker- dealer Euro Pacific Capital Inc., is delivering the message directly. He went in October to Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters had camped out, with a sign that said “I Am the 1%” and a video camera.

    “Somebody needs to do it,” Schiff said in an interview.

    Schiff, 48, disclosed assets of at least $64.7 million before losing the 2010 Republican primary for a Connecticut U.S. Senate seat, according to filings. He’s wealthier now, even though his taxes are “more than a medieval lord would have taken from a serf,” he said.

    A clip from Schiff’s video was used in a Nov. 1 segment of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” in which comedian John Hodgman, wearing a cravat, called the wealthy a “persecuted minority.” He asked that the phrase “moneyed Americans” replace “the 1 percent.”

    Neither term appeared in a Nov. 28 open letter to President Barack Obama from hedge-fund manager Leon Cooperman, the Omega Advisors Inc. chairman and former CEO of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s money-management unit. Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas” and provide health care to millions.

    Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

    “You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”