Hi, I'm David Glenn with the HDMI Forum. We're a standards organization that develops all of the future versions of the HDMI specification, starting with 2.0 and then 2.1, which we're very excited about. A standards organization that's open to anyone who wants to join any company. We currently have 84 members that spread across the industry, so we work with not just device manufacturers who make sources and sinks. We also have a lot of people making components like silicon and cables, people making test equipment. We also have members who are content developers like streaming companies, content media companies, studios. And we all get together and decide on what we want in future versions of HDMI. So in the last few years, we've been developing the 2.1 specification. The focus there was on 8K and 4K 120, as well as gaming features like ALM and VRR, which we're all very excited about coming out in products in the near future. Because device makers wonder, device is to be future proof, right? So they're looking far ahead into the future and say, we want this. How do they agree on what needs to be in there? So in the forum itself, we have regular meetings pretty much every week by phone. We also get together many times a year in face-to-face meetings, and this is where we make decisions about what kinds of features we want and technical discussions about exactly how to accomplish those things. And it's a democratic standards organization. So all the active participants get together and make technical proposals. Sometimes there's various technical proposals and we debate the merits of each and often come up with a combined solution. Sometimes there's only one proposal, but a bunch of other companies will join in and help make that better and improve it. And then it's ready. We included in a specification like we did with the 2.1 spec. So can you tell a bit of a story as to how you came to these specs for the HDMI 2.1? Is it possible that one of the members wanted AK-120 to be there? And other people said it's too difficult or something. But you can do it. AK-120 by compression, right? Yes, we support it by compression. By compression. So there's all these backing forward and you pretty much have to judge what becomes possible in the future with all these chips. Something like that? Sure. So I think the question really is about, how do we decide what to put in in terms of future capabilities like 8K, 60 and 8K-120? The 2.1 spec does support 8K-120 using DSC compression. But really it comes down to making sure that the products for the next, let's say, three to five year timeframe are going to be affordable, right? In other words, we don't want to build an infrastructure that has, say, 100 gigabits of bandwidth and force that on to consumers when it's not going to be economical in the next timeframe. So we agree as a standards organization what the right bandwidth for the next cycle of standards is and then we build specifications to that to ensure that we're doing it in a way that all the products can be made at an affordable price point for our consumers. It's already a big jump. It's 48 gigabit per second, it's pretty big. Yeah, and 4K-120 doesn't use all of the 48 gigabits. Even 8K-60 doesn't use all of the 48 gigabits in many configurations. HDR10 uses about 40 gigabits. So there is a big jump there and there is bandwidth for some future expansion especially like we said 8K-120 with compression is available within that 48 gig envelope as well. It's a pretty amazing amount of data. It's big and all these chips, they know how to handle this. I mean, they have to now for three to five years handle all this data. Not every chip has to handle 48 gigabits. If you're building a product that is a gaming monitor that's 1080p then you don't have to support 48 gigabits because you're not going to have that high bandwidth silicon in a 1080p monitor. It's only really if you're building 8K-60 or 4K-120 TVs or source devices that you really have to enable that higher data rate. The HDMI 2.1 spec doesn't always have to run at 48 gigabits. It has lower speeds it uses at 40 gigabits and 24 gigabits and various other rates so that we'll use the right data rate for the capabilities that your mix of products want to have. On the other hand the cable, the ultra high speed cable that we've defined it is future proof. So every ultra high speed cable has to be capable supporting the full 48 gigabits. So that way when you buy a UHS cable you're insured that it's future proof and you can use that cable going forward when you do decide to upgrade to 4K-120 or to 8K-60 or beyond. It's just awesome industry know. When people talk about what's to look for to its CES most of the articles are all mentioning HDMI 2.1, they're all mentioning 8K. And you are pretty much organizing the industry around that right?  Everything from American companies to Chinese companies to everybody right? Yeah we're very excited that HDMI is such a widely adopted standard throughout the world in both the consumer electronic space and other spaces like the IT or PC ecosystem. And yeah you know it's great that everyone is adopting 2.1 on these advanced devices. And HDMI has been very successful there's now over nine billion devices in the world that have been HDMI certified in terms of sources and sinks. And that's certainly going to continue to grow at a very good rate. So more than one per person. That's right. I certainly have more than one. That's a lot. One thing that I noticed is that there's a lot of different types of HDR. And is it a challenge to specify what goes in or just support all the different ones in HDMI? Yeah so with the 2.1 specification on HDR we took a framework where we really defined a very flexible mechanism for transporting HDR with wide data rates. So you know 10 bit, even 12 bit per component if you want. And very flexible ways of transporting metadata. So in the HDMI specification itself we don't really mandate the different kinds of HDR. We really enable the transport system for different mechanisms. So that way we can work with all of the different standards that are around the world for HDR. And in fact all of the existing ones are supported by HDMI and it's certainly possible to write new ones using the HDMI 2.1 infrastructure. Because it is so flexible it's certainly possible that future HDR standards could be working as well. So it doesn't mandate what type of HDR? No it does not mandate a type of HDR. Just gives the infrastructure for transporting very extended pixel data and metadata. Because HDR is awesome right? Absolutely HDR is awesome. HDR is something I've been working towards my whole career. Oh yeah so a long time? Yes. So it's even better than the resolution sometimes. People say that it's more impressive. Yes well I've been around long enough that my eyes are no longer that appreciative of the very high resolution. But I've certainly with my eyesight I'm very appreciative of high dynamic range and wide color gamut. So those are things that I think even more people can really benefit from than higher resolution. Everyone can benefit from higher resolution unless they're very low vision. But I think it's more obvious to people when they see high dynamic range and wide color gamut. So there's more things that HDMI 2.1 kind of solves. There's all these sound bars that are sometimes difficult to configure and a little bit weird. And now it's making it easier. Yeah we have the enhanced audio return channel which really is trying to take that problem and solve it with sound bars and AV receivers. So it's much more flexible in terms of negotiating capabilities and supporting a lot more advanced audio codecs. Wireless speakers, all this kind of stuff and it needs to be automatic. Well HDMI is not wireless. It's not wireless, okay. Oh yeah okay. That would be all these different kind of speakers and stuff because TVs have sometimes good sound but it's often better to have external sound. Certainly I think a lot of people prefer external sound. It is challenging to build very good speakers into small bezel TVs. Although some of the TV vendors are doing very impressive things I have to say with their narrow bezels. And then you satisfy also the gamers and all these how challenging is it to make a TV that has variable frame rates and stuff. Is that piece of cake or it's really complicated and how do you make everybody agree how that should work? Well making TVs support variable refresh rate is certainly more challenging than it is with monitors. I can't really get into the technical details of how it's done but we're very happy that VRR is now part of the HDMI standard and that's encouraging more and more TV manufacturers to recognize that gaming is such an important aspect of their market and the game console vendors of course appreciate that too. Because as far as I understand there's the chip like the GPU and the CPU sometimes they can't quite do the full frame rate or it depends how powerful it is, how many frames is going to output. So it's really nice for a gamer to have the same rendered on the screen as what the chip can do. Is that the point right? Yeah the point of variable refresh rate is that often with games you get into scenes that are just a little bit too taxing for your rendering system, your CPU and GPU. And so if you want to, you can't always achieve say 120 frames per second or 144 frames per second. And so in those more complicated scenes you can fall down to a lower refresh rate and then when you get back to a more typical scene you can get then to a higher refresh rate. There's also gamers that just prefer in PC gaming to set all their quality settings to extreme and ultra and they're not really trying to get to 144 Hertz they really want to prefer to get a very beautiful looking image at say you know more around 60 or 50 Hertz or FPS. And that allows you to work as well with without having to go and change your display into 60 FPS and back to 120 you can just stay at the one timing. And if the GPU goes down to like 71 Hertz or something it'll just work. It'll match exactly that in real time. Yeah that's right. And it also has to do with lag somehow. So that's also a big deal like there's a different standard of people doing different ways how the GPU is synchronized with the display. Yeah the HDMI specification doesn't really get into the lag elements of that. So that's sort of a separate issue that the TV vendors and some of the other variable refresh rate ecosystems like G-Sync and G-Sync they get more into the lag issue. That's not part of the spec. No. So again compatible with different. Yeah the spec is, the HDMI spec is absolutely compatible with having reduced lag but the spec itself doesn't really talk about that explicitly. When you talk about quick media switching it's like if you watch a movie in 24 frames per second or something like that. Yeah so this allows you to, often when you're streaming you're going to be flipping between different clips on say YouTube or whatever that are all at natively different frame rates. 24 FPS, 30 FPS, 60 FPS, 50 FPS. And with quick media switching, QMS, you're able to very quickly switch between those using basically it's sort of an extension of VRR. It's another mode of VRR within the HDMI specification. That allows you to then have the transport across the HDMI cable always be exactly the frame rate of that media. And that allows your display like your TV, often TVs have very good quality frame rate conversion and allows them to go to that native frame rate. Or some TVs can then simply display it at the intended rate or some multiple that. Some TVs will multiply it by two or by three or by five. So like you did 24, they'll multiply it by five and display it at 120. Does it do anything in switching the kind of like the modes? The TV sometimes has like a movie mode and they have like a game mode and like different way of showing them. So that's more of what we call ALLM. So auto low latency mode is just a signal to really tell that the source device can tell the TV whether you're playing basically game contents or that wants low latency or say video content. And some TVs can have options to move between their game modes in terms of their image quality as well. That's really not mandated by the spec. What's mandated by the spec is that when you say you're gaming, the source device says it's gaming, the TV should move into its game mode, which is lower latency than the movie mode, which is higher latency. And often the different licensees are associated with the image processing within the TV itself. So when it's watching movies, it's trying to spend a little bit more time image processing and improving the quality of the picture. Whereas in game mode, it'll spend a little bit less time doing image processing because the focus is on really getting the image on the screen as fast as possible for the gamer. So a lot of all this stuff is to do with metadata, right? It's like, it's not the 48 gigabit stuff. It's like small data. It's small, the industry has to agree how to format this metadata. Yeah, and that's definitely within the HMI specification. We have a bunch of metadata specifications. Some of them are very specific like the ALM and the VRR and the QMS are very specific. This is how you transport that metadata. Some of them are a little bit more flexible within specifications like I mentioned around HDR. So there we really provide an infrastructure and then within that infrastructure, different HDR standards can define how to transport their metadata packets. And so part of the CES 2020 has got to do with a new cable. And how big of a role has the forum to do with this? Well, this was the first cable that the HDMI forum has defined since it was, the forum was created in 2011. And the first version of HDMI that we worked on was 2.0. And in that case, we used the existing high speed cable that had been defined back in the earlier HDMI specifications. And we increased the ability of the high speed cable from nine gigabits per second up to 18 gigabits per second. And that's what we've been running with the 2.0 for the last five years. But with the demands we had for 4K120 and 8K and beyond, we needed to move up to 48 gigabits. And that was not possible with the high speed cable. So we did a lot of effort over the last few years to define the ultra high speed cable, which we're very proud of. So it's a cable that has been designed from the ground up to not only provide very high bandwidth, but also lower EMI. So we've worked carefully with international EMI standards. This is electromagnetic interference. Basically, making sure the cable doesn't radiate energy that can interfere with your Wi-Fi or your Bluetooth or your cellular network signals. And so all of the cables that are being released for ultra high speed, every single cable design will have to go through a mandatory certification program set up by one of our authorized test centers. And then it'll have a logo or label put on it that allows the consumer to see very clearly that this is a certified cable. So anyone can download an app onto their Android or iOS phone that can allow them to very easily scan the label on the product in the store and confirm that it is, in fact, a certified cable. And part of that certification is the EMI testing itself. So it goes into a very specialized test chamber where we test that the radiation coming out of the cable is well within the international standards. Because you don't wanna have the new 8K cables interfering with your cell phone and stuff. And Wi-Fi and... Yeah, and in fact, you know, if you didn't already have a premium certified cable, it may be worthwhile to get the new cable if you're having wireless interference problems because not all of the older HDMI cables on the market did go through an EMI testing. Right, so now, even if you're playing games at 1080p or watching 4K 60 on sources and syncs that are HDMI 2.0, the new cable may help you solve some of those EMI issues because it's been EMI certified. So it doesn't interfere with all that stuff if it's a bad cable? Well, sometimes. Sometimes. A bad cable can be the issue, yes. Is there a way to measure that somehow? Measuring EMI interference is not easy. It does take expensive equipment. But basically, for users at home, I think the easiest way to sort of mess around with putting your cell phone near and trying to see how many bars you get, things like that. But it's not a very exact science. There's not like an app for that. I'm not aware of an app for it, although there's maybe an app for everything and I could be wrong. So, is there a price to be a member of the forum or a price to get this certification? Well, certainly more forum members, there is a price. That's all public information on the HDMI forum website. We certainly are always looking for new member companies to join up. Basically, you have to agree to work in an open standards organization under very typical standards organization rules and there's an annual fee to be a member of a forum of 15,000 US dollars. So, often it's mainly the big companies but they could be smaller companies. But I'm not part of the forum and but they just follow everything you do. Yeah, so there's also a thing called an HDMI Adopter. So, most companies in the world are HDMI Adopters. So, they work directly with the HDMI Licensing Authority to become an Adopter. An Adopter is a company that is making an HDMI related product. But to be part of the forum is to really be part of defining the future standards rather than just building a product. So, we have bigger and smaller companies within the forum but they're all focused on the development of future standards whereas companies are really just trying to focus on building products with the existing standards they'll become just HDMI Adopters. And that helps fund the whole organization and the way you do things, right? Yeah, we're a self-funded organization through our membership fees and other product fees.   It's not just emails. No, there's a lot of email, there's a lot of teleconferences and there's face to face meetings throughout the year. And so, I would guess that every company has the top experts in this field. Like, they really know what they want and how to organize the whole thing. Yeah, we do have a lot of experts in the forum. Many of them have over 20 years of experience with HDMI, including myself. Some have been there since the very first days of HDMI being defined. The chipset companies, the TV companies. Yeah, as I said, we have TV companies, we have monitor companies. We have source device companies. We have chipset vendors, we have cable vendors. We have test equipment manufacturers, as well as studios and content distributors. All these streaming sites and stuff, they probably want to be, maybe. Well, we have a few streaming companies, yes. And a few studio companies. And the Hollywoods and all this stuff. We have a few Hollywood companies, yes. And also the Bollywoods and the Chinese and everything. Yeah. We're certainly interested in having active membership from throughout the industry around the world. All right, so do you feel like the HDMI is so huge now, but it's going to be much bigger? Oh yeah, there's no slowing down of HDMI at this point. It's certainly with the 2.1 spec, we've got everything we need for the next several years in the industry at least. We have AK-60 as we talked about. We even have AK-120 with compression. And that's certainly going to take a while for the industry to catch up with. And this gives a lot of a nice job for the chip designers to fill up this AK-60 and AK-120 with amazing content. Yes, so content, you know what I mean, an AK content on the video side, that's taking a bit of time to develop. But certainly we're having the Olympics this year. We'll be done in AK and that's going to create a lot of ecosystem infrastructure for creating video content. There's going to be cameras coming. Yeah, there's going to be cameras, there's going to be all of the studio and truck infrastructure system associated with that. But it's not just I think about video, it's also about gaming, right? And so both Microsoft and Sony have announced that they're going to have 8K support in their next-gen consoles. So that'll also be interesting to see. And I think YouTube has supported 8K for a while, but when you look at the new codecs, we can compress 8K in something like 100 megabits. That's much less than 48 gigabits. So all this compression doesn't really matter, right? It's just the video needs to be kind of uncompressed and there's a reason why it's 48 gigabits. Or does that make any sense when I'm asking? Well, so typically what happens with video streaming, for example, is it gets uncompressed in a source device like in a game console or a media box like a fire stick or so forth. And then it'll often get mixed with a menu so you'll have menu items and choosing what your next stream is and all that sort of stuff. And then the resulting thing, and often the video gets put into a window. Sometimes you can have like 20 different video clips together in your menu, right? So all of those get decoded separately on the source device, scaled and composed. And then the final image is shipped over to the interface to the display on the HDMI interface. And that makes sense to have huge bandwidth in the last part. Yes, because of the uncompressed nature. It doesn't really make sense to recompress it again and then decompress it again in the TV. Although as we said, we do support the compression standard DSC in HDMI. And that actually does enable you to work even at 4K, for example. You could use DSC with a lower quality cable without having to actually upgrade your cable if you don't have the ability to do so. So if the 48 gigabits is kind of like 4X more bandwidth, does that mean 4X more power consumption also? Well, 48 gigabits is about 2.6X of the 18 gigabits we had in 2.0. In terms of power consumption, that's not really determined by the specification, that's really by the silicon vendors. It does not mean 4X the bandwidth though. It will power. Sorry, it doesn't mean 4X or 2.6X. You've got to be confused about 4X. Yeah, so in terms of power consumption, that's really not part of our standard. To go faster bandwidths at 2 or 2.6X, the bandwidth will take a little bit more power, but exactly how much more power is really up to the silicon designers to optimize for. Because we also want to have a green planet with not too much power consumption and stuff. And absolutely. But it's also important to remember that we don't always run at 48 gigabits. We'll run the link at the rate that's suitable for the mode you're trying to do. So if you have a source and a sync that are not needing the 48 gigabits, if they only need say 20 gigabits, then we're going to train the link to 20 gigabits, or maybe even less. And so that's going to help reduce the power consumption as well, because we're not making the link run at full speed all the time. It's also going to make sure that you could potentially operate even with a legacy cable that's not a UHS cable. Because that older cable that doesn't support the 48 gigabits could be used with a lower link rate. And without getting too much into detail, but there's many different kind of chips that know how to encode and decode the stuff, right? And so maybe some of the chips are kind of including this on the SOC more and more and stuff and doing all kinds of architectures can do it, like x86, ARM, DSP, FPGA or what kind of, how does it work? A6? We're seeing HDMI adopted into Silicon from many different types of devices, right? So all the way through the ecosystem of both handheld devices, camera devices, tablets, PCs, media sticks, automotive. Yeah, so it's a widely adopted standard and it's a technology that can be integrated into a lot of different Silicon technologies. You don't need to have a very, very advanced, like seven nanometer technology to implement HDMI. You can do it in some of the technologies that are often typical of lower cost devices and sort of more consumer focused devices rather than the bleeding edge highest end, say gaming device. And they can do it maybe on the SOC or they often need to have a dedicated chip next to the connector. That's really up to the system designer and the Silicon designer, but yes, it can be integrated into SOCs, absolutely. All right, but thanks a lot. So you're going to be busy here to CES 2020, right? CES is always busy, yeah. So what's going to keep you busy?   I'm going to go through all the booths today. Some of them are forum members, some are not, but I'm always interested to see the products that are coming out, especially I think there's going to be a lot of 2.1 products in the booths this year. So yeah, the show hasn't quite started yet, but I'm looking forward to checking out today. How big a part of the CES story do you think 2.1 is going to be? Because everybody who did the articles before the show, everybody's mentioning it, right? Yeah, that's been great. The reaction we've had has been great. We hope it continues to be a good reaction and we're very excited about the feedback and the support we're getting on the 2.1 at HDMI and CES.


Hi guys, welcome back to this channel and it's the first time to come across this channel, consider subscribing, support this channel by subscribing. By the way, don't forget to hit the notification bell, you'll be the first to be updated when I upload a new video. Remember, we are still looking at Kuwait labor law, remember? Kuwait labor law, like any other Middle East country, has its own different clauses that govern the labor, the labor contracts govern both the employee and the employers in Kuwait. And today's video, we are going to look at what you call the notice period in Kuwait, remember? Each of these Middle East or these Gulf countries, each of these countries has what you call different labor laws and regulations and also it has different clauses that govern the labor law. And today's video, we want to look at what is the notice period in Kuwait, remember? Kuwait like any other Gulf countries, one of the eyes is also has a rich, a rich variable, world most variable, currency at the end of it or meaning that it has a little bit of higher money, salary conversion with the exchange rate, remember? When we look at notice period, we don't fail, we cannot fail to make sure what you call employment contracts because remember it is the employment contract or a labor contract that governs or that creates or bides the gap between the employee and the employer at that time. And remember, when we talk about Kuwait itself, Kuwait has two types of contracts, which one have what you call a definite and what you call an indefinite contract. And remember the Kuwait labor law number six for 2020, for 2010, there are differences between the two different contracts that is for the definite and that is for what you call the indefinite. And when you have what you call a definite term of contract, it means that you can, if your contract, your contract is finished, you can resign but make sure that contract is not signed or renewed dramatically under what you call indefinite contract term, which may be some time indefinite term may either be for two or three years or it can be for three years that is according to what is agreed upon. And if you sign for what you call an indefinite term, your contract does not state otherwise. The notice period is has to be three months that you have to give your employer either in writing or in what you call an email in the government or in what you call the company website but not on text message or WhatsApp. That is what governs that contract at a time that when you have a definite you can definitely resign at a given period of time or because when your contract comes to an end, you can end your service at that time. But when you have what you call an indefinite, remember an indefinite contract is more than, it goes more than what you call the three years. So meaning that for you to resign for, for you to get off the work or stop your service, you need to let your employer know about your decision to resign and it has to be put in what you call writing in what you call three months. That is for what we call per the law of kata or per the law of kuei to remember. The notice period is three months for maturi salant employers. So if for those employers that have been paid salaries, they are notice period to their employer is normally what you call three months. And one month, one month notice period will be for those people that are not paid what you call salaries. We are not paid for salaries. Definitely meaning that they can live without, can live without being allowed, they can live within one month at a time of it all. Remember the employer who terminates the employee's contract without having the employer complete notice period is required to pay a total amount of salaries covering the notice period. For example, if you're not, if for example, if you terminate your contract with your employer, if you, you terminate your contract with your employer, remember the notice period has to be three, has to be three months as according to the kuei labor law. But your employer decides to not allow you to complete a three months with him, then that means according to what you call the kuei labor law, that employer has to pay you all the three years to pay you all the salary that amounting to the notice period of the three months, then you can live and move out with all your compensation paid to you. Hope that is quite very good for the time. Unlike when we looked at other Gulf countries when they have different notice period at a time. For kuei labor law is quite very different and that is what exactly it is. Remember what you need to think about, you need to know what you call the definite and ultimate contract which I talked about and you need to know that the notice period in kuei labor law has to be three months. You have to let your employer know in three months early months that you will be living the work and also your employer has to let you know in three months if once wants to terminate you or if once terminates you, terminates you from the service. Hope I try to share something. Thank you so much for coming back to this channel. By the way, don't forget to hit the notification bell and don't forget to support by subscribing to XMAX from the next creation TV. See you again in


Well, Gallery North is encouraging the public to tap into their inner artist with their monthly creative cafe events. Lakeland News reporter Sherell Moore takes us into the workshops for this week's InFocus. Impressionistic painting of Sunday afternoon on La Grande De Jette. And I suppose more poignolism than impressionistic. Welcome to the Creative Cafe. The event has been gaining a reputation in the community as a great place to pick up a new art skill. We are a group of 20 local community artists and every month we take turns sharing some of our ability and expertise with people and it costs $5 for you to come for about 2 hours. The Creative Cafe is always held on the second Tuesday of every month. They start at 4 in the afternoon. With the rotating artists, each month is always a little different.  They're pretty simple but you got hot glue which burns your fingers real easily. Some of them have antlers, some of them don't. I really like how you can evoke different emotions or different sensations just by this most micro movement. All the materials for the crafts are provided. What we're doing here today is alcohol ink. We're doing Christmas ornaments with the alcohol ink and you can do all kinds of things with alcohol ink. Whether you want to learn new tricks or techniques or just want to try something new, the classes are a great way to start. Most they have written books and this is way more fun than the loneliness of a book over years and years of time. Reporting in Bemidji with this week's In Focus, Shoramor, Lakeland News. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


The former interim president of Bolivia, Jeanine Anais, allegedly caused self-harm to our arms, and that was an alleged suicide attempt in a prison where she is staying. But the state of health is stable and only has a few small scratches as announced this Saturday by the minister of her government, Eduardo del Castillo.


What's going on guys? Just a quick message talking about the Salisman's visual and the video you're about to see. The Salisman's visual is a fusion rifle only obtainable from Arkham's Forge. If it drops with the right rolls it is absolutely unstoppable. In my opinion the best fusion rifle in the game. See for yourself, me using it in PvP and I at the best PvP player. So if I can do good with it, anyone can do good with it. Hope you guys do enjoy the video, if you do leave a like it's much appreciated on my behalf and I will see you on that next one. 30 seconds remaining. Oh! Heavy ammo on the way. Oh! Oh dear hammers! I'm looking! I'm looking! More efforts like that and we might just win this. I will down. Oh! I'm looking!  Now what are you going to do? See that arm boy. See that arm boy now. Give me these special stuff and tear things up with my Saladins. Saladins. Oh! Saladins. Saladins. Oh! We captured Zone C.


We're back on the stage, but we're standing on here, and you get a great opportunity to talk about what you talked about. We're getting in touch with your reasons for being involved, and the reason for coming is because to me it has to come to a convention like this to represent a certain commitment, a certain investment in someone. We're talking about what you're doing on the website, so we're trying to get in touch with what it is, and then we're talking about the rest of the speech, and how a dysfunctional technique has some practical components to do with this culture. That's holistically the idealism for your side of the topic. We're talking about agreeing on your speech, and what exactly do you like the most? Yeah, I have a good one. That's just what you said, actually. I like the holistic, I like the sense of the wise of people, I like the snobble about it. There's nothing wrong with the social ones, but we can't prove in any way that we're all schemed by the time, so I need to prove in the house. I like that. I'll use that. I was like, what was it called? Sparkling or still? I'm just happy to have it. He's just glad to be hydrated. I like hydration. What would you say that you enjoy? Yes. I'm Steve Sampson. I'm Doris, 21. Alright, well this is Steve. Thank you guys for being there. I'm here. Enjoy more videos. See you guys next time. Bye.


Chapter 4. We're going to begin at verse 1. We'll read to verse 3. We'll move through chapters 4 into chapter 5. And basically I'll tell you in advance that the majority of what I feel is very applicable to us today is when we get into the portion that says David became great. And we're going to be looking at that today as we look at our study. David became great. Beginning at chapter 4, verse 1, reading to verse 3. When Saul's son heard that Abner had died in Hebron, he lost heart and all Israel was troubled. Now Saul's son had two men who were captains of troops. The name of one was Ba'ana, the name of the other Rechab, the sons of Ramon, the Beirutite, of the children of Benjamin, for Beirut was also part of Benjamin because the Beirutites fled to Getaim and have been sojourners there until this day. And so let's give an introduction and get into our study. Abner. We've been looking at Abner. We saw how Abner, who was the commander over the the army of Israel, how Abner had been killed. And when Abner was killed, troubled times for Israel, only intensified. Strife and civil war followed the deaths of Saul and Jonathan. And when when David was recognized as king in Judah, Abner had actually, being the commander of the armies of Israel, had actually led a rebellion against David. He placed Saul's son, a man by the name of Ishbosheth, on the throne. And in doings, he'll created a rival king as well as a rival kingdom. Now as this is taking place, Abner decides to take one of Saul's concubines and so Ishbosheth approached him and rebuked him for taking Saul's concubine and that got Abner angry enough to ally himself with King David. Now this is a mistake because the commander of David's army is a man by the name of Joab and he's been waiting for an opportunity to take vengeance on Abner because Abner was responsible for the death of Joab's brother. And so when given opportunity, Joab killed Abner. Now Israel is without a military commander. Ishbosheth knows this and he knows that he's too weak to deal with David. And so as it says here in 2 Samuel chapter 4 verse 1, Saul's son heard that Abner had died in Hebron. He lost heart and all Israel was troubled. He knew that he didn't have the power to hold the nation together. He knew that Abner had been the one who secured him in power and now there's no one there to support him. Now his hesitation to act actually gave time for people to find out that David had been innocent. Had he been courageous and decisive, Israel might have rallied around him. They might have been wondering, did David actually kill Abner? But because he's indecisive, because he doesn't act quickly, Israel has time to hear that David was not responsible for the death of Abner and therefore they begin to be open to having relations with David. Now as this is taking place, notice verses 2 and 3, Saul's son had two men who were captains of troops. And so these men were of the tribe of Benjamin. They were captains over light-armed troops. And so there's now a division that is is rising over Ishmael. And there's going to be a grab for power that begins to occur. We'll see that in a moment.  He was five years old when the news about Saul and Jonathan came from Jezreel and his nurse took him up and fled. And it happened as she made haste to flee that he fell and became lame. His name was Mephiboshah. Now this man, this young boy actually, he's only 12 at the time, is introduced because it's the intent of the author to make it clear to us that he was too young to be the king. He was 12 years of age, but beyond the fact of his youth he was also physically impaired. And so it's just a way of letting us know that he was incapable of ruling as king. Now David is going to care for him. We'll see this later on because this one, Mephiboshah, is actually the son of David's closest friend, Jonathan. And when Jonathan was speaking to David on one occasion, he made David make a promise that he would not only care for Jonathan, but also care for Jonathan's children. And so David was going to keep that oath that he had made there in 1 Samuel chapter 20 verses 14 and 15. But Mephiboshah is mentioned to us so that we might see him later on in the book. Now as this is going on, verse 5, then the sons of Ramon, the Verite, Rahab and Abana set out and came at about the heat of the day to the house of Ishboshah, who was lying on his bed at noon. And they came there all the way into the house as though to get wheat and they stabbed him in the stomach. Then Rahab and Abana, his brother, escaped. For when they came into the house, he was lying on his bed in his bedroom.  And they brought the head of Ishboshah to David at Hebron and said to the king, here is the head of Ishboshah, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life. And the Lord has avenged my Lord, the king this day, of Saul and his descendants. Now it was normal for captains to secure food for their troops. Ishboshah would not have noticed these people as they came in to get this wheat. So as they came to get the wheat for their troops or at least under the guise of doing so, they killed the king. Now the reason they killed the king is they think that it's going to be able to, they're going to be able to secure peace between David representing Judah as well as Israel. They also believe that David is going to reward them for doing so. Now it's interesting how they put it. Notice verse 8, when it says that they brought the head of Ishboshah to David at Hebron, they said to the king, here's the head of Ishboshah, the son of Saul, your enemy, who sought your life and the Lord has avenged my Lord, the king this day of Saul and his descendants. So what they're doing basically is they're saying, God used us to deliver the kingdom into your hands.  Well the fact is, David doesn't see it that way. They're blaming God for the murder of a man. And so David in verse 9 answers Rehab and Baniah's brother, the sons of Ramon, the birthite and said to them, as the Lord lives, who has redeemed my life from all adversity. When someone told me, saying, look Saul is dead, thinking to have brought good news, I arrested him and had him executed in Ziklah. The one who thought I would give him a reward for his news.  I don't see this as the Lord's vengeance. I see this for what it is. It's murder. You killed an innocent man. You executed the murder of a king and now you are going to be executed yourself. All the way back in Genesis in chapter 9, verse 6, when God institutes human government, it says there, whoever sheds man's blood by man, his blood shall be shed, for in the image of God, he made man. And so David is basically enacting the penalty for murder. They murdered this man. He was there on his own bed. He wasn't harming anybody. It wasn't manslaughter. It was murder. They intended to kill him, thinking they'd get a reward for it. And so he says, listen, this is what we're going to do. We're going to deal with you. Verse 12, David commanded his young men. They executed them, cut off their hands and feet, hanged them by the pool in Hebron. They took the head of Ishmael and buried it in the tomb of Abner in Hebron. So he commenced their execution. Now notice it says he cut off their hands and their feet. He cut off their hands because it was a hands that were used to murder this man. He cut off the feet because they walked to take his head to him in Hebron. And then he takes the bodies and he has them hanging there at a pool where people come to get water and all. So it will be an open kind of execution in the sense that the people will be warned when they see these bodies hanging there. And it's David's way of saying that the death penalty will be enacted on you if you take somebody else's life, especially as these did. Then they take that head, which was the remains of Ishmael and they gave him an honorable burial. Now as this is taking place, chapter 5 verse 1, all the tribes of Israel came to David at Hebron and spoke, saying, indeed we are your bone and your flesh. Also in time pass when Saul was king over us, you were the one who led Israel out and brought them in.  Therefore, all the elders of Israel came to the king at Hebron and King David made a covenant with them at Hebron before the Lord. They anointed David king over Israel. They've been thinking about what's going on and they made a decision. The elders representing the nation, the 11 tribes. There was only one tribe that was recognizing David as king and that was his own tribe, the tribe of Judah. Now these 11 tribes are represented by their elders and they come to where he's living in Hebron and they say, listen, we've been thinking about it. And these are the three reasons why we're willing to recognize you as our king. One, and I want you to see this, you are our bone and our flesh.  Secondly, you are Israel's greatest warrior. You're the one who led the army under Saul. And third, God has made it clear that you have been chosen to be king over Israel. And so there in Hebron the tribes of Israel recognized David as the rightful king, reuniting the nation as only Judah had recognized him before. Now in verse 4, David was 30 years old when he began to reign. He reigned 40 years. In Hebron he reigned over Judah seven years and six months. And in Jerusalem he reigned 33 years over all Israel and Judah. He had begun his reign earlier in Judah. Now he's recognized simply as being king over Israel. When you combine the seven and a half years that he reigned and then adding to that the 33 years on top of that, all together his reign was 40 years. Now we get into a place where I want to spend some time in just a moment looking at application. But in verse 6 it says, The king and his men went to Jerusalem against the Jebusites, the inhabitants of the land who spoke to David, saying, You shall not come in here, but the blind in the lame will repel you, thinking David cannot come in here. Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion, that is the city of David.  Therefore they say the blind and the lame shall not come into the house. David dwelt in the stronghold and called it the city of David. David built all around from the millow and inward. David went on and became great. The Lord God of hosts was with him. Let's look at this for just a moment. First we'll look at verse 6. The king and his men went to Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the most mentioned city in the Bible. It's first mentioned in the book of Genesis in chapter 14 under the name Salem. Salem means peace, but Salem is the city that is being referred to or Jerusalem as it was earlier known in that day. So in Genesis 14 at the beginning of the Bible you see Jerusalem mentioned in Revelation 21 it is also mentioned and so Jerusalem is mentioned throughout the Bible. It was a beautiful city. It still is to this day. It's in the region of Benjamin. It's just north of the boundary of the tribe of Judah. It's surrounded by valleys. It's got beautiful elevation. It would be easy to defend. It had a great water supply, the Gion spring, and it was on a busy trade route. It was just a beautiful place to live. David is there going into the region there and as he gets to the city of Jerusalem, notice there are the Jebusites or the inhabitants. The Jebusites are an interesting people. They actually are from the Canaanites. What's interesting about them is every person, every male who were Jebusites had to have the first name Jeb. So it's just an interesting thing. No, I'm lying. Now you're writing that down. I'm just teasing. Their names weren't Jeb. They were Eusites. No, Jeb. Jebusites. Canaanites. Original inhabitants. When David arrives they begin to mock his army and that's what it says there when it says you shall not come in here. The blind and the lame will repel you. Even blind and lame people can keep you from coming in. Now David is there. He's seen this beautiful city and he intends to take it and their taunting only provokes him greater. Now I want you to see what happens. Notice it says in verse 8, David said on that day, whoever climbs up by way of the water shaft and defeats the Jebusites, well this one's going to be chief in captain. Now David notices there's a small channel. Now we've been to this place many times. We've gone into this area. We've actually been there at David's city numerous times, probably about 20 times. And we have been in this area. We've actually climbed through that shaft that is being mentioned here. And what happened was this. David noticed that there was a small channel that could be used to enter into the city. There was a pipe. And one commentator said that the pipe was the depth of only about 14 inches.  The pipe was only about 14 inches deep and water ran through this pipe and the water depth was 10 inches. The pipe was small carrying the water in and yet it was a way to enter into this fortified city. When David sees it, he says whoever is first to enter in will become chief in captain in my army. And so you actually have men warriors who are willing to enter in that way. Now if the pipe was only 14 inches deep and it wasn't very wide, it was wide enough for you to get on your back and scoot in with four inches of space for air between you and the rock above you.  I don't know if you've got even a little claustrophobia about you. My wife Marie doesn't like people too close to her. You know when we get into elevators, she likes some space around her. And so I always do the same thing. She'll go into a corner, she just doesn't like people around her and I back into her very slowly until I'm about an inch from her and she panics. It's just a lot of fun. She does it all the time. She does not like that if you want to bother her and I'm not asking you to do this, I'm giving away a secret. All I need to do is put my hand close to her face and she doesn't like that. She just doesn't like to be closed in. I can understand that. And climbing into a pipe with 10 inches of water, four inches of space for you to breathe on your back, crawling for four hours, that's what it took for them to get through this pipe. On their back breathing with other men head to toe coming through that, must have been an unbelievable experience to go through in the pitch black, carrying your weapons on your back in that cold water four hours and then being ready to fight once you get out. No wonder David said, if you do it, I'll make you chief and captain. And they did it. They crawled through on their back, they came to a passage 67 feet in length, they came to the water shaft, they scaled that, they entered into the city that brought them into the fortifications and from there the champions took that city. Now what's interesting about this is First Chronicles chapter 11 verse 6 says, Joab the son of Zeruia went up first and became chief. Joab regained his standing before David by being the first to enter in and once again he's going to be recognized as the bravest of his army. David dwelt, it says in verse 9, in the stronghold called it the city of David. To this day when you go to Jerusalem and you go just south of Jerusalem, that's where the city of David is and we take you there and they have the millow there, the millow is a fortification that is there in the site and David went on according to verse 10 to become great and the Lord God of hosts was with him. David became great. This is what I want to spend some time with you looking at for just a moment. David became great. When he says David went on to become great, David grew, David grew in honor, David grew in wealth, David grew in fame, David grew in reputation, David grew through military conquests, David grew through expansion, David became great but the key to David's greatness and I want you to see this with me is the Lord God of hosts was with him. The reason David became great was because God made him great. He had incredible natural talents. When you read concerning David, he was extremely handsome. He was powerful. He was courageous. He was intelligent. He was resourceful. He was creative. He was decisive. He was extremely popular in 2 Samuel 2.36 whatever the king did pleased all the people. This was a man who had incredible assets, natural assets that would cause people to be gravitated to him. I mean he meets a young man by the name of Jonathan and Jonathan immediately says this is a man's man. This guy could be my very closest friend. I can love him like a brother. This is the kind of guy that I have a tendency of naturally gravitating to because David had that capacity about him. When David came into the room, the entire room noticed that he was there. When David spoke, people listened. When David led, they followed. They liked this man. Everybody loved this man and you can make the mistake when you read the Bible or even consider David and the stories told of him that he must have had some natural capacity that caused people to be just drawn towards him but the Bible makes it very clear that he became great because the Lord God of hosts was with him. His greatness came from God. God's the one who gave him abilities. It's God who gave him the blessings. In 1 Samuel chapter 2 verse 7, the Lord makes poor and makes rich. He brings low and lifts up. It was God who lifted up David and made him great amongst men. God does that. God did that to David. God does that today. When you trust in the Lord, he can place you in a place of greatness. When you diligently pursue him, he has a way of opening doors for you to enter in. When you have a wholehearted pursuit of the Lord, God will put you in a place that will enlarge you and he'll give you greater and greater things to do. And I think sometimes we make a mistake of thinking that these are things that we can just do on our own. You have to prove yourself faithful in that which is least before God gives you something that is greater. And a lot of people don't understand that. Yesterday we had the Anaheim Men's Conference. As I've mentioned to you, 9,000 men in attendance, hundreds who were seated outside because they couldn't get in. They had to close the door because it's illegal for them to be standing in the aisles. And so the fire marshals wanted those doors closed. No entrance. There were hundreds of men, thousands of men who were there. And the men who are speaking to those men can sometimes be looked at by those men. Regarded by those men as being something special in the Kingdom of God and not a single speaker is special in the sight of God in the sense of being greater than those men who were attending. Not one of us who spoke as any better than anybody else who is there. And yet people have a tendency of thinking so they can treat you as if you are special and you're not. You're just one of the guys that God has shown pleasure. God has given his pleasure to you for that purpose. And that's the way it works. You don't speak to 9,000 men if you haven't spoken to five. And in our church, that's how it began. My Bible studies for years were with five people, six people, seven people, no more than nine people, not just one year, not just two years, not just three years, five years, six years, seven years, eight years, nine years. When the largest Bible study we ever had would be 30 people. There were times when I saw 40 people and thought, oh man, the place is exploding. Years, years and years of that. I taught home Bible studies to my mom, my dad, my sister and two or three neighbors. That was it for years. And so sometimes we think, man, it just automatically happens. Listen, if you want to be used by God, just start where God starts you. Wake up in the morning and say to the Lord, God, this is the day that you have made. I will rejoice and be glad in it. Lord, I am thankful that your mercy is renewed every morning because today you're going to give me your mercy because I'm going to need it. Because Lord, I'm putting on my my gear. I'm going to go out today. There's going to be a battle. I want to remain faithful. Use me for your glory. That's what you do. And the amazing thing about that is that God will put his favor on you and use you. You have to get to the position in your life. And I say that as a pastor to my church, you have to be in a position in your life where you say there's nothing that is more valuable to me than to be used by God. And I want to be used by God today. So ask yourself, do you want to be used by the Lord? Because if you want to be used by God, God will use you. There's no reason why he won't unless we're providing reasons for him not to use me. Unless there's some secret sin in my life that there's some besetting sin, there's something going on in me that I am not willing to turn loose to him. And God would say, no, you've got to release that so I can use you. And God will use you. And God has a way of doing that. See, the Lord has a way of doing that. And I've seen that in my life. I can speak firsthand on this, that God has a way of giving you strength to overcome those things, even those things that beset you sometimes, and hold you back. Marie and I, my wife and I, had been married for less than a year. Before I got saved, I was an alcoholic. Anytime I had pressure in my life, I found that as an excuse to go out and drink a little bit, I got saved. But on occasion, not often, but on occasion over the first few years, when I went through pressure, I would find an excuse to drink a little bit. Marie was pregnant with my daughter Corinne. I had to quit school and I went into a depression that was very deep. And I didn't know what to do. And I wasn't exercising the faith that God gave to me, though I was a young believer at that time, still. And one day, I just got tired. I just said, you know what? Nothing's happening in this man's life. Marie was in our kitchen there in Roland Heights. We had a little apartment there in Roland Heights. She was making me dinner. And I basically snuck out of the house, drove down the street, went to a store and bought some beer. And I came back and I sat in the front room there and she's making dinner and I started drinking. And I finished the beer that I bought and I decided I'm going to buy some more. And I drove to the store again, came back with some more. I finished drinking that. I started getting a little high and I got embarrassed. And so I thought, she doesn't know me like this. Marie didn't know me like that. So I went upstairs. We had a little apartment. I walked up the stairs. I went into my bedroom, lay down on the bed, closed the door, put a pillow over my face to muffle me. I wapped.  I cried so loudly that my little girl, Marie, downstairs, could hear me. She was in her early 20s. She hears this muffled crying and she walks up the stairs. And I still remember to this day sound of her heavy footsteps as she was walking up because she was carrying my baby in her. She was yet to give birth to Corinne. The door swung open and the light hit me and I put the pillow over my face and I tried to stop crying. And she walked to the side of the bed and sat down on it. We didn't really even have a bed. It was a rollaway couch that I had brought from my parents' home. We couldn't even afford a bed. And she says, what's wrong? Why are you crying? And I removed the pillow for a moment and I started to sob and I said, because I'm a loser. I'm a failure. You married the wrong man. You deserve better. And I'm sorry. Marie, there's only one thing in my life that I want to be. And that is a pastor. Look at me now. I can't even stay away from a bottle. I don't know how to deal with what I'm feeling. And I'm so sorry that I brought you into a life like this. I quit school. I'm making just lowest wage you can make. I can't even take care of you. And you're going to have my baby. You married the wrong man. I remember that. You know what she did? She reached down and she took me by my shoulders, actually literally lifted me until she buried me in her shoulder.  And she rocked me like a kid my baby did. She held me and she whispered in my ear and she said, God will use you. I believe in you. And that love and that forgiveness and that moment, I have never forgotten. My wife has never mentioned that. She never said anything in anger. You remember when you were all drunk and she's never said anything like that to me? She has never brought it up. I'm the one who brings it up because I'm the one who was ministered to. I'm telling you, God can use you. If you get away from what it is that's holding you back, if you release it into the hands of the Lord and you say, God, I want to be used by you. Forgive me for what I've been. Make me new. You can't. I stand up here right now living testimony of the love of God and the love of a good wife. You can hold your hand in hard times and help you become great in the sight of God and man. And that's what David had. David was a great man. David was a great man, but it was because the Lord made him great. And God can use you. God can make you great. God can show you what he does. What is it in your life that you think is more important than being used by God? What is it? Is it like me? An alcohol problem? Is it a drug problem? Is it an anger problem? Is it a porn problem? What is it? What is it that is keeping you from being used by God? It isn't worth it. It isn't worth it. Let it go. Because when David began to be used by God, the Bible very clearly states, and he became great. The Lord says here in verse 10, concerning David, David went on and became great, and the Lord God of hosts was with him. Psalm 84, 11 and 12 says, For the Lord God is a Son and a shield. The Lord will give grace and glory. No good thing will he withhold from those who walk uprightly. O Lord of hosts, blessed is the man who trusts in you. Psalm 115 verse 13, He will bless those who fear the Lord, both small and great. And the Lord has a way of doing that. I would encourage you today, let the Lord work in you that he might make you great, that he might use you for all these good things he desires to do. He's looking. His eyes are going to and fro throughout the whole Lord, seeking someone that is showing themselves open to him, that he might show himself strong on their behalf. The Lord wants to use you. I have no doubt about that. So ask yourself, when is it that's keeping you from being used by the Lord? And let it go. Going on it says then, Hiram, verse 11, King of Tyre sent messengers to David and cedar trees and carpenters and masons, and they built David a house. David knew that the Lord had established him as king over Israel, and that he had exalted his kingdom for the sake of his people, Israel. David took more concubines and wives from Jerusalem after he had come from Ebron. Also, more sons and daughters were born to David. This is all intended to show us that he indeed became a very great man. He had a house that was built, which demonstrates that his reign is going to be a long and secure one. He begins to take to himself wives and concubines, because at that time it was a symbol of being prosperous and capable of caring for more than one wife. It was not, as I've said to you recently, something that God approved of. It is something that was allowed. Now, when you look at concubines, that's an interesting concept, concubinage. A concubine was a woman who had a legal relationship with a man, and she would bear his children, but a concubine was inferior to his wife. She was regarded as a kind of wife of secondary rank. A concubine had no authority in the family, and they did not share in household government. In Old Testament times, if I have a wife, my wife will say, Marie, is unable to bear children to me. She may have a woman, her own servant, a slave. She would give to me who would bear children on her behalf. They were called concubines. No legal rights, no legal standing in the sense of being equal to a wife, but that's what took place. You see that with Abraham and Sarah and Ishmael in the Old Testament and their various other places. You find that King Solomon had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Imagine that, and they say he's wise. I'm not sure about that. Now, in the case of David, he had these concubines. You might also find this interesting that in the New Testament, the sacred institution of marriage returned to its original character, and concubinage began to be regarded as fornication and adultery under the New Testament. Because in the Old Testament, these people would have other wives and would have concubines. The New Testament said one husband, one wife, one marriage, one lifetime, and so it's now regarded as being fornication and adultery. Now, David had various children. Verse 14 and 15 gives us a list of these names. You have Shamuah, Shabbab, Nathan, Solomon, Ibar, Elishu, Nefeg, Japhia, Elishema, Eliyadah, and Elifelet. Those are his sons. I'll be quizzing you next week to make sure you got all of that. Verse 17, now, when the Philistines heard that they had anointed David, King of Israel, all the Philistines went up to search for David, and David heard of it and went down to the stronghold. The Philistines also went and deployed themselves in the Valley of Refayim. So David inquired of the Lord, saying, Shall I go up against Philistines? Will you deliver them into my hand? The Lord said to David, Go, go up, for I will doubtless deliver the Philistines into your hand. So David went to Baal Parateem, and David defeated them there. And he said, The Lord has broken through my enemies before me like a breakthrough of water. Therefore he called the name of that place Baal Parateem. And they left their images there, and David and his men carried them away. Then the Philistines went up once again and deployed themselves in the Valley of Refayim. Therefore David inquired of the Lord and said, And he said, You shall not go up. Circle around behind them, come up upon them in front of the mulberry trees, and it shall be when you hear the sound of marching in the tops of the mulberry trees, then you shall advance quickly, for then the Lord will go out before you to strike the camp of the Philistines. David did so, as the Lord commanded him, and he drove back the Philistines from Gaba as far as Giza. Giza is an interesting city because it was inhabited by a bunch of old people. The old Giza's. I live there. So basically what you have here is this simply put, the Philistines are once again making war against Israel. David at one time had pretended to become an ally to the Philistines, but now it's very definitely proven that indeed he is not their ally, he remains their enemy. And so what they do is they decide that they're going to attack him. As they begin to attempt to attack him, David inquires of the Lord and asks of God, what shall I do? It's always wise to ask God what to do when you're entering into battle. And so the Lord gives to him victory. He defeats them in Baal Barat Zim. And so that was about three miles outside of Jerusalem to the south. The warriors overwhelmed the Philistines like water that's bursting through, that's why it's called that. Now notice verse 21, they left their images there and David and his men carried them away. Now they may have thought by carrying their images or their idols that these idols were going to give them security and protection and maybe even victory. And the fact of the matter is David trusted in God, not some graven image, David trusted in God not in some idol. To trust in a lifeless idol is ridiculous. Isaiah 46, 6 and 7 says they, speaking of idols, they lavish gold out of a bag, waste silver on scales. They hire a goldsmith and he makes it a God. They prostrate themselves. Yes, they worship, they bear it on the shoulder. They carry it and set it in its place and it stands from its place that shall not move. The one cries out to it, yet it cannot answer nor save him out of his trouble. It's just a piece of wood with gold on it. That's what he's saying there. It can't move. It's like the psalmist says eyes they have they cannot see, ears they have they cannot hear, noses they have they cannot smell, mouths they have they cannot speak, hands they have they cannot feel, legs they have they cannot walk. And those who make them are like them, because they're lifeless and they cannot help you. David's trust was not in some lifeless image, some good luck charm, some little statue of some sort. His trust was in the living God and that's why he spoke to God and he would ask God, what should I do? God says, go. You'll have victory. Well the next time when they once again want to re-engage in combat, David asks again, shall I go against him? This time the Lord says, no, what I want you to do is circle behind them. And the signal I'll give to you is when when you hear the sound of marching through the trees. In other words, when you hear the wind blowing through the tree, the rustling of the leaves is going to be your signal to go out and to fight, advance and strike the Philistines, which is what he does. Verse 25, David did so as the Lord commanded him and he drove back the Philistines from Gaba as far as Gizzard. The distance is several miles, so this was a prolonged attack. And in all of this, David sought the Lord and followed God's directions. And as long as you seek the Lord and follow his instructions, you're victorious. When you stop seeking the Lord and stop following his instructions, you're going to fail. The best thing to do, get into his word, remain in prayer, have fellowship with godly people who encourage you in the ways of the Lord and trust him. And God will be with you every step of the way. Will you go through battles? Yes. Do you win every individual one? Sometimes you don't. Do you win the war? Yes, you do. Why? Because Jesus is our captain. He's gone before us and we are more than victors, more than conquerors in him. So we just hold fast. We have skirmishes. Sometimes we come out on top. Sometimes we get bloodied, but we remain unbowed because we're on the Lord's side and he gives us victory. So remain close to him and watch what God will do in your life.


from New York, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Spark Summit East, brought to you by Spark Summit. Now your hosts, Jeff Frick and George Gilbert. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here on theCUBE. I'm sitting with George Gilbert in Midtown Manhattan at Spark Summit East. We're coming to the end of two days of wall-to-wall coverage. There's a lot of excitement happening with Spark and we're closing out strong, which is what we like to do. We're excited to have CUBE alumni and many times Spark IBMer, Rob Thomas, Rob, welcome. Hey, thanks guys, great to see you again. So if it's Spark, we know that you must be in the neighborhood. Absolutely, wouldn't miss it. Would not miss it. So I think last time I saw you, I think was at the Development Center in downtown San Francisco. So why don't you give us kind of an update of how that's progressing and some new updates there? Yeah, so if I recall, we stood there in the Spark Technology Center in San Fran and at the time I described to you, we were still building up a team there. We had a team focused on design, which we thought was kind of unique. And at the time, a team of about 30 people that were really exclusively focused in the open source and in around Spark. And team has now doubled in size since that time and we're still hiring as fast as we can. We're moving into a new office in June actually, just right on Howard Street. There was an announcement around Watson West, which is really IBM's flagship location on the West Coast in San Francisco. So that opens in June, so our Spark team will be moving over there with our work closely with the Watson team where we've got a lot of work going on. So these are going great. Really focused still on system ML that we contributed to open source and continuing to put, it's now an Apache Incubation project as you know. So the team's spending a lot of time on that as well. Excellent. Well, so why don't you tell us what's the latest in product announcements? You know, after system ML, what's new? So we made a, we did an announcement about three weeks ago that we called Open for Data. And the idea behind Open for Data is our whole strategy around data analytics starts with open source in terms of how we're contributing, how we're building, and you know, the Spark Technology Center is probably one of the best examples of that. But on the heels of an Open for Data thing that was really setting up for another set of things to come, the first of which was just two days ago where we announced Quarks. And Quarks is an open source contribution that we've made for streaming analytics on endpoints. And what we did is we looked at the market for IoT, Internet of Things, and we said we're in a market that's going from around, you know, 15 billion connected devices to 30 billion devices. And the current model for IoT doesn't work. The current model is collect data on an endpoint, move it back to a centralized area for processing. That might work with a few billion devices. When you get up to 30, 40, 50 billion, it doesn't work. And so what Quarks does is basically streaming on the endpoint, it will do the predicate filtering, the initial analysis of what's the relevant data, and then only pushes the relevant data back to a centralized location so it can integrate into Kafka, integrate into Spark as part of going back. But the whole idea is how do we really collect data on the endpoint efficiently, do pre-processing, pre-analytics there, and then bring it back? So from the point of view of, let's say, let's take a real example, GE predicts where they're gathering telemetry, let's say periodically from the jet engine since it may not always be connected, but maybe a windmill is always connected. Sort of what data would it not send up? What data would it filter out? And then let's talk about sort of how it fits in the programming model of a Spark or other framework. So the situation with some like GE is GE has the advantage of being vertically integrated where they're not only producing the software, but in most cases, they're producing the turbine or the engine. And so they can have a proprietary or a closed system for collecting data. What we see in the market though is most companies aren't GE, most companies aren't vertically integrated in doing manufacturing software down to microprocessors and the equipment itself. And so then you say, so how is the average company or the average developer going to access data on an endpoint? And that's the problem Quark solves is give them an open source capability to go collect that data, do it in a sub millisecond response time, do the data analysis, and then to your question on linking back to Spark, so you connect that up to maybe it's Kafka for a data lab pipeline, maybe it's directly into Spark streaming, some way that you can then bring that back to where you're doing your centralized processing. But it's a very efficient way to collect data on an endpoint where if you don't have the advantage of being vertically integrated like GE, you need something like this. Okay, there's a couple things that we're in there, let's try and unpack them. So maybe on a hardware level, would it be fair to compare it to a low cost Raspberry Pi in terms of a sort of an execution platform? The Quarks itself? So I guess I'd say the difference here is Quarks is at its base is a streaming engine. This is based off of, it's a component of the IBM Streams technology that we've been in the market with for a while that will basically collect data on a continuous basis. Oh, it's a piece of software, it's not. Yeah, it's software. Oh, okay, yeah. All right, that clears that up. And it's a streaming engine. Okay. And so what's unique there is that you can now, if you're collecting data at a very rapid pace, large amount of data on an endpoint, you can ingest that, you can quickly filter out what's relevant and what's not, and you can build models on top of that using something like Java to your question on programming language. Okay.  So the model is, that's what gives you the quick reaction time, that is sub millisecond. And then it can choose what not to filter out and send sort of back up to a central location where you have your choice of programming model. So, but those, the model at the edge has to evolve at times. So how does your central platform, whether it's Spark or some other choice, IBM Streams perhaps, how does that communicate back down to the edge device and keep it up to date when, you know, so it doesn't drift? Yeah. I'm not sure that I see us going to that kind of a model. That would be kind of a hub and spoke model you describe where you decided the hub, this is what happens and then you do that. I would say we're trying to invert the approach to analytics to say, analytics should actually be decentralized. The starting sort of point should be decentralized. And so if you wanted to make a change to the endpoint, you would change the model or the analytical or the algorithms that's running on the endpoint to adjust how data is being collected or something like that. And then that would eventually flow back in. But the point is we're trying, we believe IOT will happen at the edge. And so the analytics has to be decentralized and the centralized piece is not an afterthought but it's what happens next. It's not necessarily, it doesn't have to be viewed as one system if that makes sense. So it's not necessarily doing a better job of sending data upstream but in fact, using the analytics there locally at the endpoint then to start to make control and make decisions. That's right. Act on other types of activities there. So it never has to necessarily loop back. The point being that if you're collecting a billion events off an endpoint, so with the weather company that we acquired, some of their devices located, collecting a billion events a year, do you really need to really send all one billion events back? Probably not. But that's what most people do today. And so instead you say, if you can build intelligence on the endpoint, then you can send back a subset and that will really be where you're getting value out of it. So instead of having to build a data pipeline to handle enormous scale, build it to handle the right scale, which is the right data that needs to go back. And then will it drive also though, local action without necessarily having to go back to the mothership? So you know, again, back on the turbine example, which everybody loves to use, how much of the control of how they optimize the turbine configuration comes now from an algorithm, comes from the sensors, and how much could you do it better with the streaming engine there locally on the thing? Let me give you a real example. We were working with Dimension Data who has really instrumented all the bikes for the tour de France. And so now think of a bike that's in the tour de France as a node that is collecting data and doing that in real time. And so that data actually never needs to come back. If you want to monitor just where it is, what's happening, any changes in speed, changes in altitude, the data never needs to come back. But if you get to the point where now let's, okay, we want to analyze what happened or why something happened in the race. At that point you might bring it back. So it doesn't presuppose that you have to have a centralized model, but it gives you the flexibility for a centralized model if that's what you want. So is the Infostreams product going to be something like System ML that will be contributed to the community and sort of find its way into Spark as a platform? We have no plans to contribute infrastructure streams at this point. The technology that was contributed with Quarks is a subset of that technology that really does the streaming on the endpoint on an embedded basis really. So I would say we've taken a step in that direction, but right now we don't have any plans to do that. Is there, are there plans to do like where the weather company is like a hardware, software solution that's a service where you would be more like a GE and say, we're going to take a bunch of equipment or whatever, we're going to embed our software in it, and it will be a service that others plug into. Is, or are you going to try and stick mostly to software hardware, software and computing hardware? I think, where you're kind of going is, does it become a broader platform for IoT analytics? Which is definitely our vision. The weather company, I wrote a bit about this, is I think when we bought the weather company, the perception was that we were buying, first the perception was we were buying a TV station. We didn't do that. You left that one behind. We left that behind. Then the second impression was we're buying data, and we certainly got a rich data asset. The most impressive thing about the weather company that most people don't know is they have built a premier internet scale platform that would rival what you see from a Netflix or a Facebook. All open source, huge data ingestion, huge consumption from different endpoints, and it really gives you a platform for how to ingest data, manage IoT data, do analytics on the fly. So you didn't buy it just as a peer's weather advice to inform all these different business processes. You bought a platform. We bought a platform. Oh. That's the secret sauce that most people don't know is there. Okay. Unfortunately. It's not a secret anymore. Now the whole world knows. We don't want it to be secret. So unfortunately, we are way up against the clock. I got to get the guys in the gear to the airport in relatively short order, but I want to give you the last word, Rob. One is you've been at the spark thing for a little while now. What has surprised you most over the last year as you've seen this development and the community and the technology evolve? And then what are you most excited about? I won't say a year, that's forever from now. But over the next six months, nine months, maybe 12 months that you're working on. I'm impressed by how much this event continues to grow. How much the ecosystem continues to grow. The contributions that we see in the community are tremendous. I would say we're at a point now though where Spark needs to move to be a business discussion. And it's not a business discussion today. And you can even see that really with a lot of the, you know, what we've been doing here at the conference. There's still very much a developer discussion, but to get mainstream, which helps people move along this, you know, curve to big data maturity. Spark has to get to a business audience. That's a big part of our focus this year. That's how we start to take use cases and move from just the technical, the developer team crowd to actually making this mainstream for a line of business use cases. That's the big thing that's next. So you're going to be talking about that at Interconnect next week? Absolutely. Oh, very good. Great segue. So Rob, thanks for stopping by. Always great to see you. I'm Jeff Frick. We're at Spark Summit East. We're going to actually be at IBM Interconnect next week in Las Vegas. Stop by, we'll meet the Mandalay Bay who have the full CUBE team there. So stop by, say hello. We look forward to taking more of a business message out to the marketplace. You're watching the CUBE. I'm Jeff Frick with George Gobert. We're wrapping up day two of wall-to-wall coverage at Spark Summit East. We'll see you next week at IBM Interconnect in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.