So last week we talked about how Joe Biden was lying about progressive policy proposals like Medicare for all and this week He is continuing with that same trend. He's lying and now he is Name-dropping other progressives in the race who support policies like Medicare for all So we're gonna get to what Biden said and then I'm gonna tell you Bernie Sanders response because finally Bernie Sanders is beginning to take off the gloves and that is long Overdue because if you're going to sit here and lie about Medicare for all Then you deserve to be attacked because you are propping up a system that incentivizes profit over people and that's immoral that makes you a bad person But Joe Biden is rich. So he doesn't have to worry about losing health insurance. This is just about Maintaining the status quo. That's why he's running He's saying if I become elected nothing will fundamentally change He says this to rich elites in a closed-door meeting So he is the status quo candidate and he continues to attack these new bold progressive policy proposals That he was too chicken to fight for when he was in power So here's what he said specifically according to Kate Gluck of the New York Times He said quote I admire the rest of the field from Bernie to Elizabeth to Kamala who want, you know Medicare for all But let me tell you I think one of the most Significant things we've done in our administration is past the Affordable Care Act Mr. Biden said to applause here's Saturday morning Referencing the signature healthcare measure passed under the Obama administration He said that he wanted to strengthen the Affordable Care Act and to add a public option Something he acknowledged could come with a significant price tag But it doesn't cost three trillion and it can be done quickly He continued when asked about differences among the Democratic candidates quote I don't know why we'd get rid of what in fact is working and move to something totally new and So there are differences Bernie's been very honest about it. He said of Medicare for all He said you're going to have to raise taxes in the middle class. He says it's going to end all private insurance I mean, he's been straightforward about it and he's making his case So here Joe Biden is being a disingenuous smear merchant He's saying Bernie Sanders wants to raise your taxes The implication is Bernie Sanders is trying to harm you but what he's leaving out conveniently So is that if we raise taxes to pay for health care You're no longer going to be paying your monthly health insurance premium Co-pays deductibles and overall you end up saving thousands of dollars per year if you are the average American So he's lying. This is a lie. Joe Biden, even though he's a dumb guy He's intelligent enough to know the policy details He knows that Medicare for all is better for people But he's trying to frame it as something that's radical and new when the Affordable Care Act Was something that was new It was a new idea cooked up by the Heritage Foundation and was implemented by Mitt Romney And it was a response originally to the support that was emerging for single payer and Bernie is the one who's saying look Let's take our existing system and let's tweak it Let's improve Medicare first close all the gaps and then we'll just expand what we already have That's simple and then everyone will have health care It'll be free at the point of service and then nobody will die if they can't afford insurance But Joe Biden's lying now Bernie responded and Thankfully he's starting to get a little bit more forceful in pushing back because these are lies and You need to treat them very seriously because this is harmful So here's what Bernie said in an interview Mr. Sanders who introduced the Medicare for all act in the Senate and sometimes comes in Second to Mr. Biden in early polls Bristled at mr. Biden's remarks as he stressed that he too had been committed to passing and protecting the Affordable Care Act Even as he now advocates for something more far-reaching He also took issue with what he perceived as mr. Biden's Suggestion that the transition to Medicare for all could leave people with gaps in medical care calling such an implication Totally absurd Obviously what Biden was doing mr. Sanders said is what the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industries Republicans do Ignoring the fact that people will save money on their health care because they will no longer have to pay premiums or out-of-pocket Expenses, they will no longer have high deductibles and high co-payments Asked whether it was fair to put mr. Biden in the same category as the insurance and pharmaceutical industries given his role in advancing the Affordable Care Act In the first place mr.   You can't afford a public option a Public option that will inevitably be watered down by the for-profit market forces that you are leaving Intact under your bullshit incrementalist approach now Bernie also tweeted a little bit more about this saying human lives are more important than corporate profits Period hashtag Medicare for all our dysfunctional system is designed not to provide health care in the most cost-effective way But to make as much money as possible for insurance and drug companies investment banks and real estate firms. That's wrong That's a moral and we are going to change it under Medicare for all you will never lose coverage Even if you change jobs turn 26 move to another state have a pre-existing condition start a business get laid off get Divorced retire early not crazy passing Medicare for all and guaranteeing health care like every other major country Actually crazy a health care system designed to make as much profit for corporations as possible While letting ordinary people die now He also talked about how he campaigned for and defended the Affordable Care Act and I love everything that he's saying here But he's got to go a step further. He's got to tie Joe Biden's name to it attack him hit him hard Bernie because this is what you have to do to win Other people are starting to creep up on you Elizabeth Warren Kamala Harris They're getting close to you in the polls and Joe Biden even though he's coming down.  This is your last chance to become president. I Mean I think that Bernie Sanders largely is running a good campaign He knows what he's doing and he's not wrong to stay issues focused, but he's got to take the gloves off He's got to attack. There's a reason why people like Kamala Harris are gaining in the polls It's because they've taken the gloves off and they are attacking Joe Biden and exposing him for the fraud that he is If you want to also climb in the polls Bernie, you've got to do that, too He's calling out your signature policy So you have every right to respond and attack it as viciously as he's attacking Medicare for all So, I mean Bernie Sanders has got to take the gloves off and he started to do that here But take it a step further call him out by name Call out the donations that he has received from the health insurance industry put him on the defensive Because if you really want him to shut up about Medicare for all and stop attacking it That's what you've got to do because once Kamala went after him for talking about how wonderful these Segregationists were in Congress that he worked with he stopped talking about it So he's someone who doesn't respond well to criticism because he's a narcissist So attack him and watch him unravel.  It's that simple. So keep this up Bernie But go harder because that's the only way you're gonna win


All right, let's get started. Hello again, and welcome to MulticloudCon, co-located event at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. Good job, audience. So proud of you. You're all awake. This is great. All right, well, this event is brought to you by GitLab and Abound with Google as a sponsor. I am Priyanka Sharma, and I'm director of Technical Evangelism at GitLab. I also serve as a governing board member of the CloudNative Computing Foundation, or CNCF, the people who have brought forth KubeCon for all of us. I am so thrilled to be your host today. So out of curiosity, how many people are attending KubeCon for the first time over here? Raise your hand. Oh, wow, so many of you. This is so great. Welcome. I attended my first KubeCon three years ago in 2016, and it was only 700 people. By comparison, we're what, like, over 13,000 here today. It's a big crowd. Our industry just moves really fast. You know, I was really nervous my first time, because it was my first CloudNative conference, first Systems conference. But the community here welcomed me with open arms. And I truly believe you will have the same experience this week. Back to when I was a brand new attendee, we were all talking about lift and shift to the cloud. Folks were migrating to cloud providers. It was all new. But as I said, things really move fast over here. And today, people are running different workloads and different clouds, and the complexity is just increasing every day. And that's why we put together this event, so that people can come together and learn. We put it together because, as Sid will tell you in his keynote, Kubernetes is the great equalizer when it comes to multiple clouds. After the program section of this event is over at 3.30, we will all migrate to the Hard Rock Cafe for an unconference with an open bar. More folks from the community will join us. And there, we can discuss what we talked through today, what talks you here, what clicks for you, and just imbibe what we've learned better. Throughout the day, please feel free to tweet about your learnings and observations using hashtag multicloudcon, hashtag kubecon. And as I mentioned, when we were beginning, it's multicloud mimosas, and there's mimosas back there till 10.30. But don't rush, because you have the open bar later too, so it's all good. Well, with all that level setting done, I'd like to introduce our opening keynote of the day. We're all at various levels and stages when it comes to the multicloud journey. There's more to it than just using more than one cloud. Sid Sibrandi is the CEO and co-founder of GitLab. And he'll share the various stages of the multicloud maturity model that he's developed. Sid, please come on up. Thanks.


What's the word, y'all? Nothing brightens my day more than reacted to some good old fashioned fictional NBA trades. Mentioned this a couple weeks ago, we have this obsession as NBA fans with player movie, this and that and we haven't even started the season yet and I've read like four different articles about potential trades that could go down and I'm just, I'm here for it, you know? These trades are fictional, these are not rooted in any kind of rumors but they're always fun to react to because I give my opinions about the trades and I go to the comment section and see y'all whose favorite players are involved in the trade, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We not doing that and it's always fun. Leave a like, subscribe, let's get into it. So the article we reacted to a couple weeks ago gave us one player from every team that should be on the block but it didn't draw out real trades. This article was drawn out real trades that would change the 2024 championship race, okay? So these are the lenses we're looking at these trades through. A, do both teams walk out feeling happy and B, does the trade change the race of the NBA championship? To make a point, Fry in 2016, DeSalle in 2019, Tucker in 2021. You don't have to be a superstar player to be a move to impact NBA championship ball to be the missing piece, if you will. I guess we'll see if that happens today. But I wonder if these are the minority, you know? There's a lot of trades. Remember at the deadline last year, 28 of 30 teams made a trade made a move. The other teams that didn't with the Miami Heat who went to the finals and the Chicago Bulls who were closely going to the finals because they were up on the Miami Heat and because that's how history works. If we were to beat the Heat, we would win to the finals. No. So I wonder if these three examples are just the minority. Similarly to when we talk about the buyout market, how historically the buyout market is so fun and everything but we rarely see a buyout player impact the championship. So I don't know. Are we gonna get into a shout out to Greg Swartz of Bleach Report? The first trade is the Clippers finally get Malcolm Brogdon. It has Malcolm Brogdon going to the Clippers with Mooc, Kobe Brown, Amir Koffee and a 2024 second rounder. This is an interesting one because Malcolm Brogdon last month was traded to the Clippers for about four or five hours. At least that's what it was reported. And then it fell through because the Clippers didn't love the physicals of Malcolm Brogdon. And maybe they're willing to put that aside now because the James Harden thing is not really progressing. They have an idea of what James Harden's value is and then the 76s have a different idea and they're in a stalemate. So maybe this is their consolation prize and getting Malcolm Brogdon. Does it change the championship race? Not necessarily. Malcolm Brogdon of course is a really good player. He had a really good year coming off a six man of the year where he's a former 50, 40, 90 candidate. But would I see him on the Clippers and say, that's the team. That's the team out west that everybody should be worried about? No, could they win the championship? Absolutely, I'm not saying that they would count them out but I don't think this moves the needle enough for me to look at them and say like this was the missing piece. The point guard position as long as Kawhi and Paul George have been together with the Clippers, the point guard position has been the one that they needed the most help. They brought in Brody halfway through the season last year and he looked pretty solid playing his best basketball in a couple of years and he resigned for pennies on the dollar and maybe they're looking to say, hey, we just need a little bit more depth. This guy was the six man of the year last year. So you might not have to start because we have Brody do that but he can just impact our game positively. And for what you're giving up at Marcus Morris, Kobe Bryant and Amir Khauffi in a second, I see that as a dub for the Clippers. If I'm the Portland Trailblazers, this is all another tentacle of the Damian little trade. I don't love it but I also don't know much about Kobe Brown. Could he be a real player in this league? I don't know. Amir Khauffi signed a little extension a little while ago and I think he's a real NBA player but just like, what does that ceiling look like? And of course, a second round pick might not be super interesting but Malcolm Brogdon might not also have the value to get you even a highly protected first. Maybe you asked for two seconds. I don't know. The second trade is Miles Turner opens up the floor in New York. It is Miles Turner getting traded from Mitchell Robinson in a 2024 first round pick, top 10 protector, so it's the Dallas Mavericks pick this year. I don't see Miles getting traded. Of course, anything can happen in the association. He was a player that was rumored to be traded pretty much all last season and he came out and had a career year and then they gave him an extension and he feels like a really good center for what they want to do out there in Indianapolis in Indianapolis is what I meant to say. So this would be, and I'm trying to rationalize it from Greg's perspective. This is them saying, hey, Miles, it's still young. I think he's 27 years old. It's not like Miles Turner's like this 30-year-old vet or something. He's still a relatively young player but the rest of the team is young girls. So maybe we bring a guy in Mitchell Robinson who's younger that maybe fits the timeline a little bit more. But I think having the presence of Miles Turner is real. When I interviewed him in 2019, he was the longest tenure in Indiana Pacer. He was talking about the small amount of pressure that is added would be in the longest tenured player being one of the veterans in the locker room. That was back in 2019 and now we're in a 2023 season. And I'm assuming that he's become more comfortable with being a vet in a locker room and kind of showcasing to these younger dudes how you run or how you become an NBA player in an effective one. He was really good last season. And the way he's talking, I think that you have to have irrational confidence to be really good at what the things that they do. He said that, hey, if I'm not an all-star this season, this is a disappointing season for me. And I like the kind of confidence because he's not very far away from it, especially if the Indiana Pacers are good this season. Now, the priority is probably going to Tyrese. If they are good, but injuries, a lot of things go into a potential player making their first all-star appearance. If I was a bedding man, would I bet on him? Probably not. Probably not. I probably won't put no money on it. But I like that he has this confidence and I would feel more comfortable with just keeping Miles rather than trading him for Mitchell Robinson in his first. I don't know what happens to the first if it does it convey, but I think we're assuming that the Dallas Mavericks are gonna be at least decent this season. So it will convey. And even if it's at the end of the lottery, it's still a lottery pick, I don't know. I don't love it. But if I'm the Knicks, I love it. Open up the game for Julius Randu and Jalen Brunson who wants to get to the basket. Miles is a really good center for what they want to do. But going back to the original thing of it changing the landscape of the 2024 finals, if the Knicks bring in Miles Turner, do I think that that team is about to really compete with the Bucks or the Celtics? Probably not. But it would be pretty nice. I will say that. The next one, oh, look at the dunk from Uncle Jeff. The next one, Miami get their starting point guard. It is Duncan Robson, the 20-28 first round pick, top 10 protected for Tyus Jones. If I'm the Wizards, do this deal, 20-28 first round pick, even if it is top 10 protected, I guess you gotta ask what happens if it doesn't convey whatever, whatever. This is an asset I'm willing to take on. It's the Miami Heat at the end of the day and historically they've always been pretty good, but it's not like you've grown this attachment to Tyus Jones. He's the type of player that deserves to at least play on decent teams. I just don't think that's what the Wizards is gonna be this season. So we'll take on the contract of Duncan Robson where he can come in and shoot some shots and maybe get his value back up and give up the point guard because we don't really need that at the moment. I think that the Miami Heat are at the point now that they just want real NBA players in the locker room and impactful NBA players. And Tyus Jones has been a dude that is a no-mistakes point guard. And those things, those players are hard to find in the current NBA. Low maintenance, no mistakes, in the right spots at the right time. Defensively, you might worry a little bit when him and Tyler Harrow be in the back court. Regardless, you have the amount of buy-on Jimmy Butler that's been covering things up historically. So you might feel fine with this. 20-28 might be just a little bit too far in the future for a Miami Heat fan to give up their draft capital. Especially consider it feels like the Heat are always on the cusps of the big trade and you might want that 20-28 first round pick to pull off the big trade. Again, they always in the conversations and it ain't happened since Jimmy Butler. So I don't know how real it is, but they're always in these conversations and maybe you want to sit pat on your assets and not trade them away for Tyus Jones, who as much as I just talked about how good he can be, it's not like you're trading for a top 15 player at the, not even the top 15 player at his position. So maybe stay in pat. Ooh, Jeremy Grant joins, trade young into Jean-Té Murray. It's the Andre Hunter in a lottery protected pick a part of the Kevin Herde trade for Jeremy Grant who cannot be traded until Jan 15th, right? So this is a trade that would happen later down the line. I am very intrigued with the Atlanta Hawks this year. So intrigued that I just dropped another episode of the Kenny Beecham podcast and we spent a good amount of time talking about the Atlanta Hawks and the most intriguing player on their roster. In my opinion, I'm not gonna spoil who it is.  Adding a player like Jeremy Grant does not make me think, again, this is, I'm thinking about the lens of it changing the landscape of the race. I don't look at them and say, boom, that is a team that we should fear. Now I think it's a playoff team. I think it's a playoff team as currently constructed under Quinn Snyder for a full season, but it's not a team again when you talk about a seven game series versus the Milwaukee Baltimore seven game series versus the Boston Celtics that think that that construction of trade young, Dejante, Jeremy, and let's say, click a pillow in Yucca Congo. Whatever the rotation might be, I don't look at that and say that that's our championship contender at the moment, but it could be potentially down the line revolving around some of the younger players because they do have a lot of young, intriguing players like a Yucca Congo, AJ Griffin, Jalen Johnson, and you want one of them to hit. And I don't mean hit, is they've got to be a superstar version of themselves, but just like real adequate, real role players, real all-star, no, not all-star, start a quality players. If one or two of those players hit, it could be in the future. We just don't know that right now. The Andre Hunters contract is one that scares me, but if I'm the Portland Trailblazers, what am I playing for anyway? Right, what am I playing for anyway? I'm willing to take on that contract and to get off of Jeremy Grant's contract and receive an asset in return in a first round pick via the Sacramento Kings is kind of a dub because there's no, I don't think there's any such thing as a immovable contract in today's game. We've seen a lot of really bad contracts be moved one way or another. Usually just have to attach an additional asset to it. And this hypothetical, the Jeremy Grant asset or the Jeremy Grant contract is moved and you receive an asset. I think that's a dump. This does make the Atlanta Hawks an extremely expensive team. And usually the extremely expensive teams are competing for the Toppian stuff, but this has doubled down on Trey Young as a star. I say, hey, Trey, we got multiple defensive-oriented players to Jeremy Grant and Jean-Té Murray and Clenka Pella slash Yeka Kongu. Now is your time to cook and really take us to the promised land because we believe in you as an offensive threat, as an offensive hub. Hey, seriously though, go listen to the Candy Beach podcast to get a new episode today. Ooh, Ojiata Nobi going out for Josh Green, Jaden Hardy, Rashawn Holmes in a 2027 unprotected, woo, we don't get a lot of unprotected picks getting traded away unless you're getting a star player. So this is a huge buy-in for Ojiata Nobi who is going to test the market more likely than not at the end of this season. And because of that, that would scare me away if I am the Dallas Mavericks. Now they did it this year where they traded for Kairi Irvin. Now they didn't give up a crazy amount of assets, but they gave them some really good role players that fit alongside Luca and they convinced Kairi Irvin to resign, right? So maybe they believe that, hey, we can trade for Ojiata Nobi right now because we have a good track record and convince some players to stay around. Maybe that's their mindset.  Jaden Hardy gave us a lot of good flashes at the end of last year. He's a good NBA player or he's projected to be a good NBA player, a spark plug, if you will, in that role in Dallas.  The 2027 unprotected could be a super valuable piece considering it is 2023 and we don't know what the landscape of the league. I always preach this man because everything has changed and it can change in a year's time, a two year's time. We don't know where Luca Donce's priorities are. We don't know. Will he be in Dallas by 2027? Will Cary Irvin be in Dallas by 2027? You talk about completely unprotected? Whew! If I am the Toronto Raptors and I'm not completely sure about where Ojiata's head is at, do you want to stay in Toronto? Does he want to test the market? This is a deal that I'm willing to do because this allows us to get a future asset in the 2027 first round pick and Josh Green, who again is a good 22 year old player that could be more than that and say, hey, now it is time for us to make a decision about the direction of this organization because right now we have a little bit of both. We have the youth and then we also have some older players that are on expiring deals. Maybe we just say, hey, the youth is our route. But also, if you're the Dallas Mavericks, do you look at Luca and say, hey, I know you want to win. Ojiata Nobby is the type of player that can help us win. You remember what Doreen Finney-Smith was doing for us? We're doing that time seven. Okay, I'm not saying he's a seven time better player, but he has more versatility, at least offensively. He can put the ball on the floor a little bit. He wants to do it more than maybe he should be doing by the numbers, but like Luca, we're willing to give up a pick four years in the future where we probably shouldn't in exchange to keep you happy. Do I look at Ojiata Nobby being added to the Dallas Mavericks and say, ah, this is the team? No, but the Western Conference is so open. Same thing that I mentioned with the Clippers that anything can really happen out West. There's no super juggernaut. Like we love the Denver Nuggets. We believe in the Denver Nuggets ability to compete for a championship again, but it's not like they're head and shoulders above the competition. That's how deep the West is. And maybe adding a guy like Ojiata Nobby could take the Dallas Mavericks who are a good roster. I know they didn't make the playoffs, but a good. Okay, Luca's good. Kairi's good. How about that? I can't even look at it and say, good roster. And add another piece. It's like, okay, now, instead of us having the top two talents, we have a third and a distant third, but it's a lot better than what we have in locker room right now. I don't know, let me know what you think. I feel like I overlooked some stuff, some different things about these trades. Shout out to Greg over at Bleach Report for putting it together. I'll go listen to the Kennedy Beach podcast. Links are in the description as we try to become the number one basketball podcast in the world. We were sitting at number six, which we appreciate, but we want to be number one. Appreciate you and I'll see y'all tomorrow.


Welcome to the tea of the day today. I've got a nice easy one. This is organic lavender Fresh sage and fresh mint I've done one similar to this before but the main reason I'm wanting to do this today is because this is a nice calming tea Especially a lavender. I mean if I could do chamomile some other things like that are supposed to be really good calming soothing ones, but I Like this mix sage always gives me that nice calming feeling when I taste it And it's not that I'm like, you know particularly stressed or anything today. I'm going to this crazy National Film Awards tonight, but it's not making me stress I'm just more having one of those days where I've been feeling uptight just because I've been a little unfocused and I go What do I do? And so I need a little calm and down That's what I got my tea for


Traditionally, the business model was I make the product, I sell it to you, you use it and you discard it. In a circular economy thinking, we take a different notion. We actually will recuperate the value of the product when it comes to the end of its life cycle. We can either repurpose or refurbish the product for another use cycle, or we can recuperate the raw materials from the end product and recycle them so that we can build another product. In circular economy business models, I would like products to come back to me as the original designer and manufacturer. And once you get your head around that notion, why would I actually sell you the product if you are primarily interested in the benefit of the product? And maybe I can stay the owner of the product and just sell you the benefit as a service. If you carefully look around us and we look at other companies, there are plenty of examples where circular economy thinking is applied. Aircraft engines are often made by Rolls-Royce. Rolls-Royce has a business model where they stay the owner of the engine and make sure that they sell aircraft flying hours. I would love this to become further ingrained and not only for B2B business models, but also for B2C business models. In the circular economy thinking, people in the company have to start thinking differently. That applies to marketing, product design, but also to management, especially to management. Because how do you measure profitability in a circular model? The initial cost price of a product that is circular can actually be a little bit more expensive. Because it's designed to take the modules back and to recoup the value at the end of its first life. That means that you need to measure profitability maybe over an eight or even fifteen year time frame. And if the product is five percent more expensive initially, but I get thirty percent of the value back after eight years, then that's a great proposition. But it does require us to have a long cycle in judging the value of a customer relationship and a business model. I often get questions whether circular economy thinking is understood by shareholders. And I daresay if we do a good job, yes, shareholders understand it and even can appreciate it. And why is that? Well, shareholders actually like to have predictable results. And if I build up my business with recurring revenues that come out of a base of customers that will take my product as a service rather than only the hit and run of the linear model, I can build a very profitable and recurring revenue stream and shareholders like that. So initially the reaction may be, you know, let's focus on the quarter, let's focus on the next half year. But long term investors, value investors are interested in understanding how the company builds up a recurring revenue stream which fits perfectly well with the circular economy thinking. Phillips is the leader in energy efficient lighting. But energy efficient lighting is a little bit more expensive. Maybe up to thirty, forty percent more expensive than traditional lighting. And that puts customers off. We went to Schiphol with a proposition where they can buy lighting as a service that takes away the initial adoption barrier. It saves the Schiphol Airport fifty percent of their electricity bill. It gets them a product that lasts up to seventy-five percent longer. So they have less replacement cycles and they save labor. And it gives us a relationship with Schiphol Airport that will last many years. It actually reduces my selling expenses and it continues that ongoing business partnership. All in all, this deal was very profitable both for Schiphol Airport as well as for Phillips. In healthcare we design and make medical scanners. Often, you know, five hundred thousand to a million dollars a piece. And there's a lot of very valuable parts in a scanner like that. Nowadays we design so that we can recoup later on from our customers these machines. We take them all back and then in our refurb factory we repurpose them and we make them almost as new and we can sell them to other customers. From a design perspective, we had to design the product so that it would be easy to take it apart. That certain modules would indeed, as the word says, be modular and they can be reused in the second life of the scanner. My recommendation for those of you who are considering to embrace the circular economies thinking in your business is to assemble a few people, marketing, R&D, manufacturer, sales, and have a workshop where we clear the plate, we open the mind and say, you know, what is it that we really offer to our customers? I think you will be surprised on how inspiring that session is going to be. How much energy will be unlocked through that, you know, brainstorm. And I would also advise you to involve your customers. What are they really after from you? What do they value in you? Is it the product or is it the benefit of the product? It took Phillips 15 years to get where we are, so don't think that, you know, this is a solution overnight. You will grow into it, I'm sure.


The two issues I've been asked to address, and I will do so in that order, is one, who may be targeted against whom a lethal force be used under international humanitarian law. And then the second issue is the territorial or geographic scope of applicability of IHL. So as regards the first issue, it needs to be made really very clear that the rules on targeting under IHL, I'll say targeting, even though this word is not included really in the treaties, it's use of force, use of lethal force. But I'll speak of targeting anyway, is that the rules of targeting are actually, as regards international conflict, pretty clear. Lethal force may be used against combatants, meaning members of the armed forces of another state in this type of conflict. In fact, IHL specifically says that combatants have the right to take a direct part, to take a direct part in hostilities. And as we know, of course, the use of lethal force is the very essence of war. It is one of the ways you prevail upon the enemy. And it is the specificity of this type of human behavior, if I may put it that way. The more vexed question is, in fact, what about the other category of persons involved, meaning civilians? International humanitarian law treaties, additional protocol one and two, specifically have a rule, both of them, so applicable in international and non-international conflict, that civilians enjoy protection from attack, i.e., they may not be targeted, quote, unless and for such time, as they take a direct part in hostilities. So the question, subject to much controversy today, is what does direct participation in hostilities mean under those relevant provisions of AP1 and AP2, and how should they be interpreted? I can, at this point in time, only remind you of what the ICRC's response to that question was. It was provided in 2009 in a document issued by the organization called the ICRC's guidance on the notion of direct participation in hostilities under IHL. And what does it say? It's sort of for non-lawyers. I think it would be rather complicated to read. I'm going to try and be as simple as I possibly can. What it essentially, the essential question, thus, that it answers is, when are persons otherwise considered civilians not protected from attack when they may be targeted, because they are directly participating? And the guidance, in fact, differentiates between two such categories. If I may put it that way, you see that I'm trying to simplify, so that's not correct. The first one are members of organized armed groups. In other words, fighters in a non-international armed conflict. The guidance in the ICRC took the position that persons whose continuous combat function it is to directly participate in hostilities on the side of an armed group in a non-international conflict and who are therefore de facto the armed forces of that non-state party do not enjoy protection from attack and, in fact, cease to be civilians for the purpose of the conduct of hostilities. The other, it's not a category, but the other group that the guidance refers to are individual civilians who may take a direct part in hostilities on a sporadic basis. Thus, for example, if I'm involved or I live in a non-international armed conflict area and a government soldier is passing by and I shoot him, obviously I am directly participating in hostilities and lethal force may be used against me. That's what IHL says when it says civilians enjoy protection from attack unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities. So what the guidance recognizes is that individual civilians, when they take sporadic participation in hostilities, are not protected from lethal attack during those specific acts of violence. I will just add two more very quick points. One is that the fact that civilians may lose protection from attack under the rules on the conduct of hostilities because they themselves directly participate in hostilities and must expect to be, you know, that force may be used back against them. They do not acquire prisoner of war status upon capture. In other words, the issue of targeting in the guidance has been disassociated from the issue of civilian protection, which civilians, of course, have and maintain upon capture. There's no question about that. In other words, they remain also subject to domestic law for any acts of hostilities, whether as a member of an armed group or as an individual civilian that they may have undertaken. Now, the last point I'd like to make is that I don't have time to go into this, but the guidance also includes something called recommendation nine for those of you who may not be familiar with it. And it essentially says that even though civilians, as I've just described, lose protection from attack under IHL as specified in the treaties for such time as they directly participate in hostilities, nevertheless, this doesn't mean that it's sort of a shooting spree. You can shoot at all times, you know, at anyone. And the guidance introduces this idea of unnecessary balance between military necessity and humanity into, in fact, targeting and essentially says, and I'm sort of paraphrasing here, that the kind and degree of force used must not exceed that which is actually necessary to achieve the military purpose in given circumstances. We can come back to that later. I just want to say that I know that colleagues on my left and on my right are not too happy with the ICRC's interpretive guidance. Neither are states. So I think we've kind of hit a middle road there. That's my personal opinion and I have the right to say it here. The next question I've been asked to address, so sort of that's who may be targeted, combatants, fighters in armed groups as long as they perform a continuous combat function and are thus members of that group or individual civilians who take a direct part in hostilities for the time that they do so. The next question is the territorial scope of applicability of IHL and as has been mentioned, the use of drones has in particular raised a lot of controversy and many legal and other questions related to the territorial scope of application of IHL. I can only hope to address, in fact, three points and I'll sort of take them in turn. The issue is, by the way, raised because IHL treaties are not explicit and not precise on the scope of application, the territorial application, their own territorial application. So you could actually argue it sort of one way or another way and people have done so over the last couple of years. The first issue is, does IHL apply to the whole of the territories of a party to the conflict? And the second is, what about the applicability of IHL to the territory of non-belligerent states, for example, by means of a drone strike? To address the first question which is, does IHL apply to the whole territory of states, I would suggest and I think that's non-controversial that the answer in international conflict is yes, IHL applies to the whole territory of the states, one or two or more that may be involved. There's nothing to suggest otherwise. In other words, it doesn't just apply to what is called colloquially as the battlefield or the zone of combat. Once there's an international conflict between two countries, it is triggered. Again, I come back to recommendation nine, which does not mean there's a free for all. It simply means, in our view at least the IHL sees you, that an assessment between humanity and necessity may be made in some obvious cases and might not lead to the necessity for the use of lethal force. The question of the applicability of IHL in cases of extraterritorial NIAC is controversial and I have to give a specific example here. However, hypothetical, imagine if Switzerland were a party to the conflict in Afghanistan. It had sent jets, it had sent troops, whatever the case may be. The question arises in this particular scenario is the following. It's clear that IHL, that there's a NIAC. Why is there a NIAC? Marco had said that. And why is Switzerland involved in a NIAC? Sorry, non-international armed conflict. It is because Switzerland is fighting with the consent of the Afghan government on the side of the Afghan government against organized armed groups. That's clearly a NIAC. So I think it's, again, non-controversial that IHL applies to the territory of Afghanistan. But if a member of an armed group, say a Taliban member, came to Switzerland and attacked Swiss military objectives, does IHL apply to the territory of Switzerland? And different views have been submitted on this issue. That's an ongoing debate. According to some views, no, no. IHL is only limited to the territory of Afghanistan. Applicability, according to other views, and I have to say I would share this view personally, is that IHL would be also applicable as a matter of law. It's a different thing whether in practice and in policy, you know, how the situation would be dealt with. But as a matter of law, would IHL be applicable to the acts of a Taliban in Swiss soil? I would say yes. You can't have it both ways. Let's be very frank.  There is something called the equality of rights and diligence among parties to armed conflicts, including non-international, of course. And my sense is that for legal and political reasons, confining the applicability of IHL to the territory of one party to the conflict and leaving out the other would not uphold that principle. So that's, I repeat, that remains an issue of debate and state opinions have been far and few between as regards what the answer to this question should be. And then the third issue, which is because I have to kind of only really speak about this one and then end, I think, yes, is the issue of what is the legal regime governing in the following scenario, meaning the territory of a non-belligerent state? Switzerland is what it is. It's not involved in any conflict at all anywhere of any kind. A member of an armed group, say the Taliban, come to Switzerland and directly participate in hostilities from Swiss soil. Modern technology, as we know today, would allow that. The question is, can this person be targeted under the rules of international humanitarian law on Swiss soil as a matter of law? Again, regardless of whether he would be targeted as a matter of policy or practice. And once again, there are two essentially different views on this issue. There are writers and states obviously who believe that IHL has no territorial application. And as long as there's a nexus between that individual and the conflict in Afghanistan, and that individual is directly participating in hostilities vis-à-vis that conflict in Afghanistan, he may be targeted or she may be targeted anywhere on the globe. I repeat, I'm not saying this would happen in policy or in practice, but as a matter of law that they could be targeted everywhere. And that in fact, other bodies of law, primarily UN Charter law and the law of neutrality, even though it's applicability and NIAC is, well, it doesn't happen actually, that other bodies of law would prevent the scenario that I am speaking about from happening in practice. And then there's the other view, which is that taken by the ICRC, which is that the individual person directly participating in hostilities from Swiss soil should not be dealt with as a matter of IHL. In other words, that IHL does not apply to him or her as a matter of law. And that that situation needs to be dealt with by the rules on the use of force that are contained in human rights law. Because to say that IHL follows, like in a backpack, anybody moving around the globe would actually lead to the notion and the acceptance of the concept of a global battlefield. There are policy reasons as well. If a Taliban member comes to Switzerland and DPHs in relation to the conflict in Afghanistan, why would the Swiss population or any non-belligerent population for that matter have to bear the consequences of the use of lethal force under IHL as a matter of law? Again, I'm not talking saying this would happen in practice. Why could collateral damage be inflicted on the Swiss population, which it could under the rules of IHL? And again, in policy and in just humane terms, it would appear that the global battlefield extension to these types of situations would be counterproductive to say the least. Finally, and here I know I'm way beyond the time, is to say naturally it is possible, although I'm not aware of such a scenario at the moment, that you could imagine the scenario I've just given Switzerland. You have one Taliban there. What about if, leaving aside usabella issues, an organized armed group constitutes itself on Swiss soil, and the intensity of hostilities with another government, or with, I don't know, I mean, many factual scenarios, or with Switzerland and joint Switzerland, and we have in Afghanistan, in fact, like scenario, what happens in those circumstances? All I'm saying is that it's invisible that if the requisite criteria have been met that Marco Sassoli was talking about, in other words, intensity organization, that you could have a scenario in which a non-villagerant state would in fact cease to be a non-villagerant state, and on whose territory a separate non-international armed conflict may be constituted. I might just briefly abuse my control of the microphone to add a word myself on one of the issues, and that's the geographical scope that Jelena mentioned. And I do so just because I think it's important to try and explain the other view, and how, at least for me, how I get there, recognizing the problems with it in terms of this notion of a global battlefield. Because in the example that was given, we're talking about, say, someone who's a Switzerland involved in conflict in Afghanistan, and now there's someone from, say, I don't remember if you used the Afghan Taliban or Al-Qaeda, Afghan Taliban, who's now in Switzerland and can this person be targeted under IHL? Now, that obviously straight away gives us the most dramatic final straight to the extreme. And I think the difficulty for me with reaching that same conclusion is that if I take it step by step, I don't get there. So if I say, well, you've got the person fighting right now, he's in Afghanistan, and you've got the hot zone of the battlefield, and everyone's fighting and shooting each other, now let's imagine that the person is 50 meters away from the hot zone, but just across the border in Pakistan. But does that 50 meters make them suddenly not targetable? I don't think so. Is it the fact that the person's just across the border make them not targetable? Well, that brings us into questions of use at Belem and violation of Pakistani sovereignty and so on. But I don't think it affects the use in Belem, the question of whether the person is a legitimate target or not. Let's say that those 50 meters away, the person's still doing the same thing that they were doing on the battlefield, because you can be commanding your troops and you can be doing everything when you're 50 meters away. And now out of the person's a kilometer away, but they're doing the same thing. They're holding the satellite radio. They're commanding the troops. They're doing everything. At that moment, everything that the ICSE would recognize is clearly taking a direct part in hostilities. Is it now because they've gone from 50 meters to 500 meters to a kilometer, but they're still doing exactly the same thing? Does that make them any less of a target? And then you follow me. You've got 10 kilometers away, and you go 100 kilometers away, and now you're in Geneva. But you're doing the same thing. And you're holding the radio, and you are commanding the troops. At that moment, giving orders is doing commands and doing the same thing. Does that necessarily then mean that because of that distance, IHL ceases to apply to the question of whether the person can be targeted or not. And my own view is that IHL doesn't tell us anything about distance in this case. It wasn't designed to determine the geographical boundaries of an armed conflict. It was designed to apply to all acts of hostilities between parties to a conflict. And so wherever those acts of hostilities are taking place between parties to a conflict, then it might be that someone is very far from the battlefield, but they are clearly taking a direct part and possibly even an important part in the conflict. I don't see how we can say that IHL wouldn't apply. At the same time, I share the unease of where I've reached with my conclusion. I mean, my own view, unfortunately, the way I approach the law very often makes me reach conclusions that I don't like. But it doesn't mean that I necessarily think I'm wrong. It just, I think there may be a problem with the law. We need to overcome it. I think policy in these situations would dictate that we don't use. I would reach the same conclusion as a matter of policy. I'm just not certain that that's the answer in IHL. But legally, I think there's another root here. And that is, well, two issues. One, if you're talking about targeting an individual in territory of another state, there's the use ad bellum, which may well be the reason that you can't target that person. They might be legitimate target under IHL, but you don't have justification to use force on the territory of another state because of the use ad bellum. And the other is human rights law. And here again, we enter another whole area that we didn't cover in this panel, but an extremely controversial and area full of debate over the relationship between IHL and human rights law. And here my own view is that that relationship between them is a dynamic one that is context dependent. And the further you go from the heart of the battlefield, the stronger the role that human rights law plays in the interplay between them. So it may be that in the situation we just mentioned, my conclusion would be that that person may be a legitimate target under IHL, but the interplay between human rights law and IHL in that situation means that targeting them would be unlawful. But it's not because they're not a lawful target under IHL, it's because of the interplay between human rights law and IHL. So I'd reach in the way of the same conclusion, but I would still say that under IHL, the person might be a legitimate target. It's just we have. He's right. Thank you. Anyway, look, these are all areas full of debates, full of problems that they can open up a whole other can of worms here with also the IHL and human rights, but I just felt I wanted to explain some of the other views here.


Geochemistry, geochemistry is the science that uses the tools and principles of chemistry to explain the mechanisms behind major geological systems such as the Earth's crust and its oceans. The realm of geochemistry extends beyond the Earth, encompassing the entire solar system, and has made important contributions to the understanding of a number of processes including mantle convection, the formation of planets and the origins of granite and basalt.


We have another guest, Nathan Biggs, who is the CEO of House of Brick. The House of Brick is probably the foremost consultant in the area of VMware for Oracle. We talk about Oracle a lot. Hi, Nathan. Hi, Dave. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. This is my co-host, John Furrier. Nice to meet you, Nathan. Oracle. Me too. House of Blues, House of Bricks. We love Oracle. Oracle, Brick. We love VMware. Oracle, VMware, kind of different strategies, right? So Nathan's company, House of Brick, basically, as I say, is the foremost VMware Oracle consultant on the planet.  We have some of the smartest people that we've met. But basically, you specialize in taking business-critical and mission-critical applications that are Oracle-based and running them on VMware. That's right. We all know the success that server virtualization has had. Server virtualization has really exploded. It has allowed us to cut costs, to really improve operating efficiencies and improve agility. And now we're seeing more and more of the application portfolio kind of chunk into VMware. Right? So we talked to customers maybe three or four years ago. A very small portion of the application portfolio was virtualized. And now today, it's much, much higher. Can we set the stage first? We have a lot of audience out there that might not know the inner workings of Oracle VMware competition. So let's just, Dave, set the stage for the folks out there about Oracle. I mean, I have my own opinion. But you know, you get Oracle, the big, Larry, Allison, Onze, Yacht, Big Power, Iron Fist, VMware, the new EMC, Spinout, Virtualization, Open, Ecosystem, Palmaritz, Wintel, Pat Gelsinger. Oracle is like the big bad bully, right? And VMware is the up-and-comer. So here's the deal. It's pretty straightforward now, especially since Sun was acquired by Oracle. Oracle essentially wants to own the world. And they understand that by vertically integrating as many pieces of the stack as possible, it can increase its revenue, increase its profits, and its competitive advantage. That's clearly Oracle's strategy. Now, one of the things that Oracle did probably about two years ago is went out and bought a small company in Massachusetts called VirtualIron. VirtualIron essentially is a little virtualization platform, not nearly as robust as VMware, but it allowed Oracle to say, hey, we have that too. Buy ours. It's better because we're Oracle. They say everything that they have is better. They're very brilliant marketeers. Now, so what they've done is they've bundled essentially everything into their stack, the hardware, the software, the applications, and of course, very importantly, the database. Here comes VMware. VMware is a software company. Any software company is essentially the enemy of Oracle because Oracle wants to own the software business. So VMware is now starting to somewhat democratize the software business by consolidating, lowering the number of servers, making Oracle potentially less expensive. Oracle doesn't like that. It's going to lose control of that place. Oracle tries to fight it a little bit. At the same time, Oracle realizes a lot of people want to go to VMware, so it has to provide support. There's nothing technically about VMware that won't support Oracle. But Oracle wants to get as much of that pie as possible. So it'll maybe trip the competition, maybe throw them a little elbow as they're running into the boards, and Oracle's being very aggressive trying to buy time while it can build up the robustness of its platform. Enter companies like House of Brick. You know VMware inside and out. You know Oracle inside and out. You've got great customer relationships, and what you say is, look, we can make this stuff work. We can help drive business value. That's who we are today. Well, the biggest reasons that people are not virtualizing Oracle on VMware are not technical, like you said, Dave. The reasons that people are not virtualizing Oracle are emotional. They're political. And Oracle does a good job, as the reasons that you mentioned, that they like to preserve their license revenue. And so there are reasons why they don't want people to virtualize. But there are so many great advantages for virtualizing Oracle stacks on VMware that really people need to consider that. Like what? The number one reason that people consider is cost savings. And so that's a big driver for people. That has been with VMware for a long time. People have been consolidating servers, and they're realizing some tremendous cost savings. But there are other advantages when you consider virtualizing tier one applications, such as high availability, even working hand-in-hand with Oracle real application clusters. An Oracle Rack and a VMware-HA combination together is just a sweet solution for HA, for tier one customers. There's the optimization of the application development lifecycle. People can dramatically reduce their lifecycle time, but also improve the quality of their application releases. So those are just a couple that... Yeah, so we had a peer insight on wikibon.org last week. Nathan, you participated in that.  And the findings out of that call, we were presenting some research from wikibon.org, from David Floyd's research. And our findings were that the vast majority of applications out there are candidates for virtualization, including Oracle applications. Now, there are some that don't make sense to virtualize. The highest, most mission-critical applications probably don't make sense, although you would debate that, so we should have that discussion. But generally speaking, the vast majority makes sense. We agree on that. We also found that Oracle sometimes will certify VMware on Oracle, Oracle on VMware, especially if you pay them through the nose, like in the pharmaceutical industry. Other times, maybe they're not so supportive. They'll drag their feet, especially for smaller customers that don't pay them as much. You guys have had some success there, I realize that. So there's a lot of research on wikibon around this that shares our findings. But what are you seeing? This whole notion of actually bringing mission-critical applications to VMware. A lot of people say, hey, unless the ISV supports it, straight out and certifies it, there's no way I'm doing it. It's too risky. What's your angle on that? Well, you need to pay attention to the difference between support from Oracle and certification from Oracle. Oracle, in their support statement, it's on MetaLink or MyOracle support, it's 249212.1. That's the VMware support statement from Oracle. And it says that they will support all Oracle technologies running on VMware. But they say they don't certify. And so there's a difference between certification and support. Our customers are getting great support from Oracle. We've heard of cases, although we haven't experienced it ourselves, where Oracle has asked them to re-platform their Oracle workloads onto physical. When there's a problem, re-platform onto physical, recreate the problem onto physical, and then we'll support it. But you've certainly heard cases directly. We have heard cases, yes. But with our customers, and maybe it's just the way that we work with their customers, but they're getting good support from Oracle. See, I have a theory on this. I've been thinking about this. Experts in Oracle virtualization, particularly on VMware, I said, how come you're not seeing this? And I think I have the reason. The reason is because your stuff works. You know how to make Oracle work in VMware. So you're not having the same types of problems that many other customers are having. I think that's got to be a big reason. So you guys are getting great support. Because you know what you're doing. A lot of customers are running at blind. You need to get help. Either you need to have in-house people or you need to go outside. That's the bottom line. The benefits will certainly offset the cost of hiring that consultant in many, many cases. Yeah. And we're always willing to come in and help, obviously. But just for your listeners, give you a little hint here. If you run into a problem, don't presume it's VMware. Presume first that it's Oracle and work on tuning Oracle and optimizing the performance of Oracle. More often than not, you're going to find where the problem is. A lot of times people presume that the problem is in the configuration of VMware. And so they go there first. And that's where they run into problems. So maybe the advice is if you're running Oracle and VMware, start with, okay, call Oracle. Say, hey, I got a question on how to configure Oracle. What the best practice is on Oracle. Now, of course, they're going to say, what are you running? Well, I'm running VMware. Okay, but maybe ask questions about Oracle and find answers about Oracle and try to attack that side of the equation before you even go down the VMware rat hole. And that's been our experience. House of Brick started out 13 years ago as an Oracle Performance Company, as an Oracle Optimization Company. And so that's what makes us good. And it's what makes us good now, even running on VMware. Yeah, so you're here at EMC World. I mean, EMC World obviously has an interest in virtualizing Oracle applications. EMC is doing that in-house. Sanjay Mershandani on tomorrow. EMC's doing a lot with Oracle. Applications doing a lot with SAP applications as well. They're sort of, I think, one of the leading edge companies. I mean, it's their business, so they did a lot better. So what's your relationship with EMC? What are you doing here at the event? Our relationship with EMC is a great one. Good partnered relationship. We have a subcontract relationship. So what EMC does is when they run into opportunities where their customers are running Oracle, where their customers have application stacks that are running on Unix, whether that's Solaris or AIX, HPUX, and they want to replatform onto an x86 architecture to take advantage of some of the cost savings and the performance improvements, then they bring in House of Brick to enter that conversation, because we know how to take those applications and bring them onto the new hardware and the new virtualized infrastructure and really make them perform well. So EMC recognizes the value that House of Brick brings in enabling them to do their business better. We enable them to sell V-blocks. We enable EMC to sell storage. We enable the VCE company to sell their product. So we don't get in the way. We enable their sales. And I think that's what makes a good partnership with House of Brick and EMC. You've met David Floyer, one of our lead analysts, and he has said flat out that VMware is the most robust platform for enterprise applications. I presume it's safe to say you concur. We do. Is that right? And he said it's, look, it's just far more mature than Oracle VM. That's just the way it is. Hands down. He has said that. Why? What makes it hands down better than say, for instance, Oracle VM? I sat in the keynote from Paul Moritz for CEO of VMware this morning. And Paul talked about how the ESX hypervisor is the component of VMware that's becoming the least prominent, if you will. I don't remember the words that he used, but he talked about all of the other tooling and all of the other advantages that VMware brings. And so the ESXI, which is VMware's free hypervisor, might compare to something like Oracle Virtual Machine. But VMware has done so much to put tooling and application support and other things around their hypervisor that really make VMware much more mature. The operational benefits of VMware far outpace what we're seeing on Oracle Virtual Machine. We have customers who, for support or certification reasons, want to try Oracle Virtual Machine. And many times, of course, we help them with that, but many times they find that they're not getting the performance, the tooling that they need, and so they ask for our help to then migrate back onto VMware. You can understand, based on my intro where I was talking about Oracle wanting to own the stack, you can understand why Oracle doesn't want to appear to be overly supportive of VMware. They're trying to freeze the market so that they can get their act together in Oracle VM to the point where they can compete more effectively. Companies do that all the time. There's no distribution today that won't be available for many months. Well, why pre-announce something? Well, you pre-announce something so you can build up market momentum and maybe freeze some of the momentum of some of your competitors. And Oracle is very, very good at that. So you can understand that. But I think that, as David Fleurer has pointed out, this is an inevitable trend and VMware seems to be at the heart of it. But the other, so, and now we had some people on the call last week. Bill Santilli in particular said, you're going to do it unless Oracle certifies it. And, or at least, you know, guarantees that they're going to support it forcefully. Now, that's the other end of the spectrum. A lot of the customers that we have have said, look, I'm going to do Test and Dev. And Bill agreed, Test and Dev, no brainer. Start there, gain experience with the platform. And you wouldn't disagree with that, would you? I would not disagree. Test and Dev is a great thing to do with Oracle on VMware. And that's a great place to start. If customers truly are concerned about certification, then House of Brick has some best practices where we can configure the virtualized infrastructure to quickly migrate to a hardware. If that's what they want in their infrastructure so that they can move quickly from virtual to hardware, we have some best practices to make that happen in a matter of minutes rather than a long, protracted period of time. Well, we've seen today from, and we saw yesterday from Pat Gelsinger, statistics, I think there are IDC numbers that showed that there's more physical, more virtual servers shipping now than physical servers. There are more virtual applications than physical applications, or more applications that are virtualized. So we're seeing that tipping point. It's happening, it's inevitable. VMware's not the only one. Hyper-V's out there, and they're doing a good job. They're growing very fast. You know, it's free. They changed the whole model and taken a playbook out of the old Microsoft. Now, of course, VMware executives know the Microsoft playbook, so they see what's coming there. But that's a fast-moving game. Citrix, obviously very, very strong in the desktop. But Zen is a force as well. So you've got three prominent players out there, and others. IBM's got its own technology, now, of course, Oracle. So there's a vibrant market out there. VMware clearly is the leader, and I think you've backed the right horse, in our opinion. But what advice would you give to those practitioners that are saying, look, Nathan, I'm really nervous. I don't want to bet my business on... I think I'd get fired for not doing VMware. I mean, I might eventually, if I don't cut my cost, but I'm afraid. I'm afraid not to go or to go with VMware because Oracle's not going to certify it. What would you tell those guys? Well, what I would suggest is starting small. If you haven't virtualized your test and dev environments with Oracle, start there. Start by putting test and dev on to a virtualized infrastructure and look at the advantages that you're getting out of that. The next thing to try is maybe identify a small project where you could take something into production and start to see what advantages you can get out of a production grade Oracle installation on VMware. It's our assertion that there are some tremendous advantages that you can get by doing that and it will outweigh some of the other concerns. But I understand that certification is an issue for some organizations. The next thing I'd suggest for the Oracle customers out there is to go on to my Oracle support or MetaLink and do a search and search for VMware. Look for all of the cases that are VMware-related and look at how many were bugs related to VMware. We haven't found any out there in Oracle's database. We haven't found any VMware-related bugs that people have reported. And we have a lot of customers that are working with Oracle support. So start to satisfy your own concerns about this issue of support versus certification. Oracle does support VMware. And we've seen that time and again with our customers. The last thing I'd recommend is take a look at the Oracle certification matrix. The Oracle certification matrix certifies operating systems on chip sets. Oracle doesn't certify any particular brand of hardware. And so on the Oracle certification matrix, VMware lives underneath that operating system level where Oracle typically certifies down to that level. That may be a way that you can satisfy yourself. That support, the Oracle committed support is sufficient. I want to make it clear. Oracle will certify VMware. This is one of the findings that we came out of the study in the pharmaceutical industry. It's well-known that Oracle certifies VMware. You got to pay them to the nose. But that just underscores that there's no technical reason. We're talking to Nathan Biggs, CEO of House of Brick Technology, the foremost VMware Oracle consultant. If you need help configuring Oracle and VMware, Nathan's your man. You got a great team. Nathan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Dave.


My name is Sanbaki and the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. The advent of cloning, surrogate motherhood, and the donation of garments and sperm, have shaken the traditional biological definition of parenthood to its foundations. The social roles of parents have similarly been recast by the decline of the nuclear family and the surge in alternative household formats. So why do people become parents in the first place? Do we have a moral obligation to humanity at large? To ourselves? To our unborn children? Hardly so. Raising children comprises equal measures of satisfaction and frustration. Parents often employ a psychological defence mechanism known as cognitive dissonance to suppress the negative aspects of parenting and to deny the unpalatable truth and fact that raising children is time consuming, exhausting and strains otherwise pleasurable, tranquil and functional relationships to their limits. This is not to mention the fact that the gestational mother experiences and I'm quoting, considerable discomfort, effort and risk in the course of pregnancy and childbirth. No, this is not a sentence I have written. This was written by Narayan and Badkovjak in 1999 in their seminal work, Having and Raising Children, published in the Pennsylvania State University Press. So parenting is possibly an irrational vocation, yet humanity keeps breeding and procreating. This may well be the call of nature, as many people think. All living species reproduce and most of them are end. Is maternity and paternity proof that beneath the ephemeral veneer of civilization we are still merely kind of an animal, beast, subject to the impulses and hard-wired behaviour that permeate the rest of the animal kingdom? In his important book, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins suggested that we copulate in order to preserve our genetic material by embedding it in few in the future gene pool. Survival itself, whether in the form of DNA or on a higher level of suspicious, determines our parenting instinct. Breeding and nurturing the young are mere safe contact mechanisms, handing the precious cargo of genetics down generations of organic containers known as children. Yet surely to ignore the epistemological and emotional realities of parenthood is misleadingly reductionist. Moreover, Dawkins commits a scientific faux pas of teleology. Nature itself has no purpose in mind because it has no mind. Stinks simply are in nature, period. There's no goal, no plan, no master plan. The genes end up being forwarded in time does not entail that nature or for that matter God planned it this way. Arguments from design have long and convincingly been refuted by countless philosophers. Still, human beings as opposed to nature do act intentionally and so we are back to square one. Why bring children to the world and burden ourselves with decades of commitment to perfect strangers? Well, here's a hypothesis for you. Offspring allows us to delay death, to postpone, to procrastinate. Our progeny are the medium through which our genetic material is propagated and immortalized. Additionally, by remembering us, our children keep us alive after physical death. And these, of course, are self-delusional, self-serving illusions. Our genetic material gets diluted with time. While it constitutes 50% of the first generation, it amounts to a measly 6% three generations later. If the everlastingness of one's unadulterated DNA was the paramount concern, insist would have been the norm, not our breeding. As for one's enduring memory via the generations, let's go through a simple exercise. Do you remember or can you name your maternal or paternal great-great-great-grandfather? Of course you can't. And that means that our memory vanishes within three to four generations. Intellectual feats or architectural monuments are far more potent mementos of our existence than children. Still, we have been so well indoctrinated that this misconception that children equal immortality. This yields a baby boom in each post-war period. Having been existentially threatened, people multiply and procreate in the vain belief that they thus best protect their genetic heritage and their memory as persons. So let's study another more rational and grounded explanation. The utilitarian view is that one's offspring are an asset, kind of a pension plan and insurance policy rolled into one. Children are still treated as a yielding property in many parts of the world. They plow fields, they do menial jobs very effectively. People hedge their bets by bringing multiple copies of themselves to the world. Indeed, as infant mortality plunges in the better educated, higher income parts of the world, so does fecundity. The richer we are, more educated we are, the more wealthy we are, the fewer children we have. In the western world, though, children have long ceased to be a profitable proposition. At present, they are more of an economic drag and a liability. Many continue to live with their parents into their thirties and consume the family's savings in college, tuition, sumptuous weddings, expensive divorces, parasitic habits. Alternatively, increasing mobility breaks families apart at an early stage. Either way, children are no longer the founts of emotional sustenance and monetary support they allegedly used to be in previous generations. So, this explanation falls by the road. How about this third attempt? Procreation serves to preserve the cohesiveness of the family nucleus. It further bonds father to mother, strengthens the ties between siblings. Or is it the other way around? A cohesive and warm family is conductive or conducive to reproduction. Either way, they seem to be connected, functional families and reproduction. But of course, both statements are false. Stable and functional families sport far fewer children than abnormal or dysfunctional families. In fact, between one-third and one-half of all children are born in single parents or in other non-traditional, non-nuclear, poor, undereducated households. Such families' children are mostly born unwanted and unwelcome. The set outcomes of accidents and mishaps, ignorance, wrong fertility planning, lust, gun, awry and misguided turns of events. The more sexually active people are, the less safe their desirous exploits, the more they are likely to end up with a bundle of joy, the American saccharine expression for a newborn.  Still, there is no denying that most people want their kids and love them. They are attached to the kids, to their children and they experience grief and bereavement when their children die, depart or are sick. Most parents find parenthood emotionally fulfilling, happiness inducing and highly satisfying. This pertains even to unplanned and initially unwanted new arrivals. Could this be the missing link? Do fatherhood and motherhood revolve around self-gratification? Does it all boil down to the pleasure principle? Child rearing may indeed be habit-forming. Nine months of pregnancy and a host of social positive reinforcement and expectations can condition the parents to do the job. Still, a living thought is nothing like the abstract concept. Babies cry. They soil themselves and their environment. They stink. They severely disrupt the lives of their parents. There's nothing too enticing in an infant, objectively speaking.  So many things can and do go wrong. So few expectations, wishes and dreams are realized. So much pain is inflicted on the parents. And then child runs off and his procreators are left to face the emptiness. The emotional returns on a child are rarely commensurate with the magnitude of the investment. Few eliminate the impossible, said Sherlock Holmes. Whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. People multiply because it provides them with narcissistic supply. A narcissist is a person who projects a false image onto others and uses the interest this projection generates to regulate a labial and grandiose sense of self-worth. The reactions garnered by the narcissist, attention, unconditional acceptance, adulation, admiration and affirmation, all these are collectively known as narcissistic supply. The narcissist objectifies people and treats them as mere instruments of gratification to be idealized, used, abused and discarded. Infants go through a phase of unbridled fantasy, tyrannical behavior and perceived omnipotence. An adult narcissist, in other words, is still stuck in his terrible tools and is possessed with the emotional maturity of a toddler. To some degree we are all narcissists, yet as we grow we learn to empathize and to love ourselves and others. We grow out of our primary narcissism. We do not develop what Freud called secondary, malignant, pathological narcissism, but narcissists do. They are stuck in a time world. They have never grown up. This edifice of maturity is severely tested by newfound parenthood. Babies evoke in the parent the most primordial drives, protective, animalistic instincts, the desire to merge with the newborn and a sense of terror generated by such a desire. It's a fear of vanishing and of being assimilated and assimilating. Neonates engender in their parents an emotional regression. The parents find themselves revisiting their own childhoods through and via the infant, even as they are caring for the newborn. The crumbling of decades and layers of personal growth is accompanied by a resurgence of the aforementioned early infantile narcissistic defenses. Parents, especially new ones, are gradually transformed into narcissists by this encounter with the newborn. They find in their children the perfect sources of narcissistic supply, euphemistically known as love. So parenthood, child-rearing, caring for children, caregiving, these really are all forms of symbolic co-dependence of both parties. The child provides narcissistic supply, the parent consumes it. Even the most balanced, most mature, most psychodynamically stable of parents find such a flood of narcissistic supply emanating from the child irresistible and addictive. Such supply enhances the parent's self-confidence, buttresses his or her self-esteem, regulates the sense of self-worth, and projects a complementary image of the parent onto himself or herself. And so this interaction is so addictive that it fast becomes indispensable, especially in the emotionally vulnerable position in which the parent finds herself, with the reawakening and repetition of all the unresolved conflicts that she had with her own parents. Well, if this theory of parenthood as narcissism is true, if breeding is merely about securing crime-quality narcissistic supply, then the higher the self-confidence, the self-esteem, the self-worth of the parent, and the clearer and more realistic his self-image, the more abundant his other sources of narcissistic supply, the fewer children such a parent will have. And these predictions are blown out by reality. Educated, high-income, high self-esteem, self-confident people have few or no children. And so the higher the education and the income of adults, consequently, the firmer their sense of self-worth, the fewer children they have. That's statistical law. Children are perceived as counterproductive by these people. Not only is their output narcissistic supply redundant, they hinder the parent's professional and pecuniary progress and the parent's liberty and freedom. The more children people can economically afford, the fewer they have. This gives the lie to the selfish gene hypothesis. The more educated people are, the more they know about the world and about themselves, the less they seek to procreate. The more advanced the civilization, the more efforts it invests in preventing the birth of children. In Western civilization, we spend billions of dollars in preventing pregnancy or aborting fetuses. Contraceptives, family planning and abortions are typical of affluent, well-informed society, not poor ones. The more plentiful the narcissistic supply afforded by other sources, the lesser the emphasis on breeding. Freud described the mechanism of sublimation. The sex drive, what he called the eros, libido, can be converted, sublimated into other types of activities. All the sublimatory channels, politics and art for instance, are narcissistic, all of them yield narcissistic supply. They render children unnecessary, superfluous. Creative people have fewer children than the average, or none at all. This is because they are narcissistically self-sufficient. They know how to generate their own narcissistic supply. They don't need children to give them narcissistic supply, they have enough. The key to our determination to have children seems to be our wish to experience the same unconditional love that we had received or were supposed to have received from our mothers. This intoxicating brew and feeling of being adored without caveats and without conditions, for what we are, with no limits, reservations or calculations. This kind of love, this kind of laser focused attention, it's the most powerful crystallized form of narcissistic supply. A child's love nourishes our self-love, our self-worth, our self-confidence. It infuses us with feelings of omnipotence, of omnipotence, of omniscience. In these and other respects, parenthood is a return to infancy.


OK, so here we are again. We're just going to add another camera into this just to make the scene a little bit more interesting. OK, and the first thing we're going to do is just put the camera in place. So this time, because we've not got anything really happening with the camera, we're just going to create a camera. So there's no aim on this one. So I'm just going to go to Create, Camera, and Choose Camera. And again, like I did with the last camera, I need to get this in place first. So I'm going to go back into my Top View. So that's Orthographic Top. And then I need to find the camera which should be selected. So if I put my Move Tool on, there it is. I can now move it much close to the plane. I'm going to zoom in. And I want it somewhere behind the plane, about there. For now, I can always edit it in a minute. I also need to look at it in the Front View because it will be too high. There we go. OK, so that's a good starting point. But it's not even looking the right way. So I just need to get that a little bit better as well. So I'm just going to rotate it around so it's looking at the plane. Now I'm going to go and look through that camera. And that's going to help me to line it up so that I'm 100% happy with it. So I'm going to go into Camera 2. And that's not a bad angle, but I think I can do better. So I'm just going to zoom out a little bit. Try and get fairly central. I think I just want to be looking over to one side just to make it a slightly more interesting shot. I'm trying to get a bit more central in frame. So I'm quite happy with that. So this is going to create hopefully quite a cool looking shot. OK, now we need to be very careful. So we're about to parent the camera to the plane, as we've done with the aim in the previous video. But once you've done that, you need to be very careful not to look through this camera and edit it. Because it will change where its initial position is. And it will only move relative to what the plane does. It will never go back to the position that you had it in. Because we've not set any key frames on it. OK, so I'm happy with that. I'm now going to put this back into my top view. In fact, no, I'm not because I want to preview it in a minute. So I'm just going to go into my perspective view, press F to frame my camera up. So my camera is already selected. Shift select the body of the plane and press P. And as I start to sculpt through the animation, you'll see that the camera follows it. Right, back into the view. And then if I play it, you'll get an idea of what kind of animation we've created. So now we're sort of sitting behind this plane and we get a much more dynamic shot. Possibly some of the turns are a little bit harsh, which is making it look a bit less believable. But overall a really nice looking shot. We've got these sort of rolling mountains in the background. We get really close to one, so it's looking really nice. OK, so that's that one. Now in the next video, we're actually going to change an attribute of the camera further. Because what I want in this camera is I want the plane to be in sort of nice sharp focus. But I want the background to be slightly out of focus. So we're going to use depth of field. And there are two reasons for this. One is because it looks cool. And the other one is because the texture map that I've got for the mountains is quite low resolution. So you can see in some cases like the pixels that are making it up, which looks a bit crummy. So we're also going to be using this depth of field to hide that a little bit as well. OK, so I will see you in the next video for that. I can't wait.