I remember with particular clarity some moments of my early teenage years. Usually the traumatizing ones. My first girlfriend and how she dumped me via the phone, random alcohol testing during junior prom under the school’s first “zero-tolerance” policy, and the time I accidentally called my history teacher “Mom.” (Sorry, Mr. Weinstein.)
One of the ones that I remember vividly was when my dad confronted me with a $120 bill from AOL. (This was $120 in 1996 dollars, as well, so that would be over $160 dollars today. Kids don’t understand how good they have it…)
Dad wasn’t angry, but he was disappointed. Obviously, the Internet thing had become a big part of my life, and five free hours a month just wasn’t cutting it. It was then that we decided to switch over to a small dial-up ISP that had no time fees. Memory of the shame I felt has been one of the reasons that I’ve opposed bandwidth caps from broadband providers. (This is not the official position of ScienceLogic, Inc., just my own personal opinion.) Mainly, I just don’t like the idea of being surprised by a big bill at the end of the month because I used more than I thought I was using.
Memories of my teenage trauma came back when I read Move to the Cloud or Stay Home, written by Antonio Piriano, our CTO, for APMdigest. Migrating resources to the cloud can be tough enough without a shock when the first bill comes due. Antonio points out that a cloud provider providing visibility into the cloud – part of good cloud management – has already established a foundation for customer confidence.
Of course, one of the key considerations when you decide whether to move to the cloud is being able to monitor your cloud expenditures as they happen – to predict the size of the bill, and to let you know exactly what resources you’re using – and what you’re not using, but still paying for.
The idea is to avoid being surprised by bills. It is such an important concept that we believe actual and projected costs to be one of the crucial visibility metrics that cloud service providers must provide to their customers. After all, the whole point of cloud migration is to lower costs – and any IT manager is going to want to verify that those costs actually are lower.
You may have been wondering about Vblock, which is rapidly becoming a staple of the data center. Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Vblock – essentially a “datacenter in a box,” with network infrastructure, storage, server technology, and orchestration software in one package – allows IT departments to move very quickly in building new application infrastructures, and it can help remove the risk of the unknown with pre-testing and pre-certification.
But with that agility and speed come management challenges. You need to monitor your integrated Cisco, EMC, and VMware data center in order to identify and fix any issues that come up with equal agility and speed.
This is where ScienceLogic’s IT management platform comes in. If you’re at Interop, this is your chance to see Vblock at its most nimble. Go to Interop Booth 609, and ask about our new Vblock dashboard – we’ll be demoing it there.
It was important for us not only to support the Vblock architecture – and we’ve been Vblock certified for a while – but for us to make monitoring and managing Vblock easy, and to give you one place to manage your physical, virtual, and cloud resources.
There’s no lack of data provided by the integrated Vblock architecture. There’s EMC Ionix UIM, VMWare, and Cisco UCS monitoring tools in Vblock – and these are not poor tools. They’re just separate tools, and there’s no easy way to consolidate information across the physical and virtual components. That makes it hard to determine the appropriate courses of action to solve and prevent problems. It’s just simpler and more effective to put all your monitoring data in one place.
At Interop Vegas 2012, I enjoyed hearing Padmasree Warrior kick off the mammoth event with a thought-provoking speech on collaboration and the evolving nature of networking – very appropriate for this high-tech meeting of minds.
For those who have just returned from a Mars expedition, Padmasree is the CTO, SVP of Engineering, and general manager of the enterprise business for Cisco. Most have heard of her; she has 1.4 million Twitter followers.
Padmasree’s keynote title was “Work Your Way,” and her message was pure Cisco: How Cisco will win in an increasingly cloudy and connected world.
In true Cisco style, Padmasree warmed up the crowd with a nice video with a catchy jingle about collaboration with voice, video, telepresence. Of course, she worked in several nice words for Cisco Jabber – a new communications application allowing collaboration anywhere on any device.
And with that, she laid out Cisco’s vision for a networked future.
Collaboration has been a strong trend across different devices and different platforms. What’s new is the emphasis on the user experience and allowing you to work your way.
According to Padmasree, networking is evolving at an amazing pace. Change has been exponential in the last 25 years or so, in particular in how we communicate and collaborate with each other, helped along by the evolution of the network, of course:
Connectivity – We have access to the online world at all times, and all places.
Digital Revolution – The physical world is being digitized (think e-commerce, telephony).
Network Economy – Yes, we are living in a collaborative world (social media, cloud sourcing, smart phones, and mobility)
“Human Network” – What is this? The immersive digital world, unified workspace, knowledge clouds, the Internet of Things, immersive applications – all of these are changing the way we interact with each other.
Not surprisingly, Padmasree predicts that every 5.32 years, the Internet will double in size.
She also had several predictions for the next 3-5 years:
Video will quadruple all IP traffic by 2014.
Not only that, mobile and video are converging, with two-thirds of the world’s mobile data traffic video by 2015.
Enterprise-class cloud technology will be used by 70% of enterprises by 2012.
According to Forrester Research, 56% of organizations want desktop virtualization.
Cloud. Mobility. Video. Social. Open Source. Big Data. So what does all of this change mean?
CEOs are always thinking about profitable growth and business agility, and businesses expect service-on-demand anytime, anywhere. The users are all about personalization and communities. Business roles across organizations are dramatically changing with new delivery models, collaboration, and seamless access.
This is the “New Enterprise.”
Padmasree identified three megatrends that heavily impact the enterprise:
Mobility – “Bring Your Own Device” (a.k.a. BYOD)
Cloud – SaaS and virtualization
Immersive Collaboration – Pervasive video
These megatrends are adding pressure on the organization’s IT groups as they try to beef up security to meet accelerating cyber-threats; increase IT productivity, causing service and network management to become paramount; and increase energy efficiency (it’s not easy being green). I would agree with Padmasree’s assessment that the network is at the center of these challenges.
Cisco’s approach, said Padmasree, is to expose the entire network value. Cisco has an open programmable environment – creating APIs for access to multiple layers of the stack (transport, control plane, data plane, etc.).
Cloud environments are just more efficient – up to 50% TCO savings in a virtualized data center. According to Padmasree, Cisco’s strategy is to combine the unified data center and cloud intelligent network to enable cloud services. Coming up is Cisco Cloud Connect, scheduled for a June launch, to securely connect the data center to cloud resources. Said Padmasree: We will continue to partner with companies like VMware and EMC to create integrated solutions.
Padmasree concluded, “We are looking forward to working with everyone in the industry.” (What she didn’t say was “except for Huawei”…)
Next week, Interop 2012 takes place in Las Vegas. Of course, ScienceLogic will be there, at Booth 609, but I’m sure that most of you making the trip aren’t going just to see us. I mean sure, mostly to see us, but you’re gonna want to do other stuff too.
This year’s keynote speech looks like it’ll be interesting. Padmasree Warrior of Cisco will deliver a talk on how the major trends in the IT industry play into the larger business trends of the world. She’ll examine how the rise of mobility, the widespread adoption of cloud computing, and the new importance of video tie into business “mega-trends” of industry volatility, personalization, and global transformation.
We think a lot about these major trends here. Our ScienceLogic platform provides end-to-end performance metrics for your entire IT infrastructure, including mobile devices, cloud computing, and video services. I think we’re all hoping to glean some additional insight from Padmasree’s speech, as well as from the other Interop attendees. Our onsite team at Interop will be happy to discuss these issues with you, and show you how the ScienceLogic platform help our customers meet upcoming challenges.
Another keynote that has piqued my personal interest is the one by Bill Chang, Executive Vice President of the Business Group of Singapore Telecommunications Limited, about how IT has responded to the growth opportunities in Asia. I always find it interesting to hear how different regions of the world approach information technology: what challenges are unique to an area, and how they were overcome.
And if you can’t make it to hear Padmasree or Bill, well, there’s always Barry the Magician at the ScienceLogic booth!
If you can’t make it to Interop to talk to us in person, you can always request a demo to see ScienceLogic’s IT management abilities.
I’ve been reading Rebecca MacKinnon’s Consent of the Networked, which is a good primer on Internet free-speech issues in both autocratic and democratic societies.
In short: The Internet is not a magical freedom-bringer. It has brought more public discourse, but also increased the ability of repressive governments to find the identity of activists and suppress them.
Much of the book’s criticism is reserved for companies such as Facebook, which provides the most effective method of organizing protest in repressive regimes, but prohibits anonymity, and has often changed its privacy settings without notice. Yet the social networking service is so large and pervasive, it can be difficult to do business without Facebook, just because everyone seems to be on it.
But ultimately, the book makes a criticism that while the companies that host our content and enable us to communicate with each other are a fundamental part of our society, they operate without what philosopher John Locke called “the consent of the governed.” The policies that shape our technological lives are not decided, in most cases, by the user base, but by the companies that run the software. Some exceptions – especially in the Open Source movement – do exist, but they are not the norm.
“As Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig explained more than a decade ago in his seminal book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, software code and technical standards are for all practical purposes a new form of law, because just like laws, they shape what people can and cannot do.”
This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be concerned about when using cloud computing solutions for your company’s data. MacKinnon argues, in all cases, for the freedom of people, and for technology companies to do the right thing morally even if it may not be the easiest solution.
Although U.S. law is very specific about physical searches of homes and phone tapping, information stored on the cloud – everything from Amazon to Zoho Office – is currently “fair game” – law enforcement can request all data or email without need for a warrant if it was stored for more than 180 days. This law, passed in 1986, simply hasn’t kept up with the technology.
As cloud adoption continues to grow, the lack of guarantees that your data will not fall into the hands of outside hands continues to be one of the last barriers to adoption. Who can trust a cloud service willing to deliver your private information to a repressive government? Yahoo, for example, was embarrassed over its handling of the personal information of Shi Tao, a Chinese blogger. Yahoo handed over all the information that the Chinese government needed to locate and arrest Shi Tao, arguing that it had “complied with local laws.”
“As Congressman Tom Lantos put it at a dramatic congressional hearing lambasting executives from Yahoo as well as Google, Microsoft, and Cisco in February 2006, ‘If the secret police a half century ago asked where Anne Frank was hiding, would the correct answer be to hand over the information in order to comply with local laws?’”
Ultimately, it is up to us to fully understand and consider the implications of technology policies – both governmental and private. This is not an issue for the bearded Unix grognards to gripe about – these policies have real and tangible consequences on us as individuals and the businesses we steward.
Five years ago, Netflix was a household name for offering mail-order DVD rentals. Seven years ago, Valve was an independent computer game software developer. And ten years ago, Amazon.com was an online storefront for books. Today, Netflix streams video and makes video content, Valve is the biggest downloadable PC games distributor, and as for Amazon? Amazon’s business plan when they started was to be the earliest to develop and leverage network connectivity and computing power in order to sell books. Now what they’re selling is network connectivity and computing power.
The key factor in all these fields is the idea that businesses need to be extremely flexible. What you think your business is may not, indeed, be your business next year if you are savvy enough to recognize where your strengths are and take advantage of them.
Which makes the revelation of a Gartner survey that CIOs are being dismissed by CEO’s as “too techie” mindboggling. More specifically, Gartner found that companies are preferring to hire CIOs from outside, rather than building CIOs through their own business, and that the basic hierarchy of the CIO position hasn’t changed in the past ten years, despite the massive changes in information technology that have occurred not just in the tech industry but every industry. In fact, the role of the Chief Financial Officer will increase, according to a Google survey, while the role of the CIO decreases.
Part of the shift of emphasis from CIO to CFO is the shift in cloud computing. The role of the CIO has often been, to oversimplify it, to answer the question: “How do we support our business applications?” The answer, over the past few years, has often been: “We’ll pay someone else to do it for us.”
And this isn’t wrong, per se. Information technology is about increasing productivity, cutting costs, and providing new opportunities for profit – all of which are the prime motivators for cloud computing. But still, when companies focus only on their core competency, they may gain resolution, but they may also lose opportunity. Striking a balance is a difficult, yet necessary task.
Earlier this morning, ScienceLogic’s co-founder and chairman, David Link, gave a keynote address at the ScienceLogic Customer Symposium. So we tried to think of ways to introduce him to the crowd. We thought about focusing on his leadership abilities, upon the growth that ScienceLogic has had over the past nine years, about our service provider background. We took a team of six researchers, and thoroughly examined the company’s background and history, and spent a good deal of research time in finding out what information was most relevant to the message that we were trying to convey.
Then we decided to throw that all out and just put together a really silly video where we turn Dave into a folk hero who crosses the country like a “Johnny Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring-seed.”
We’d like to thank a few people for helping us put this together: First off, we’d like to thank the actors we hired from the Austin Improv Collective, including Bryan Roberts (who plays the Narrator, and previously played our Evil Overlord), Asaf Ronen (the Devil), Aden Kirschner (the Prospector), Clinton Harris (the Dam Engineer), Brett Tribe (the Lost Traveler). We’d also like to thank Sara Farr of the Puppet Improv Project, who helped assemble the green screen chromakey we used for all the scenes.
And yes, that is me singing and playing harmonica.
We are excited to hold our first annual Customer Symposium next week at the Hyatt Regency in Reston, Va! With the theme of “Navigating the Future,” we will discuss all things pertaining to IT operations and cloud management as well as feature a first look at the latest release of the ScienceLogic platform. Here’s a quick look at the activities:
Keynote speeches from ScienceLogic CEO Dave Link (“Navigating the Future”) and CTO Antonio Piraino (“Don’t Fly Blind into the Cloud: Management Imperatives”)
20+ educational sessions covering ScienceLogic capabilities and best practices
Valuable Q+A time with ScienceLogic product managers and executives
Information about the upcoming 7.2 product release, including a general session given by Eric Rudin, Senior Director of Product Management
Hands-on customer lab that provides one-on-one time with ScienceLogic experts
Networking opportunities, including roundtables and an evening social event
We’ll have two tracks of educational sessions for customers who are on either the technical or management side of IT, featuring topics such as:
Streamlining IT Operations with the ScienceLogic API
The Symposium is for ScienceLogic customers only. There is no registration fee for those with current product maintenance agreements and no limit on attendees per customer. To register for the event, please visit: http://www.sciencelogic.com/customer-symposium/register.
Stay tuned as we’ll be sharing some exciting news and information from the conference next week!
Okay, there’s enough technology out there to be sufficiently impressed by the supercomputers that we have in our wallets. And perhaps flying cars was never a feasible dream. Yet I can’t help but wonder why some technologies haven’t been developed, or haven’t taken off. Here are some examples:
Commodity Television
The same technology that brings us high speed internet also brings us television channels. It’s all compressed digital video, though. Why, then, do we still follow a “channel and time” model of distribution? Why not just allow people to download what shows they want to watch when they become available? Furthermore, why doesn’t this occur under a fully-competitive commodity standard, where content producers can choose to provide television shows as a service, as individual downloads, or both?
To me, the concept of channels is silly – yes, live sports and live news will always have a place, but it seems extremely wasteful to require people to watch a show at a specific time while sending 100+ other shows that they can’t – and don’t want to – watch simultaneously to them. And of course, it serves the long tail. Perhaps there are 8 people in the world who want to watch re-runs of the obscure game show “Duel” – why not get some revenue from them? The film is already in the can.
Consumer Cloud Compute
If a company wants to buy extra computing cycles to speed up database searches and rendering, they have many options, including AWS. But if I want to buy a few extra computing cycles to speed up rendering of a video, my only option is to buy more processing power in a desktop computer. It seems strange that cloud computing hasn’t made many inroads into the consumer market. Any application that required brute force computing – video and picture editing, for example – would be well served by cloud computing.
This will only become a bigger problem as we switch from bulky desktops and laptops to tablets – the iPad has a rudimentary video editing application, but I can’t imagine rendering on such a small processor running off of a charged battery.
Perhaps the bandwidth of consumer Internet – especially upload speeds – don’t support datacenter computing. But I think that it would be a boon to start developing consumer applications with multi-computer capability in mind. It may not be “a cloud,” but it would be nice if I could use my laptop or tablet on the road, and use the processing power of a desktop – or cluster of desktops – in my closet when I come to my home LAN.
Simple File Transfer
When I need to transfer a file from one computer to the next, why is it that every option seems overly complicated? Dropbox-style programs require setting up a network (and a fee), FTP requires DYNDNS, using instant messaging programs is a crapshoot – why can’t we just send large files as a link to the home computer in an e-mail – that when the recipient receives it, they can download it then? Perhaps you’d need to implement something like IPv6 universally to have enough IP addresses, or make the dynamic DNS systems simpler – perhaps installed at default with an operating system – but even so, why is sending files still a big challenge?
Easy to remember passwords as the standard
It seems that every Web site has a different standard for “acceptable passwords.” For example, I often encounter: “You must use capital letters, at least one number, and at least one symbol.” As Randall Monroe pointed out, this is easy for a computer to crack and hard for a human to remember. But take four normal random words, and it’s amazingly easy to remember, but would take centuries of computing time for a brute-force password cracker to get.
A neck strap for tablets
When I’m on the road and taking notes at a conference or keynote, I usually have my bulky laptop in my lap, typing while trying to use my wrists to keep the laptop from sliding off of my knees. It is uncomfortable, to say the least, and it seems that these conferences never give you tables to put laptops on. I’d consider getting a tablet, which seems to be much lighter, but tablets do not come with keyboards by default – even though I can buy a Bluetooth keyboard, I can’t type on the keyboard AND hold the tablet up. Why isn’t there a little neckstrap that I can buy that holds the tablet up and gives me a firm base while I type? Whoever can invent a solution and get it into the pages of SkyMall the fastest will certainly get a lot of money.
Today at FOSE, our CEO and co-founder Dave Link along with Jack Wilmer, Deputy CTO & Technical Director of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), spoke on the subject of Cloud First: Key Government Considerations for Selecting the Right Service Provider. It was a lively discussion that covered everything from cloud migration strategies to security policies to criteria for what should be hosted where and, of course, who should host it. Here is a look at what Dave and Jack said as well as how they answered audience questions:
DISA provides joint IT services to promote information sharing across the Department of Defense. Jack provided some information up front about the agency’s IT Enterprise Strategy Roadmap to increase security, operational effectiveness and reduce costs. They started pulling together 26 initiatives a year ago and have six in process now:
Data Center Consolidation – “Franchise” model. What is an enterprise data center? They are moving from over 700 data centers to a much smaller number, creating a robust enterprise model with common rate cards, etc. Key criterion: What’s the best place to host an application?
Joint Information Environment – Common infrastructure hosted in enterprise data center, so developers worry about the mission itself and not the infrastructure.
Identity and Access Management – Renewed emphasis on this. Who are you and what are you doing? Making sure you have access to all the information that you should have access to. Infinitely more complicated when it comes to fighting wars – interoperability with other countries’ fighting organizations.
SaaS Offerings – DOD Enterprise Email. Moving from 320K users 1.4 million (including the entire Army). They are hosting these users/email. Looking at more online/SaaS services like web conferencing. They’ve learned several lessons from doing this. As they roll out email, for example, local networks are all deployed/configured differently. As they move forward, they are looking to standardize.
Security – Command and control of the network. Network operations tools integrated with cyber command.
Dave started out discussing best practice ideas to help audience members walk out with information they could actually leverage. He asked the audience, “Who is using cloud today?” Only 10% raised their hand. One attendee asked, “How do you know if you’re on the cloud or not?” Dave said that is an interesting question, depending on the interface of course and how transparent it is to end user. Jack said the fact that you don’t know means we’re doing our job the right way. It shouldn’t matter to you – you should be able to access your data from anywhere. The goal is to take your CAC card and login from anywhere, securely.
Dave – “As you’re using these service offerings, how do you decide what services to include and from where to procure them? Of course there are the usual productivity tools, etc., but now users have more choices – look at iPhones, iPads, etc. It is critical that government IT have the right tools to deliver these services and measure/ensure service levels for their users.
If you work in IT, you know things break. And now you’re buying services from a basket of sources – you need to make sure that the service quality your end users are looking for is up to standard.”
Dave – “How many of you using Gmail? (Many hands went up.) So how are you backing up Gmail? What if there is a specific email you want to keep? How do you do that? (Response – “Forward to another location/email!”)
The reason I bring this up is we had a customer ask us if it is possible to backup my cloud emails/data to my data center? Interestingly – not backup to the cloud. Gmail does have a backup utility as well – backup to your own hard drive. But as IT professionals, you need to ask yourself, how do I get to my data?
Other service provider considerations – Look at the fine print of your service level agreements: Normally vendors of SaaS are responsible for the software updates. But what if one of the updates fixes some issues but breaks other functionality that your organization is dependent on? Will they agree to roll back a patch?
Does the service provider you are using provide a website or portal that is continually updated with the latest status, announcements, service levels, etc.?”
Questions/Comments from the audience:
1. “Regarding SLAs with Service Providers: We’re operating as a private cloud. I ask them to meet that criteria as a minimum. For example, end-to-end monitoring of the whole system and testing of all interfaces. The service provider I select must meet the criteria for the service level I have to provide to my end users.”
Dave – “Do your users need to access 24/7?”
Audience member – “Depends on the application but absolutely more need 24/7 availability service, mainly because of geographic coverage.”
Dave – “That’s a good point. Those are the kind of considerations that go into your service provider selection and your service level agreements. SLAs should be customized for each application use profile.”
Jack – “For our email service, we create 3 copies of all that data on different levels of storage. As you are talking about, it depends on the requirements. I would say that most service providers don’t customize their service levels – they offer what they offer. This is a huge struggle for government in particular. We are used to buying COTS but then customize. As we offer cloud services, it is very difficult to try to convince different organizations of that.”
2) How do you do chargeback to each agency?
Jack – “We don’t have to worry about profit, thank goodness. Some services are just funded and we don’t charge users. A second class of services is funded by working capital – so the Army and Navy, for example, will pay their “fair share,” e.g., $39/user.”
3) Are there standard SLAs offered by DISA?
Jack – “It depends on the application or service. We still need to negotiate how that works with our agencies. Different services require different amounts of “touch”, e.g., with our collaboration service, we provide first line of support, but for the email service, the Army provides first line of support.”
4) With storage on demand, have you found that your sustainment costs have gone down?
Jack – “Yes, actually cost per GB has gone down every year, but we don’t follow industry pricing models. We just charge per gateway. By the way, in government, some customers need the “regular” instead of the ad hoc pricing for budgeting purposes.”
5) What collaboration tools do you provide?
Jack – “Web-based conferencing and chat – we’ve had different contests around this over the years for selecting vendors.”
6) Could you elaborate about enterprise services and how they are supplied as SaaS? Is there something called EaaS?
Jack – “Even before ‘cloud’ terms came out, we’ve had a focus on providing enterprise services. So collaboration via web but without some of the cloud promises like elasticity that we’re able to provide now.”
Dave – “If you look at the definition of the cloud, look at NIST. “Shared pool, multi-tenant resources.” Phase one is looking at how to use these new technologies to become more efficient. But honestly IT has been doing this for years – you’ve already been doing this. But the key is how do you leverage what you have now to deliver the right solution to the right end user audience, cloud or not. I was just out speaking at AFCOM, and they were talking about industry clouds, government clouds, open cloud platforms. Ten years from when we started talking about cloud/virtualization on a wider scale, just over half (52%) of servers globally are virtualized. Not everything is moving to the cloud. You will still make decisions about what should be hosted where.”
7) Open source initiatives – How is that tied into these SaaS offerings?
Jack – “We are trying to include open source where we can, from Linux for the operating system to some of the applications themselves.”
8) How does the cloud change things for traditional IT?
Jack – “From an efficiency perspective, a lot of good is done in the cloud. But from a practical perspective, there are some applications that cannot move for various application, operational and security considerations.”
Dave – “We all have to be pragmatic in our approach. You’re looking at budget with the constituents you are trying to serve. For IT today – IT is spending less time on system administration and more on sourcing, mobility, etc.; the ‘higher level’ functions that we think IT should always have enough time to do.”
Dave – Final Thoughts on Selecting a Service Provider:
Document a methodology for determining service levels.
Do you get an automatic credit if there are service level violations or do you have to ask for it?
Check your contract and read the fine print. Is there an out if there are repeat SLA violations?
How transparent is your service provider? How easily can you see your service health and risk?
Where is your data going to reside? Is there backup? And can I always get to it?
Jack – Final Thoughts on Selecting a Service Provider: “How do you prevent vendor lock-in? Make sure you think about migration strategy as well – like the point that Dave made earlier about your data. It’s important to think ahead because there are no widely accepted standards when it comes to the cloud.”
I remember with particular clarity some moments of my early teenage years. Usually the traumatizing ones. My first girlfriend and how she dumped me via the phone, random alcohol testing during junior prom under the school’s first “zero-tolerance” policy, and the time I accidentally called my history teacher “Mom.” (Sorry, Mr. Weinstein.) 
