Gala Coral Group

Gala Coral Group Ltd is a British betting shop, bingo and casino operator owned by private equity firms Candover Investments, Cinven and Permira. In October 2005 it merged with Coral Eurobet for £2.18 billion. The acquisition made it the UK's third largest bookmaker and largest bingo operator. It owns over 30 casinos. Coral will remain a brand and trading division of the new group.

The Group headquarters are in Nottingham (Gala Bingo and Casino), Stratford, London (Coral), and Woking (Gala Coral Remote Gaming). However, in 2011, a decision was made to move substantial parts of the business to Gibraltar, including almost all of the remote gaming division.

The group, through acquisitions and new developments have over 1800 licensed betting offices.

In July 2015, it was announced that Ladbrokes would merge with its slightly smaller rival Gala Coral, and that Ladbrokes' CEO, Jim Mullen would become the CEO of the new company, Ladbrokes Coral.

Group divisions

Gala Bingo

Gala Bingo operates 137 clubs throughout the UK, with approximately a 24% share of all clubs and nearly 40% of National Bingo Game ticket sales up until the operator's withdrawal from the National Game in Summer 2008.

Coral Content Distribution Network

The Coral Content Distribution Network, sometimes called Coral Cache or Coral, is a free peer-to-peer content distribution network designed and operated by Michael Freedman. Coral uses the bandwidth of a world-wide network of web proxies and nameservers to mirror web content, often to avoid the Slashdot Effect or to reduce the load on websites servers in general.

Operation

One of Coral's key goals is to avoid ever creating 'hot spots' of very high traffic, as these might dissuade volunteers from running the software out of a fear that spikes in server load may occur. It achieves this through an indexing abstraction called a distributed sloppy hash table (DSHT); DSHTs create self-organizing clusters of nodes which fetch information from each other to avoid communicating with more distant or heavily-loaded servers.

The sloppy hash table refers to the fact that Coral is made up of concentric rings of distributed hash tables (DHTs), each ring representing a wider and wider geographic range (or rather, ping range). The DHTs are composed of nodes all within some latency of each other (for example, a ring of nodes within 20 milliseconds of each other). It avoids hot spots (the 'sloppy' part) by only continuing to query progressively larger sized rings if they are not overburdened. In other words, if the two top-most rings are experiencing too much traffic, a node will just ping closer ones: when a node that is overloaded is reached, upward progression stops. This minimises the occurrence of hot spots, with the disadvantage that knowledge of the system as a whole is reduced.

Coral (name)

Coral is a female first name of Indo-European origins. It was the 943rd most popular name in the United States from 1900-1909, the 977th in 1991, and 988th in 1992.

Notable people with this name include: Coral Atkins, Coral Browne, Coral Smith and Carl "Coral" Eugene Watts.

Fictional characters

Bayé

Bayé is a town in the Solenzo Department of Banwa Province in western Burkina Faso. As of 2005 it had a population of 5,478.

References

Coordinates: 12°04′N 4°05′W / 12.067°N 4.083°W / 12.067; -4.083

Bay (shelving)

A bay is a basic unit of library shelving. Bays are book cases about 3 feet (0.9 m) wide. Bays are stuck together in rows. Items are shelved from the top shelf to the bottom shelf in each bay.

Rows consist of a number of bays, either single-sided or double-sided, connected to each other. The standard length of a row is five to six bays, but it is not uncommon to find rows seven bays wide or even wider. In some countries a row is referred to as a 'stack' or a 'range'.

References

Bay (chancellor)

Bay, also called Ramesse Khamenteru, (died 1192 BC) was an important Asiatic official in ancient Egypt, who rose to prominence and high office under Seti II Userkheperure Setepenre and later became an influential powerbroker in the closing stages of the 19th Dynasty. He was generally identified with Irsu (alt. Arsu, Iarsu, Yarsu) mentioned in the Great Harris Papyrus, although no contemporary source connects Bay with Irsu.

Bay's importance is emphasized by the fact that he was given permission, possibly by Seti but more probably by Siptah, to construct his own tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings (KV13). His tomb was clearly constructed as part of a triad of tombs, including that of the Pharaoh Siptah and Queen Twosret. This was an unprecedented privilege, the likes of which were rarely accorded to a commoner, let alone a foreigner (though previous exceptions, such as that of Yuya, have occurred). It is possible that Bay was accorded this tomb because he was a relation of Siptah's mother, a Canaanite concubine of Seti II, or perhaps even of Amenmesse. His tomb was later usurped under the Twentieth Dynasty by prince Mentuherkhepshef, a son of Ramesses IX.