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.

Korall

Korall (Russian: Коралл) is a Russian cream cheese with a shrimp flavoring. The cheese began production in Soviet times. Today the brand has no single owner, and is produced by several companies.

The cheese is characteristically pink and is soft. Spices are often added to the cheese, just as black pepper to accompany the taste of shrimp and black pepper. Korall contains 60% fat and no more than 2% salt, and around 10% protein fish paste. On the cover of the white polystyrene boxes it is sold in is the image of a crayfish and it is packaged in boxes of 50, 100, 150, 200 and 250 g, as well as in tubes.

References

Requiem

A Requiem or Requiem Mass, also known as Mass for the dead (Latin: Missa pro defunctis) or Mass of the dead (Latin: Missa defunctorum), is a Mass in the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the soul or souls of one or more deceased persons, using a particular form of the Roman Missal. It is frequently, but not necessarily, celebrated in the context of a funeral.

Musical settings of the propers of the Requiem Mass are also called Requiems, and the term has subsequently been applied to other musical compositions associated with death and mourning, even when they lack religious or liturgical relevance.

The term is also used for similar ceremonies outside the Roman Catholic Church, especially in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of Anglicanism and in certain Lutheran churches. A comparable service, with a wholly different ritual form and texts, exists in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, as well as in the Methodist Church.

The Mass and its settings draw their name from the introit of the liturgy, which begins with the words "Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine" – "Grant them eternal rest, O Lord". ("Requiem" is the accusative singular form of the Latin noun requies, "rest, repose".) The Roman Missal as revised in 1970 employs this phrase as the first entrance antiphon among the formulas for Masses for the dead, and it remains in use to this day.

Requiem (John 5 album)

Requiem is the fourth solo album by guitarist John 5. It is essentially an instrumental metal album, but it also has some bluegrass elements. The album is notable for having the majority of its songs named after medieval torture devices.

The first single, "Sounds of Impalement", was released via John 5's official website.

Reception

The album received generally positive reviews, the album received a 3/5 on Sputnik Music and a 10/10 on FPM102, the highest rating the site had ever given to a metal album.

Track listing

Personnel

Requiem (MacMillan)

Requiem is a one-act ballet created by Kenneth MacMillan in 1976 for the Stuttgart Ballet. The music is Gabriel Fauré's Requiem (1890). The designer was Yolanda Sonnabend, who had first collaborated with him on 1963's Symphony.

In MacMillan's words, "This danced Requiem is dedicated to the memory of my friend and colleague John Cranko, Director of the Stuttgart Ballet 1961–1973." The first performance was given at Stuttgart on 28 November 1976. MacMillan recreated the piece for the Royal Ballet, London, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden on 3 March 1983.

MacMillan's decision to set a ballet to Fauré's Requiem met with opposition from the board of the Royal Ballet. Catholic members of the board felt that sacred music should not be used for ballet. MacMillan wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury to seek his opinion. Although the response was favourable to MacMillan the board remained unpersuaded. MacMillan then contacted the artistic director of the Stuttgart Ballet who had previously expressed an interest in commissioning a ballet from him. They reacted with enthusiasm. The piece was a portrait of the ballet company coming to terms with the death of Cranko, their much-loved artistic director.