What Explains the Supply of Fame? - Famous Belgians. Over a long dinner (and more than a few glasses of wine) with some economist friends, conversation turned to trying to understand why happiness is declining in Belgium. Helena Svaleryd offered an audacious new theory: the Belgians have not enjoyed the rise of celebrity culture that provides so much amusement for the rest of us. Concurring, Anna Sjögren argued that no one in Belgium is famous. You may argue that this theory is questionable. But if everyone does this, it may be more profitable instead to attack the empirical premise. At least that is my usual approach.
But the premise is true: Belgium is suffering a severe shortage of famous people. Between the five of us at dinner, we managed to come up with one-and-a-half famous Belgians: Hergé (the author of the Tintin books), and Tia Hellebaut, a leading women’s high jumper (whose surname couldn’t be recalled). The website Famousbelgians.net boasts of 259 famous Belgians, but I have heard of very few of them. 11 Business Plans For Twitter. Bridgesandforrester. Sun buys cloud-computing vendor Q-layer - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership. IDG News Service — Sun Microsystems has bought Q-layer, a Belgian vendor of software for automating the management of computing clouds, it said Wednesday. The acquisition provides a clue as to how Sun plans to go about delivering on the cloud computing strategy it outlined last month. Q-layer is the developer of NephOS, a system designed to allow enterprises to create and manage their own private computing clouds by linking facilities operated by different divisions of the enterprise.
The software works with Windows and Linux, according to Q-layer, which says it has partnerships with Microsoft and VMWare. Sun is counting on Q-layer's technology to enable rapid provisioning and deployment of applications, servers, storage and bandwidth within cloud computing infrastructures. In December, Sun staff described how they hope to sell to companies running cloud development platforms and computing infrastructure. Q-layer, founded in 2005, will join Sun's Cloud Computing business unit.