The Space Shuttle is an interesting feat of engineering. There is not a data center story in this, but I know many of you would enjoy this video.
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In Pacific NW, 1 nuclear plant is more expensive to maintain than 31 hydro-electric plants
Washington State has one nuclear power plant that is up for renewal.
Seattle Times science reporter
RICHLAND — When Washington's only commercial nuclear-power plant applied for license renewal last year, the timing seemed charmed. Hailed as a clean alternative to carbon-belching coal and gas, atomic power was poised for a renaissance.
Operators at the Columbia Generating Station near Richland were so bullish on the technology they talked about expanding with small, modular reactors.
PREV
In another Seattletimes article discussing the cost and benefits of nuclear power, the maintenance cost is mentioned.
Looking only at operating and maintenance costs, Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) puts the price at 3.6 cents per kwh. Hydropower costs about 2.8 cents per kwh.
BPA has had to boost rates — including a proposed 8 percent increase for 2012-13 — to pay for upgrades at the nuclear-power plant. According to a 2009 BPA analysis, it costs more to maintain and operate the Columbia Generating Station than all 31 of the hydropower plants in the Columbia Basin combined.
But the plant provides about 10 percent of BPA's electricity, which would have to be replaced if it were shut down.
Organizational Charts- Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Oracle, and Microsoft
Here is a post a a friend shared on some tech companies organizational Charts.
I don't know about you, but I couldn't have done any better to add humor to how companies can look.
Google's shows a complexity in the hierarchy.
Amazon has simplicity that comes from a Retailer with separate business units.
Apple shows how the world revolves around the red dot - Steve Jobs.
Facebook is different version of a flat organization.
Oracle shows the power. the power of Oracle Legal.
And, Microsoft. This is one way to explain business units (Windows, Office, and XBOX) survival tactics.
The complete original post is here. But, it was more fun to break up the sections.
CA Technologies, a cloud player most don’t think about
CNET has an article about CA Technologies focus on cloud computing. Check out this statement.
As a side note, I've always thought of CA as a place where software goes to die--an image that the company is well aware of and working to fix. I was impressed with the focus and forward-looking comments from both Fry and Debra Danielson, senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions, and I expect to see them be more aggressive about marketing their cloud-oriented products.
The article is about a discussion with Jay Fry, VP of marketing for cloud computing.
At this week's Structure conference in San Francisco, I spoke with Jay Fry, vice president of marketing for cloud computing, about what the company is doing to address the burgeoning cloud marketplace. (The company changed its name last year from CA, and before that it was Computer Associates.)
According to Fry, this year is about figuring out what customers really want--not just from CA Technologies, but from any vendor focused on the emerging cloud market. Enterprise users are trying to keep things under their control while service providers are looking to get users connected to their services. The rate and pace of cloud adoption are very different depending on the use case.
I’ve known Jay Fry since his days at Cassatt, a company CA acquired and Jay came over. Jay is a data center guy and I’ve chatted with Jay at Gartner Data Center, Uptime Symposium, Structure, and even at a Starbuck’s when we have been able to connect our schedules when we are both in the bay area.
It is nice to see a write-up on what I have learned in my conversations with Jay. If you haven’t thought about CA Technologies as a cloud player, you should.
Is data center infrastructure a battle ground for terrorist vs. governments?
MSNBC has news about a hacker attack on al-Qaida’s web com sites.
NBC News: Hacker attack cripples al-Qaida web communications
Digital assault is similar to one last year linked to UK government
WASHINGTON — Computer hackers shut down al-Qaida's ability to communicate its messages to the world through the Internet, interrupting the group's flow of videos and communiqués, according to a terrorism expert.
"Al-Qaida's online communications have been temporarily crippled, and it does not have a single trusted distribution channel available on the Internet," said Evan Kohlmann, of Flashpoint Global Partners, which monitors the group's communications.
This could be the action of government-sponsored hackers.
Kohlmann said the latest incident "once again appears to bear the telltale fingerprints of government-sponsored hackers."
Think about this. Would you want to be the persons trying to repair the al-Qaida outage? Don’t you think the hackers and others are watching who is repairing the outage. It is hard to hide when you are repairing something that has lots of visibility.
This is like flushing out the enemy and setting a trap. If you scare the IT staff too much they don’t repair the site which is a win as well.
Can you imagine the guys trying to figure out how to repair the sites and constantly worried a predator UAV is targeting them?