Water is a fundamental to so much we do, but unappreciated except when it is scarce. You are in the desert. Or more often you are in car full of kids driving and the kids are thirsty, and you forgot to stock up on drinks before you left. The value of water is much higher now.
So, why shouldn't location and the site's availability of water be considered when thinking of environmental impact?
Veolia water illustrates this point comparing peanuts to tomato sauce.
Another example is beef production.
A second example: the volume of water needed to produce one pound of beef – 1,857 gallons – appears to be the same regardless of whether the beef comes from a water-rich or water-poor area. But the impact on the water resource in two different states or, for that matter, two different areas of one state (East and West Texas, for example) can vary considerably.
The question few environmental groups ask is what is the local impact? If there is plenty of power from existing infrastructure, is it possible that a renewable energy plant could have a higher environmental impact?
Most don't want to think about this issue, because it complicates the call to action. Save our planet, renewable energy is the answer, in some places. :-)
Do You Want to Help Build the Next AWS Service?By Werner Vogels on 19 April 2012 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Over the past several years I’ve spent much of my time traveling around the world speaking about distributed systems. From building infinitely scalable data stores, architectures for high performance computing, to the challenges imposed by the CAP theorem, there are wonderful, complex, fascinating problems to be solved in the area of distributed computing. During my travels I’ve met thousands of brilliant engineers who are leveraging the cloud to deliver exciting new products and revolutionize IT as we know it. One thing that’s become obvious to me is that there are innovative, inspiring developers in every corner of the planet from Australia to Iceland and from Israel to Peru.
The specific jobs posts are here.
And that leads me to another distributed problem – finding good engineers to help AWS build the next generation of cloud computing services. We’ve got a big vision and to realize it we need to find qualified engineers to join us on our journey. A quick look at the AWS career web sites reveals that we are hiring hundreds of people around the world.
I often get asked the question of what Facebook will do with the ginormous amount of money it will raise as part of its forthcoming initial public offering that will value the company in excess of $100 billion? I don’t know how they will put all of it to use, but a nice piece of it will go towards maintaining and building out is backend infrastructure. The company on Thursday announced that its second data center in Forest City, N.C., is now serving live user traffic.
I think Gigaom's repeated questions on data centers is what got them to recruit me as an analyst for GigaOm Pro.
Watching the data center industry is sometimes like a Kobayashi Maru scenario, a no-win scenario. So much of what goes on is the same as what was done last year, the year before that, and the year before that. The rules are written to keep things relatively the same with small changes allowing the established players to keep on winning. Name a start-up like Instagram in the data center industry.
One of the most disruptive forces in the industry is Amazon Web Services, but so far it has mostly allowed the established players to modify their offerings to include private clouds. Companies like Zynga start in AWS, and move to wholesale space when they are ready to reduce costs which supports the normal growth of the data center industry.
James T. Kirk beat the no-win scenario by redefining the game.
James T. Kirk took the test three times while at Starfleet Academy. Prior to his third attempt, Kirk surreptitiously reprogrammed the simulator so that it was possible to rescue the freighter. This fact finally comes out in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, as Kirk, Saavik and others appear marooned, near death. Saavik's response is, "Then you never faced that situation...faced death." Kirk replies, "I don't believe in the no-win scenario." Despite having cheated, Kirk had been awarded a commendation for "original thinking."
Which brings me to part of the conversation with Compass Data Center's Chris Crosby. Chris commented.
Professionally, I’m already enjoying the freedom of thinking clearly about building a brand again. I get to figure out my own personalized approach based upon all of my experiences and the input of incredibly bright friends and colleagues. It’s freeing and fun. It’s almost like a disease when you want to have everincreasing responsibilities.
...
I had a whole summer off where I fielded a lot of phone calls and gained a lot of perspective. It was healthy for me. I got disassociated from the personalities of the business and now have a clear refreshed perspective on the business potential.
One way to describe what Chris is trying to do and where we connect on ideas is there are a lot of things that occur that don't make sense. It is like the scene in Moneyball where the scout makes a comment about a players girlfriend.
"Ugly girlfriend means bad eyesight," warned the scout.
Says Pitt, "We put a version of that line in the script, 'Ugly girlfriend means no confidence.' But what he really said was 'bad eyesight.'"
What is needed is a different way to play the game. Play the game to win with much less money.
Slate has an article that goes into a lot more detail of Michael Lewis and Billy Beane.
But “Moneyball” is also a phenomenon, which after changing baseball is now sweeping almost all ballgames, from British soccer to Australian rules football. And it’s a phenomenon that reaches beyond sport. With hindsight, what Lewis captures in his book—the triumph of the highly educated over the lesser educated—is exactly what happened in the American economy.
Changing. Being innovative is hard. And just as the established scouts protested...
Innovation hurts. After Beane began using numbers to find players, the A’s’ scouts lost their lifelong purpose. In the movie, one of them protests to Pitt: “You are discarding what scouts have done for 150 years.” That was exactly right. Similar fates had been befalling all sorts of lesser-educated American men for years, though the process is more noticeable now than it was in 2003 when Moneyball first appeared. The book, Lewis agrees, is partly “about the intellectualisation of a previously not intellectual job. This has happened in other spheres of American life. I think the reason I saw the story so quickly is, this is exactly what happened on Wall Street while I was there. You had the equivalent of the old school…”
The executives were even more shocked.
But the former ballplayers who then ran baseball were even more aghast. The notion that numbers could trump gut outraged them. Unfortunately for them, a year after the book appeared, the Boston Red Sox, with the 30-year-old Yale graduate Theo Epstein as general manager, won the world series of 2004 using Moneyball methods. In 2007 the Red Sox won again. Other teams began hiring Epsteins and Beanes rather than clubbable ex-players. Last season only three of 30 GMs in the major leagues had played professional baseball, none of them very successfully. Beane has ended up restricting job opportunities in baseball for people from backgrounds like Beane’s.
So, what is the secret that Chris Crosby is working on, looking at the numbers. He'll be writing about it on his own blog posts, then we'll discuss it publicly. But, I don't plan on writing a book on the story and turning it into a movie. :-) It is much more fun thinking of ways to help Chris in his vision.
However, the people who make this objection don’t seem to grasp the basic principles of imitation and catch-up. Once all teams are playing Moneyball, then playing Moneyball no longer gives you an edge. Indeed, the richer clubs have the means to play it smarter. The New York Yankees recently hired 21 statisticians, Beane marvels.
There are some interesting people working on the Compass Data Center system. People who don't like to the no-win situation in data centers, and get it how MoneyBall ideas can change the game.
