Who would have thought that the Tablet Wars are between Apple, Google, and Amazon

I have an iPad, Samsung Tablet, and a 1st generation Kindle Fire.   In the past month Apple, Google and Amazon have announced their new Tablets and CNET has a post on display quality.

iPad Air topped by Kindle Fire HDX in display quality test

The iPad Air has an "excellent" display -- but not quite as excellent as the Kindle Fire HDX 8.9, DisplayMate says.

On Thursday I am getting a Kindle Fire HDX 8.9.  During the day I find myself spending time in amazon’s, apple’s, and google’s mobile OS.  The true test on the Kindle HDX is what my kids think.  They are always making fun of the number of things I use during the day.  One of these days they may understand what I am doing what all the devices creating a mobile service solution. When I try to tell the story of what I am building I feel like it is bedtime situation.  My family usually gets sleepy, nods their head, “uh huh”, “yea”, and they are ready to go to sleep. I’ve learned this lesson and don’t tell the mobile stories unless I have someone who has the problem set we are trying to solve.  That’s when they are awake. 

What is interesting is Amazon, Apple, and Google are each trying to solve a different mobile problem which is defined by their business model.

Valve's Steam exhausts the heat three ways for CPU, Graphics Card, & Power Supply

Here is is a simple solution to the heat problems in a PC.  Exhaust the CPU, Graphics Card, and Power supply separately and isolate their heat. The Verge got a chance to check out the Valve Steam Machine.

The Steam Box

Valve will ship 300 prototype Steam Machines to beta testers this year, and there's nothing particularly special about their specs. That’s kind of the point, though: the first Steam Machine is a computer that can fit bog standard parts just like a full-size gaming rig, and yet fit into your entertainment center. Valve's steel and aluminum chassis measures just over 12 inches on a side and is 2.9 inches tall, making it a little bigger than an Xbox 360 and smaller than any gaming PC of its ilk. And yet the box manages to fit a giant Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan graphics card and a full desktop CPU — and keep those parts quiet and cool — without cramming them in like a jigsaw puzzle.

The secret is actually quite simple, it turns out: Valve designed the case so the parts can breathe individually. The CPU blows air out the top, the power supply out the side, and the graphics card exhaust out back, and none share any airspace within the case.

That might sound like common sense, but it’s remarkably hard to find a case that does so while still making it easy to drop components in. Here, the key component responsible for dividing those three zones is a simple plastic shroud which unscrews in a jiffy. The box we touched was already surprisingly cool and quiet, but Valve's still tweaking the design: we saw Valve printing a couple of the shrouds as we walked through its rapid prototyping lab.

Microsoft makes its first Wind Power Purchase in Texas

GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher reports on Microsoft’s Wind Power Purchase for data centers.

Microsoft to buy Texas wind energy to power its San Antonio data center

by Katie Fehrenbacher

6 HOURS AGO

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SUMMARY:

Microsoft gets into the game of buying clean power directly from a power company for a data center in Texas.

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Microsoft is buying clean energy to help power a data center for the first time. On Monday morning the tech giant announced that it has entered a deal to buy 110 MW of wind energy from a wind farm that will be located just outside of Forth Worth, Texas, and will be connected to the power grid that supplies power to Microsoft’s San Antonio datacenter.

Obama's Obamacare peer reviewed by President Carter, tried your best which is questionable

Peer reviewing is good for the soul if you want to learn from your mistakes and build better systems.  I use peer review all the time to test ideas, software, and research.

How much better would Obamacare be if it had run through a peer review process?  Well, it is going through peer review now to get things fixed.

Here is an interview with President Carter in Parade, and you guessed it Obama comes up.  

On how he would evaluate the Obama presidency so far:
JC: “He’s done the best he could under the circumstances. His major accomplishment was Obamacare, and the implementation of it now is questionable at best.”

Ouch.  Your Democratic President peer with years more experience lays it out to the public.  Sometimes the best way to get people to change is not to tell the person, but to tell the public what you would tell that person.

Oh yeh, BTW I found this article through one of my super smart friends I have known for 25 years.  He has Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, Google on his resume.  I have HP, Apple, Microsoft.  With friends to run peer reviews, we try not to do really stupid things like Obamacare V1.0.

Hey that’s it.  Obamacare will be like Windows, it will be good in version 3.0.  Who was a Windows 1.0 or 2.0 user.  By the time 3.0 came out there were 10X-100X more users.  Oops, that’s not going to help Obamacare now.

HGST ships Helium filled HD with 49% higher performance per watt per TB

As most of you know storage whether it is RAM, SSD, or good old HD has a cost and power impact in the data center.  HGST announced today a new Helium filled HD.

First Hermetically Sealed, Helium HDD Platform Provides Path for Higher Capacity Storage, While Significantly Lowering Power and Cooling, and Improving Storage Density
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Cloud Expo Silicon Valley (Booth #209), November 4, 2013 – HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), today announced that it is shipping the 6TB Ultrastar He6 hard disk drive (HDD). Key OEM, cloud and research leaders working closely with HGST to qualify the drive include HP, Netflix, Huawei Unified Storage, CERN, Green Revolution Cooling and Code42, as well as some of the world’s largest social media and search companies. Revealed in September 2012, HGST’s cutting-edge HelioSeal™ platform provides a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come while significantly lowering customer total cost of ownership (TCO). Leveraging the inherent benefits of helium, which is one-seventh the density of air, the new Ultrastar He6 drive features HGST’s innovative 7Stac™ disk design with 6TB, making it the world’s highest capacity HDD with the best TCO for cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments.

I first saw this news in ComputerWorld’s post, then found the press release.  Here are some of the stats.

TCOptimized™ - Driving Down Data Center TCO with HeliumThe amount of data that companies need to store is growing exponentially, but IT budgets remain flat. With 6TB, a low 5.3 idle watts, a reduced weight of 640g, and running at 4-5°C cooler, the new Ultrastar He6 lowers data center TCO on virtually every level. Key TCO benefits when compared to a 3.5-inch, five-platter, air-filled 4TB drive include:
Highest Capacity HDD on the Market; 6TB, Seven-disk Design, Providing the Best TCOLowest Power Consumption with Best Watts-per-TB
-23 percent lower idle power per drive -49 percent better watts-per-TBBest Density Footprint in a Standard 3.5-inch Form Factor -50 percent higher capacity
Lighter Weight than a Standard Five-disk 3.5-inch Drive–50g lighter even with two more disks, offering 50 percent more capacity–38 percent lower weight-per-TB- 

One of the companies referenced is Netflix.  Isn’t Netflix all in AWS. NO.

“The Netflix Open Connect delivery platform is a highly optimized video content delivery network. We serve billions of hours of streaming video per quarter to over 40 million subscribers,” said David Fullagar, director of Content Delivery Architecture, Netflix. “As part of our efforts to optimize the delivery ecosystem for Netflix and our Internet Service Provider partners, we strive to build better and better streaming appliances. The high storage density and lower power usage of the Ultrastar He6 hard drives allow us to continue with that goal, and create a great customer experience.”