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Most of my readers are USA based, but many of you aren’t. It is Thanksgiving this week in USA, and I am committed to disconnect more, but not completely as next week is a busy week traveling to Atlanta and North Carolina.
I won’t be blogging much for next couple of weeks with vacation and traveling.
Happy Thanksgiving!
I think there should be a “Life is Good, Disconnect” T-shirt. Although that is probably not as appealing as these.
I just got back from 7x24 Exchange in San Antonio.
And one of the simple reasons I like the conference is there are smart people attending and they are social. There are conferences that have smart people, but it is hard to socialize or the attendees aren’t very social. And, there are even more conferences you can go to where the people are social (aka sales people & business development), but the attendees are not some of the smartest in the industry.
A simple way to look at what conferences I attend is whether there are smart people attending and are they social. So far my favorites are 7x24 Exchange and GigaOm. I work for GigaOm Research as a freelance researcher now, but before that I found the conferences met the bar which is part of why I accepted the invitation to work with the research group.
Working in a data center is not glamorous. Neither is working in warehouse. I used to spend lots of times in warehouses at HP and Apple working in logistics. Big buildings with racks and rack of pallets. I remember when the Mac 512K was going to be released and people were excited about the product. I said the Mac 512K is no different than the Mac 128K, same size box, and it weights the same. All that is different is the sku # and a label. Many times the servers look like that to people in the data center, it’s another 1U server, what processor it has, RAM, HD, or SSD isn’t that much difference. How much does it weigh, how much power does it consume.
BBC has a controversial post from a warehouse worker in the UK on the conditions inside the warehouse.
"We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.
Prof Marmot, one of Britain's leading experts on stress at work, said the working conditions at the warehouse are "all the bad stuff at once"."We don't think for ourselves, maybe they don't trust us to think for ourselves as human beings, I don't know."
He said: "The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness."
One of the observations I have made and asked others about.
“Do you notice that we don’t see people at other data center companies that are ex-Amazon data center staff?"
“We’ll see ex-Microsoft, ex-Google, etc. But, when was the last time you saw someone who was ex-amazon data center? Many of us know a person or two who have joined amazon.com and once they are in, they disappear."
One way you could explain is they are so burnt out of working on data centers at amazon.com they don’t want to do it any more. Maybe the noncompete agreements are too painful.
Any vendor who works on amazon.com projects knows they say nothing about their work for amazon if they want to stay a supplier.
There are many who pride themselves on being competitive. So competitive they are regularly saying in their mind and to others how much better they are than the rest. This superior attitude then leads you to think others are dumb. They don’t get it. Your way is better than others.
This could be described by Type A vs. Type B behaviors.
I have many times told the story one of the things I realized being surrounded by many Type A people in major corporations is that one way to look at people who are Type A is they are much more insecure than Type B, and happen to be really good at a few things. So good at these few things that they these things become a top priority in their work and lives, they then tell others how good they are at these things. Some may be impressed. Many times though as time goes on, 5, 10, 15, 20 years, it looks kind of silly.
An example is Intel’s new CEO admitting the company had become Insular. The world does not revolve around x86 processors. In the Intel view, they are dominant of the x86 processor and they beat everyone else. Meanwhile, many others have moved on to smartphones and tablets where the x86 processor is irrelevant.
“We’d become insular,” Krzanich said. “We’d become focused on what was our best product versus where the market wanted to move.”
...
“I was personally embarrassed that we seemed to have lost our way,” said Bryan, who lives in Oregon and works from Intel's Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro. He acknowledged that Intel had flat-out missed the consumer appeal of the iPad and other tablets, which now run primarily on designs from rival ARM Holdings.
That “put us in a hole,” Bryant said. “We’re paying a price for that right now.”
I can imagine there were dozens if not hundreds of people since the launch of the iPhone and iPad at Intel who were trying to tell others to wake up and embrace the mobile market. “We are we have the Intel Atom.” No that is a dumbed down x86. The market wants a powerful mobile chip. “We have the Intel Atom v2, then version 3.” Meanwhile Qualcomm ships a Snapdragon 800.
One way to view Intel is to think of them is not as a processor company, but as the dominant x86 processor semiconductor manufacturing company. No one builds x86 processors better than Intel. Who cares? Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, Marvell, and many others are running many times faster than Intel building ARM processors to create the mobile experience. Intel has become Insular to the mobile change.
We all have many more ARM processors in our lives than x86.
This problem is not unique to Intel. I can name many more dominant companies that show the Insular, Type A I am better than you weak Type B people behavior. Type A people because they are so competitive they will do anything to get to the top which means the Insular views grow faster.
One thing I learned is waiting for change is more frustrating than just moving on. Some who are Insular will show a steady decline, than no different than that hype competitive person is point the blame on other things, and not on themselves that they focused on something that most of us don’t care about.
in·su·larˈins(y)ələr/adjectiveadjective: insular
synonyms: narrow-minded, small-minded, inward-looking, parochial, provincial,small-town, shortsighted, hidebound, blinkered; More
antonyms: broad-minded, tolerant
antonyms: cosmopolitan
BBC reports on Duke Energy Renewables paying $1 million for eagle deaths from wind turbines.
A huge US energy supplier has agreed to pay out $1m (£620,000) over the deaths of golden eagles at two wind farms.
Duke Energy Renewables agreed to the sum after pleading guilty to charges over the deaths of 14 eagles in the past three years at the Wyoming site.
It is the first time the Obama administration has taken action against a wind energy company in such a case, the AP news agency report.
There are almost always consequences from energy projects, even renewable ones. I wonder if Bird Lovers will protest the Renewable Energy movement?
Other Birds are killed by a Solar Array in California.
Some animal rights activists are wondering just how many birds green energy may unintentionally kill as more and more birds turn up dead at solar energy facilities throughout California.
A recent article by Vice author Lex Berko notes that dead birds are being found with "singed wings" around several California solar energy facilities.
It happens that many of California's solar plants are, the article claims, in the path of "the four major north-to-south trajectories for migratory birds" called "the Pacific Flyway."
Birds are dying in one of two ways. In some cases, they imagine the shining solar panels to be bodies of water and dive straight into them. There they die when they smash into the panels from the sky.
Others "feel the wrath of the harnessed sunlight." The ultra polished solar mirrors bounce sunrays strong enough to burn the feathers off birds that quickly crash to the ground, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Many of the fowl dying as a result of their unfortunate flight paths over solar facilities are birds protected by the federal government under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
