144,593 People Like Zuckerberg's Call to Obama to stop being a Threat to the Internet

Mark Zuckerberg has a post with 144,593 likes after 6 hours on Facebook.

I've called President Obama to express my frustration over the damage the government is creating for all of our future. Unfortunately, it seems like it will take a very long time for true full reform.

So it's up to us -- all of us -- to build the internet we want. Together, we can build a space that is greater and a more important part of the world than anything we have today, but is also safe and secure. I'm committed to seeing this happen, and you can count on Facebook to do our part.

 

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  145,105 people like this.

Wonder what would happen if you could wind back time to 3 years ago when President Obama sat next to Zuckerberge at a Silicon Valley dinner.  Can you imagine what Zuckerberg would say to Obama now?

A White House official described the meeting as "part of our ongoing dialogue with the business community on how we can work together to win the future, strengthen our economy, support entrepreneurship, increasing our exports, and get the American people back to work," noting prior to the event, "The President and the business leaders will discuss our shared goal of promoting American innovation, and discuss his commitment to new investments in research and development, education and clean energy."

See the photos below, followed by the guest list.

Image credit: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza

Capitol One Data Centers follow the pattern of the Innovators, 8 locations consolidated into 3

Capitol One had a data center event not unlike a Google Data Center event.  The local press covered the event in Richmond, VA.  How does this look like Google.  The VA governor and Capitol One CEO are at a data center event.  

Daniel Sangjib Min

Capital One founder, chairman, and chief executive officer, Richard Fairbank, left, and Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, right, connect symbolic cables with the help of Brian Cobb, center, managing vice president of Capital One, during a grand opening ceremony of Capital One's new data center in Chesterfield County on Wednesday, March 12, 2014.

5 years ago you would never see an event like this.  Now you see data center openings as PR events.

Operations had already started there. But on Wednesday, the McLean-based company held a ceremony to serve as symbolic opening for the center, located in a highly secured facility surrounded by a wooded area and tall, reinforced fencing.

The security is important because the Meadowville site is one of Capital One’s three primary data centers where the company stores and manages vast amounts of information produced by its business providing financial services to roughly 65 million customers.

The other pattern Capitol One has followed used by Google, eBay and others for high availability is three main data centers.

Capital One is consolidating operations at its eight data centers that it has been operating because of numerous recent acquisitions of other banks and credit card providers.

The data operations are being consolidated into three centers — the one in Chesterfield, one in Henrico County, and one near Chicago.

The latency to the customers isn’t as important as the latency between the data centers. The data centers are all located East of Mississippi.

And just like other efficient data center operators the headcount is low.

The center has about 50 employees now, but the company expects it will employ more than 100 eventually.

The Lean Construction Market, Insight into those who practice and those who don't

Many of you are familiar with Lean Construction, and I bet you run into people like I do who don’t know what Lean Construction is.  Your experience figuring who gets Lean Construction and who doesn’t is anecdotal and hard to gauge.  Thanks to folks at Dassault Systemes and McGraw-Hill a survey was conducted in Sept 2013 to understand the Lean Construction Market.  You can get a copy of the study here which requires you to register and will most likely get a call from a sales associate.  I did.

One of the eye opening statistics is that 55% of the market doesn’t know Lean Construction, and those who don’t practice Lean Construction have 4X the amount of people thinking they are “efficient/highly efficient.”  So, as long as you don’t practice Lean Construction you are unaware of how inefficient you are?  How much 4X more the people.  This explains the resistance to go Lean.  People believe they are already efficient, so why would they change.

If you are in that group that believes you are already efficient and Lean Construction isn’t for you, then ignore the rest of this post.

There in depth interviews  with insights from talking to those who use Lean Construction.

Even if you practice Lean Construction you are always looking to learn more. 

You use Lean Construction for many benefits.  Here is a nice list of benefits.

Lean Construction Keynote Video by 2 Second Lean's Paul Akers

I was chatting with Compass Data Center’s Chris Crosby about Lean Construction and we were having a good laugh that the media makes it seem like Lean Construction is something new because Facebook and a few others have seen the light of Lean Construction.  Lean vs. Waste - Simple vs. Complicated.  Chris mentioned the 2 Second Lean book and I went to the website.  The company FastCap which 2 Second Lean’s Paul Akers founded is in Bellingham, WA the same city that my Woodstone Oven is made.

A local friend who works in the construction is active in Lean Construction and I saw that a conference he went to has Paul Akers Keynoting.  Below is his talk at the conference.

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Some notes I took from the video are:

Paul believes in videos to illustrate points.  Check out this F1 pit stop.

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Lean is a choice of being Simple vs. Complicated.  Simple & Fun vs. Complicated & Painful.  Most places of work are complicated & painful because management doesn’t believe in being Lean.

Lean is simply to see waste and to focus on the teaching and training of the people to eliminate waste.  This supports more quality and more value which is good for the customer and good for the business.

Paul tells the story of how he thought the answer was to be organized, but he was clueless  compared to the Toyota Production System, Lean Manufacturing, and Kaizen.  Now Paul is a speaker and author on the concept of Lean.

Lean Construction is not new.  There are probably at least 50% of the construction industry who don’t get Lean.  It is a simpler less wasteful way to do work.  Lean is greener and more sustainable.  But, many think a Lean Construction project is innovative.  No it is not innovative.  It is about time.

Seeing the Communication Gap between Data Center Teams - Design, Construction, Operations, and IT

Whenever I heard how DCIM will bridge the gap between facilities and IT I look, but question whether there is really something there that can bridge the gap.

How hard is it to bridge the gap?  Consider this video of the Oracle America’s Cup Race team Wing designer and his challenge to talk to the sailors.  WSJ has a good story on this challenge.

Do you think the answer was to install an Oracle Software solution that both would use.  No.  It took many loses to the New Zealand team to finally get the America team to try something the computer hadn’t modeled

There was little time to experiment with the new technique, and Mr. Ozanne's software indicated Oracle would easily outsail New Zealand upwind even without foiling.

Technology was a problem, not the answer.

Nobody had expected this. Had team Oracle placed too much faith in the technology? Had its enormous budget lulled the team into overconfidence? Had Mr. Spithill gotten away from the lessons he had learned in Elvina Bay?

What especially galled him was the New Zealand team's apparent contempt for Oracle's approach. The managing director of the New Zealand team, Mr. Dalton, was openly disdainful of the costly, high-tech catamaran Oracle had chosen. The Kiwi boat had a similar, but more rugged, design. Dean Barker, the opposing skipper, was the son of New Zealand businessman Ray Barker, who had founded the menswear company Barkers.

The results were achieved by challenging technology and its assumptions made by humans.  What makes me laugh is how many times people will make it seem like Technology is something magical.  No it’s not, it was created by people who just like other people make mistakes and incorrect assumptions which gets embedded in the code.