Your Custom Text Here
Google added another 407 MW of renewable Wind Energy. That’s a lot. Google now has 1 GigaWatt of Wind Power.
This is our seventh and largest renewable energy commitment to date, bringing the total amount of renewable energy we’ve contracted for to over one gigawatt (1,000 megawatts).
I wonder if Google will be able to make the next addition 210 MW to achieve the 1.21 gigawatts for “Back to the Future"
Apple put an environmental video up with a good line - “We have a long way to go."
Better
301 views 2 hours agoAt Apple, we strive to reduce our impact on climate change, find ways to use greener materials and conserve resources for future generations. This video was shot on location at Apple Facilities. Now more than ever, we will work to leave the world better than we found it.
https://www.apple.com/environment/
Data Centers are part of the video.
Here is the video you can watch.
Green Data Centers are accepted in the data center industry, and the three who have the mindshare are Apple, Google, and Facebook. Steven Levy has told the Google story many times, and Facebook. With this lengthy post Steven tells the Apple Green Data Center story.
Apple Tries to Clean Up Its Carbon-Spewing Ways With New Data Centers
- BY STEVEN LEVY
- 04.21.14 |
- 10:00 AM |
- PERMALINK
- inShare14
Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president for environmental initiatives, gives a tour at the company’s solar field in Yerington, NV. Photo: David Calvert/WIRED
On a stunning cloudless day in the Nevada desert, Lisa Jackson stands with her back to an array of advanced solar cells, peering across a low chain link fence at NV Energy’s Fort Churchill Power Generating plant just a few hundred yards away. The 1960s vintage facility has two giant boilers rising from the scrub brush, belching steam and god knows what else. It couldn’t be more different than the futuristic tract where Jackson is standing, with its gleaming rows of curved mirrors and palm-size silicon wafers silently drawing energy from the blinding sun. It’s like a contrast between a phone booth and an iPhone.
The post is long and the most interesting part is at the end.
Since this wasn’t my first data center, I was able to contrast Apple’s with the competition’s. In many ways, a data center is just a data center, a bunch of computers you only get to see if you endure multiple retina scans to open up the doors. Yet there are subtle hints that this is an Apple facility, even if Jony Ive didn’t draw up the plans. The outside of the administration building has some sweet design elements, like decorative strips of terra cotta paneling in three shades of red, giving it a feeling of a desert lodge. The halls are festooned with huge, neatly hung photographs of tiny details iPhones and other Apple devices. Even the computer rooms seem to have an Apple vibe—they’re not so industrial. The doors to the hot aisle have frosted glass, like lavatory doors at a hip restaurant. The air-cooled facility is relatively quiet; unlike some other data centers, no earplugs required. You get the feeling you could probably eat off the server floor.
Rarely will you find Executives Talking about the Mistakes they have made. Ed Catmull has a talk at Stanford where he talks about mistakes made.
So many executives take the strategy of I am at the top and will show you what perfection looks like. We should all strive to be perfect like I am.
In a fear-based, failure -averse culture , people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative. But if you can foster a positive understanding of failure, the opposite will happen. How, then, do you make failure into something people can face without fear? Part of the answer is simple: If we as leaders can talk about our mistakes and our part in them, then we make it safe for others. You don’t run from it or pretend it doesn’t exist. That is why I make a point of being open about our meltdowns inside Pixar, because I believe they teach us something important: Being open about problems is the first step toward learning from them . My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.
Catmull, Ed; Wallace, Amy (2014-04-08). Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration (Kindle Locations 1750-1758). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
This sets up a culture where mistakes are not tolerated. No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. So what do you do? You learn to hide your mistakes and/or make sure others get the blame for mistakes.
When you push for something innovative you are constantly making mistakes.
TED released Matthew Carter’s “My Life in Typefaces” from Mar 2014 Vancouver, and it is a pleasure to see an old friend get up at TED and talk about Typography. I was curious what Matthew would present as it has been years since we have chatted.
Matthew starts out explaining how important type is.
Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.
But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good.
This last sentence is where Matthew is looking at the horrible kerning between the T and E in this slide.
This bad spacing is what drives type people nuts. I used to be a type person. And, as I went through this video which is quite popular with over 190,000 views from Ted, iTunes, and Youtube in two days, I was curious what Matthew was going to talk about in 16 minutes.
What is the point of Matthew’s Talk? The connection between technology and design, and his point was 18 years ago was the change to screen fonts. At the 10:33 mark is where Matthew talks about what he did with Microsoft.
10:33You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance.
FYI - when Matthew says Microsoft, I was the renegade who pissed off the type group by focusing on fonts for the screen when 90% of the group was focused on the historical typefaces from lead forms. I worked with Matthew when I was at Apple and when I came up the idea for Verdana at Microsoft without question there was only one guy I would go to to get Verdana designed. Matthew Carter is the best and his Ted Talk does a great job of telling the story of how typography has changed.
14:49Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for courser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology?In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining.
My wife had never heard this story. I’ve told it so many times I couldn’t believe I hadn’t told her. She finished by saying “it is another project, where you don’t credit for.” My response was “that’s what happens when you work at a big company. You do the right thing. Don’t play the politics right, and you don’t get the credit. That’s OK. I have so many more better ideas that I’ll get the benefits of given we own the company we are developing the ideas for."
The politics behind Verdana were complicated. I wrote a post back in 2009 on it.
7/26/1994 Later in the afternoon, Dave Ohara called, with Matthew Carter and Tom Stephens in the room, to talk about the Verdana face. Matthew said that he was sad to read my note the other day, but found out soon after that we would still get a chance to work together on the Verdana face.
So, let’s start off when the first time I got in trouble for Verdana. One afternoon, my Microsoft general manager Steve Shaiman came looking for me, and he yelled “what the hell did you do?” What? BillG (Bill Gates email alias, back then we called people by their email alias, I was DaveO) thinks we should be doing fonts for screen and Pan-European typefaces.
