Bill Hunter transitions from Gone Fishing to TBHE Consulting LLC

I've known Bill Hunter since his days at AT&T, then Disney, then Amazon. We would keep in touch socially and most of time stay away from company talk especially when he worked for Amazon. In 2016, Bill left AWS after 5 years and he changed his LinkedIn profile to Chief Fisherman and "gone fishing."

Today Bill updated his LinkedIn profile to Consultant/Owner, "TBHE Consulting LLC." Bill and I are both in the Seattle area and we chat about the industry much more often now that he isn't traveling the world for whatever he was doing at AWS.

Know many of you have been asking what Bill is going to do when he left AWS. Now you can contact him on LinkedIn.

Cutting the Cable TV cord

I am sure all of you have thought about cutting the cable TV cord. Yesterday I did. Keeping my fingers crossed that everything works. Worst case go back to the cable TV vendor. There are plenty of reviews on cable TV alternatives, but the guidance is mostly for non-technical people and they focus on things like getting an HDTV antenna.  I can’t use an HDTV antenna because all the trees, mountains, and houses that get in way of a signal. And the same applies to satellite TV options.  Anyway most important part if you are going to cut the cable TV cord is how good is your internet connection and your network gear?

I have a Comcast Business Internet connection which gives me about 65mbps down and 12mbps up. PFsense running on Netgate gives me performance statistics and the ability to do traffic shaping.  Here is a daily total network performance.

I can see hourly data and get other statistics like the queues. What are queues? Queues are what you set up as how to manage the traffic allocation. One of ways I get customer feedback for how well network is working is whether my son has any problems playing Xbox One games. In the queues there is a specific one for games. Also can see when facetime is being used as well.

So network is set and I can check how well things work.   Back to cutting the cord. Checked out DirecTv Now, Hulu, Google, Sling TV, and Playstation Vue.  After going around I decided on Playstation Vue. Not the lowest cost, but it has all the broadcast stations which I needed given I couldn’t get an HDTV to work. Got it running on Apple TV, iOS mobile devices, and Amazon Fire TV.  Not running on Xbox One of course. :-)

What is nice is I knocked a hundred dollars off my cable TV package. Part of that cost was $30 a month to rent the set top box devices. For $10 a month I could easily justify spending $200 for a new Apple TV 4K, but don’t have a 4K TV yet.  

One reason I can make this switch is I have business comcast Internet at home which doesn’t have any data caps. If you do have data caps then you need to worry about your data usage when cutting the cord. 

Car Companies tracking you like Google, Amazon, Facebook and others

Washington Post has an article on how car companies are now tracking drivers.

“Honda wanted to track the location of his vehicle, the contract stated, according to Dunn — a stipulation that struck the 69-year-old Temecula, Calif., retiree as a bit odd. But Dunn was eager to drive away in his new car and, despite initial hesitation, he signed the document, a decision with which he has since made peace.

“I don’t care if they know where I go,” said Dunn, who makes regular trips to the grocery store and a local yoga studio in his vehicle. “They’re probably thinking, ‘What a boring life this guy’s got.’ ”

Dunn may consider his everyday driving habits mundane, but auto and privacy experts suspect that big automakers like Honda see them as anything but. By monitoring his everyday movements, an automaker can vacuum up a massive amount of personal information about someone like Dunn, everything from how fast he drives and how hard he brakes to how much fuel his car uses and the entertainment he prefers. The company can determine where he shops, the weather on his street, how often he wears his seat belt, what he was doing moments before a wreck — even where he likes to eat and how much he weighs.”

There aren't many who think that in order to hide their activity they shouldn't use their car. Turning off your phone is another thing you would do to hide your activity, but how many would do that.

Tracking your activity is still in the early stages and will grow fast as so many companies' business models are built on analyzing your activity and monetizing it.

Chayora announces Data Centers for Beijing and Shanghai

Chayora has a press release announcing its China data centre campuses.

Beijing is currently under construction.

“it has finalised agreements with the government of Beichen, Tianjin, to begin construction of the company’s first hyperscale data centre campus in China. The 300MW, 32-hectare / 80-acre campus will serve the greater Beijing region that is home to more than 150 million people in the JingJinJi mega-metropolitan area of northern China.”

And soon the 2nd data center will start for Shanghai.

“Forthcoming in the second quarter of 2018, Chayora will begin construction of its second hyperscale campus, a 280MW data centre to serve the greater Shanghai region. Unlike most other options for Shanghai, Chayora’s facilities will be newly-built and designed from the ground up to international standards with all necessary permits to enable global corporates to access Shanghai and the surrounding provinces of eastern China, a population of more than 200 million. Shanghai is a key location for global organisations, including financial services, e-commerce and cloud service providers, and is in need of significant high performance data centre capacity.”

Jeff Dean publishes Part 1 of Reflection of 2017 Google Brain results - ML, ML, and more ML

Jeff Dean posted part 1 of his reflection of Google Brain’s 2017 achievements. https://research.googleblog.com/2018/01/the-google-brain-team-looking-back-on.html

If you don’t know what Google Brain is you can check out this wiki post.  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Brain

When you read the post you can see the work is lots and lots of ML. Using the below infrastructure.  Well they are probably using some really amazing stuff that Google won’t share for a long time. This is the elite Google Brain team they can get anything they want.

As an example of some of their work Jeff references this text to speech work. https://google.github.io/tacotron/publications/tacotron2/index.html 

Check out this graphc that shows where TensorFlow is used.