The Data Center Con Game

The con game has gone on for your so long and much of the attention has been on the political environment lately.

There are also con games in the data center industry.

Curious on how some people can fooled I found this article on the history of con and how it works. The article does a good job of covering the various techniques used by a con person. Reading them will help you spot the con. But as the article points out many times the conned defend the con game and the con person.

Here is a few paragraphs that cover this.

In 1822, a Scottish con man, Gregor MacGregor, convinced countrymen seeking easy wealth and their neighbors’ better lives to buy bonds, land and special privileges, fill two ships and sail to an idyllic country, the Land of Poyais. 

MacGregor priced land in Poyais to make it affordable to Scottish tradesmen and unskilled workers who had heard of promising South American investments but lacked the means to take advantage of them. Poyais had a distinctive flag, its own currency and a diplomatic office in London. The only problem was that Poyais did not exist. Most of those who sailed died on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras. Some of the few survivors were so taken in that they refused to accept that Poyais did not actually exist and argued that it was MacGregor who had been defrauded.

Please stop embedding information in serial numbers, Apple finally is taking this step

MacRumors covers the effort by Apple to switch to random serial numbers and stop embedding manufacturing information in the serial number with a sequence of higher numbers as more are built.

In an internal AppleCare email this week, obtained by MacRumors, Apple said the new serial number format will consist of a randomized alphanumeric string of 8-14 characters that will no longer include manufacturing information or a configuration code. Apple said the serial number format transition is scheduled for "early 2021," and confirmed that IMEI numbers will not be affected by this change.

Some people and organizations are stuck in the old school of a serial number has to be a sequence. It helps them count. They have a bean counter mindset.

a person, typically an accountant or bureaucrat, perceived as placing excessive emphasis on controlling expenditure and budgets.

In Arstechnica some are whining about the change.

Serial numbers are used in online forums, repair shops, and company IT departments to expedite troubleshooting and other tasks by quickly learning more about the machine in question—for example, whether a computer that is exhibiting a problem is part of a certain set of models manufactured in a certain time period that all have that issue. Some of the information will still be accessible after either booting the machine up or taking it apart.

But let’s look at what a random serial number approach does. #1 is u can make the number of characters shorter which has how many hours accumulated across customer support issues. The manufacturing process is much easier to assign a random number, then associate the relevant information required for support and service like manufacturing date, production run, manufacturing location. The current serial number has benefits in case of theft to determine information about the unit without logging into an Apple system to check the serial number information. If you log in, there is now an event at a given from an IP address that could help support recovery of stolen devices.

It is change that makes things easier in the long run, and a minor inconvenience for those who built their processes around the existing numbers.

One of these days serial numbers will be QR codes that can be quickly looked up for product status.

Next 20 years of Google's Environmental Impact after 20 years of effort

Google published its 2020 Environmental Impact report and it is nice.

But reading the report it missed something. I looked at who the Google Executive referenced in the report and it is Ruth Porat Alphabet and Google CFO. Ah. it reads like a financial statement. Well I guess it is a report. Urs Hölzle Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure is also a co author.

Google discusses the next decade which is also good. But it was missing something still.

What would I write? Make it more of a challenge. What is it Google could achieve in 20 years. What could it dream. What is it a Gen Z new hire would want to spend working on thet is worth 20 years of their time which il almost is double their life.

The past results are good if you know about PUE, energy efficiency, power per watt, but that is a small fraction of people.

Getting people excited about the future and what could be done is a much bigger audience.

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Learning what makes a great organization. Ron Westrum's words and reused.

A friend pointed to Andrew Shafer’s post on developer ideas. in one of his slide decks he points to Westrum Typology. When I first saw it I thought it was Western Typology. No Westrum. Westrum who? looking it up Ron Westrum created the Westrum Typology. Has Ron written anything. One book. A book with 5 stars ratings on amazon.com. A book on how the Sidewinder missile was developed.

“In the mid-1950s a small group of overworked, underpaid scientists and engineers, working on a remote base in the Mojave Desert, developed a weapon no one had asked for but that everyone was looking for. Sidewinder is the story of how that unorthodox team at China Lake, lead by the visionary Bill McLean, overcame Navy bureaucracy and more heavily funded projects to develop the world’s best air-to-air missile.”

Got more curious after buying the book and wrote to Ron and asked him for other things to read. One of the paper’s Ron wrote was on information flow and its impact on safety.

“Not only is information flow vital to the organization’s ‘‘nervous system,’’ but it is also a key indicator of the quality of the organization’s functioning. “

“The important features of good information flow are relevance, timeliness, and clarity.”

“By examining the culture of information flow, we can get an idea of how well people in the organization are cooperating, and also, how effective their work is likely to be in providing a safe operation.”

Ron is 75 and has spent a long time studying organizations. It is interesting that the DevOps community has picked up on his Typology.

A DevOps book Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations has a chapter with much of Ron’s ideas integrated.