Andrew Lark

Dell on the Datacenter

Well worth a watch. One of the smartest guys I know on Datacenters…

gigaomtv on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free

Disclosure: I work for Dell…

Worth Watching…

The book is great, and the video just as good.

Willy Wonka & The Dell Factory…

Great story on some of the things going on in our DCS group – the folks that build the world’s leading cloud servers.

If Dell's cloud server lab is a candy shop for geeks, littered with components and exotic system designs, then Jimmy Pike is the Willy Wonka of servers.

Pike, a jolly man with grey hair and seemingly boundless energy, is in charge of server design at Dell's Data Center Solutions division, which builds custom servers to meet the high-density and low-power needs of online giants like Microsoft and Facebook, as well as other "hyperscale" computing customers.

Management Innovation

Great story on the MIX over at Fast Company:

The MIX Manifesto reads as a kind of intellectual rebuttal to the leadership mindset defined by the Fortune 500. The defining challenges for management going forward, it argues, are to "mend the soul of business; unleash human capabilities; foster strategic renewal; distribute power; reshape managerial minds; and seek balance and harmony."

Today, for most of us, those noble goals and big dreams are just that. They don't have much to do with the day-to-day realities inside most real-world organizations. But we've all encountered organizations, we've all spent time with leaders in various walks of life, who are making a difference by working differently, who are creating lasting value based on the values they bring to their work, and who are determined to share the wealth their organizations create. The folks at MIX are eager for these grassroots innovators to (ahem) throw their ideas into the mix, and, thus, individually and collectively, help shape a new and more human agenda for competition, business, and leadership.

Disclosure: I’m an advisor to the MIX, Dell is a sponsor and provides my paycheck.

Really? Twitter is Too Busy

What a joke. At some point the Web 2.0 world needs to stop laying track in front of the train…

The Impact of Social Shopping

Over at the New York Times…

Visitors to social media networks and services such as Facebook and Twitter shop more online than those who don’t go to such sites, according to comScore’s latest quarterly overview of the online retail economy, as reported by eMarketer. And in the case of Facebook, comScore’s figures show that the more frequently a user visits the social network, the more he or she spends online — $67 on average for heavy users of Facebook vs. $50 for a “light” user of the network and just $27 on average for a non-visitor (comScore defined a heavy user as anyone in the top 20 percent of visitors to the social network, as measured by time spent on the site).

Our Mate Andrew

We lost another one of the good guys on Tuesday – Andrew Harris – an inspirational friend and brilliant entrepreneur. I first came to know Andrew when I landed in the US where he was was one of the people that made be feel welcome and spent time helping me orientated. The last few years were made more special by the fact we got to know his wife Lisa. We will miss him, but never forget.

Brian over at HomeAway had this to say: “Andrew’s contributions to this business are extraordinary and innumerable, and his strong leadership, experience, wisdom, and keen sense of humor kept HomeAway on track through a period of incredible growth,” says Brian Sharples, chief executive officer of HomeAway. “He will be remembered for his passion for excellence, a love of competing, and the opportunities he created for all of us. He will be missed tremendously and never forgotten.”

This is the third friend I’ve lost to cancer – but the stats are much more sobering than that. And reading this interview over at The Roar bought it home:

Lance Armstrong’s … reasons for a comeback are incredibly noble, and unlike an Ali or Jordan, there is a deeper mission here, one not dependant on results.

“The reasons are twofold. First and foremost we want to take the Livestrong message across the world and the burden of this disease.

“My bike has a couple of numbers on it. One is 1,274, the amount of days since I last raced a professional bike race in Paris, 2005. The other is 27.5, for 27.5 million. In those 1,274 days, approximately 27.5 million people have died from this disease.

“It’s a staggering number when you stop and think about it, it seems like I’ve been off the bike for a while but it’s only been a few years and in the meantime about the same number of people who live in this country are gone.

Statistics don’t make up for the friends you’ve lost. But they do bring home the need to keep fighting the battle against cancer so that others don’t have to. Here is a good place to start.

Google Bans Microsoft For Being Microsoft

All the noise around security concerns is just that. Noise. And if a company with the technology prowess of Google can’t get it’s security act together we all have something to be worried about – especially given the amount of our data they have.

While the rationale that Windows is much more broadly distributed than other operating systems, and therefore more susceptible and attractive to attack – holds true for the rest of us, that it holds true for Google is nuts. They are just a big, juicy target period.

But by framing it as a security driven decision, they contribute to the mythology (and some of the reality) surrounding Windows security. But come on, Google competes more with Microsoft every day.

Frank Shaw crafts a doozy of a response from his personal twitter account, pointing to some of the idiocy of the reporting.

bad headline, wrong premise here. Google going google, okay, but free pass from FT on reason = bad reporting. http://chilp.it/1e421d

News flash: Google bans Bing from its computers. Must credit FT. Picture on Bing home page is distracting to G engineers.

News flash: Google bans ford cars using Sync from its parking lot, citing security issues. Must credit FT.

news flash: Google boards up all windows in its global HQ, citing security concerns. Must credit FT.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-spokesman-mocks-ft-over-google-dumps-windows-story-2010-6#ixzz0pdNAIm4N

DeLinkification

All those links can be very distracting. Nick gets at this point very clearly:

The link is, in a way, a technologically advanced form of a footnote. It's also, distraction-wise, a more violent form of a footnote. Where a footnote gives your brain a gentle nudge, the link gives it a yank. What's good about a link - its propulsive force - is also what's bad about it.

I don't want to overstate the cognitive penalty produced by the hyperlink (or understate the link's allure and usefulness), but the penalty seems to be real, and we should be aware of it. In The Shallows, I examine the hyperlink as just one element among many - including multimedia, interruptions, multitasking, jerky eye movements, divided attention, extraneous decision making, even social anxiety - that tend to promote hurried, distracted, and superficial thinking online. To understand the effects of the Web on our minds, you have to consider the cumulative effects of all these features rather than just the effects of any one individually.

You can read more here. And some more below. Lets put links at the end.

Salon review

Neuorethics at the Core post

Standage's tweeted chortle

The Shallows site