Google-90%, Microsoft-77%, AWS-66%, % employees of who recommend working for their Cloud

Google, Microsoft, and AWS are in fight for the Cloud and recruiting top talent.  One way to judge how good their cloud is based on how good their employees are.  To get a peak into the employees you can use Glassdoor like Forbes did to discover whether employees would recommend working for the company.  For these top guys here are is one set of data.  90% of google, 77% of microsoft, and 66% of AWS employees would recommend to their friends to work there.

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You can go through the list to come up with where the rest of the cloud guys show up.

These results can give you an idea of the ability of each of these companies to recruit which allows them to build for the future.

WSJ says Public Library beats Amazon's Kindle Unlimited, yep

Years ago I used to buy 1-2 kindle books a month.  Now I buy a kindle book 2-3 times a year.  Why the change?  Reading less.  No reading more with 4-8 books a month going through my kindle.  I stopped buying books and started checking books out from the Public library.  Not physical books, but kindle books.

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I can check out a book at no charge for 3 weeks.  I figured if I don’t read a book in three weeks my probability of reading the book in future is less than 10%.

WSJ posts on its own analysis of Amazon Kindle Unlimited and they say the public library is better too.

A growing stack of companies would like you to pay a monthly fee to read e-books, just like you subscribe to NetflixNFLX -0.30% to binge on movies and TV shows.

Don't bother. Go sign up for a public library card instead.

Really, the public library? Amazon.comAMZN -0.34% recently launched Kindle Unlimited, a $10-per-month service offering loans of 600,000 e-books. Startups called Oyster and Scribd offer something similar. It isn't very often that a musty old institution can hold its own against tech disrupters.

But it turns out librarians haven't just been sitting around shushing people while the Internet drove them into irrelevance. More than 90% of American public libraries have amassed e-book collections you can read on your iPad, and often even on a Kindle. You don't have to walk into a branch or risk an overdue fine. And they're totally free.

And guess what the public library has more selection than unlimited.

Though you still have to deal with due dates, hold lists and occasionally clumsy software, libraries, at least for now, have one killer feature that the others don't: e-books you actually want to read.

To compare, I dug up best-seller lists, as well as best-of lists compiled by authors and critics. Then I searched for those e-books in Kindle Unlimited, Oyster and Scribd alongside my local San Francisco Public Library. To rule out big-city bias, I also checked the much smaller library where I grew up in Richland County, S.C.

Of the Journal's 20 most recent best-selling e-books in fiction and nonfiction, Amazon's Kindle Unlimited has none—no "Fifty Shades of Grey," no "The Fault in Our Stars." Scribd and Oyster each have a paltry three. But the San Francisco library has 15, and my South Carolina library has 11.

Go to this graph the WSJ created to get the comparison and you can see your public library has a good chance to beat the paid unlimited services.  Oh by the way, you do pay for the library through your property taxes.

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Proof those airport body scanners suck, flaws exposed by University Researchers

One of the benefits of being Pre TSA is you skipped the full body scanners.  Now, all those body scanners have been removed due to privacy concerns.  And, thanks to independent research done by UC San Diego, University of Michigan, and John Hopkins we find out that these device basically suck as there are ways to sneak by explosives and guns.  What?

Here is what the manufacturer and government would like all  of to believe. 

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The researchers found they can hide a .380 ACP Pistol.

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and C4 explosives.

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How can the researchers do this?  They bought a surplus scanner on eBay and spent time figuring out the flaws of the scanner.

The researchers attribute these shortcomings to the process by which the machines were designed and evaluated before their introduction at airports. “The system’s designers seem to have assumed that attackers would not have access to a Secure 1000 to test and refine their attacks,” said Hovav Shacham, a professor of computer science at UC San Diego. However, the researchers were able to purchase a government-surplus machine found on eBay and subject it to laboratory testing.

Many physical security systems that protect critical infrastructure are evaluated in secret, without input from the public or independent experts, the researchers said. In the case of the Secure 1000, that secrecy did not produce a system that can resist attackers who study and adapt to new security measures. “Secret testing should be replaced or augmented by rigorous, public, independent testing of the sort common in computer security,” said Prof. Shacham.

Outages of Microsoft Azure

I saw this post on GigaOm on Microsoft outages on Monday.

“Whoops,” says Microsoft Azure: cloud service goes down for many users

by 

 

AUG. 18, 2014 - 3:19 PM PDT

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Scott Guthrie at Windows Azure 2012 intro
photo: Microsoft
SUMMARY:

Several Microsoft Azure services — virtual machines, cloud services, StorSimple, backup and site recovery — were off line for hours Monday afternoon.

It’s Monday, and it’s already been a pretty bad week for Microsoft Azure. Starting early afternoon Eastern time, the company witnessed partial and full service interruptions to several of its services across multiple regions. The sites were back up again at around 8 p.m. eastern time, according to Microsoft.

Out of curiosity going to Azure History you can see the range of issues that have occurred over the past month.  At Microsoft’s scale there it looks like there is a constant stream of issues.

August 2014

A Data Center in Monterey, CA, who will go?

James Hamilton wrote a blog post on a water desalination plant that wants to add a data center in Monterey, CA

 

DeepWater Desal plans to build a desalination plant  at Monterey Bay. Desalination produces drinking water from sea water. Given the abundance of sea water in the world and the shortage of drinking water in many parts of the world, these plants are becoming more common. They are fairly power intensive techniques but still used extensively throughout the world especially in the Middle East.

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Deep Water Desal proposes to mitigate the power consumption of desalination in a very creative way. Rather than reduce the power required to desalinate water, they proposed to co-locate up to 150MW of data center facilities on site and reduce the power required to cool the data center. Essentially the desalination plant and data centers would be symbiotic and the overall power consumption of the combination of the two plants together would be lower.

Being more efficient in cooling is appealing, but probably not a major tipping point.