Preston L. Bannister { random memes }

Hmmm – maybe Idaho?

Boeing to Consolidate Southern California Facilities
ST. LOUIS, July 21, 2006 — Boeing [NYSE: BA] has announced plans to consolidate company facilities in Southern California over the next four years. The Boeing facility in Anaheim, with about 3,700 employees, will relocate to the Huntington Beach facility.

I grew up a few miles away from the massive Autonetics plant in Anahiem (later Rockwell, recently Boeing). During the Cold War a tremendous amount of engineering work took place at this location – any sort of complete accounting would be impressive. Much of the very early microelectronics technology was born here (all classified at the time). Workers were told to transfer know-how from Autonetics to Fairchild, and the Intel founders came from Fairchild. This along with many other projects live on in technologies we use every day. This plant was the very peak of high technology at the time.

The place now is a mere ghost of it’s former self – and soon to be gone entirely.

“This plan provides a strong foundation for long-term stability and competitiveness,” said Gary Toyama, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) vice president, Southern California region. “Our vision is to integrate and optimize our capabilities to meet customer requirements.”

Nearly all of the moves will occur within a 25-mile radius. Design and construction in Huntington Beach will start immediately, with minor employee moves. Significant employee relocations are anticipated to start early in 2007 and will continue through 2010.

“As our programs change and mature, we will adjust accordingly to provide a stable environment, reduce operation costs and maintain our competitiveness in the marketplace,” said Toyama.

What this means is that Boeing is looking to shed a lot of employees. Engineering jobs seldom pay especially well anymore (especially in the defense industry were the pool of jobs is shrinking). Many employees are going to live where housing is less expensive – a good long drive from the existing Anahiem plant, and the new Huntington Beach location is even further. Many older employees will retire rather than face the unpleasant commute across Orange County.

If they were truly looking to reduce costs, they might chosen to shift jobs to where costs were lower – outside the county entirely. The shift to Huntington Beach just does not – for the stated reasons – make any obvious sense.

The company will work closely with the City of Anaheim to redevelop the property in a manner that maximizes its economic benefit, both for Boeing and the community. Boeing Realty Corporation will manage the disposition of the Anaheim site.

You can interpret this bit just as simply. Real estate in Orange County is pricey. Closing the Anahiem location sheds the maximum number of employees, and frees up land to be sold.

I would bet the leakage of weapons technology out of the country is probably greater now than any time since WWII. For an engineer working in the defense industry – poor pay and an uncertain future make the temptation to “sell out” greater than ever. If presented with an opportunity, why would you care – if neither you company or your country seems to care in the slightest about your future?

From The Sultan’s Elephant event in London.

Giant Girl Doll

One of an entire collection of videos…
Sultan’s Elephant

The Sultan’s Elephant

Wonderful surreal nonsense…

• Flickr: The Sultan’s Elephant in London
• crashed ship
• … and a lot more links.

Engineering Gap? Fact and Fiction
1. Shortages usually lead to price increases. If there were a shortage of engineers, salaries should have risen. Yet in real terms, engineering salaries have actually dropped (see BusinessWeek.com, 9/15/05, “Good Time to Learn Accounting”).

Shortage of skilled workers is a convenient mirage
Know any scientists or engineers who have been laid off in the last five years?

Most readers would be able to answer “yes” to that question, but you’d never know it from reading op-ed pieces by local academics and senior managers from industry.

Thousands of highly trained scientists and engineers still roam Silicon Valley looking for work after having been cut adrift by the same types of people who now claim that they can’t find anyone to hire. And thousands more are now working in different fields at substantially lower salaries, having given up searching for an equivalent to their previous positions. “No one I know who has looked at the data with an open mind has been able to find any sign of a current shortage,” said demographer Michael Teitelbaum in the Wall Street Journal’s Nov. 16 front-page story, “Behind `Shortage’ of Engineers: Employers Grow More Choosy.” In a column titled “A Phony Science Gap?” (Feb. 22), the Washington Post’s Robert J. Samuelson explained in detail why “it’s emphatically not true, as much of the alarmist commentary on America’s `competitiveness’ implies, that the United States now faces crippling shortages in its technological elites.”

When the time comes for students whose parents grew up in the United States to choose a college major, they will remember those dinner-table conversations. When the best students, being rational, start to desert science and engineering, businesses will have nobody to blame but themselves. The solution will be the same one that existed before the Reagan administration, as Harvard economist Richard Freeman told Samuelson: “If we want more (scientists and engineers), we have to pay them better and give them better careers.””

Another clueless (paid) journalist…

Google’s Costly Rebellion: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance
According to a story published in today’s edition of The New York Times, Big Goo builds its own servers and could even get into the business of creating its own chip designs.

There’s already plenty of hubbub over whether these initiatives will be good for the company or the industry at large. I have my opinions, but I’m loath to share them. I believe doing so would detract from the larger issue at hand — namely, that Google has dramatically altered the competitive dynamics in its industry. And that may prove to be really, really bad.

Put yourself in Google’s shoes. You are continuously buying new servers, both to expand capacity, and to replace older servers that are no longer useful. Profitability for your company is critically dependent on:

• Minimizing initial cost per unit of performance for your applications.
• Minimizing replacement costs for failed hardware.
• Minimizing ongoing power and cooling costs.
• Maximizing performance for your applications.

Google has bought and continues to buy large amounts of hardware. Big customers get special treatment from hardware vendors. Big customers can and often do require changes to the vendor’s stock offerings.

Now if I were in Google’s shoes, I would carefully benchmark each hardware vendor’s offering with my applications. I would also be looking for features to add or eliminate that would make a significant difference to my applications. I might find that I need more (or less) memory in each node. I might find that better network connections (more or faster NICs) are an advantage in my application. I might find that some CPUs (cough, AMD and Sun Niagrara, cough) suck a lot less electricity and yield better performance.

Doubtless I would share my results with interested hardware vendors. The guys willing to best change their stock offerings to suit my needs – at the best price – are most likely to get my business.

Now the question comes down to what Google actually makes. They are not going to get into the business of manufacturing CPUs, memory, or disk drives. The racks they can get custom-fabricated locally … no need to get each server individually wrapped.

They might get their power supplies custom-designed. I’d guess a smart designer with a few extra dollars in the parts budget could turn out a more reliable and efficient power supply. This expertise is fairly specialised – not too likely Google would do this in-house. Power is a big deal in a Google-scale server farm.

I would bet that the hard-drive maker with the best power consumption per drive (Western Digital?) gets big orders from Google.

They might get the motherboards custom-designed. They can eliminate features they do not need, specify parts with the best cost-effective reliability, and add bits as needed. I would guess that having two or more NICs on each motherboard might be a win for many of Google’s applications. (Think fewer ethernet collisions…)

They might get semi-custom designs out of the fabricators of “glue” chips. Not sure if this is worth the effort – but something to look at.

All the above are simply guesses about why Google makes servers for their own in-house purposes, based on what makes sense given the current market and technology. Digging a bit further, came up with…

A Search Engine That’s Becoming an Inventor | theledger.com
“Nobody builds servers as unreliably as we do,” Mr. Hölzle said in a speech last year at CERN, the Swiss particle physics institute. Google is reducing cost while maintaining performance by shifting the burden of reliability from hardware to software individual hardware components can fail, but software automatically shifts the local task and the data to other machines.

While Google’s servers are built on inexpensive parts, the designs it uses have been modified every year or so, to improve their efficiency and increasingly to customize them to Google’s applications. The current generation uses the powerful Opteron chip from Advanced Micro Devices, which uses less power than the Intel chips Google had used.

Google is among Advanced Micro’s five largest clients, and the largest that does not make computers to resell, according to a semiconductor industry executive with knowledge of Advanced Micro’s business.

Oddly enough Dell just announced they will be building server hardware with AMD chips.

Google is increasingly doing business with Sun Microsystems as well. Sun, known for systems that are both reliable and expensive, would not seem a natural match for a company that emphasizes economy and self-sufficiency. But Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, is a former Sun executive, and Sun has developed a new microchip that is especially efficient in electricity use.

Moreover, Google increasingly needs systems that are less likely to fail than those it uses for its search engine in order to handle important information, like e-mail and payments in its new Google Checkout service.
Beyond servers, there are signs that Google is now designing its own microchips. The company has hired many of the engineers responsible for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s well-regarded Alpha chip.

Mr. Hölzle said Google had considered custom semiconductor design, but he declined to say if the company had built any. He said that, in general, Google did not want to build anything from scratch if it could buy something that was just as good.

We build our own servers because it’s more efficient: Google
Energy efficiency is a subject Hölzle speaks passionately about. About half of the energy that goes into a datacentre gets lost due to technology inefficiencies that are often easy to fix, he says.

The power supply to servers is one place that energy is unnecessarily lost. One-third of the electricity running through a typical power supply leaks out as heat, he says. That’s a waste of energy and also creates additional costs in the cooling required because of the heat added to a building, he says.

Rather than waste the electricity and incur the additional costs for cooling, Google has power supplies specially made that are 90% efficient.

“It’s not hard to do. That’s why to me it’s personally offensive [that standard power supplies aren’t as efficient]”, he says.

While he admits that ordering specially made power supplies is more expensive than buying standard
products, Google still ultimately saves money by conserving energy and cooling, he says.

In a sense, none of this is rocket-science. Google is simply covering all the bases.

I feel so special!

From: Shawnna
Date: Sunday, July 16, 2006 5:20 PM
Subject: hey
Message: hey cutie, saw you online.. wanna kill some time together?
hit up herearepages.com/shawnna for some more pics and my cam

XoXo
Shawnna

I am sure that Shawnna and I have much in common! Heck, she is only two years older than my son.

Great irony here…

Wired News: Crashing the Wiretapper’s Ball
“It’s ironic that spooks so often remind us that we’ve got nothing to fear from their activities if we’ve got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability.”

I believe secrecy in government, when allowed, should only be limited and temporary. Everything done by government should be a matter of record, and eventually public. This might be a confirmation of sorts.

“The best conversation I had was with Robert van Bosbeek of the Dutch National Police. I asked him if he was tempted to buy anything.

“Not really,” he said with a laugh. “But it’s always good to see what’s on offer. Basically, we’re three or four years ahead of all this.”

He said that in the Netherlands, communications intercept capabilities are advanced and well established, and yet, in practice, less problematic than in many other countries. “Our legal system is more transparent,” he said, “so we can do what we need to do without controversy. Transparency makes law enforcement easier, not more difficult.”"