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A “spine” of wires and pipes supplies power, cooling and other vital resources throughout Microsoft’s Chicago data center, which is under construction.
(click for image gallery)

Though the building alone covers a whopping 11 acres, you can’t even see Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)’s new $550 million data center in the hills west of San Antonio until you’re practically on top of it. But by that point, you can hardly see anything else.

These days, the massive data center is a bustling construction zone where visitors have to wear hardhats, helmets, orange safety vests, goggles and gloves. By September, it’ll be the newest star in Microsoft’s rapidly expanding collection of massive data centers, powering Microsoft’s forays into cloud computing like Live Mesh and Exchange Online, among plenty of other as-yet-unannounced services. Pulling in, visitors are stopped by Securitas guards who check IDs and ask if they work for Microsoft. An incomplete gate marks the way. Microsoft’s general manager of data center services, Mike Manos, won’t say exactly what security measures will be in place when the data center opens, but won’t rule anything out. “Will the gates be able to stop a speeding Mack truck?” I ask. “Or more,” he responds. “Will you have biometrics?” “We have just about everything.”

As the car rounds the bend beyond the gate, the building sweeps into full view. The San Antonio data center building itself is 475,000 square feet, or about 11 acres. It’s a 1.3 mile walk to circumnavigate the building. To get a perspective on that, it’s one building that’s the size of almost 10 football fields laid out side-by-side, or 1/10th the floor space of the entire Sears Tower, covered with servers and electrical equipment. “I thought I understood what scale looked like,” Manos says.

When the San Antonio data center was under peak construction, 965 people were working full time to build it, with more than 15 trucks of material coming and going each day in order to get the job done in 18 months from scouting the site to opening up. The facilities were built with continuous workflow of materials in mind, even after the site’s completion.

As one walks toward the data center’s main entrance, a feature that stands out is a row of several truck bays much like would be seen in an industrial park. Trucks pull up and leave servers or other materials inside the bays or “truck tracks,” to be picked up and inventoried in the next room and then moved to storage or deployment.

Most everything in the data center is functional. On the small scale, wainscoting-like pieces of plywood cover the bottom of hallway walls to protect both the walls and servers and other equipment moving back and forth. On the large scale, San Antonio is actually two data centers side by side to separate business risk. “One side could burn down and the other one could continue to operate,” Manos says.

The components inside are just as gargantuan as those on the outside. Seven massive battery rooms contain hundreds of batteries and 2.7 mW of back-up power apiece. Very few industrial sites, among them aluminum smelters, silicon manufacturers and automobile factories, consume as much energy as mega data centers of the order Microsoft is building.

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It’s been a while since we stopped by Planet Britney, mostly because there are only so many ways you can poke fun at the mentally unwell.

However, it seems as if Britney Spears might actually be getting better in leaps and bounds, because she’s just been granted that most valuable of parenting rights – the overnight visit.

Sean Preston and Jayden James being able to sleep at their mother’s house isn’t just good news for Britney Spears – Kevin Federline will also benefit from the ruling – it means he’ll now get to wake up some mornings without the hassle of dealing with crap and piss-covered bedsheets. Seriously, sneaking them into the washing machine before the kids woke up and wondered why daddy’s room smelt funny was such a chore.

It’s been a long, hard, harrowing journey so far – sometimes it felt like being trapped in a tunnel with no beginning and no end. There have been tears, there have been tantrums, but finally the clouds are starting to lift – Britney Spears might be getting well enough for us not to feel like monsters for taking the piss out of her. Hooray!

Ever since she locked herself in a bathroom topless with one of her kids and didn’t come out until the brain doctors turned up, we’ve had to say goodbye to comically unaware Britney Spears, and had to make do with a Britney Spears who was such an unfit liability that she wasn’t even allowed to go to the toilet by herself for fear that she’d wind up trying to strangle herself with her own piss-stream in a traumatic cry for help.

However, with the help of her parents, Britney Spears has been fighting to get better. And this has been for one reason only – to get her kids back. Sure, Britney might have behaved slightly irresponsibly with them in the past but – spurred on by the knowledge that her sons probably lose two or three of their already meagre IQ points for every hour they spend in direct contact with Kevin Federline – she’s made winning them back her absolute goal.

And yesterday Britney Spears took a very definite step forward. That’s right – Britney Spears has now been granted permission to lie unconscious in an entirely separate room to her equally unconscious children. Happy days! E! Online reports:

The court session, attended by both Spears and Kevin Federline, resulted in “a change of visitation status” for the new aunt, Los Angeles Superior Court spokesman Allan Parachini told reporters at a brief posthearing press conference. Sources told E! News that Court Commissioner Scott Gordon granted Spears overnight visits with her sons, beginning as soon as this weekend.

It’s a proud moment for Britney Spears’ recovery, that’s for sure. In effect the Court Commissioner has said that Britney Spears isn’t as likely to stay up all night letting off an unrelenting stream of harrowing animal yowls as she was before. Or that she is as likely to do that but it’ll sound like a beautiful lullaby to the kids after six months of hearing Popozao all the poxy time. We haven’t quite worked that one out yet.

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Posted by John Foley, Jun 25, 2008 01:30 PM

I’ve had occasion to chat with Bill Gates a number of times over the years, and there’s often a point when something unexpected happens. He’s been brutally honest, occasionally evasive, and surreptitiously a nice guy. As Gates gets ready to ride off into the software sunset, here are a few anecdotes that stand out.

Bill Gates is retiring five years earlier than planned. It’s an obscure fact, but true. Back in August of 2003, in a luncheon speech at the Detroit Economic Club, Gates said he had “a little more than 10 years” left in his software “career.” The math is simple–that would be 2013. A mere three years after that speech, however, Gates surprised the business world with his announcement of a 2008 retirement, five years earlier than indicated. New York Times reporter John Markoff caught this discrepancy. It was the first question out of Markoff’s mouth at Gates’ retirement news conference, but Gates said he didn’t recall his earlier statement, and the subject was dropped. See my blog, “Bill Gates Waves Goodbye Earlier Than Planned,” for all the details.

Bill Gates and Scott McNealy weren’t really archenemies. In January of 1996, I was on Sun’s campus for a day of interviews. This was at the height of the Sun v. Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) wars, and speculation was that Sun was negotiating to acquire Apple. McNealy, however, was relaxed and eating frozen yogurt during our interview. His first son, Maverick, had been born a few months earlier, and McNealy excitedly went to a corner of his office to show me something. It was a hand-written note from Bill Gates congratulating him the new arrival.

Bill Gates dodged only one question. In 2003, IT departments were spending hours patching buggy Windows PCs. One CIO I know crunched the numbers and said he was going to bill Microsoft for the work put in by his staff. So I asked Gates whether other business customers were making their own demands for reimbursement. “Is this something you’re talking to business customers about—somehow taking some of the financial responsibility for the work they’re having to do?” After a very long pause, Gates answered: “We’re very focused on doing our best to avoid these problems. That’s our focus.” It’s the only time he completely sidestepped a question during one of our interviews.

Bill Gates has a calculator in his head. OK, so that’s not a revelation, but I saw it in action when Gates walked me through the evolution from 16-bit to 32-bit to 64-bit computing. The occasion was the launch of 64-bit Windows, and Gates was walking me through the advances in microprocessor design over the years. He started with the premise that the IT industry had been gobbling up about 1 bit of memory address space per year, resulting in a need for ever more address space. During the interview, Gates came to the realization that the industry was consuming address space at nearly double the rate of the past. For more on this, see “A Trip Down ‘Memory Lane’ With Bill Gates.”

Bill Gates once gave his own software the lowest possible rating. In May of 2002, just a few weeks after Gates’ famous memo on Trustworthy Computing, my colleague Chris Murphy and I interviewed Gates for more than an hour in New York. I mention the length of the interview to make the point that Gates can be generous with his time. It’s usually the PR people who cut off an interview or try to keep the discussion “on topic.” Gates himself tends to be freewheeling. Towards the end of the interview, we asked him to rate Microsoft’s overall software quality on a scale of one to 10, where one was unsatisfactory and 10 was high satisfaction. His answer: “Is it as good as people want? One.” It was a blunt self-assessment, and the right one at the time. For the full Q&A, see “Bill Gates On Trustworthy Computing.”

Bill Gates drinks, or sips, double fisted. The scene was an invitation-only dinner for about 15 journalists in Las Vegas a few years ago. Jeff Raikes was the host of my table, and Gates was at the next table. After dinner they got up and switched tables in order to spend a little time with all the guests. Red and white wines had been served with dinner, and Gates carried a glass of each with him. Managing two drinks at once may be politically incorrect in some circles, but not in this one and not on this occasion. Windows Longhorn was in the throes of development. We all understood.

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LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.

Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove designed to let people move e-mail, contacts, and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google’s online service. Google initially helped LimitNone develop, promote, and sell the product, assuring LimitNone it wouldn’t offer a competing product, but then reversed course by giving away its own tool, Google E-mail Uploader, to premier-level Google Apps customers, the lawsuit said.

“With gMove priced at $19 per copy and Google’s prediction that there were potentially 50 million users, Google deprived LimitNone of a $950 million opportunity by offering Google’s competitive product for free as a part of its ‘premier’ Google Apps package,” the lawsuit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.

Google didn’t immediately comment for this story.

LimitNone had shared confidential technical and sales forecast details with Google, the lawsuit said.

“Without Google’s knowledge and use of the gMove trade secrets and confidential information, Google would not have been able to solve its longstanding Microsoft Outlook to Gmail conversion problem,” the lawsuit said. “At a minimum, Google’s access to the internal workings of gMove allowed it to gain a significant head start on designing the inner workings for a competing application.”

Google’s product “copied gMove’s look, feel, functionality, and distribution model, including several unique and proprietary operations,” the suit said.

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LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.

Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove designed to let people move e-mail, contacts, and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google’s online service. Google initially helped LimitNone develop, promote, and sell the product, assuring LimitNone it wouldn’t offer a competing product, but then reversed course by giving away its own tool, Google E-mail Uploader, to premier-level Google Apps customers, the lawsuit said.

“With gMove priced at $19 per copy and Google’s prediction that there were potentially 50 million users, Google deprived LimitNone of a $950 million opportunity by offering Google’s competitive product for free as a part of its ‘premier’ Google Apps package,” the lawsuit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.

Google didn’t immediately comment for this story.

LimitNone had shared confidential technical and sales forecast details with Google, the lawsuit said.

“Without Google’s knowledge and use of the gMove trade secrets and confidential information, Google would not have been able to solve its longstanding Microsoft Outlook to Gmail conversion problem,” the lawsuit said. “At a minimum, Google’s access to the internal workings of gMove allowed it to gain a significant head start on designing the inner workings for a competing application.”

Google’s product “copied gMove’s look, feel, functionality, and distribution model, including several unique and proprietary operations,” the suit said.

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