Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book
Items
I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture,
and of course Writing
This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science
fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it,
his Day Book.
I encourage you to see Jerry
Pournelle's site
and subscribe
to his services.
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This
week: December April 14-20, 2014
Summary of this week:
- IRS misses WinXP deadline, wastes million$
- Google buys a builder of solar-powered drones
- Microsoft announces tablet-friendly Office 365 pricing
- Google can now break its own captchas
- The Digital Public Library of America is one year old and growing
- Nike drops out of wearable computing
Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
Monday April 14, 2014
The Washington Post had a feature story on the raise of Google's lobbying in Washington. The Post did a hatchet job on George Mason University in the process.
San Francisco has become the mecca of intolerance: person beaten for wearing Google Glass.
Our tax dollars at waste: the IRS can't move out of Windows XP quickly enough, so they waste tens of million$.
How the Internet Archive preserves history. With so much history "stored" on the Internet, it is easy for dictactors to erase all of it.
Family Dollar closes 370 stores. This is a big loss to many rural towns.
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Tuesday April 15, 2014
We can now buy Microsoft Office online for the Chrome OS.
Coming soon, cloud computing as a commodity.
An explanation of the collision among San Francisco, Silicon Valley, old money, new tech money, demographics, and owls.
A great reverse hack: using a Raspberry Pi to resurrect a Commodore 64.
Great news (not): the IRS can take our money to pay debts someone in our family owed the government decades ago.
They are using this to get back Social Security payments that were
overpayed decades earlier. The government made a mistake in the 1960s,
so it just seems fair (not) for someone today to pay back the mistake.
The Mozilla CEO saga continues as the appoint an interim CEO. Note, the word "interim" is a prediction, and most of us are not good at predicting much of anything.
Google buys Titan Aerospace, a company that builds solar-powered drones.
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Wednesday April 16, 2014
Quicken is caught seeding a grassroots campaign against income tax filing simplification.
Microsoft announces an Office 365 package meant for the tablet world.
DARPA is experimenting with using old drones to bring WiFi Internet to deployed troops.
That is exactly what DARPA should not be doing. That is NOT a research
project but merely a logical use of existing technology. Your tax
dollars at waste.
Do you really save money with Amazon Prime?
Tails: a Linux that makes communication much more secure (just ask Snowden).
The back story of Google's idea for baloons transponding the Internet.
It's now easier to email photos with gmail.
Yahoo had a good financial quarter.
A look back at 1996 websites: simpler graphics that downloaded much faster. Now we are smarter(?).
Our country has become more of an oligarcy, not a representative democracy.
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Thursday April 17, 2014
Content publishers, the smart ones, are altering their presentation to fit the access method.
All about Lego and how they reversed the fortunes of a dying company. And the kid in all of us is the winner.
The growth of Pinterest into a geographic search engine.
The battle in cloud computing between dominant Amazon and challenging Google.
Will the sitting desk go the way of the dinosaur?
Keep that tablet away from your toddler (hey grandparents, read this).
The courts declare that bloggers have the same rights as traditional news media.
Google can read address numbers in Street View photos, which means it can break captchas as well.
Time Warner Cable and Hotspot 2.0: roam the WiFi world.
After a week visiting my mother in rural Southeastern Louisiana, I can attest to this: rural broadband still lags far behind urban. What happened to all those billion$ of tax dollars?
You can now access your desk computer via your Android phone.
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Friday April 18, 2014
The two-minute rule: a form of the proven adage of Do It Now (DIN).
Google adds a new camera app, i.e., new photo processing software to Android.
The Digital Public Library of America is one year old and growing. See their site here.
The growing world of Android gets 53% of new US phone activations last quarter.
“May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.” Something to say when you sit and begin writing.
How Nest, now Google, shares data with ulitity companies and makes a lot of money.
Ubuntu14.04 is released and handles tablets and all those touch screens.
I love these demographic maps that show where few people live in the US. Here is one. Here is another.
There have been 100million downloads of OpenOffice. I have contributed half a dozen to that number. The definition of success has changed.
LinkedIn hits 300million users.
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Saturday April 19, 2014
Here is one vote that wearable computing should concentrate on the ear, not the wrist.
We already have wearable computing in the ear: it is called hearing
aids. Today's models are marvelous computers and communications devices.
Reinventing the axe.
Microsoft will build a $1billion data center in Iowa.
Southern California Edison will offshore its IT support. Bye bye jobs.
64GigaBytes on a microSD card—amazing.
Great title and great thought for travellers on this earth: The worst thing that can happen rarely does.
Nike drops out of wrist-wearable tech-health monitors.
A simple idea for blocking the hot sun from a building. Why weren't we doing this decades ago?
Apple maps finds the Lock Ness Monster.
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Sunday April 20, 2014
Google has grown as the Internet spreads. But now, the Internet has just about reached everyone, so Google's growth will stop. Unless, of course, they create something new.
A part of Dell continues to make PCs and big profits.
Thoughts on Cloud 2.0, Google, Amazon, and all the new companies that have yet to appear.
Large asteroids hit the earth twice a year. We have been lucky so far.
A Russian dashcam catches an asteroid, not a real big one.
Excellent advice for writing for the sciences and technologies.
The power of writing your own stories—mostly from childhood.
Rest, taking a nap, is a critical part of being a freelance writer.
The abilities of the introverted writer.
Time management for writers.
Thoughts on creating a location independent writing career.
Write, now, it's your job, just do it.
The value of teams of people working with a freelance writer.
How to find a local writing group.
Advice to beginning writers: you aren't good yet, but keep writing all the time so you can become good.
Trying to differentiate writers from those who make "copy."
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