Summary of this week:

• Co-op broadband has lower prices than big-company counterparts
• The crypto currency bubble bursts
• My mother dies on 14 January at age 87

Monday January 15, 2018

A personal note, very personal. My mother, born Betty Jane Istre, dies yesterday morning after I had posted the daybook for that day. She was 87 years old. Her obituary is at this link. We traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana where we laid her to rest on Saturday this week. Dementia is a terrible thing. It is a terminal and, at this writing, incurable disease.

Not much Internet viewing time this morning.

It appears that Co-op broadband providers are less expensive than the big, commercial outfits. Competition. Good.

Chinese nationals are returning to China after stints in Silicon Valley. This seems to surprise some which is surprising in the amount of ignorance of Chinese culture.

.....

Tuesday January 16, 2018

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 

Wednesday January 17, 2018

Perhaps the bubble has burst on all the crypto currency hype. It's just another stock option.

It is finally here, again. The Kodak 8mm film movie camera. Of course the result looks different. And some people love the difference.

Google shares its plans to install new undersea cables. It isn't really crowded down there on the ocean floor.

Google teams with Coursera to train IT support persons. Raise the number of trained workers, lower the average salary. This is simple economics. I do applaud the efforts at educating persons.

"Net Neutrality" has become a jobs program for lawyers.

The MacBook Air is ten years old. We experimented with the first model to test the characteristics of the solid state drive.

American space launch companies may put Americans into space this year. NASA is along for the ride.

Pop music: slower, sadder, louder, simpler. We didn't think it possible for it to be simpler, but the entertainment industry lowered the bar lower than we expected.

Upon further review...the spread of the plague has been changed from rats to human lice. Of course, we can still look at ice cores and predict the temperature of the planet to a tenth of a degree a thousand years into the future. Folly. Sheer folly.

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Thursday January 18, 2018

Small form factor PCs that are just big enough to hold high-performance Nvidia processors.

For the USB-C transition, a nice 7-port converter box.

It took a while to catch on, but the hottest app there is comes from Google, and it matches your face to a famous painting.

With new tax laws, etc., Apple plans to spend $350Billion domestically over the next five years. I thought I heard many liberals complaining that the new tax laws would doom our economy?

Climate "science" folly. It is humorous to use the word "science" when discussing this jobs program for researchers.

Got $50,000? Get this Hasselblad that captures 2.4GigaByte stills.

It appears that America's youth are eating laundry detergent and making YouTube videos while doing so. I guess there is a message here.

Google Cloud AutoML—do machine learning without writing software. This isn't free (what is?), and it should work.

Nintendo releases cardboard cutouts so kids (parents) can build things to use with the Switch game console.

In California, if you don't like shuttle buses for tech companies, you just smash the windows. Somehow this teaches the rich guys at those companies a lesson in economics or something. I guess the police are investigating, but since no one was hurt, there is no need to really push it.

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 

Friday January 19, 2018

The please-amazon-come-to-my-home-town race continues. Look for the losers to claim the winners bribed everyone. This is the ultimate ego fantasy. Pick a location, then tell everyone that the location hasn't been chosen, and then watch everyone shower you with praise and dinners and whatever else follows.

IBM appears to turn a corner and has its first revenue growth in almost six years.

Transition time for headphones with the old headphone jack going away and the USB-C slowly arriving.

Intel releases two cameras promising real, three-d depth in images. Plug and play and SDK and all the usual buzzwords.

Yeah!!! 2017 was one of the three hottest years in the history of our planet. Hence, we alive today are the greatest people in the history of mankind to be able to survive such! Ego! Arrogance! Yeah!

Wine 3.0 is released. Wine Is Not an Emulator. Run windows on Linux. I am not sure why anyone would want to do that, but ok.

Hospital groups are forming a co-op to make their own generic drugs. Will they pass the savings to consumers?

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 

Saturday January 20, 2018

Silicon Valley has lost much of its gleam to Chinese investors. Where is the next one? I've heard that question from 35 years.

YouTube creates the Intelligence Desk to ferret out offensive material before a few million persons are offended. They are still taking shortcuts and not simply hiring people to do the job.

Apple sort of acqui-hires Silicon Valley Data Science (SVDS) to provide more, you guessed it, data science expertise.

Facebook will let the wisdom of the crowd decide which news outlets are real or fake. Good luck with that one. The problems are obvious, predictable, and have been predicted.

Microsoft Office for Mac finally gets multiple editors on the same document at the same time.

Funny thing happened to the game console: everyone told me they were gone, but they are bigger than ever. Nintendo Fever!

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 

Sunday January 21, 2018

GASP! Russians have Twitter accounts! Who would've thunk it?

Small satellites, small launch rockets, small companies...big success. No, they will never put a person into space, but they will do a lot of good for a little expense.

The sorry state of government computing and technology in general continues. The Hawaii missile alert is one recent example. Yes, there are little bright stars here and there in government, but they are engulfed by...well, it is mediocre on its best, best day ever.

With all the talk of the nation state falling apart while the plutocrats hop the globe, just look at the crash of crypto currency to see that we aren't quite read to pull down all the flags.

The high-end graphics processors from Nvidia are in short(?) supply because crypto miners are buying all of them.

January 23rd is...get ready for this...National Handwriting Day. So grab a pencil and paper and write something that appears neat.

Seven story ideas or just ideas to start me writing about just about anything.

Stay positive as a writer. I guess this means to stay with the writing and avoid those who tell you to stop.

Thoughts on writing memoirs.

Experiences of several writers writing for content mills. Ugly pictures. Low pay. Low pay. Low pay. Did I mention low pay?

Thoughts on writing for business-to-business markets.

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org