Summary of this week:

• There is talk that our government will take over a nationwide 5G network (folly)
• Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, dies at 91
• Elon Musk sold 20,0000 flamethrowers
• Facebook, despite all its angst, is pulling in $1Billion per week
• Apple and Amazon add to the list of good financial quarters

Monday January 29, 2018

oooops, US soldiers wearing fitness trackers have allowed themselves to be tracked in places they don't want to be tracked. Duh.

Will our central government take over a national 5G network to prevent foreign governments from doing so?

Computing, AI, and the synthesis of speech for those of us who can no longer speak.

Real News but not really news: Vladimir Putin didn't want Hillary Clinton to be our President. He undertook what may have been the most cost-effective advertising campaign in history.

Ingvar Kamprad, founder of Ikea, dies at 91.

Linux 4.15 kernel is released.

Tuesday January 30, 2018

The story of how Apple began to build its own processors and now dominates the industry with them.

Microsoft acqui-hires PlayFab—a small company that helps game designers move their ideas to production quicker. This will become part of Azure.

Waymo (Google(Alphabet)) strengthens its ties with Fiat Chrysler. The numbers are still relatively tiny, but they are still working together.

Among other childish nonsense coming from his past weekends Grammy Awards are complaints that some groups didn't win enough. The concept of "winning" and not winning carries the concept of competition. If there is a competition, someone does not win. The non-winners evidently didn't compete well enough and need to improve. This is not an editorial, but merely a review of the English language. I find it odd that such reviews of the definition of words are needed among adults.

Creative accounting knows no end as Dell may sell itself to itself in order to remove $50billion in debt and become publicly traded with becoming publicly traded. This is real, not fake, news.

Microsoft has a significant upgrade to its Teams application.

Nvidia makes inroads into the petroleum industry bringing AI (machine learning). Of course the oil and gas folks want to take advantage of better technology. They have long been at the cutting edge of advanced computing.

Elon Musk's Boring Company is making a fortune selling flamethrowers, that right, flamethrowers.

A new one for me: prosopagnosia or face blindness.

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

Wednesday January 31, 2018

RedHat buys CoreOS to improve its containers technology.

Facebook bans all crypto currency ads. Are political ads next, and then...

Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase are sort of merging to form a healthcare company that will fix the American healthcare system by creating some type of co-op.

How drug companies flood towns with pain pills. This town received two pills per man, woman, and child per every day of the year.

LibreOffice 6.0 is released. It come two years after 5.0 with major improvements.

Microsoft updates Office and OneDrive for the iPad and iPhone.

Apple's iPhone X isn't selling as they predicted.

Samsung has a good financial quarter.

For the first time ever, the number of daily active users at Facebook falls.

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 
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Thursday February 1, 2018

Driven by much better cloud computing sales, Microsoft has a good financial quarter.

And despite all the bad publicity and angst, Facebook continues to rake in the money at a rate of $1Billion per week.

Lenovo loses a little money in a quarter in which it is trying to change direction.

Airbnb and its affect on the housing market in New York City. The model is different; the result is different. The change is good for some and bad for others.

Elon Musk sold all of the 20,000 "flamethrowers" he made.

February is International Correspondence month: write someone a letter by hand each day.

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

Friday February 2, 2018

Americans want basic income and we want companies that use AI to eliminate jobs to pay for it.

Apple has a good financial quarter. $20Billion profits in 13 weeks.

iPhone sales are down 1%. Apple sells almost a million iPhones a day. about 900,000 a day. The definition of success has changed.

Google's Cloud pulls in a $1Billion a quarter. That is 1/5th of Amazon's, but still a lot of money.

YouTube TV is now available on Apple TV and Roku.

Chrome OS 64 is here.

Microsoft's Office 2019, the standalone product, will only run on Windows 10. Want other services? Use Office 365 subscriptions.

Amazon busts the bank again this quarter.

Apple adds the iPhone 7 to its refurbished store. Save 10%.

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

Saturday February 3, 2018

NASA uses it latest technology to take a selfie of the Mars rover. A bit misguided?

The Legislative branch investigates the Executive branch for civil rights abuses. That is part of its job. And now everyone is screaming. Funny how these things happen.

Telecommuting, remote work, not seeing other persons in person. Will it all work?

Is this is beginning? Some research shows some types of cancer in some rats exposed to cell phones.

Microsoft cuts the price of its low-end Surface laptop.

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

Sunday February 4, 2018

I seem to have a long list of items viewed today...

I highly recommend Seth Godin's piece today about cities building Super Bowl stadiums when it makes no sense and how these projects win. Good lessons for change agents.

Some history: the Lena image (not photo, but scanned image, there is difference) and the descent of computing into today's brotopia.

Here is some incorrectly rewritten history about open source software. The story credits Netscape 20 years ago with creating it.

A few details on how Amazon plans to revise healthcare for its employees and, we can hope, for the rest of us as well.

Is any new job a good job? Many Amazon warehouse jobs are not good jobs, but poor cities give away everything to bring in Amazon jobs to learn too late how bad it can be.

Microsoft has created an S mode for Windows 10 so the rest of us can lock ourselves into apps from the Microsoft store.

Hollywood, hypocrisy, sexual misbehaving, and all that rolled into one at the Grammy Awards.

The value of the user story in agile development and why managers should become good at them.

What to do when creativity hits the wall? Write about how creativity hit the wall and how you feel about all that. And also, keep a blank piece of paper next to your writing because you will have lots of new ideas come to you while writing this hit-the-wall piece and you want to capture them.

I like this writing post. It contains simple yet practical ideas that work. Of great value are the ones about avoiding the kitchen and keeping journals everywhere you go so you can always jot down the great ideas that come at odd times.

Writing at a steady pace and finding a book a year completed. 300 words a day, 300 days per year is a 90,000-word book each year. That is quite a bit. And you won't be writing all day.

"You’re struggling daily with that little voice in your head. The one that keeps telling you that everything you want to tell, has already been written and told."—Laura Tong ... from me...No, everything has not already been written and told. Each of us is unique. Hence, what we write is unique, too.

"When I coach creative people, I ask, 'what if your work helped just one person? What if your work connected with one person and colored their life with joy for one moment? What if it gave just one person a powerful connective experience, a sense that they aren’t alone?'”—Genevieve Parker Hill

Want you spouse to work with you as a writer, or anything else. Think carefully. Set boundaries. What is business? What is personal?

Thoughts on "Archival Fiction." I find this fascinating.

Tips on beginnings and endings of a memoir.

Some techniques to fight the writer's problem of trying to be perfect.

The basic elements of a story.

Taking the steps to saying, "I am a writer."

Writers, writing, and writing communities. It often helps just to have someone say, "I read what you wrote." There are many other benefits as well.

Simple little things you can do to reduce interruptions while you are writing.

Omitting adjectives and other, often needless, words.

Content mills masquerading as marketing agencies.

No nonsense tips on finishing writing. That first book is difficult. Concentrate on habits instead of pages. The pages will come if you sit in the chair and put your hands on the keyboard everyday.

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