Summary of this week:

• The Olympics withstands a cyber attack
• Crypto Miners are hijacking computers from websites
• Amazon has layoffs
• General Dynamics buys CSRA
• Uber continues to lose $100million a week
• Uber claims it could be profitable if it wanted
• Vimeo makes it easier to stream live all over the place

Monday February 12, 2018

And now folks are stealing the computing power of websites to mine crypto-currency. I suppose this has some deep meaning to it, or perhaps it is just stealing because that is where the money is.

Fake news was nothing. With newer technology we can fake anything. Time for the Fair Witnesses of Stranger in a Strange Land.

Machine learning systems, such as facial recognition, are "taught" who is who. Feed in a million photos of caucasians and you can recognize caucasians. This seems to baffle some persons.

Reading bad handwriting that was penned a few centuries ago. Difficult, but some people seem to have the talent for it.

The Winter Olympics withstood a major cyber attack during the opening ceremonies.

MIT's latest approach to flying autonomous drones uses the idea that "you won't need all that mapping information." Just avoid that tree. Simplicity triumphs again.

Tuesday February 13, 2018

Google sold about 4million smartphones last year. Pretty good until we consider that Apple sells this many in a week. The definition of success has changed.

Google updates its TPUs for TensorFlow machine learning cloud computing.

Amazon lays off hundreds of employees. Most are in the retail business. The cloud business is still hiring.

General Dynamics buys CSRA to boost it to number two provider of Federal IT services. This story hits home in Northern Virginia where all this Federal contracting occurs. Elsewhere? Yawn.

Oracle is building new data centers as it hopes to make a mark in cloud computing. This costs a lot of money.

What it's like to use a 50 MegaPixel $10K Hasselbald camera.

A German court rules that Facebook cannot use the personal information of users. This ruling has a long way to go still, but the opening ruling can change everything.

Everything you ever wanted to know about the inside of a printer or copier and why the paper jams. It IS rocket science.

The young among us continue to leave Facebook.

Following other industry leaders, Amazon is starting to design its own "AI" processors to run Alexa.

fill-in-the-blank technology will not fix your broken culture. At least someone has a grasp on reality.

Wednesday February 14, 2018

Warnings continue about using phones made by the Chinese as these companies have close ties with foreign intel agencies.

SpaceX plans to launch its first couple of Internet relaying satellites this weekend.

Some leading schools are trying to teach “Ethical Foundations of Computer Science” and other such. I think ethics should be mentioned everyday by the professors. I guess I am too old for this.

Google releases AMP for email. Now we may have video emails or something like that which load quickly.

Skydio releases the $2,499 self-flying camera system. It comes without a controller as it doesn't need one. See the video. This is a breakthrough.

Of all people, Bill Gates is chastising tech companies for their success and actions that invite government regulation. I seem to recall the Microsoft anti-trust hearings of the 1990s.

Uber lost $1.1Billion last financial quarter. Uber loses almost $100Million a week. Everyone loves Uber. What is happening here?

Amazon Twitch has as many viewers as CNN and MSNBC. What is Twitch? I don't know. How bad has CNN and MSNBC become? The world is upside down.

..... Email me at d.phillips@computer.org 
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Thursday February 15, 2018

The website, as we have known it, is going away? We shall see. We may go to conversations instead of information.

Qualcomm has a new LTE chip for 2GBPS speeds. The infrastructure won't support that, but here is wishing...

Lots of folks are buying up the best graphics processors to do crypto-currency mining, and that leaves the guys doing real science waiting in line with puny government budgets.

Vimeo has new services to allow live streaming over just about every social media platform at the same time and doing it without being a computer whiz kid.

State of the cloud computing industry...yes, AWS still leads, but everyone else is slowing gaining ground. This competition is good for the rest of us, although it can be confusing.

MIT creates a special-purpose processor optimized for use in neural networks. Of course it works better at this one application. This was done 20 years ago, but people weren't using machine learning nearly as much.

The Asus ZenBook 13. This laptop is really thin and it has an Nvidia graphics processor anyways.

Microsoft reveals an Ultimate Performance mode for Windows 10. It turns off all the extra junk that we never needed so the computer can run the problem at hand. Amazing idea (not).

Don't put your Apple HomePod on good wood furniture as it will leave a permanent white ring. Oooops, no one tested this???

Uber's CEO claims they could be profitable. Sure (not). They are investing too much in a future that may never come. Let's see what happens.

Panasonic still has a line of not-real-thin laptop computers that instead have optical disk drives and batteries that last all day long.

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

Friday February 16, 2018

Law enforcement was informed about the Florida school shooter months ago. They "investigated," but, well, you know.

Google alters its image search results that make it harder for everyone to grab an image. It also makes it better for copyright holders.

Facebook made a major change in its algorithm on what shows up on our newsfeeds. This has made a major change in users' experiences. Not all of us welcome the change.

Gmail Go (or Gmail lite) is now running on Android.

When you do business in Russia...Instagram helps the Russian government censor its subjects.

Cisco to bring $67Billion (with a B B B) back to the US this quarter. The change in tax law is working.

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

Saturday February 17, 2018

Uber continues to sell its assets in Asia.

Different thoughts on how automation benefits those who already have money, those people save their money, the economy stops pumping.

Our government indicts Russians citizens for meddling in the 2016 election.

This article demonstrates the silliness of the indictments of the Russians.

And, of course, TechDirt has the best article about the Russian indictments. No one will be arrested. No one will be tried.  Lots of publicity.

Beware of the clear glass door. It is bludgeoning Apple employees at their new building.

It is on the way: child-free seating on airliners. Some cheer, some scorn.

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

Sunday February 18, 2018

Learning to program a computer is more difficult as the computer sellers (and the operating system companies) are hiding everything from users. Good suggestion here, put BASIC in every phone tablet PC etc. in an obvious place.

Amazon.com is leaning towards the Dollar Store market. Terrible idea. The dollar store is the store for isolated, rural areas. Amazon.com could close those stores to the great detriment of rural life.

Facebook increases the amount of censorship it will use on us. All because the person who couldn't possibly be elected was elected and everyone in the world who predicted the election incorrectly must find an excuse to tell everyone, "Yes, I am still the smartest person in the world and I KNEW there was a reason why I looked stupid. So here it is."

ooops, it seems that everybody, and I mean them too, is ignoring Federal Election Commission rules requiring "I put this ad here" on Facebook. Americans aren't yet accustomed to censorship and limits on freedom of speech.

LIDAR technology finds yet another giant ancient city. Funny, we are learning that we didn't know about ancient civilizations, yet we can state positively what the temperature of the earth was at the time. This is yet another story of, "We had this wrong all along. The consensus was just plain wrong."

The iMac Pro is a POWERFUL desktop computer. And there are applications that can use that power.

The opportunity or irritant plot lines.

Writing A BOOK can be daunting. There are many reasons why you will not finish and maybe even not start.

The slump or fatigue that often comes in the middle of a long-term project.

Turning your autobiography into a novel. If its a novel, it is fiction. It doesn't have to be all true.

Some ideas that may be push a person to be a writer.

Some good pointers to good tools for marketing.

Lumen5 (why that name?) seems to hold much promise to easily create marketing videos.

Milestones, looking back. These guys have sold 300,000 books! Are you kidding me?

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