Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 23-29 April, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Open-Source software: The OpenBook Challenge and Apple's FoundationDB
• YouTube turns 13
• Gmail rolls out a new look and function
• Amazon wants to put packages in the trunk of our cars instead of our front doors
• Nintendo blows away all tech companies with its financial quarter
• Facebook has a great quarter despite all the broo-ha-ha
• Bill Cosby is convicted of sexual assault
• Amazon rolls in AWS money AND raises Prime cost 20%
• Intel sets a record in its financial quarter

Monday 23 April 2018

Predictable and predicted: global music sales grow spurred by streaming music. Some had foreseen doom when CD sales went away.

Facebook has taken all the bad press, but Google has just as much data on all of us.

You may have noticed the new page previews on Wikipedia. I love them.

Soon we will buy all our fashions from...Amazon. Yes, Bezos wants to take over the fashion world.

But first, Amazon wants to greatly increase sales of food in India.

The OpenBook Challenge: create a good Facebook replacement that won't covet all knowledge about us.

FoundationDB: Apple wants this to become the next great open-source software database for the world.

Tuesday 24 April 2018

Amazon has a (no longer) secret project building a robot that navigates the home. Combine Alexa with Roomba with lidar and, well, this might work in some limited fashion.

Paid endorsement are circling around Amazon prohibitions via Facebook.

Researchers find a way to hack into a Nintendo Switch my a hardware hole in the Nvidia processor.

Microsoft continues its quest for real gold in the Minecraft community.

Alphabet has a mixed financial quarter. Its ad money is up, but some of its expenses grew faster.

Nest is one of the sinks where Alphabet's money is draining away.

YouTube turns 13 today.

YouTube is acting more adult-like having pulled 8.3Million videos in the last three months. Software spotted and pulled most of these. Censorship in America. I guess we are getting better at it. I don't like the trend.

Mining gold from old smartphones and such.

Real estate is good if you are Jeff Bezos. He has a $23Million mansion in Washington D.C.

Sit in economy class for a 20-hour flight. This is an advancement in technology? Seems more like punishment.

Wednesday 25 April 2018

Coming from Amazon—the Fire TV Cube. And that is all we know.

Must see video: Nvidia has a breakthrough in fixing degraded photographs.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have created a new conductive sheet that may help us take notes on paper that show up on computer. Current cost are 30cents a sheet.

Amazon will now put a package in the trunk of your car. Many find this more acceptable than the attempt to open our front doors of our homes.

High tech companies win over pharmaceutical companies in a Supreme Court ruling on patents.

Google's music service ends and shifts over to YouTube's Remix.

Small reforms in immigration regulations will make like a little tougher on H-1B visas.

Google begins rolling out the new Gmail today. I haven't seen it yet.

Along with the updated Gmail, Google updates its Tasks apps so we can make To-Do Lists and ignore them.

No hiding what they want: Chinese software companies are hiring pretty women to be motivators for overworked male computer programmers. Of course this is all legal, it's China where the increased productivity is good for the (Communist) Party.

Thursday 26 April 2018

Amazon releases a version of Alexa for kids. I would like to see one that can understand a three-year old's speech.

Qualcomm has a better than expected financial quarter.

Forget all the broo-ha-ha, Facebook has a better than expected financial quarter with steady growth is daily active users.

AMD has a big financial quarter with noticeable gains on Intel in the market.

Samsung, boosted by memory chip sales, not smartphone sales, has a big financial quarter.

Expert economists are predicting nearly half of jobs to be replaced by technology. Some people seem to understand how this all works.

The hottest of all tech companies is...Nintendo??? 500% increase in profits powered by a ... game console? The Nintendo Switch is a money-making machine.

A new ... I don't know what you call this... movement? "Incel” stands for “involuntarily celibate."

LG has a record financial quarter driven by sales of the latest high-end televisors.

Twitter, unprofitable forever, actually made a profit for the second quarter in a row.

The biggest news of the day: Ford will stop selling sedans. The Mustang remains along with some crossover something or other and then all the trucks and vans.

Friday 27 April 2018

A Canadian company supplies the technology for governments to censor the Internet in their countries.

Our US House of Representatives passes the Music Modernization Act.

The money continues to roll into Amazon. Their ad revenue is steadily growing. Amazon Web Services grows 49% over last year. $1.4Billion rolls in. 

Despite all this money falling from the skies, Amazon raises the price of Prime service 20%.

Apple is dropping all its WiFi products...the AirThisAndThat line will be gone when current supplies are depleted.

Microsoft has a good financial quarter. Office 365 subscriptions continue to grow as does their Surface computer sales.

One generation's hero is the next's convict. Bill Cosby convicted of sexual assault. Prison.

Snap shows version 2 of its Spectacles. The first version flopped in the marketplace. At least this version has better looking models in the ads.

Intel sets new records in a good financial quarter.

Drew Cloud, the student-load expert journalist, is not a real person. It is a company that runs student loans. All the major newspapers in the US were duped.

Why are people cutting the cord and stopping cable TV? The prices have risen 74% since 2000 while incomes have dropped. Follow the money.

Saturday 28 April 2018

Google's unreleased operating system Fuchsia will run Android apps. Odd how something that doesn't exist is showing a list of features.

Bill Gates on parenting. He makes some good sense.

Google wants to engineer a community much like Disney tried several generations ago. Locals are suspicious.

Rick Dickinson, who designed the Sinclair Research ZX80 and ZX81, has died. These were significant machines in the early days of the personal or home computer.

It appears that the Russian military is recovering and has skipped a generation in electronic warfare.

DNA, open source everything, and the Golden State Killer case. I hope these DNA guys know what they are doing. I hope in 20 years we don't shake our heads and conclude that maybe we had it all wrong in this technology.

This must be important as it is all over the Internet: Apple is rumored to be building an unprecedented Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality headset.

Must see video—especially if you have a 4K display: Lightning at 1,000 frames per second.

NASA bumbles it again as it cancels or postpones a lunar mission. An entire agency has a lack of focus.

Sunday 29 April 2018

Somehow, a scoring of the makers of laptop computers. Apple is way down the list with Lenovo on top.

How Slack hires minorities. One thing is they go behind MIT and Stanford...the rich kid schools.

The life of the "Virtual Dating Assistant." People pay other people to do this, so... I don't know.

How Amazon and other tech companies ruined the Seattle housing market. Only the tech rich can buy a house. Middle class? Go somewhere else and commute in to teach school or be a fireman.

The roots of Facebook: the three major television networks in the early 1970s. It is all demographics and advertising dollars.

"The apps ran on an assembly line, built with "open-source", off-the-shelf components. The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were copy and paste..." It seems this is unfortunately true.

Another excellent post here. Advice. Try it all. User what works.

The importance of private writing...Call it a journal. Call it a writer’s notebook. Excellent post.

Traits that certainly help if you want to enter the business of writing...and it IS A BUSINESS.

If, unlike me, you don't have anything to write...here are some tips for finding something.

Simple HTML to get by for a little writing. Years ago I discovered that HTML was the future of writing something that everyone could read.

When writing, write shorter. Cut with a sharp knife and no regrets.

Good suggestions for what to bring on a trip.