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: 14-20 May, 2018

Summary of this week:

• College commencement speeches time once again—Tim Cook at Duke
• Supreme Court prohibits federal laws on sports gambling, let the games begin
• Microsoft improves on the idea of the white-board-size tablet computer
• US Senate passes Net Neutrality bill (has no hope of becoming law)
• Google removes "do no evil"
• And Harry and Meghan married in London, thankfully this won't happen for another generation

Monday 14 May 2018

Adtech: Advertising based on tracking people without their consent. This is all becoming illegal. Will the bubble burst under Google, Facebook, et al?

Customers file a class-action suit against Apple for the crummy keyboards in the current MacBook. If the product is bad, don't buy it. Can I sue McDonald's for a lousy hamburger?

Google still scans our gmail to learn about us and sell ads. A company founded on "do no evil."

It is college graduation time; it is time for celebrities to give commencement addresses. The best ones are given by rich people to rich students. See Tim Cook at Duke.

Tuesday 15 May 2018

Our Supreme Court goes libertarian and kills the Federal law that makes sports gambling illegal. Now each state can pass its own laws on sports gambling. Take care with college sports, especially small-dollar sports where bribes are feasible. Hence, no one will bet on college games as they are too easy to fix.

Qualcomm to release a new chip this year to take smartwatches into a new generation.

A side trip to the best Wear smartwatches on the market at this time.

A few Google employees resign as Google enters a contract to help our Defense Department process drone imagery. Killing people is not a good business. It is often dirty. There are, however, folks in the world who truly want to kill Google employees. Do you try to protect your own? Do you have peaceful solutions?

Google 1: Google revises the extra storage we can rent online in Drive and other places. New plans, lower prices, good all around.

The Australian government is investigating Google's harvesting and sales of Android phone data.

More trouble with advertising dollars. You can't target ad receivers like you used to. So why would advertisers pay the same rates for less-effective ads?

Seattle's government levies a tax on jobs, i.e., the Amazon Head Tax of $275 per head. This is less than some wanted and $275 more than Amazon wanted. The $49Million a year is supposed to go to the homeless. We shall see how it is spent.

Another goof at Facebook where a personality quiz had security holes exposing the data of 3Million users.

FujiFilm announces a second instant-print camera. We try to go back to the Polaroid.

Get a letterman's jacket for playing video games in high school. Folly? Let's check back in ten years.

Amazon adopts its own "Rooney Rule" for senior-level management positions.

The Chrome browser version 68 is here where httpS is the default and all other things are marked as exceptions.

Wednesday 16 May 2018

Our Justice Department is investigating what used to be Cambridge Analytica. I am not sure what you can do to a company that no longer exists, but we shall find out.

Must see video: How about a 50" tablet computer? Microsoft shows their Surface Hub 2. Maybe one day this will be in offices.

Facebook finally adds people, not software, to review content. Now we come to the subjective part of what is good and what is not.

Joshua Adam Schulte: remember that name. Now a former CIA employee who allegedly leaked cyber tools to the world.

The current President eliminates yet another job that the prior President thought was necessary.

Our President authorizes government CIOs to act like CIOs. Funny, I thought the previous President was fixing all the outdated government IT systems since he was so tech saavy.

Target pushes into the next-day delivery service. Let's thank Amazon for pushing the traditional stores into better service.

Amazon starts to make Whole Foods worth the trip with extra discounts for Prime members.

Long dormant, the Apple self-driving car program is growing rapidly with more than 50 cars on the road now.

Facebook claims to have deleted 583Million fake accounts this year. That number is larger than the population of the US.

Amazon Web Services releases Sumerian: a service to help build mixed-reality (AR VR etc.) apps.

Thursday 17 May 2018

HP releases a new high-end portable computer with more CPU mores, more GPU power, and more of everything for about $2,000.

Unmatched cool for the desktop: a new HP all-in-one with a curved 34" display.

$200 gets you the new AOC portable external monitor for your laptop computer.

Apple wants an east-coast campus for 20,000 employees. They are looking in my neighborhood of northern Virginia and also in the state of North Carolina.

Our US Senate starts acting like a legislative body and passes a law that probably will never become law, but perhaps this may be habit forming and they will stop being an agent of the Executive Branch of government.

Microsoft releases the Xbox Adaptive Controller for persons with disabilities. Cool for gaming, but the real value is the experimentation and spread of devices for the disabled.

Google announces YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. Free choices and pay a little for extra services.

The world is ruled by obvious items, but many appear to be oblivious. See following examples.

News Flash (not): Amazon will move jobs out of Seattle to avoid paying a Jobs Tax.

News Flash (not): research shows that physically demanding jobs shorten your life span.

New Flash (not): Uber drivers make about minimum wage (or less).

And despite all the broo-ha-ha...Facebook is still letting advertisers know too much about its users so they can make more money on ads.

Friday 18 May 2018

Intel's Mobileye has a contract to supply 8Million cars in Europe with self-driving technology.

And Intel's Mobileye is driving 100 self-driving cars in Jerusalem. They claim to be coming to the US real soon now.

Investigation and question into Google's Duplex demo are returning no answers. This leads many to think the demo was highly faked.

Our Immigration and Customs Enforcement drops its machine learning program and opts for trained humans to vet immigrants.

ooops, in a 21st century version of an internal memo that was not supposed to go external, Google embarrasses itself with a vision of what Google can to for (to) us with all our information.

Another example of the definition of success changing: Apply only shipped 600,000 HomePods in two months and that was a failure.

YouTube and its influence on many types of education. Kids worldwide can watch things from the other corner of the globe...at no cost. Knowledge multiplication.

The number of humans born in the US drops to an alarming number.

The scam of the crypto-currency world.

Saturday 19 May 2018

Headline says it all, "Google Removes 'Don't Be Evil' Clause From Its Code of Conduct" That item was there because, as the founders of Google and many others at the time saw it, Microsoft was evil. Microsoft was telling everyone what to do and how to do it and everything. Google, and all the others to follow, wouldn't do what Microsoft had done to dominate the IT world. Instead, Google and others simply dominated the whole-wide world. Oh well. It was just a piece of paper anyways.

At least one person agrees with me about how the social media giants are trying to do censorship and discovering that is it pretty hard to do in America as we have little practice.

AWS adds yet another high-performance virtual server. This one uses NVMe storage for even faster movement of data.

The advancement of portable computers continues. ASUS has a new really thin laptop (ZenBook Pro 15) with more CPU power, more GPU power, thinner, lighter, faster, and all that amazing stuff.

Partying with the crypto-currency crowd. I guess some people never grow up or their idea of being an adult differs greatly from mine or something like that.

Google tries to push forward the technology of augmenting a person's knowledge in real-time maintenance work—the one area that needs AR.

Think you have a good camera? Look at this one and the 12K video. Combine three cameras (I couldn't afford one of them) and some serious computing and there you have it.

To "protect" the interests of a very few, our Congress is at work extending the Copyright protection again.

Government in the UK, when they finish going to someone's wedding today, is considering turning off FM radio.

Sunday 20 May 2018

A quick look at today's EliteDaily.com shows what the most important event in the world was this past...well year or something. Hint, a wedding in London.

The Chinese government-run accelerators in Silicon Valley. Find talent, ship it to China to get rich there.

Hackers of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea are simply robbing banks to bring cash into their cash-strapped country. If you can't have a foreign policy, steal the money anyways.

Google's AI experts share their latest research with engineers from the Alphabet portfolio of companies. Smart, very smart.

Photos show the urban overbuilding in many cities of the world. What a shame. Lots of concrete sold.

The future of tech giants? Build you own island nation out in the ocean. Don't worry about existing and outdated governments.

For some of us, this is much more interesting than that wedding in London...rebuild a PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi parts. oohh, aaahh, coooool.

Repo men plus license late scanners. It was predictable and predicted. What's next? We know what is next.

Of course these Silicon Valley shacks, i.e., houses are worthless, but the land they occupy is worth $1million. Want the Amazon Headquarters 2 in your town? Be ready, be ready.

The tension of creating and staying in a routine so that you can be creative and write the most un-routine pieces. Structure permits freedom—in some cases for some writers.

Ideas on finding the fun of writing, again.

Different techniques to increase the intensity of a story.

One writer discusses how she changed her writing habits over the years. Yes, change. Do what works now.

How old is "too old" to start writing? How about 80? How about anytime you have a breath in you?

Why can't I start this story. Here is a suggested start, "This story doesn't seem to start anywhere, not, at least any place that I can find. It sort of emerged from a distant fog and came upon us before we noticed it." Be honest with yourself and simply write what you feel.

Most ideas have their right time. Our notebooks and computers hold many ideas that were at the wrong time. Now may be the right time for them. Go look and see.