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 July, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Sony shows a 48MegaPixel image sensor for smartphones
• Google has a good financial quarter
• Qualcomm shows its tiny 5G-enabling antennas
• Facebook loses $150Billion in value in one day
• Amazon's AWS continues to grow and fund the company
• Amazon's Rekognition mistakenly IDs Congressmen as criminals

Monday 23 July 2018

In find XKCD especially good this morning with the data visualization trick.

In Egypt, if you have 5,000+ followers on social media, you are officially official media and subject to laws and regulations.

That Missouri Uber/Lyft driver has been removed from those services as well as from Twitch. The censors win this one. It was all legal, but...

Sony has made a 48MegaPixel sensor that will be in our smartphones real soon now.

America's higher education, i.e., colleges sort of accept Wikipedia now. They never did move quickly.

News Flash (not): We like it when someone says "thank you." "Civility" is the new term for this. The old term was "manners."

Welcome to the We're-a-rich-company-with-no-national-borders world where Amazon threatens the British government with civil unrest if they don't do something or other.

Antsy to avoid another election-year analytical debacle, Facebook suspends Crimson Hexagon before the election season over fears of misuse of data.

Tuesday 24 July 2018

The never-ending search for background noise that allows us to "concentrate." I have an old Steve McQueen movie on now at low volume.

The current Administration has a different view of car emissions than the prior one. As with many things, taking the easy route to change allows the next Administration to do the same.

Qualcomm shows its new tiny antennas that will permit smartphones to move to 5G real soon now.

The Pinterest folks are about to become really, really rich. They hit $1Billion in ad sales and may go public this year.

It appears that Google has eliminated phishing and many other security problems by using physical security keys (little USB devices).

Google greatly increases its spending on building its cloud hardware.

The UK's government pledges to run fiber optic broadband to every home in 15 years.

Alphabet has a better-than-expected financial quarter. They continue to spend large amount$ on "side bets" and research.

How do you fight government interference? Lobby in Washington DC. That is what the big tech companies are doing in record number$$$.

Google Translate has emerged as a world-wide popular service. Now comes the ad money.

Wednesday 25 July 2018

The James Webb Space Telescope: NASA is a mere 15 years behind schedule. Is that a problem? Incompetence reigns supreme.

How to delete your old, embarrassing or worse, tweets and save your job or something.

This guy has been using the same old, simple Chromecast for five years. So have I.

Google pushes a smart grammar checker out to Google Docs.

It seems that a retired Georgia Tech professor holds a patent on all this ride sharing stuff that Lyft and Uber use.

Apple confirms that the new MacBook Pro over heats. They claim a software error causes it and is issuing a fix today.

Chinese subjects use blockchain technology to hide and distribute censored news stories.

Satire, out-of-context questions and answers, fake news, a million viewers, and what else is there these days?

Our DHS tells us that Russian hackers have hacked into control rooms of hundreds of utilities in the US. Don't connect your utility system to the Internet. Is that a difficult concept?

Google releases Cloud Services Platform to make hybrid clouding (did I just invent a term?) easier and integrates with its Google Cloud Platform.

Segway now has some self-balancing roller skates or shoes or something. Got $399 to burn? Why not.

Hackers steal $2.4Million from a bank. Don't connect it to the Internet! Is that a difficult concept?

Thursday 26 July 2018

In Silicon Valley, the free cafeteria at tech companies is being outlawed. Local restaurants want the employees to come to them and pay. The companies will find a way around this regulation.

Facebook's growth and profits were less than estimated (so fire the estimators for being wrong). This led to all sorts of chaos.

Facebook's value drops $151Billion (with a B) in one day.

Maybe we discover lots of underground water on Mars. Tell me when we are making coffee with Martian water.

Google is now selling its own hardware security key.

Half of the persons who work at Google are contractors with none of the benefits of the actual employees.

An in-depth review of the updated Apple portable computer.

AMD has a good financial quarter.

Google Drive is about to reach 1Billion daily active users.

Samsung takes a big step closer to bendable, unbreakable OLED displays.

Friday 27 July 2018

Amazon's AWS continues to fund the rest of the company. Growth of 49% from last year is the most surprising as experts mistakenly felt the market was saturated.

The top tech companies are accelerating while everyone else is merely maintaining. The difference? The top tech companies are using the technology they developed to their advantage.

Those ride sharing services are doing the opposite of what they were supposed to do. They are creating more traffic in cities.

Slack teams with Atlassian to improve its chat and take on Microsoft.

A glimpse at the human moderators at Facebook. These are part-time subcontractors who do this on the side for extra money. This isn't a profession.

Google reveals its Edge Tensor Processing Units (TPU). They'll go out on the edge of computing to infer things on the factory floor that datacenter TPUs trained.

Let the games begin: our Pentagon's $10ka-trillion-jillion cloud computing contract is open for bids. Prediction: the award will be protested. Congress will declare that multiple winners are appropriate, and we will split this big pie a dozen ways before it is over.

Tech companies collect more of our information. Our law enforcement routinely asks for and receives copies.

Google, running away from the mess that comes with cryptomining, bans such applications from its Play Store.

Intel updates its small form-factor NUC with newer processors.

Saturday 28 July 2018

Funny, bud sadly true, see xkcd today about how people volunteer so that others can make bigger profit$.

Groupon pays IBM $83Million in a patent violation.

The NSA audits itself and find that even several years after Snowden they are still fumbling around in the dark.

The Guerrilla Skepticism on Wikipedia project: just some volunteers who can think rationally and debunk stupid articles on Wikipedia. Thank you.

Amazon responds to this week's test showing how badly their facial recognition software performs. At this point, the technology is fun, but not good enough to kick in doors and grab citizens off the streets.

Lots of high-tech in Silicon Valley. Lots of naive people, too. Interesting combination and easy pickings for industrial and national espionage.

And effort to build small homes in your backyard for your aging parent. Good idea, terrible implementation here. $125,000 for 400 square feet? And the bathrooms are all wrong for the elderly. How can smart people be so wrong?

Convicts (not inmates as reported) hack systems and get money. They have copious free time and access to a few essential resources.

It is summer, the news is slow, I get it, but really...scientists revive 42,000 year old frozen worms. Really?

Sunday 29 July 2018

A look at the industry behind raising the profile of products sold on Amazon.com.

The folks at the big social media companies are simply simple and gullible. Who wouldn't follow the courteous guidelines for behavior? Well, plenty of folks wouldn't as these companies have finally realized.

The regulators in New York City are trying to greatly curtail Uber and Lyft.

Researchers are trying to find ways to see through flames and learn who is on the other side and needs rescuing. Terrible example footage. These guys really need to find ways to communicate their research findings.

The late Carrie Fisher will appear in the next Star Wars movie. They have enough recorded video of her.

Amazon Prime indicates that we will pay for free shipping. Wait, isn't that...

News Flash (not): Politicians already in office warn that free air time on social media given to those not in office will destroy democracy. Politicians already in office are always trying to prevent the other guy from campaigning.

Intel has a good financial quarter.

I love this story. In 1990, writer Harlan Ellison took opening lines from people in a book store and pounded out multi-thousand-word short stories on a manual typewriter. He demonstrated, "I'm paraphrasing Harlan here. He explained he wrote this way to rebuke the belief writing is mystical, a special process reserved for the few who know the rules, know the secret handshake, wear the invisible super-secret decoder ring. He wanted to show a writer did not need an outline or writing in support groups, critiquing, did not even need re-writes." Great stuff!

Writing a non-fiction "how to" book requires expertise. Right? Maybe not as much as you think.

Some good tips on writing a short story. Here is my tip: write a short story every week for a year. By the 12th month you will be much better at it.

One of Ray Bradbury's writing secrets: start each day by writing aimlessly for 15 minutes. Anything. Just spill it out. Go back and read it later. Who know what is there.

Some common ways that writers who don't create outlines are creating outlines.

A list of website that pay real $$$ for articles on business.

And I really like this post about writers and how we do things to ourselves, sometimes good, often not so good.

The monsters in the writers' closets. Fear of... is the first word of each monster.

Things we shouldn't put in our writer websites.

Afraid of automation and being unemployable? Learn how to learn quickly. And don't tell anyone your age.