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: 15-21 April, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Notre Dame Paris burns
• Apple and Qualcomm settle all their lawsuits
• Intel quickly drops out of the 5G chip market
• Facebook executives continue to embarrass themselves and destroy Facebook
• Wisconsin and Foxconn continue their swirl
• Huge Internet hack of 40 nations
• The Mueller report is released to all of us

Monday 15 April 2019

Tuesday 16 April 2019

For the record—Notre-Dame in Paris burns in a massive fire. The full extent of the damage and the cause are yet to be determined.

A recent laser scan will help rebuild.

One of SpaceX's boosters landed as intended on a sea barge, but then slid off in heavy seas.

Among all of Facebook's celebrity woes, it has a real technical outage for the third time this year.

The government of China uses facial recognition to track the location of Uighurs and other across the landscape. False positives? Who cares? 

The world of the fake review on Amazon.com.

Large parts of Asia are following China's lead in censoring the Internet. Of course they censor the Internet and use it to watch their subjects. That is what governments like that do.

Production of iPhones shifts from China to India.

In addition to a credit score, we all now have a "Sift" score that somehow measures our trustworthiness.

The slow shift in Silicon Valley towards unions and socialism. Stupid bosses, as usual, are fueling this.

Volkswagon is making a big push to electric vehicles and to the China market.

The LFGD: Large Format Gaming Display. Acer has a new one for only $1,299.

Documents and meetings. There is a good way to use these.

Wednesday 17 April 2019

Leaked documents show that some persons at Facebook just don't get it. I guess we can say that this is what happens when too much money comes too quickly to persons too young.

Silicon Valley can't seem to help itself. Harass other people? No problem. Move to another high-paying job at another company across the street.

Apple and Qualcomm become best friends again. All litigation worldwide ends. Apple will buy Qualcomm products again.

As a reaction, Intel stops working on 5G products.

IBM has a disappointing financial quarter.

Microsoft has a new subscription combing various online gaming services.

White, male researchers researching researchers say researchers are too white and too male. Contend that some need to move elsewhere, but who?

Netflix has yet another good financial quarter as it adds 10million new subscribers. Apple? Disney? Who?

The government of Ecuador releases Julian Assange to jail. 40million cyber attacks ensue.

The students at the Ohio school opened by LeBron James are learning and growing. Good for all involved.

$60 and a little of this and a little of that and we can know who is walking about in public places. Facial recognition and inexpensive cameras.

Thursday 18 April 2019

Perhaps Apple will try to build an autonomous vehicle after all. They are buying(?) a lidar supplier.

Microsoft releases the Surface Hub 2: a really big touchscreen PC for meetings.

Facebook private groups. It isn't difficult to build a private group outside of Facebook and all the big players. The technology is quite simple.

Samsung's folding-screen phones are breaking in the first few days of use. It is the first version. Give it time.

The Apple AirPods. They look ridiculous. Really. Yet people are wearing the obnoxious things (or is it that obnoxious people are wearing the ridiculous things?).

Microsoft, know the limitations and errors in the technology, declined to sell facial recognition technology to law enforcement.

ooops, Facebook "accidentally" gets all the details of the email accounts of 1.5Million customers.

This is probably the biggest hacking event in Internet history: a group hacks into the country domains of some 40 nations.

Facebook is trying to move into the market of the voice-assisted everything. Of course it will work technically, and most of us will use it while ignoring the nonsense of the celebrity CEO.

Friday 19 April 2019

"The Mueller Report" is out. They released it on Compact Disc (remember CDs?). No one in Congress had the old hardware to read CDs. Did you need Windows NT as well? 

If you have one of those fancy new Internet connections...you can download the report here. It is one of those old PDF files that has no links or anything too post-modern.

$500 gets a new Chromebook from HP. What happened to the idea of the simple, inexpensive window to the Internet?

Challenges (as usual) for the US Intelligence Community. Moving too slowly with a cumbersome HR system and largess of unimaginative mid-level managers.

Strong rumors about super-duper cameras coming with the next iPhones.

Google and Amazon finally decide to let their videos play on the others' systems and devices.

Rich white people have already donated a billion$ to rebuild a rich-white-person building. And others are upset that these folks aren't donating money to rebuild other buildings and fix social emergencies and all that stuff. It just seems to upset some of us when others spend their money where they want and not where I want.

Zoom went public, and it's stock price jumped up 80% in the first day.

Nvidia releases its Issac SDK to make it easier to develop robotics applications.

Saturday 20 April 2019

When algorithms run amok...Scribd's algorithms identified the Mueller report as a copyright work and pulled it. Persons were sitting about and corrected the error. You can't make money if you hire persons to apply some sense. Hence, algorithms (mis)rule.

Some Microsoft employees have the audacity to question if diversity is more important than excellence (as one radio host would say).

Technology and brains are pushing us inevitably to driver-less tractor trailers to deliver all our goods. The loss of jobs will be large and widespread. I hope some other brains are working on that problem as well.

In America, 26 states have laws prohibiting government from competing with private industry. Many persons see this as a bad thing. They want taxpayers to buy goods for everyone and print phony money to make up the difference.

"Militants" remain on the Internet. I guess this is good as long as I am the person charged with deciding who is a militant and who is a good guy.

Here is an example of the above. The government of China has identified a large group of persons as militant. Hence, it deploys technology to round 'em up and put a million persons in detention camps. Some people identify these militants as heroes. Some identify them as simply people who want to worship a god.  The arguments continue, but since the government owns the means to force persons to do things, i.e., all the guns, the governors decide. Are they benevolent or malevolent? Who decides that? This isn't a new discussion, and I won't solve it here.

The government of China censors German camera maker Leica after it shows the "wrong" photographs in an ad.

At least I'm not alone. PDF experts also declare the PDF file of the Mueller Report as being less than very good at all.

ooops, it seems that all that green, renewable energy isn't so green and isn't so renewable. Someone failed to think all the way through the situation.

Bosque: yet another programming language. This one may actually be something new as it has no loops. We shall see.

Sunday 21 April 2019

Proof that we have more watchers than watchers. WhatsApp is running Nazi propaganda. WhatsApp doesn't have enough censors to catch it all. It appears others have enough watchers to note the WhatsApp lapses.

This probably was a secret...CIA reveals that Huawei is funded by the government of China as an arm of spying. I guess that is a revelation to some and old news to most.

In France, where the government owns and runs just about everything, the government launched a messaging app for all. ooops, it has big security holes.

Looking back 30 years to the Nintendo Game Boy and Tetris. Fond memories. I was worried when my wife was playing Tetris everyday. The situation was unusual, but that is another story for another day.

Integrating existing resources to build something useful: a self-taught programmer builds a robotic hand he controls with his mind.

A look inside the stupidity of the Boeing 737 system of hardware and software and money and ... stupidity. Let's not mask this with group dynamics or synergism or communication anomalies or such... a few folks did things that were just plain stupid.

A Beowulf Cluster is built for less than $1,000 use Raspberry Pi boards. This is all an education toolkit to lower the cost of teaching parallel supercomputing. Again, let's have a Nobel Peace Prize for the most successful educational project in the history of man.

Don't like what you have written? Keep going. There will be plenty of opportunity for someone else to hate it, too. Then you may start to like it.

Reading like a writer. Learning like a teacher. Listening like a speaker. Flip the role for a different perspective.

Focusing on my own strengths as a writer or any type of freelancer.

Some XKCD cartoons are funny because they are real but don't make any sense. This is one.

One writer's list of good books about writing. Careful about these. You read and read and never write.