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: 29 July - 4 August, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Google and VMWare teaming
• Qualcomm and Tencent Gaming teaming
• Captial One exposes data
• Apple has yet an other record financial quarter
• Apple spent over $60million a day on R&D
• Where the money is: hacking medical records flourishes
• Intel releases 10th-generation processors for laptops
• Pinterest now has 300million users

Monday 29 July 2019

Not much viewing time this morning.

All the big tech companies are together on this one as they petition our FCC more space in the 6GHz area. Utilities protest as they want the same thing. Gue$$ who will win.

In Europe, a $10Billion deal merges Just Eat with Takeaway.com in food delivery.

Seth Godin has some excellent thoughts on what is learned in most government-run schools versus what is taught and how we can change all that.

Tuesday 30 July 2019

Google and VMWare team to make it easier to run each other's products on each other's products. Efficient. Optimize. What could possible go wrong?

AT&T wins a $Billion contract with our Dept of Justice to install news phones and such.

Qualcomm and Tencent Games (China) team up their entertainment-bringing technology and their entertainment.

Nvidia is releasing new drivers for their newest hardware so that "creatives" (who are those people?) can edit in 10-bit color (and what is that?).

The Fortnite World Cup was last weekend, and by now everyone knows that the 16-year-old winner took home over $3Million—that is more than the winner of Wimbledon and the Masters. If Tiger Woods' parents had only...

Programming languages that are supposedly on their way out, so learning something different to keep you job. These predictions are usually wrong.

Windows 7 is at the end of its life. The UK's National Health Service is still running it with no end in sight. The vast majority of government agencies worldwide are the same.

oooops, Capital One has a booboo and exposes information about tens of million$ of credit card applicants.

Wednesday 31 July 2019

When did it become Facebook's job to stop the flow of silliness and other forms of "misinformation"????

Apple has yet another record financial quarter. They are making over a Billion $$$ a week profit.

Something odd is happening with Amazon's Ring and local law enforcement across the US.

Amazon improves its text-to-speech technology to provide more "natural" sounding voices.

Apple joins The Data Transfer Project.

Unions for gig workers. I think this is a contradiction in terms, but hey, its political campaign season, so it's the norm.

Thursday 1 August 2019

IBM continues to struggle with age discrimination as more facts reveal efforts to be "trendy" and "cool" by being younger.

Qualcomm has a weak financial quarter. They promise that they are positioning themselves for 5G technology. We shall see.

For seven quarters in a row now, smartphone sales have declined worldwide. The makers need something different.

Training a computer to play better chess by reading commentaries on chess matches. "Good move" led learning that move while "okay" led to ignoring it. Simple, ingenious idea.

Google passes Apple. Google has $117Billion cash in the bank while Apple only has $102Billion. The numbers are so large that I doubt the counts are accurate, but we get the basic idea.

Friday 2 August 2019

No Internet viewing today.

Saturday 3 August 2019

Hacking medical records is a growth industry. 32million hacked in 2019—already double that of 2018—with a few months to go. Let's see, was it the prior President who pumped all that money into health care? Thieves go where the money is.

Intel releases its 10th-generation processors for portable computers. Don't buy this year, wait until... You have to buy sometime.

Our Federal Reserve makes an on-sight inspection of an Amazon data center. I'm surprised that this was the first such inspection as these should have been done years ago.

Google Project Zero appears to be working. They find errors in software from other vendors and tell them. 95% of the errors are corrected within 90 days.

Facebook will now make it obvious that WhatsApp and Instagram are really Facebook.

The Chinese claim to have put AI into computer-based training for kids. We shall see if the world learns faster and better. But can the kids go play on the swings?

This seems to be a surprise to many persons, but electric scooters are not good for the environment. Next week someone will confirm that electric cars aren't either (and they aren't).

"There’s a chasm between science, where the identity of the discoverer doesn’t matter, and culture, where, “because he said so,” is a factor in our beliefs."—Seth Godin (well said)

We are moving closer to practical systems that use solar power and make sea water potable.

Food delivery wars, merges, acquisitions, etc. continue as DoorDash buys Caviar.

That little old Pinterest now has 300million users.

Our Dept of Defense is testing balloons at 65,000 feet carrying SIGINT packages.

Various German national, regional, and local governments were hit hard with ransonware this past week.

I'm not sure what to make of this story. I'm struggling to accept that taxpayers are funding a National Lightning Detection Network.

Sunday 4 August 2019

We have too many morons in America. Yesterday one of them shot a few dozen persons in El Paso and another one did the same in Ohio. Too many morons.

Our FAA finally approves a commercial drone that flies beyond the operator's line of sight. Sit at the kitchen table and look at your 500-acre farm in the morning.

The Instagram beach party. We have invented places where persons become celebrities and then gather with celebrities and celebrate celebrity...or something like that. Yet another measure of the wealth of the country.

In the last financial quarter, Apple spent over $60Million a day on R&D. That is the largest number and largest percentage in its history. It also eclipses anything the government attempts to do.

When did using facial recognition become a privacy violation? I've used Apple's Faces in their Photo software for years.

As opposed to the Instagram beach party, here is a good use of technology: diabetics are using electronic skin patches and smartphones to monitor their health instead of pricking their fingers.

oooops, StockX (they sell shoes) was hacked with data from 6.8million customers stolen. How can you be smart enough to have that many customers and yet not so smart as to ... 

This one person studied a topic five days a week for nine months, then found a good job. What worked for him in self-study. It isn't easy.

Strong rumors that the next batch of portable computers from Apple will have 5G connectivity. Finally someone is going to do this after all these years.

The latest high-end monitors from LG and how they work as second monitors for Apple laptops and tablets.

Publishers of personal essays, i.e., entertaining and enlightening non-fiction.

Yet another creative "thinking" (I use that word charitably) that the world is ending with today's politicians and moaning and groaning about "How can you write fiction when reality is so bad." Get over it folks.

“If you are seeking creative ideas, go out walking. Angels whisper to a man when he goes for a walk.” ~Raymond Inmon

Tips on writing science fiction. There is some science in it, but in varying degrees.