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: 2-8 December, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Public Libraries are dropping the late fees as it costs more than its worth
• Apple's worth hits another all-time high
• VW runs its own luxury ride-sharing business in Europe
• AWS offers quantum computing service: Braket
• AWS updates SageMaker to a Studio IDE
• Qualcomm has new processors for 5G
• Reddit has a 30% growth in the number of users this year

Monday 2 December 2019

While showing commercials about how great it is to work in an Amazon warehouse, Europeans picket such on Black Friday.

Our Dept of Justice arrests a researcher for giving a lecture on cryptocurrency in North Korea. There is a law about such, but all the information is openly available online and in books sold everywhere.

Some of us remember Christmas 1983 (15 degrees in Baton Rouge) and the price wars of the home PC market. $100 was the breaking point that broke many companies.

There is a growing trend of public libraries not charging late fees for overdue books. It costs more to make the phone calls than the money collected, and the late fees fall predominantly on the poor.

It costs nothing to have social media accounts. So who owns something that has no cost? When someone dies, do the heirs own it or can Twitter et al delete it?

oooops, a database of millions of text messages is left unsecured.

Tuesday 3 December 2019

An interview with Andy Jassy  who runs AWS on the future of everything in the future.

Our Dept of Homeland Security wants to take photos of all of us as we transit the airports. When did the Bill of Rights stop at the airport?

AWS announces its own quantum computing service: Braket.

The quest to build the flying car takes another setback.

The plutocrats versus the nation states: the plutocrats sign on to the Paris Accords while many nation states do not.

Remember that app this past summer that made everyone look older or something? FBI ties it to Russia and face-collecting and intel gathering and all such things.

YouTube removes Trump reelection ads without explanation. Of course this fuels the conspiracy of Silicon Valley hating the President and all that.

Cord-cutting continues as more of us shift to playing video games from streaming services. What is CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox? Who remembers that era?

Want to learn surgery? Tune in to YouTube.

European regulators start yet another investigation into successful American companies. The goal, as always, is to gather money.

A look at VW's Moia ride-sharing service. This is much closer to a luxury bus service. The driver is a VW employee. The vehicle is a high-end VW electric van. The inside is better than any other vehicle I've ever ridden.

Wednesday 4 December 2019

YouTube claims its censorship is succeeding and that the rest of us are now watching the right information instead of the wrong information. (right and wrong being subjective)

AWS is holding its big annual re:Invent event in Las Vegas this week.

AWS says its new Inferentia chips are available to use. As the name implies, these are custom built to make inferences in machine learning applications.

AWS shows Outposts: smaller (much smaller) datacenters that they will put in between their big data centers "regions."

AWS updates its SageMaker AI tool to SageMaker Studio that puts everything in one place.

Qualcomm shows some new processors for mobile phones. The somewhat puzzling combination shows how sophisticated a processor must be to handle 5G.

Firefox 71 is released. I hope it works better with MacOS Catalina than release 70.

The governors in India are playing the long game with successful American companies. This will hurt the Indian consumer for now, but may pay off later.

Researcher break unbreakable cryptography schemes again. This time with more efficient algorithms instead of more powerful hardware.

Page and Brin step away from the big C-roles at Google Alphabet.

Cracks in ice sheets are creating the world's most spectacular waterfalls. Such hasn't been seen in tens of thousands of years. We need to freeze the climate at this point so we can continue to enjoy these.

A look back at when we combined dozens of PlayStations to build supercomputers that were really, really inexpensive. It all worked. Today, the same is possible with other household gadgets.

Thursday 5 December 2019

Real news that isn't news: The coming 2020 census has massive technical and cost problems. Last we checked, the year 2020 will begin in less than 30 days.

A story claiming that Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft (The Silicon Six—I like the name) aren't paying the taxes they should. Seems that government tax collectors are doing their jobs. Let's get them in line and the problem goes away.

Bad news for Google as our National Labor Relations Board becomes involved in firings.

Our FTC is "scrutinizing" (sounds bad) Amazon in investigations of succeeding too much, i.e., antitrust violations.

The symbolism of the Mac Pro, which will be in stores real soon now. Few persons will need this machine, but that isn't the point. Apple is a computing company, and the stylish desk-side machine is a computer.

The CEO of AWS makes public comments about Microsoft receiving the big DoD contract (not AWS). Such public comments tend to indicate that AWS has no hope of winning a protest.

Friday 6 December 2019

Qualcomm shows new processors that are aimed at 5G VR headsets and goggles. The next generation could be something.

Qualcomm also releases new processors aimed at the always connected PC.

Uber releases safety figures from 2018. In 1.3Billion rides, there were 3,000 sexual assaults, 219 rapes, and 9 murders. All these are large numbers.

Coming real soon now from Apple is an iPhone that has no ports for wires. All communication with the device will be wireless.

Studies show that 95% of our largest voting counties are vulnerable to email fraud.

The tragic measles outbreak of 2018: 142,000 deaths are estimated worldwide.

Bernie Sanders, always anxious to help us spend our money, has a $150Billion plan to use our money on broadband access.

AWS has a new contract with the NFL to study data and hunt for ways to reduce injuries.

Acer makes a tougher Chromebook for about $200.

Intel releases more information on its NUC Element line of PC-building modules.

Toshiba shows a new line of disk drives up to 6TeraBytes. The performance specs aim them at surveillance systems as they can take inputs from video cameras 24 hours a day.

Saturday 7 December 2019

The US economy adds 266,000 jobs in November—far above expectations. Not bad for the worst President in our history and for a guy the House will vote articles of impeachment.

Elon Musk wins defamation suit by pedo guy. I suppose there is some profound social commentary here that I am missing.

Amazon will open an office in New York City and hire 1,500 persons. Far short of the 25,000 once on the table. Politicians tweet one another. Persons of true substance, aren't they?

Streaming movies and not watching the entire movie. It is easy to "walk out" on a streaming movie. Such doesn't happen nearly as much in theaters.

MIT researchers are working on seeing around corners via shadows. They are progressing, but still far away.

It seems that plants vibrate at ultra-sonic frequencies under certain conditions. Some call this "squealing when stressed."

The case for Greenland selling itself to the US. You could make this case for other places as well, but Greenland actually has some value.

Reddit jumps into the censorship business by banning accounts that don't deserve to be on Reddit.

Western Digital is now selling new external SSDs that connect to our computers via the fastest USB. Capacity goes up to 2TeraBytes.

Sunday 8 December 2019

LSU, my alma mater, is having one of those football seasons where everything seems to go right at just the right time. People in Louisiana are having a great time with this, lots of fun. It shows that some coaches can draw better plays than most other coaches. It really is as simple as that: hire the better coach, the better thinker. The difficult part is that the incumbent coaches have to admit that they are not as good as the new person.

This is a good summary of Group Think.

Coming Tuesday, we can order the new, new Mac Pro and super duper display. Get the checkbook ready (if you are old like me and still have a checkbook).

Amazon is pushing the supermarket industry to change things. It will work, eventually. This is like those upstart football leagues that all failed financially, but pushed the NFL to change rules.

Along these lines, here are changes to retail shopping from the last decade. It appears that many of them have cut the number of jobs in stores. People used to have careers (30-year jobs) as store clerks. They weren't great jobs, but...

The CEO of Intel admits that dominating the central processing unit market is not the future. There are wider markets with more money.

Seth Godin on the genius of the water tower and the ability to work slowly and steadily to create reserves that dampen spikes in demand.

Advances in the area of small audio and listening devices have made room for new companies with less-expensive and better products. This has also led to such in hearing aids.

I don't shop in this market, but someone is: Bed, Bath, and Beyond had a "candle day," and the sales volume crashed networks.

A different take on storing potential energy via solid materials (sand, gravel, but not water), elevation, and gravity. The new idea here is to NOT use water (evaporation, leaks, etc.).

fill-in-the-blank-with-your-favorite-social-media uses a new AI system to catch bad stuff. It takes five minutes for the crows of humans to find ways to beat it.

Writes, and everyone else, "Sometimes, it’s good to simply play."

Tired of blogging? How to get un-tired. I have done it for over ten years. My motivation? I can't keep from it.

Is it necessary to write everyday. No. But if you can't keep from it, you write. You don't know if it is today. It is now, and you write.

Find time, make time, choose time, whatever. Write. Write. Write.

"Pants-ing" just write and make each thought up as it comes to you. It works for the whole story. It works for parts of the story. Then again, it doesn't work for some of us.

The memoir and finding the right voice. Take care not to analyze this over and over. Write. Write it again. Write it again.

Writers: try to move away from junk, low-pay jobs. Look at some of these.