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: 30 March - 5 April, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Tech news remains sparse as the predicatable and predicted results of coronavirus abound
• The National Emergency Library criticized by authors and publishers
• AMD's Ryzen appears in actual laptops, beats all Intel performance
• Nvidia's latest GPUs appear on the market in new laptop computers
• Google creates 100,000 no-charge WiFi access points in California

Monday 30 March 2020

I have noted the National Emergency Library. They have put 1.4million copyrighted books online. Authors and publishers are not happy.

It appears that the Saudis are tracking their subjects as they travel in the US.

Amazon warehouse workers in New York may strike. That would stop one major supply line of goods into the hardest hit place in the US. Panic coming?

I guess it is okay to suspend the Bill of Rights during a pandemic. Someone must have said so.

Once again, we have decided that it is fine to predict the end of the world. Panic-inducing proclamations are fine.

Universal Basic Income is receiving a big boost during this time of economic collapse.

Tuesday 31 March 2020

Microsoft announces vertical tabs and a few other new features for its Chromium Edge browser coming real soon now.

Microsoft releases a version of Teams for consumers. As expected, usage is through the roof.

A look at AMD's Ryzen processor for laptops. It has eight cores and all sorts of other things that make it the most powerful processor in the laptop market.

One example of the AMD Ryzen in a laptop is the ASUS ROG: slimmer and lighter, it is still a gaming machine.

Wednesday 1 April 2020

Microsoft is pushing its Azure Edge Zones as it competes with Amazon to connect coming 5G with cloud computing.

Our FCC puts phone companies on notice that they must abide by the STIR/SHAKEN protocol by next summer. This is supposed to reduce those robocalls and such nuisances.

Is this the end of the conference, that occasion where people gather in one place to hear one message at one time?

Business is booming for Amazon retail. Is this where success leads to failure?

College students are building their campuses in Minecraft. I am interested to see the fall in knowledge due to schools being practically cancelled. If there is no falloff, then perhaps we are all grossly overpaying and being delivered practically nothing for it.

At least one group of persons seems to understand that a "flattened curve" still has the same area, i.e, all this stay at home merely delays illness.

WeWork drastically cuts prices on longer-term leases.

Xerox drops its bid to buy HPE for $30Billion.

Thursday 2 April 2020

Here are a few of the new machines using these new GPUs: Here is one from Acer. Here is one from Lenovo. And here is one from MSI.

Getting married remotely online. Why not?

The big players all sign on to the Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS) group to improve the security of routing everything around the Internet.

This is how Amazon answers our phone calls. It isn't pretty.

Google to provide 100,000 no-charge WiFi access points in California as well as "thousands" of Chromebooks. Good for Google. Also shows how ill-prepared states are when they decide to close schools. Tax refunds on the way?

We find evidence of a rainforest in Antarctica. Shows how little we know about our planet.

Friday 3 April 2020

The big mean people at Amazon are meeting to figure out how to punish labor organizers and those who want better working conditions at warehouses. The story probably has some truth to it.

I find this fascinating. Google can follow us around. They have reports county by county of how much and how little we are leaving our homes and going places.

Here is the Google site that has all the mobility data. Great stuff.

It appears that all these Zoom meetings we are all using have been easily hacked.

Nikon is making all its online photograph classes no charge $$$ for April.

Bill Gates says we need a nationwide shutdown for ten more weeks. A year from now, I want to review some of these statements made by rich persons telling poor persons that they should not work and earn their rent. Is Bill Gates paying everyone's rent?

6.6million Americans filed for unemployment last week. Rich people tell everyone else to stay home.

Jeff Bezos donates $100million to food banks. Good for him.

Waste. Billion$ wasted on all this.

In tech news, yes there is some tech news, Intel's latest processors for laptops cross the 5GHz barrier. More power in our hands.

This is how dictatorships handle pandemics. In Russia, the government loads tracking software onto all subject's cell phone to ensure they only go where the government wants them to go.

Saturday 4 April 2020

Google "trains" a robotic "dog" by using video of real animals.

Silicon Valley's tech giants are not hurting from COVID-19. The opposite is true as they have taken advantage to lobby for changes they have wanted for years. Panicked politicians are falling for it.

The lives of the plutocrats. This is a profile of Larry Ellison.

Taxpayer money flows into the telehealth industry.

Swiss researchers have a bra that helps early detection of breast cancer. The field of wearable computing aimed at health is wide open.

In the age of facial recognition technology, our government now recommends wearing bandanas and such. What was that masked man?

Sunday 5 April 2020

Some backlash against Zoom (America's latest darling), as security concerns mount. Why hack Zoom? Everyone is using it. That is where the money is.

A Microsoft program manager, who is also a state legislator, wrote Washington state's facial recognition law. Well, do we want a lawyer to write a technology law?

The current economic crash hits the rest of Silicon Valley hard.

The Eclipse Foundation releases Eclipse Theia, an open-source alternative to Microsoft's latest. Many persons have already been using this under different names adopted by Google, Red Hat, and others.

Excellent tips on starting an autobiography or the amazing idea of writing about one day in your life.

If you are a writer, you will be writing about our current odd circumstances. When these pass, you will be writing about the next odd circumstances as every day has its own.

Writing different kinds of writing during the coronavirus writing drought. It appears that some writers are struggling to put words out there at this time.

A method of challenging and changing your writing for the better. " The general rule is that it’s better for your psychology to set smaller goals and repeatedly outperform them — rather than consistently under perform in relation to what you hoped was possible to achieve."

A basic piece on how to read books faster. I've done this for years. It works.

"The best writing advice I’ve ever had was just that it’s possible."---Tomie dePaola 

Writing with pencil and paper or pen and paper. It is wonderful. Try it sometime.

Write a book: make a due date, make a schedule, and don't edit while writing the first draft.

What one person did to wake earlier and write before going to a regular job. It wasn't easy.

"Kauffman suspects one epiphany that may emerge out of mass school closures will be about time management. A lot of time is wasted with busywork at school. A few hours of intensive learning at home should be more than enough to compensate for what’s accomplished during the average school day."

How one writer moved past always trying for perfection, "At that point, I asked myself what the real goal of writing was for me: to spend hours reading every paragraph 50 times, or to be helpful?"

One writer's method for working on writing tasks a little at a time.