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: 21-27 June, 2021
The prolonged year of the virus brought one tech flop to note: contract tracing didn't work in the US. I label it "good" that the US isn't good at surveilling citizens. Surveillance reduces citizens to subjects.
The prolonged year of the virus is pushing computer makers to turn laptops and tablets into big smartphones. I always wondered why they didn't bury a telephone inside laptops. They certainly have the space.
It is now summer. Amazon has its two Prime Days today and tomorrow.
Our Navy stops working on the railgun concept after 15 years.
....In China, the governors are closing the crypto currency mines (computer data centers).
It appears that Amazon ranks its office workers against one another and pushes out the lower-performing 6% every year. The Federal government did this when I worked there for 28 years. The policies weren't as efficient, but were used.
HPE acqui-hires Determined AI to boost the machine learning and high-performance computing it uses.
Stronger rumors about what Microsoft is to show this week at its "Windows 11 (?)" event.
Hyundai has bought Boston Dynamics.
The WHO predicts horrible things from the new delta variant of COVID.
Another study shows good things coming from drinking coffee.
.....Social media sites writers can use to market their writing.
In Canada, they have a new law treating social media outlets just like broadcasters. We have avoided this in America. Let us see the results of the experiment, although the US and Canadian publics behave quite differently.
Google drops its Engineering Residency program. There were complaints about unequal pay for equal work. The jobs were not mandatory, and persons walked in with eyes wide open. It was an opportunity, but I guess not opportune enough.
AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) appears to work well and make games look better.
At Google, if you want to live in a less expensive place and work from home, expect less pay. This is known as "locality pay" in Federal jobs. Perhaps one day the concept will move to the tax system as well.
Tim Cook personally lobbies Nancy Pelosi about pending anti-trust bills.
Something to watch. Quite good. Man straining with a load.
.....We are a strange lot. The next two stories show how the Democratic Party has close ties with Silicon Valley, but at the same time wants to dramatically increase regulations on those folks.
Our current President has brought in many persons from tech companies to run government.
Never heard of Bitmain Technologies Ltd.? That company is the world's leading maker of Bitcoin mining equipment. It has halted sales in an effort to slow mining and raise the value of Bitcoin after a big fall the past two months.
John McAfee dies in a jail in Spain at 75.
Adobe launches a new product called Substance 3D for better 3D creation.
DeepMind is attempting to find cures for lesser-known maladies.
.....From the prolonged year of the virus, Microsoft is making Teams a part of the Windows 11 package. This equals Apple's placement of FaceTime in MacOS and goes back to the 1990s and anti-trust suits.
Researchers find a big security hole in Dell laptops.
Amazon launches AWS BugBust. Find one of a million errors in their software and win prizes.
Microsoft and Intel promise that Android apps will run on Windows 11.
.....Nvidia develops a model that makes us look good on ZommerTeams meetings. It seems that we can also use Brad Pitt's photo (pick the person whose appearance you like) to make us look like him.
I enjoyed George Will's thoughts on merit and equity. The argument is, "Where do we allow merit and where do we disallow merit?" The entertainment industry (professional sports is part of that) is for merit. Political campaigns and elections are for merit ("win" and "lose" elections). School teacher jobs are for merit (I want a "good" teacher for my child). Healthcare is for merit (she is a "good" doctor). I am trying to find an endeavor where most of us do not want merit. Someone please educate me.
SpaceX plans to do an orbital test of its Starship in July (next month!).
Literacy is absent once again as folks don't seem to know what "unidentified" means. If we identify flying objects as alien spacecraft, they are no longer unidentified.
We begin to learn the details of what computers will not run the new Windows 11. Microsoft has "reasonable" reasons for its choices. Sometimes, however, the marketplace doesn't react reasonably.
The "conspiracy theory" of the Wuhan Virology lab started with a Harvard-MIT Post Doctoral lab expert. Thus we expand the definition of redneck yahoo wackos. The PostDoc in question was concerned that folks were not exploring all plausible lines of thought. Hmmm, yep, something wrong with her.
.....I have seen several signs recently posted on the doors of coffee shops, restaurants, et al stating something like, "Our service is slow today. We are short handed." Prices have risen, service is worse. We thought we were doing "good" by locking ourselves in our homes to "flatten the curve" (Remember that slogan?) Seems that we were causing irreparable to an industry and to many of our neighbors. Such was predictable and predicted. We now live with the result of our choice.
I note a constant parade of persons in and out of Starbucks. The order-online-and-pickup business is booming. Few sit to chat. I lament the passing of community, but I am an old man.
YouTube removes videos showing abuse of Uyghurs in China. There are some "they violated this little thing and that little thing" notes. If you violate YouTube's rules you are pulled. If you violate the rules of China's governors, you are disappeared. Good thing YouTube has rules, huh?
AP analysis of CDC data shows 99% of recent COVID deaths are unvaccinated folks. CDC won't do similar analysis because they admit the data AP analyzed is faulty. Garbage In, Garbage Out still holds true.
We now have "fatphobia" in which doctors don't respect fat people or something like that.
We have the case of Peter Thiel and the Roth IRA and US income tax law. Thiel's IRA account is worth billion$$$. Somehow, this is a crime or something. He invested in his own company. That was a risk. The risk paid off. He didn't write the tax laws, he simply abided by them. If the laws are unjust, let's change them. If we need to punish someone, let's find the folks who wrote the unjust laws.
CentOS Linux is gone. Now we have Rocky Linux 8.4 to replace it.
Someone solves the Zodiac Killer's final two encrypted messages revealing the killer's name.
Our reaction to the year of the year brought pent-up demand for cars. We now have inflated their value to a new record high.
Social media sites writers can use to market their writing.
One novelists experiences writing non-fiction to earn money and learn new things.
Despite the old title, this is a good post on creating a website for a writer.
A tech blogger shares lessons learned from two years of growth as a writer.
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