Summary of this week:

France will try to tax data mining - Google, Facebook, and others
The iPhone was the holiday bestseller in the U.S. and Japan - Android everywhere else
2012 Google sales - $50Billion
Intel moving out of the motherboard business
Apple has another record quarter
Mozilla shows a Firefox operating system smartphone - all open source software

Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday

Monday January 21, 2012

More details about Eric Schmidt’s visit to North Korea. No surprises. North Korea is a communist dictatorship where everything is controlled by a small group of people. Growing the economy via open Internet access is not part of the agenda.

Intel releases a set of Linux distrubution tests. Good for Intel. They developed for their own use at their own expense and are donating them to the community.

Atari files for bankruptcy protection. Atari was once a giant in the industry, but times change.

Sergey Brin where Google glasses when out in public. This is known as eating your own dog food, i.e., use your own products if you believe in them.

More on the Swartz case. MIT was battling a mysterious intruder. MIT never used to battle people like that. Times change.

Why use an over-powered iPad to make a presentation when a 1987 Apple IIe will suffice? Excellent question. Excellent implementation.

Statistics on Kickstarter projects. Somehow, dance projects are most often funded and succeed.

A $16 solar-powered light for the 1.6Billion people on earth who don’t have electricity. I hope this works. This is an excellent charity project. See the story about North Korea above. They could use a million or two of these.

Sigh. A college student is expelled after finding a security flaw in university software. There is more to the story than that statement, but still, student finds problem, student reports problem, student tests the supposed fix, student is smashed.

The government of France thinks it has found a way to tax Google, Facebook, and others. This may or may not hold. I expect the government of the U.S. to try something similar during the next four years.

This is a good introduction to using the Raspberry Pi.

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Tuesday January 22, 2013

Something for the grandkids - iTrace helps kids learn to write their letters and numbers.

Someone out there must still want to buy old-fashioned desktop computers - the ship time for the 21" iMac has increased to 2-3 weeks.

One of the reasons Google succeeds is its generous benefits to employees (who work very hard and very smart). This article discusses the maternity and paternity leave packages - five months paid leave that can be taken when you wish.

Microsoft hires Andrew Kim - a man who suggested a new company image last year on the web.

"Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published." I don't like this, not a bit.

The iPhone "won" the holiday sales race in the U.S. and Japan. Android phones were more popular everywhere else.

Warnings about people stealing your information from your computer. This article is not science fiction. People can access your computer through networks. The best protection, if you choose to be on the Internet, is that no one will pay attention to you. If, however, you drive to Starbucks in a $100,000 car, people will pay attention to you.

Computing power continues to advance: Intel announces lower-priced processors using the 22nm technology.

What frightens "the smartest people in the world."

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Wednesday January 23, 2013

Intel is moving itself out of the motherboard business.

Canonical may stop issuing new Ubuntu releases every six month.

AMD lost over $1Billion in 2012.

300 Blockbuster video stores to close; 3,000 jobs lost.

The National Day of Civic Hacking This is not the invention of my bored mind. It is a real, government-sponsored event. As with most things government, it last June 1 and 2. (Can anyone at the White House count to one?

Adafruit has a 1” diameter circular circuit board on which you can build wearable computer applications. I can see people building things to help them monitor the health of the elderly, disabled, and small children.

Excellent video about why the moon landings were not a hoax. Space travel technology was more advanced in 1969 than movie and television technology. Funny part, or is it tragic - sometimes I confuse the two, is that in 1969 we could travel to the moon but not fake it. Today, we can fake it but not do it.

More information on Dell’s little USB stick computer. It is sort of a client computer, but not exactly.

IBM has higher profits on the same income. This is known as being more efficient, being more productive. Someone will find some evil in this.

Today is National Handwriting Day. I can’t make these up. So go out and write some things by hand.

Raise the retirement age from 65 to 70? I am afraid that the answer should be “yes.” We can’t pay Social Security and health care costs for people for 20 years each. Ouch, but sometimes the truth hurts. There have been recent studies that show what most of us see - medical science fighting death has progressed while medical science fighting disability has not. Therefore, people live much longer and require a lot of health care dollars while they live.

Google’s sales for 2012 were $50Billion. That is a lot of money for a company that gives away products.

Microsoft announces that the Surface Pro will be available on February 9th.

This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important. Microsoft may put $1 to $3 Billion in the Dell buyout.

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Thursday January 24, 2013

Mozilla unveils a Firefox operating system smartphone. This is all open source software. Let the games begin!

And a grand experiment begins - 40 public universities are to offer free online courses this semester with credit.

Facebook is now the most used mobile app as it passes Google maps.

Apple has $137Billion in cash. I wish they would spend some of that helping people go to engineering and computer science schools. I suppose that infusion of cash would only allow the colleges to raise tuition on everyone else. Apple is pretty smart; they could find a way.

Google is responding to government requests for email accounts a little slower and requiring more legalities. Good for Google.

Google improves it image search.

Google wants to build an experimental wireless network in Mountain View, Ca.

250million people are using Apple's iCloud.

Apple has sold over 500million mobile devices. The definition of success has changed.

Put a super PC into a guitar amp and you have this $1,900 model from Orange. Yes.

Google spent $16Million in lobbying. Google had $50 thousand million in sales last year. 50 thousand compared to 16. Those lobbying efforts are a tiny amount to Google and others like Google. The government doesn't seem to understand what is happening in the world.

And Google's driverless car could bring $2Trillion a year in revenue. The driverless car will change just about everything.

Apple sales in China are up %67.

NYPD claims to have radiation scanners that can detect firearms from a distance. Can anyone spell illegal search? They claim to be consulting lawyers on the proper use, but don't worry, they will use these - turning citizens into subjects.

"Robots will create, not kill, jobs." So say manufacturers who are anxious to replace people with robots.

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Friday January 25, 2013

It appear that Apple does have a conscience. They cancelled their contract with a supplier that used under-age labor.

700Million smartphones were sold in the world last year. That is about 10% of the world’s population.

Microsoft has record profits. Hmmm, the PC died and all that and no one uses MS Office any longer and...maybe all those guys were wrong with all those predictions.

If the FBI visits your house and you don’t keep your computers out in plane sight, you will be charged with concealing evidence. Hmmm.

Intel’s low-cost Yolo smartphone goes on sale in Kenya.

Huawei is the third-leading smartphone maker in the world.

Intel will build a $4Billion plant in Ireland and hire 4,300 people. America? Jobs?

Yet another sleep monitor. This one takes an IR photo of your bed every 15 seconds. Then it allows you to correlate times when you weren’t sleeping with the room temperature, noise, and other factors.

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Saturday January 26, 2013

For some reason, Best Buy has cut the price of the MacBook Air $200.

Rural movie theaters are closing because they can't afford the cost of moving to digital.

A possible advance in batteries that work well and don't catch fire.

The H.265 video format has been approved.

More news from the Swartz case. The local prosecutors were not going to press charges. The Federal attorney walked in and the rest is history.

And more news related to the case: hackers take over several government web sites.

There are about 86,000 printers in the world that you can send a print job. No idea where the printer sits, who owns it, or what they owner will think of what prints. These are found in Google searches. I guess my HP printer is one of those?

I like this. I really like this - a hidden exterior door.

Make a resume that looks like an Amazon page. Clever.

Doom and gloom about unemployment in America. One answer is to cut regulations, but I doubt that will happen. What is fascinating is the histogram of income.

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Sunday January 27, 2013

Why one author goes eBooks then has a way to print bound copies of books. Good ideas here.

Seth Godin has some good observations about airports and about how you don't want your business to operate anything like an airport.

Some scenes for the upcoming jOBS movie were released this week. Steve Wozniak (the guy who was there) is quite umimpressed.

Tips for things a writer can do while there seem to be nothing to do.

What some writers say and what some of them actually mean when they say it. Humorous to a point.

For a writer, there is great value in having a wise advisor to discuss things now and then.

Some writers outline, some don’t. I like this advice, at least scribble some notes.

Some thoughts on the logistics of having a writing group.

Pay attention or as Jerry Weinberg told me countless times, “notice.” I once heard that Mark Twain was “a greater notice-r of things.” It is a useful skill; it is almost a necessary skill if you want to write.

Virginia Woolf on the benefits of writing to yourself everyday, a.k.a., a journal.

You need some money to start a freelance business. Even to be a writer, you need a computer. You can go to a public library, sit at one of their computers for an hour at a time, and use Google Docs as your word processor and disk drive. That will actually work, but then you have to figure out how to eat and where to sleep and what to wear.

Some tips on writing faster. Here is one that isn’t in the post: learn how to type faster. That may sound silly, but it actually works.

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