Summary of this week:

Oyster: the Netflix for books
Mindsy: the Netflix for education
Microsoft to introduce Surface tablet 2.0 late September
Apple's big event: iPhone 5S and 5C and iOS 7 updates
Dell goes private
Ray Dolby dies at age 80

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

Monday September 9, 2013

Instagram now has 150million users. The definition of success has changed.

What would a day be without more breaking news on the NSA and the role that "the most open and transparent administration in history" played in spying on citizens? This time, the administration secretly went to a secret court to secretly have restrictions lifted on what the NSA could secretly do to citizens. No wonder they got away with it for so long. This is a terrible thing for the U.S. In many ways this is worse than Watergate. The citizens cannot trust other citizens who happen to be government employees. Someone at the top convinced citizen employees that what they were doing was okay.

So it appears that Amazon won't introduce its own smartphone this year and it won't be free.

Intel is developing a 3D camera for laptops that can detect emotions. See my short story here about a possible use of such technology.

Google is expanding the way that apps built for the Chrome OS can operate in other OSes.

Apple is having a big event on Tuesday. Will it be a boom or a bust for the company?

Oyster: the Netflix for books. Pay a monthly fee and read as much as you wish.

Mindsy: the Netflix for education. Same story, pay a monthly fee and see all the education videos you wish.

Two items: parts of Los Angeles are now called Silicon Beach and MySpace flopped by several big successes came from it.

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Tuesday September 10, 2013

Improved audio noise rejection is coming to portable and desktop computers from the mobile world.

Next year, Seagate will sell a small, 5 TeraByte hard disk drive.

A crypto pofessors at Johns Hopkins had a blog post about the NSA removed. Big brother sitting on free speech. This is terrible for all of us. The government by, of, and for the people is terrorizing the people. There are some people who are employed by the government forgetting that they are terrorizing themselves. No one in the meeting room is standing and saying, "No, this isn't right."

Maybe there is hope for the soft keyboard on tablets. Dryft learns where you want the keys to be on the tablet screen and adapts. See the video.

Google tries to adapt gmail to smartphone screens.

In Fairfax County Virginia, the Director of Public Libraries has thrown away 250,000 books in an effort to be more digital. It is the norm for public libraries to move out books and give them to others, not to use them as landfill.

The Chromebooks are expected to have the latest Intel processors this week. More compute power to power the browser. Is this wise?

Microsoft to unveil the Surface Tablet 2.0 later this month. I hope they learned a few things: cut the price, cut the price, cut the price.

Writing can improve your life.

The Glendale school district in California is now monitoring the social media activity of all its students. There are many things wrong with this. I never want to hear that schools don't have enough money to teach reading, writing, and math.

We are now in the era where businesses no longer buy computers, they rent cloud space from someone else. Prototecting IP?

A few people are becoming rich from the data supplied freely by the rest of us. This is not fair. It is, however, legal and it may actually be good for us.

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Wednesday September 11, 2013

Apple held its big event. One big item is the iPhone 5S. There are many stories about this on the net. Here is Engadget's report. The 5S has a fingerprint sensor (why?), a better camera, and a 64-bit A7 processor. Another new item is the iPhone 5C. It was supposed to be the inexpensive iPhone, but it is only $100 less than the 5S. Here is one report on the 5C. My thoughts? Same price, more performance. This is an evolution, not a revolution. Is there any way to have a revolution with a phone any more? Maybe one day someone will surprise us.

A closer look at the differences between the 5S and the 5C.

And Apple is updating iOS 7.

But the stock market wasn't impressed with all this stuff as Apple's value fell.

On the other hand, the value of Netflix hit an all-time high.

Also all over the Internet today is that a secret judge ruled that the NSA violated all its secret laws for three years. A few too many people were a bit too ambitous. That happens sometimes in government. People want to get ahead, so they push it and push it and push it. This is especially in the "secret" world as their actions are better hidden.

A look at WiFi Direct and it can connect devices without a router.

When Google and Twitter change or drop features, where is the consumer to go? Well, we receive those goods at no cost, so we have no legal way to redress greivances. And some people see this as a terrible problem.

I heard this before, but Seth Godin states it well - Cell phone cameras repel UFOs.

This site is an eBook that teaches programming. It has a hardware emulator built in. Good idea.

Johanna Rothman has excellent comments on the STEM crisis and the war for talent. Summary: hire people, teach them what you want them to do, don't be an idiot, pay them well.

This could be the most significant item of the day: Google teams with EdX to create mooc.org.

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Thursday September 12, 2013

Intel demonstrates the next processor - the Broadwell that will replace the Haswell real soon now.

And the Intel Atom Bay Trail processor is here to help the tablets go faster on less electrical power.

Intel's CEO predicts $100 tablets by Christmas - ones that actually work well.

Corning receives approval of its fiber optic version of the Thunderbolt interface.

Researchers find new security flaws in Java that will probably not be fixed. Is everyone ready for national electronic health records?

With the Intel Haswell processors, several companies jump into the Chromebook market. Will Wintel (Windows Intel) be replaced by Gintel? (Google Intel)

Gogo is boosting its data to airline services - rates rise from 9.8 to 60 MegaBitsPerSecond. I would rather have fresh milkshakes on airlines instead, but that is just me.

This story is all around the Internet: Colorado voters recalled two state legislators. The issue is not as important as the process. Basically, enough voters sign a petition to hold an election. The two candidates in the election are (1) the current person in office and (2) everyone else in the world. The idea being that almost anyone else in the world would be better than the current person. Question: if such an election were held for every member of Congress and the President/Vice-President, what percentage of the current persons would hold on?

Not content to be left behind with only 32 bits, Samsung's next smartphone will have a 64-bit processor, too.

We've just discovered a huge amount of water under Kenya. Now, do we use till its dry or preserve it?

Fascinating map made from the U.S. census of 1860 showing slave holdings in the South. Note the heavy use of slaves along the Mississippi River.

Amazon Web Services dominates the cloud computing market.

Yahoo is growing, now has 800million active users a month. The definition of success has changed.

Dell will go private today - finally.

M anson Whitlock died last month at 96. He repaired typewriters for 80 years. God bless him and his era.

Excellent "rules" from Corita Kent.

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Friday September 13, 2013

Intel puts its latest processors and graphics chips in its little Next Unit of Computing, NUC.

Ray Dolby died at 80. He was the creator of the noise reduction system that bore his name.

That fellow who taught people how to beat a polygraph, a.k.a., a lie detector test, was sentenced to eight months of prison. That case is odd and wrong in many ways.

More on distrust of government or reasons to distrust government: the NSA disguised itself as Google to gather data.

Go to a Microsoft retail store and trade in your iPad for money.

Google's Creative Labs produced code that makes it much easier to make a web server out of a Raspberry Pi.

Vodafone of Germany was hacked, and the information of two million customers was compromised. Is everyone ready for national electronic health records?

Go to Mars on a one way trip? 200,000 people have volunteered.

A study confirms what we believed: college professors with tenure don't care much about teaching any longer.

The audio cassette is 50 years old.

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Saturday September 14, 2013

There is a big fuss about the U.S. creating the title of Science Laureate. This is a good example of the political nature of science. Science is not all facts, figures, observations, and repeatable experiments. At times I wish it were so, but that is a wish with little chance of becoming reality. Science is driven by money, and, unfortunately, politicians seem to control the money.

Has technology made us smarter? We can debate on end. Note: we live at a time when we can quickly find any fact. This changes much of life.

Intel buys a voice recognition company.

This is a cute video showing the difference between the icons in iOS 6 and 7.

I like this article on pens that we use to write. Good technology tutorials and a review of inexpensive, but high-quality pens. I use a Pilot Precise V5 RT. I buy them at Wal Mart and Target and the CVS. They are inexpensive, but much higher quality than they cost. For example, I once handed one to a company Vice President, salary $500K/year, to sign something. He made sure to return it to me as said something like, "Here, this is an expensive pen, let me make sure to return it to you."

An experiment in education: before class students watch video lectures and read. In class, the students work together on the material.

Thoughts about some of the new social media companies that bring what people do offline into the online world.

HTC America lays off 20% of its workforce - only 30 people, but that hurts those 30 people and their families.

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Sunday September 15, 2013

A look at the advances in Intel's Atom line of processors. I thought the Atom was to be small, less powerful, and less power hungry. It would run computers that did much less at a much lower price. I was misinformed (Humphrey Bogart once said that in Casablanca).

Photos from a person who spent a year in Antarctica.

It seems that local governments are reading your toll booth EZPass to track your location. That is just plain weird let alone wrong.

More good information on people you may meet in writers groups.

Freelancers and writers: stay fit, stay healthy. This is important. If you are ill, you won't work and you won't earn any money and pay any bills.

I like this article on pens that we use to write. Good technology tutorials and a review of inexpensive, but high-quality pens. I use a Pilot Precise V5 RT. I buy them at Wal Mart and Target and the CVS. They are inexpensive, but much higher quality than they cost. For example, I once handed one to a company Vice President, salary $500K/year, to sign something. He made sure to return it to me as said something like, "Here, this is an expensive pen, let me make sure to return it to you."

Writers - move slower in creating networks of people.

Thoughts on building your platform: your stage to show your show.

Business, not craft, destroys a writer's career - Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Writing can improve your life. I agree.

Not writing for a while? Don't feel like writing? Some things to start writing again.

Not having success finding freelance writing jobs? No, I am not.

The power of understatement. Don't tell everything, yet.

Another post on the same topic - let the reader wait a while.

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