Summary of this week:

Western Digital has 6TB disks holding helium gas
Apple is building a factory in Mesa, Arizona
Los Angeles to run fiber to every home ($5Billion)
Twitter has its IPO
Microsoft updates it online Office apps with co-authoring
Government CIO in charge of healthcare.gov resigns

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

Monday November 4, 2013

My grandson is five years old today. Time does fly when you are having a wonderful time.

Google finds more ways to make more money: "the number of locations serving Google’s search infrastructure increased from from a little less than 200 to a little more than 1400."

Seth Godin on understanding the critical path in a project and behacing appropriately.

The Washington Post has a long article on how political appointees, not tech experts, were in charge of Health Care dot Gov. The results were predicatable and predicted.

The Linux 3.12 kernel has been released.

Hackers break into a limousine service revealing 850,000 customers - many rich customers. Of course (not) Health Care dot Gov will be secure.

$1billion in paintings found in Germany. Nazis confiscated the art during WWII and it was passed down the generations. This is the stuff of high fiction - the kind that makes you wonder, but then you dismiss because it just can't be so in today's world.

Western Digitial found a way to keep helium gas sealed inside a disk drive - 6TeraBytes. 50% more capacity, 23% less power usage, 38% less weight.

Guess what? Men who work in IT can be tricked by beautiful women. Author and consultant Jerry Weinberg discovered this decades ago. He wasn't able to convince many managers of this little situation. I guess some people still don't think it exists.

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Tuesday November 5, 2013

Apple is building in Mesa, Arizona and creating 2,000 jobs. I trust the jobs will all go to legal U.S. citizens.

More evidence, this from AT&T, that the iPad Air is a huge hit in the marketplace.

The iPad Air display is not as good as Amazon's Kindle Fire HDX. Apple's name is much easier to remember. That is one of the silly little geniuses of Apple - the names of their products. Other companies just don't get it.

"if you factor out our government’s ineptitude, the United States has quite a bit going for it globally" Well said.

Watch the LG Flex smartphone flex a little. I guess there is some utility in this.

Maybe we will soon have graphene-based electronics as demonstrated in this research video. That is some flexibility with real utility.

Microsoft expands its $100K security bounties. Here is a thought for the government: do the same for Health Care dot Gov. Of course that would have to happened six months ago before real people put real information on the site. That would have required forethought and timeliness on the part of the government, and well, you know.

Someone has realized that you can put all those Google Street View photos to good use. My guess is that Google has far more photos than they put on Street View.

Is Silicon Valley arrogant or just plain smarter than everyone else? Their rate of success is much higher than that in Washington D.C., but is that because they are smarter or merely dealing with an easier set of problems?

Looking at the Intel C++ compiler, the GNU C++ compiler (g++), and the LLVM clang compiler. Comparisons are, as the post says, problematic.

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Wednesday November 6, 2013

To improve WiFi speeds in their lecture halls, Georgia Tech is using better antennas. I cannot believe this is new and is news. Of course better antennas greatly improve RF performance. This is Georgia Tech! They should have done this on day two many years ago.

They didn't have "colleges" like these in my day. The Academy for Software Engineering does just one thing - well. Their home site.

Samsung leads the market for smartphones in China. Am I the only person who finds it historically odd that a South Korean company rules the market in the People's Republic of China?

Los Angeles will spend $5billion to run fiber lines to every home in the city. I don't ever want to hear that they are out of money out there in the golden state.

The idea of the "health coach." Life coaches used to known as the old guys who sat on the bench in the park. We miss them and wish they were back.

Google Helpouts - video chat with someone who can help you with just about anything. A new market for writers?

Peugeot shows a hybrid car that uses a gasoline engine and compressed air.

Seagate now has the thinnest 2TeraByte disk drive for portable computers.

India launches a mission to Mars. I hate to write it, but the next people to walk on our or any other moon will probably not be an American. We have allowed a bureaucracy to destroy our space program.

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Thursday November 7, 2013

The Done Manifesto. Interesting.

Microsoft adds co-authoring to the Office Web Apps.

Sponsored by Microsoft and Facebook, the Internet Bug Bounty Program pays cash if you find security holes in anything on the net.

Google to host a hackathon for Glass later this month.

Johanna Rothman's experience with a full disk drive and deleting by formatting the drive.

It appears that the state health care exchanges are ripe for hacking and stealing information.

Bad news for auto makers - 20 somethings prefer smartphones over cars. This will rule the world for decades.

Google tells us about its mystery barges. The explanation is vague enough to make politicians envious.

Twitter has its IPO today.

This story of invading a person's body in search of non-existant drugs is horrible. People like this hurt the nation as they cause citizens to distrust everyone connected to the government.

Microsoft makes $2billion a year profit from Android patent royalties. They use this to hide losses in other areas.

The future is bleak for broadband service to rural America. This is terrible news for America. It further increases the divide between rural and urban America. Our elected representatives don't seem to mind the divide as it, in some odd manner, serves their political longevity. What happened to the concept of "one nation?" I guess I am too old and naive.

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Friday November 8, 2013

I had breakfast with some fine gentlemen this morning, so no Internet viewing.

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Saturday November 9, 2013

Spanish company makes wearable computer that tells you when a child's diaper needs changing. Cute. Now extend the idea and use the same sensor to tell you when an elderly or infirmed person needs attention. Yes, hospitals have such devices, but they are large, complex, and expensive. Home care would benefet greatly from such tech gadgets.

Today's toddlers were born into the mobile age. What will they do?

Our TSA (yes, it is ours), sigh, no end to the moronic behavior.

There appears to be a growing middle class of app developers.

Marissa Meyer creates a Quarterly Performance Review system at Yahoo. The employees hate it. This is the norm.

Intel purchases Kno and tries to move into the education market.

Poverty rises in America and shifts to urban not rural. Of course this is the result of a new definition of poverty.

The one group of Americans most anxious to use private drones are - farmers.

The FCC may let citizens test and report mobile broadband speeds. Prediction: good intentions bring corruption.

Perhaps one day this will lead to something: Duke researchers are harvesting RF energy from the air and charging batteries.

NSA employees gave Snowden their passwords - they were duped.

We now have a metal, 3D printed firearm. Of course the process is much more expensive than just buying a firearm, but...

Slackware 14.1 is released.

The government CIO in charge of Health Care dot Gov has resigned.

And now we have a hactivist tool to overload Health Care dot Gov. Proponents of the ACA and the web site scream, "Aha, we told you so. It is a subervise plot!" Of course Apple and Google and Yahoo et al. all face the same challenges every day and survive.

One user spends one week with the iPad Air and LOVES it.

For the third year in a row, Apple is the world's most valuable brand.

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Sunday November 10, 2013

Writers have to learn to wait - wait for people to reply. What do you do with all that time? Write.

Three programmers wrote a helpful health care web site in a weekend. Duh! Government contract?

The Firefox browser is 9 years old. It changed the world.

The Environmental Protection Agency just declared most wood stoves illegal. No one discussed the matter in public or passed a law and there is no one we can vote out of office or any of that. Simple, eh?

"A presentation that doesn't seek to make change is a waste of time and energy." - Seth Godin

Learn from the simpleton - those who don't worry about all those things that don't matter.

You, and everyone you know, are probably living a great story.

One reason a writer should have a blog - blogging is another form of writing practice, and practice is good.

Whatever you want to call it - journal, notebook, scraps of paper - a writer should keep one.

Notes on the finances of being a freelancer.

Thoughts on going to a niche instead of a general web site for writers.

Becoming a better writer and what "better" means.

Part of writing is being stuck. When you are stuck, acknowledge that you are in a normal phase of writing and move on. Accepting that troubles are normal is a major boost to life.

Authors don’t sell books; they spread ideas. Good post.

You should write the kind of books you wish you had read.

Good advice for starters and other writers.

Building a following as a writer.

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