Dwayne Phillips ' Day Book
Items
I happen to view each day. Science, Techonology, Management, Culture,
and of course Writing
This is my day book for this week. I have modeled this after science
fiction and computer writer Jerry Pournelle's view, or as he calls it,
his Day Book.
I encourage you to see Jerry
Pournelle's site
and subscribe
to his services.
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This
week: December March 24-30, 2014
Summary of this week:
- Age discrimination rules Silicon Valley
- Our President may do something about something the NSA does
- Facebook buys Oculus VR
- Google cuts the prices of its cloud computing services
- So Amazon cuts its prices as well
- NLRB says college athletes are employees
- Microsoft releases Office for the iPad and other tablets
Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
Monday March 24, 2014
Citi Bike is losing money. Winter tends to reduce bike riding along with a lot of other things.
Silicon Valley is the capital of age discrimination. Young people are just smarter.
Old people are past their prime. Take care who you threaten young man,
you can't imagine the things I know. Just kidding folks (sort of).
Who cares about Flappy Bird. We are now playing 2048.
US government retirees papers are processed by hand in an abandoned mine. No, this is not short story fiction.
The LA Police scan all license plates all the time. The 4th amendment? What Constitution?
The HealthPatch: stick it to your chest and it reports your health to your iPhone. I trust this is secure?
How Google eliminated the cubicle office for glass walls.
How Google's robotics companies are rejecting DARPA money.
The
fall of the boombax and the rise of the iPod. At least with the little
earphones we didn't have to listen to the other guy's music.
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Tuesday March 25, 2014
Disney is buying Maker Studios, a YouTube "network," for $500million.
It seems we are calling the missing airliner as crashed into the ocean.
The more likely explanation is that of a fire on board that led to a
change of course. The Malaysian air traffic system failed miserably,
and the plane went down in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps we will never know.
The Google Glass crew is working with Ray-Ban on more models and fashion. Yes, remember that eyewear is often much more fashion than function.
Surrounding yourself with "good" people. Of course "good" is highly subjective.
The Writer's Guild of America is asking the FCC to block the Comcast-Time Warner Cable deal.
ComputerWorld gives their tips to self-publishing an eBook.
According to Facebook, in 2008 they declined to join the group of tech companies that limited hiring and limited salaries.
Coursera hires former Yale president as its CEO.
San Francisco hated tech workers way back in 1999.
The rumor of the day is that our President will do something vague about something vague that the NSA vaguely does.
Apple's OS X is 13 years old today.
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Wednesday March 26, 2014
Honda makes a home energy system with solar panels and batteries. This is old technology. The batteries are still a mess to make and destroy.
USC has a Google Glass course for, of all people, journalism majors.
Facebook buys Oculus VR for $2Billion. Zuckerburg feels this is the
next big thing in computing platforms. And this means, among other
things, that John Carmack, the creator of Doom, is now a Facebook employee.
Microsoft releases the source code of old MS-DOS.
That was a single-user, single-task operating system, which makes it a
good basis for a secure operating system for voting machines. Viruses
can't run in the background because there are no background tasks.
Google cuts the prices for all its cloud computing services.
This report compares the new prices of Google cloud computing to that of Amazon.
Intel buys wearable computing company Basis Science.
This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important: our IRS rules that Bitcoin is property, not currency, and gains and losses will be taxed for property.
Also in the category of it must be important or why else would every web news site carry it...Apple wants emoji to be more multicultural.
Yes, we used to distribute software on cassette tapes.
MIT developed a platform to make it much more difficult to spy on web sites.
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Thursday March 27, 2014
The Russian government is dropping the iPad for Samsung tablets over fears that the U.S. is spying on them via the Apple product.
Apple computers are now firmly in place in corporate IT departments.
How Asus built a $179 Chromebox computer. That price is quite low.
The televisor is dead: long live the tablet and the laptop. The younger generation doesn't need a big screen TV.
At least one blogger thinks that experience is important. I wish they would talk to hiring managers around here who call someone with only ten years experience a "senior" person.
Amazon counters Google by lowering the price of its cloud computing services. It is great to be a consumer.
A federal labor official has ruled that college athletes are employees, not student athletes. If this ruling stands, we will not recognize college sports in ten years.
Analysts predict that PC sales will continue to drop in 2014.
A rack mount chasis for the new cylindrical Mac Pro computer.
Embeddable computers are already here, but will multiply soon. My mother in law has a heart pacemaker, a fancy name for an embedded computer.
The story of the team that helped rescue Health Care dot Gov.
Excellent qoute, “They have no use for someone who looks and dresses
like me.” Despite all the talk, the Federal government doesn't hire
people who look different and act different. That is a great shame, and
shows how close minded most Federal agencies have become.
Coming today, Microsoft's most important product in years: MS Office for iPad.
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Friday March 28, 2014
Microsoft released Office for the iPad. There are a millions stories about this on the net today. Here is one review; you must have an Office 365 subscription to edit anything. Another review is here.
The Facebook Connectivity Lab and its efforts to make Internet access for everyone.
AT&T, Cisco, GE, IBM and Intel unveiled the formation of the Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC).
The government of Turkey has now blocked YouTube.
This tiny piece of glass has just shrunk the camera an order of magnitude.
A look at why airlines are still using the ancient black-box recorders.
Some Mozilla employees are upset with their new "anti-gay" CEO.
The horror and stupidity of our government's no-fly list. Why do we do this to ourselves? Someone please explain this to me.
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Saturday March 29, 2014
An excellent infographic explaining the Internet of Things.
It is more difficult to be hired by Wal-Mart than to be accepted by Harvard. And some people claim that unemployment has dropped and our economy is receovering.
Google employees and their struggle to walk away from work at the end of the day.
I fit into the category of integrators as work and home blend together
all day. I find that to be the case with most people as does Google's
research.
Android is the most-used computing platform in the world and growing bigger daily.
And Google's new licensing agreement requires "powered by Android" to appear on all new devices.
How to save $100million in government: use Garamond font as it uses less toner than Times Roman. Sometimes it is the simplest things that make the most sense. Of course this won't be implemented.
What it is like to be 55, highly qualified, and unemployed. Hey wait, that describes me, too.
MS Office for the iPad is a big hit. I tried to download the free app yesterday, but couldn't as traffic was too heavy.
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Sunday March 30, 2014
A look at two Windows 8.1 tablets from Lenovo.
Must see video, tilt-shift lens magic of Sidney, Australia.
The Director of the NSA retired.
A tutorial on using Microsoft Office on the iPad.
Many American companies have become hyper-efficient at the expense of their employees.
It is quite short sighted, as employees who have money spend it on
products sold by companies. Employees who don't have money, don't spend
it.
The struggle to increase diversity in the programming profession.
One writer's method for writing a book.
Some thoughts on making the time to write.
Answers to some common writing questions.
"How Do I Write? I don’t know how you write. I know how I write." That
is about it. Each person writes differently. There are many techniques
available. Instead of teaching by tossing out all the techniques and
letting people choose, we tend to tell people, "THIS IS HOW TO WRITE!"
That is too bad.
The spark file: one place to keep all the ideas.
George Plimpton interviews Earnest Hemingway in 1958. A treasure.
Are you tired of writing because nothing is selling?
Join a very big club of us writers who can't seem to sell anything. But
if you are a writer, you write everyday anyways because if you don't,
you cease to live.
Stephen King's drawer method of editing: put a piece of writing in a drawer for six weeks. Then edit it.
This is one of my issues as a writer: moving past that warm-up and into real writing.
Some of the things working at home people miss about the office (not).
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