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.

Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page
Email me at d.phillips@computer.org

This week: February 2-8, 2015

Summary of this week:

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

Monday February 2, 2015

The New England Patriots (America's cheaters) won the Super Bowl.

The Raspberry Pi 2 is here with a quad-core processor, 1GB RAM, and still at $35. They have sold 4.5million units to date.

Microsoft will have a free version of Windows 10 ready this year for the Raspberry Pi 2.

You would think something catastrophic happened, but its just the private jets leaving Arizona after the Super Bowl.

The Daily Mail acquires Elite Daily.

Our President proposes a one-time tax on US corporations' foreign holdings. Several items to note: (1) this is illegal and (2) one-time taxes are never one-time taxes.

Thoughts on the clash between classic management and Agile practices. In my experience, the vast majority of organizations that claim to use Agile practices do not.

Research shows that anonymous information isn't. Hence, either put your name on something or don't participate.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Tuesday February 3, 2015

Here are some thoughts on writing software and making it clean.

How much will the Apple stores change when they start selling gold watches? The culture clash is coming.

Apple will build a big data center in Mesa, Arizona.

Uber is working with Carnegie Mellon on autonomy technology, a.k.a., self-driving cars.

Google wants to use its self-driving cars as a ride sharing service. This all points to the day when Google and Uber merge into Goober. Sorry, surely someone else say this silly name thing coming.

This is one of the problems with Android. There are so many Android devices, that they don't upgrade to the latest version of the OS.

China now claims over 500million mobile Internet users.

The decline and death of Radio Shack. It was a good place to go and buy individual electronic components to build something.

Radio Shack may sell some of its store fronts to Sprint. The rest will just close.

For the first time in their short life, tablets are dropping in sales.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Wednesday February 4, 2015

Apple Pay continues to grow into key financial markets.

The Apple Thunderbolt interface is not doing as well with external disk drives.

An interesting thought that'll never happen: Google buys Radio Shack to quickly get retail stores.

Wild rumor: Amazon may buy a bunch of Radio Shack stores.

It seems that Apple is driving camera-loaded vans on the streets. Possible Apple Street View?

Customer focused? How about your own employees? Interesting perspective.

Ars Technica looks at Dell's 8" tablet that has almost no bezel on three sides.

A market reversal: iOS is now more used in the US than Android—first time since 2012.

Amazon opens a "store" at Purdue Univ. with more campus stores to come.

The Taiwan plane crash as recorded on a dash camera.

Here are robots in use on farms. Yes, unemployment is a real thing.

Despite promises from our President, there has been little actually done about surveillance abuses.

One person has edited grammar errors out of Wikipedia 15,000 times. Good for him.

Amazon can't sell its Kindle Fire tablet—no one is buying it anymore.

The #1 seller of smartphones in the #2 market in the world (India) is Micromax. Who?

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Thursday February 5, 2015

The big lie about lower unemployment. The situation is so bad that historical measures no longer make sense.

The smartphone industrial suppliers are giving engineers a lot of small, low-power parts to use.

The soap opera story of Google Glass.

Staples and Office Depot merge due to the crunch of Amazon.com.

Women on the inside as outsiders in the tech industry. I pity the poor fool who mistreats my granddaughter on the job.

Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield has been hacked. How much is this going to cost me? And of course nothing like this will ever happen to Health Care dot Gov.

Once again, Twitter tweets will appear in Google search results.

Apple is negotiating with cable TV companies to put shows on Apple TV.

Alan Turing's notes were being used as insulation at Bletchey Park.

It appears that IBM is laying off 100,000 people.

JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, C#, C++, and Ruby still popular programming languages with Apple's Swift rising fast on the charts.

Google now has its own mortgage calculator online.

The FCC, net neutrality, and what happened to the $8billion aimed at rural broadband?

Microsoft shows its Office suite optimized for touch and Windows 10.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Friday February 6, 2015

Google and Mattel (what a team) are having a big event on February 13th.

Ars Technica looks at Intel's third generation Next Unit of Computing—minscule desktop, big performance $450.

No turning back as it's official—Radio Shack is bankrupt.

If you have $4,000, Canon has two cameras with 50MegaPixel sensors.

Now we have the first Ubuntu smartphone. This is the first version, so don't expect much.

SpaceX will make another attempt at landing a booster stage on a barge.

A preview of Apple's new photo app that will replace iPhoto and others.

Twitter has a good financial quarter.

Pandora missed expectations in its quarterly report.

GoPro is having a tough time financially.

The government of China is a prime suspect in the Anthem hack.

The era of wage fixing is over; Apple and Tesla are raiding each other's employees.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Saturday February 7, 2015

Sometimes this Internet thing works (too well); student raises $300K for guy without a car. Oh that such successes happened everyday, but then they would be normal and not noteworthy.

The Zuckerbergs donate $75million to the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation. I hope the money is spent wisely.

Seth Godin on giving and receiving feedback.

Facebook buys a lot of land in the valley. Beware the corporate headquarters as it is often the death of a company.

A proposal to transform the Oklahoma panhandle into the wind energy hub of the country.

MIT builds a tiny robot that zips your zipper. Yes, this is just a stunt, but it is a step on the way to very tiny robots that swim in our bodies and correct problems while they are tiny.

The headline says it all: New York City is in a tech boom. Software, the heart of it all, is a person-dominated endeavor and young persons today seem to like the city life (at least for now).

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Sunday February 8, 2015

Deaths at rural railroad crossings have declined greatly in the past 30 years. This doesn't mean much to many people, but it means much to me as I went to high school in a rural area where people died every year at crossings.

Perhaps the ultimate in expensive silliness: control your Tesla car with your Apple watch.

Will Apple leave Intel and make its own processors? Probably not.

The newest Raspberry Pi crashes if you take a photo of it with a Xenon flash.

New reports on the practices and attitudes of millennials at work.

Some people are a little slow to realize what you can do with a hobby RC "drone:" consider our DHS as an example.

Be careful what you say in front of a Samsung TV. It understands and it shares.

This advice is not original. It is, however, excellent: write the story that scares me to death. It won't scare everyone, but it scares me and that emotion will come through to the reader.

The 15-minute novel writing plan: Write for 15 minutes, most days of the week. That is it. For some people it works. As usual, try it. If it works for you, use it.

Some tips on how to have a productive year or life.

Many of us writers deny ourselves good things out of some episode from childhood. Do it now, please, before it is too late.

I like this: the emotional milestones of writing a novel.

Writers need to focus, and it seems to be a lost art to concentrate on one thing for more than ten seconds.

Writers often need someone or something to encourage them to keep going. Here are some pithy qoutes.

Love a writer? Here are some Valentine's Day gift ideas.

Reasons why travellers should not blog about their travels.

Ideas on writing stories for business.

The heat of a struggle and how it fits in a story.

A list of good iPhone apps for freelance writers.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page