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: May 18-24, 2015

Summary of this week:

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

Monday May 18, 2015

We see the first trailer of the latest Steve Jobs movie.  Will this one show him ilegally conspiring to hold down wages of engineers?

Why does the university survive? Because it is a country club. It is the fun, stupid.

Will the auto industry learn from IBM's failure in the 1980s?

NASA approves the SpaceX Falcon booster for use in medium-risk payload launches. That is sort of like the IRS approving TurboTax.

Google and Univ of Washington create method of mining photos from the  Internet and creating time-lapse sequences.

Seth Godin provides a simple bureaucracy test.

"Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem."

Wary of hacking, the PLA (China's Army) bans smartwatches in the ranks.

Netflix's stock hits a record high. Where are those DVD mailers?

This must be important because it is all over the Internet all weekend and continuing today: the UK gives its intel officers immunity from prosecution.

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Tuesday May 19, 2015

dot com wasn't good enough. Here comes .pizza and other Internet silliness.

Apple buys a company with GPS expertise.

Our Navy has fouled up its data cloud project so badly that it is moving to another part of the bureaucracy.

Not having much to do these days, our President gets a Twitter account.

The Light Phone: designed to be used as little as possible. You make and receive phone calls. The end.

Hillary Clinton has made million$ by speaking in $ilicon Valley.

Google lowers the prices on its Cloud Computing services.

A very short video preview of the new Doom.

Microsoft's Solitaire game is now 25 years old.

It seems that Apple was working on a TV, but after ten years of experiementing dropped the idea.

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Wednesday May 20, 2015

Apple upgrades the MacBook Pro and the iMac. More performance at the same price.

The computer industry urges our President to disapprove of back doors in encryption. The tempation is too much.

The Internet of Things big question: which things should a business connect to the Internet?

Now we are getting some place with these flat-screen TVs. LG has a 55" OLED flatscreen so thin, so light it attaches to the wall with a magnet.

In Germany, KFC has a paper-thin bluetooth keyboard on your serving tray. Lucky Germans.

The newspapers of the 1800s were much like Reddit and others of today—publishing already published materials.

Starbucks partners with Spotify to bring music to its locations and sell it.

Four big cancer charities are charged with fraud. They took in million$ in donations, but spent the money on themselves.

Our President, with not much to do, sets a record for a million Twitter followers.

Uber raids Carnegie Mellon's robotics lab to build its own self-driving car.

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Thursday May 21, 2015

Praising the Go programming language over Python.

A look at WordSmith—software that writes news stories.

Another prediction of how self-driving cars will make the future—200-mile commutes to work.

We are slowly and surely advancing in brain-powered prosthetics. Now as long as some jerk won't twist this into a weapon.

More on technology replacing human jobs. It is happening; sorry about that.

Forward to the past of the psychology of computer programming. Organizations are still killing their programmers.

I am dismayed by stories like this that grab headlines. Who cares if the font will change on the iMac? That is not engineering or technical design. It is merely glitz and sparkle.

ooops, another health care hack—this one in the Washington D.C. area. I'm so glad that the big health care web site is secure (not).

User interface problems with the new MacBook—bad keyboard and mousepad. It is still all about the input/output.

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Friday May 22, 2015

Be careful what you do when you discover a security hole in someone's system. Often, the discoverer is punished.

US Court tells FBI that there is no "two-minute rule."

Is your ISP throttling your Internet speed? Use the Internet Health Test.

Are journalists doomed in the future by robots?

The Java programming language is 20 years old—declared "easy to read."

Hackers flock to ATMs to steal credit card information—that is where the money is.

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Saturday May 23, 2015

An iPhone stunts a shotgun blast and saves a man's life. Really.

Leap, the luxury bus service, is closed by regulators.

Brillo: a Google operating system for low-power Internet of Things devices.

It seems all those extra security questions are almost worthless at protecting data.

I am not alone; about 70% of American doubt that our government can protect our personal information.

This guy appears to have a working hoverboard. No details available, but he travelled 1,000 feet.

How the FBI violated the law for seven years. Sometimes the executive branch of our government is the most lawless organization in our country. What are people who work in these agencies thinking?

IBM tries to justify its use of H-1B visas.

This is an EXCELLENT post on human psychology and user experience UX.

We return to the 1700s as the rich are exclusively educating children of the rich. The plutocrats are here, again.

Windows 3.0 was released 25 years ago.

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Sunday May 24, 2015

Humble email is still hot in the investing world.

I never thought of this one, but now that I have, I don't like it. Citizens who work for the government are harming all citizens. A judge rules that police don't have to give citizens information collected by license plate readers. The public officials performing public duties in public collect information about a person, but won't share that information with the person. Wrong.

Mobile data usage is much less expensive in the UK than in America.

Here is a tiny home with solar and wind power built in.

Young people today want to work for Google and Apple. Young people today simply want to get a job.

Samsung's smartphone business is collapsing.

Some bloggers earn $200 per post—they spend a lot of time marketing.

A history of pen names. I once wrote a short story about the pen name scheme.

New–coloring books for adults. Sounds like fun to me, why not?

Places to send those short stories.

“Just write the damned book.”—Tom Clancy.

Several simple yet big things to do to help be better organized, i.e., write more.

Some literary journals are now charging a reading fee, i.e., you pay them to reject your writing.

Tips on managing your email inbox while still treating people as people.

All writers struggle, at least all the writers I have ever met.

Want to learn about and write about farms?

Writing to write vs writing to be memorable. Often, the first lead to the second.

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