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: July 13-19, 2015

Summary of this week:

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

Monday July 13, 2015

We are in almost-mid July, and the back-to-school computer deals are already here. Your new Apple laptop will be all scratched up by the time school starts.

A look at LinuxMint 17.2.

Satoru Iwata, longtime president of Nintendo of Japan, is dead at 55.

Global sales of tablets are flat. There is still a lot of money to be made here.

Hillary Clinton to address the sharing economy and campaign against it. She runs the risk of sounding like an old lady complaining about "kids these days."

The Apple Watch may have been just too far of a leap without the needed hardware in place.

Be ready for more announcements about US government hacks that may overshadow OPM.

Microsoft is developing a maching teaching tool so that most of us can teach computers about our fields of endeavor.

MIT demonstrates flash-centric computing, and that may be the future of supercomputing.

Is a world without work at hand? Do we want that? Are we smart enough to find new work?

The biggest censorship program in the history of man continues. 280K people ask Google to be forgotten causing 1.1million links to disappear. Criminals love this program.

The crypto wars: governments with no technical know how vs individuals with technical know how.

Google invests $100million in security company CrowdStrike.

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Tuesday July 14, 2015

As a default, Mozilla is blocking Adobe's Flash due to security problems.

Hillary Clinton gives her big anti-Uber speech, and, in classic form, never mentions Uber by name. This is the great Clinton double-speak and plausible denial and all that stuff that causes people to hate their elected officials and eventually hate democracy.

A detailed report on the performance of solid state disks running MapReduce algorithms.

O'Reilly introduces their Next:Economy conference. It looks to be fascinating. The Conference site is here.

Qualcomm joins Thread Group: an Internet of Things consortium.  The news is that Qualcomm is already a member of a rival consortium. Perhaps, just pehaps, there will be a meeting of the mindful.

Retailers rejoice! Facebook is working on a digital assistant that will help us shop.

Apple Pay is now operating in the UK.

Rackspace strengthens its ties with Microsoft and the Azure cloud.

Amazon is helping build a large wind farm in North Carolina. Once again, my resident state of Virginia is missing out on these opportunities. Our governors are either running for President or trying to stay out of jail while money flows to neighboring states.

On July 29th, we can walk in a store and buy a computer running Windows 10.

Freedom of speech? Freedom of association? The director of the Edward Snowden film, a US citizen with rights, is detained everytime she enters the US.

New York City pays family of Eric Garner $6million. This is why no one talks after one of these police killings. The government hides to reduce the amount of money they know they will have to pay citizens. The same happens in upper-middle-class Fairfax County, Virginia.

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Wednesday July 15, 2015

Spoon University: trying to teach younger Americans what to eat. This is cute enough to succeed.

Yet another Chromebook is reviewed and almost given a good grade. Each flops in one or more aspects.

I commend Nike for this new shoe for people with disabilities. Excellent video. Excellent work.

The Commodore Pet is back as an Android smartphone.

The UK government is not trying to block encryption, at least not today. Yesterday it was.

One recent study suggests that robots are not taking jobs.

One Georgia county wants to buy UAVs for emergency response to eliminate costly  human jobs.

IBM and Nvidia partner to work on supercomputer centers for our Department of Energy.

Google is growing up and learning how to cut costs. Is the fun gone?

Want a portable keyboard for your iPad? Get it from Microsoft.

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Thursday July 16, 2015

Shoppers celebrate!

Facebook is bringing a "buy" button so we can buy while doing whatever it is we do in Facebook.

Google is bringing a buy button so we can buy right after doing a search.

Shoppers in Iran celebrate as Apple is already negotiating to sell its products there.

United Airlines pays out bug bounties to hackers who found security holes in their systems.

Apple has a new iPod Touch with better camera and better everythng else, too.

Intel has better than expected earnings with an accompanying rise in stock price. I guess the PC isn't quite dead.

Two weeks ahead of release, Windows 10 is finished.

Amazon celebrated 20 years in business with its Prime Day—mixed results. Sales were up, but many shoppers were disappointed in the not-so-deep price cuts.

Our President has declared it, so it is official—the Internet is a necessity, not a luxury.

The ConnectHome program will bring broadband to poor people. I like the sentiment. The fiasco of the rural broadband program, however, gives me doubts that this is nothing more than another situation where a few companies suck up all the money and relatively few people actually get broadband service.

All the financial numbers are great a Netflix. And these guys started out mailing DVDs.

Windows XP continues its slow descent into non-support. And, hackers will stop working on security hacks of Windows XP. A great product. I will miss it.

System76, maker of Ubuntu-loaded PCs, drops Adobe Flash as too dangerous.

Best yet photos of Pluto show fewer than expected impact craters.

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Friday July 17, 2015

Xiaomi will start selling its Android smartphones in the US.

Google has a good financial quarter and its stock rises 8%.

The Reddit founders come forward with new guidelines that allow more "free speech."

Ellen Pao has an editorial in the Washington Post.

Microsoft will sell copies on Windows 10 on USB drives—eliminating the need to have a DVD drive on your computer.

The sharing economy moves into the presidential campaign. Ready yourself for the ignorance.

Amazon claims that Prime Day was huge—bigger than Black Friday.

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Saturday July 18, 2015

Distracted drivers are hitting the Google self-driving cars, often.

iOS is now approved by the FDA for medical uses including spinal cord stimulation.

Surprise. A $3 clip-on camera lens kits for smartphones actually works.

For an extra $10,000, your Tesla model S can go 0 to 60 in three seconds.

Now that we can see some of Pluto's surface, we are surprised at what we find.

Google making money on mobile search and YouTube.

The Donald Trump presidential campaign continues to dominate social media. Can we elect a person president who has not real political experience? ooops, we did that 7 and 3 years ago.

Homejoy went out of business when its contract workers sued to become employees. Now everyone is unemployed. Isn't that so much better? (not)

In steps Google—it hires the tech team and looks at the home services business.

Working at Apple is not all great stuff.

Windows as a service: you will like the auto-magic update downloads.

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Sunday July 19, 2015

This is excellent: turn a van into an office.

This is an outstanding website for demographics by zip code.

The Open Document Format is not an ISO/IEC standard.

Perhaps it was once a good program, but recent evidence shows that the H-1B visa program is for jobs replacements by low-paid, foreign workers.

Trying to start new business in, of all places, Greece.

Here is a $3,000 electric scooter. This is almost practical, but dangerous on the road where people tend to run over you.

This little-known site has all the keyboard shortcuts for everything.

Thoughts on the little-known, but most powerful Border Gateway Protocol.

Thoughts on writing short pieces.

How Jane Austen learned to write: (1) she read everything in her father's library and (2) wrote personal letters daily.

Good thoughts on writing for self or writing for other people.

Here is a how-to on writing a short story. I disagree with just about everything in the post.

Some tips on moving from real life into real fiction writing.

Things freelance writers can do to get out of the house.

This post is given in a religious context, but don't miss the point—taking notes with hand, pen, and paper leads to more thought and better retention.

Udemy is offering a free writing course. Of course, get a keyboard and any good book and you also have a free writing course.

How to become a freelance writer. This post is far better than most with the same title.

 Tips for blogs that have big audiences.

Writing failure and writing success. Sorry, it seems that no one achieves the success without first the failure.

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