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: November 9-15, 2015

Summary of this week:

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

Monday November 9, 2015

Black Friday? Forget about it. One reseller has the lowest ever price on Apple computers this week.

Zuckerburg et al. give out $22million in the Breakthrough Prizes to scientists.

Silicon Valley gives us the first glimpse of the plutocrat class and their influence on democracy.

We created 4.4 zettabytes of data last year. Expect 10x this year and the next and the next. Aren't we so smart to create such  new stuff?

Comcast, data caps, and the lies behind it all.

Would someone explain why it costs our government $1BILLION to put one form online? You tax dollars at waste.

Online college is here—4million students took online-only classes last year. Did anyone notice?

Crackas with Attitude claim to have hacked into a law enforcement portal. I'm glad that Health Care dot Gov is secure (not).

Who is Faraday Future and where did they get $1Billion to build a car factory in California? Apple?

A simple explanation to all this cloud computing stuff.

Don't look now, but WordPress powers 25% for the world wide web.

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Tuesday November 10, 2015

Google releases its TensorFlow as an open source library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. This is deep stuff, not for the faint of heart. More news on the release.

Big predictions from Apple on the big iPad Pro.

The World Anti Doping Agency claims that Russia had a major cheating program and should be banned from the Olympics.

Is this the death of college sports? The Missouri football team causes the President and Chancellor to resign. The powers behind universities will not allow college athletes to rule colleges. Hence, they will rid colleges of sports.

Oracle will make a major push in cloud computing real soon now (six months).

More on the proposed UK bill that will require companies to have backdoors in their cryptography. Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a US Senator asked, "Why don't they just put zippers on mail envelopes so the government can read my mail?"

How one Ohio company fired its staff with a cruel presentation and sent all the jobs to India. Welcome to the new world order or something.

Thoughts on the mobile ecosystem and how it now rules the tech world.

A death in an Airbnb rental points to the lack of safety regulation in the sharing economy. So far, people are willing to make the trade.

The latest Steve Jobs movie continues to flop at the box office.

So how will persons have a livable income when their jobs are all gone?

Stop worrying about the economy: our President gets his own Facebook page so all will be just fine.

Believe it or not, until today, Sony has still been making Betamax tape cassettes.

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Wednesday November 11, 2015

Today is Armistice Day, a.k.a., Veterans Day in America. The first great war ended on this day in 1918.

Order your big iPad Pro today, pick it up on Friday.

A close look at the Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor.

AT&T expands its gigabit Internet service to 23 more cities. I don't live in any of them.

On the heels of Google's open source AI tools, a look at Microsoft's.

November 11th is China's "Single's Day" and is breaking all online shopping world records.

Nvidia releases the Jetson TX1 developer module. The package emphasizes machine learning.

There are plenty of jobs in IT security. Now if someone would just decide what IT security is.

New York joins the growing group of states to outlaw FanDuel and DraftKings.

Sweden closes its borders to refugees citing that it has no more room.

Google Maps is now usable when you aren't connected.

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Thursday November 12, 2015

The new HP Inc. comes out with new portable computers with 4K screens.

Apple brings better SharePoint support to its iPads.

Interesting technique to magnify deviations from the ideal and show weaknesses in structures that the eye can't see.

People have the big iPad Pro in their hands. Reviews are mixed as it doesn't yet seem to be a laptop replacement. I saw a person with one last night. It is an attention grabber, but that doesn't make it a good tool.

Facebook's Notify news app finally starts working today.

Microsoft is putting cloud storage in Germany so we won't worry about our government spying on us. We are reaping what we sowed. This is terrible.

A new book is out bashing the H-1B visa program.  A link to the book itself.

Someone hacked into 70million prison phone call records and found all sorts of misconduct.

The Firefox browser is now available for iOS.

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Friday November 13, 2015

Captain Florent A. Groberg, US Army (Ret), was awarded the Medal of Honor yesterday. He is part of Warriors Ethos, an organization that helps veterans obtain job skills. Warriors Ethos is associated with Intelligent Waves, my current employer.

Critics rate "Master of None" the best new show this fall. Trouble is, it is only on Netflix and few people can see it.

Mountain View Police stop a Google Neighborhood Electric Vehicle for going slow.

YouTube (Alphabet (Google)) launches its own music service.

Fossil, the watch company, is buying a tech company that makes wearable fitness gadgets.

A good source for experimenting with software-defined radio and GNU Radio.

Friendly hackers demonstrate how easy it is to hack into medical systems in hospitals. They did this at the Mayo Clinic—the best of the best. Imagine what they can do at a small-town, low-budget hospital.

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Saturday November 14, 2015

Terrorists attack Paris with multiple bombs.

Facebook has activated its Safety Check tool in Paris to help people find their loved ones.

Sources of news regarding what is happening in Paris.

US Nationals Labs and Nvidia are working together on Fortran compilers for massively parallel processors.

This is a world record of some sort as Fallout 4 shipped 12million copies on day one.

Computer designer Gene Amdahl dies at 92.

The case that robots won't replace human jobs.

Microsoft makes its Distributed Machine Learning Toolkit (DMTK)  open source.

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Sunday November 15, 2015

The history and future of cloud computing. Nice prespective.

What is killing the sales of tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs? Smartphones.

B&H is discounting all the Apple computing products this holiday season. Yes, it is shopping time already.

Diversity and culture and all those messy and important things in tech companies.

Our Federal government is trying to bring in a handful of tech brains to fix our Federal government. The needed brains are already here. The powers that be need to start listening to them.

How one writer found and removed time wasters from the day.

Thoughts on writing articles and sending them to the top newspapers and magazine instead of sending queries.

The case for freelance writers to write on Medium.

Sitting won't kill you if you take a few minutes to stand and walk now and then. It isn't that complicated.

Why working alone often beats collaboration. Write alone, let teams review and comment.

And now to follow that, here is how to write a book collaborating with someone else.

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