Summary of this week:

The never ending quest to learn new skills
IBM introduces Quarks for IoT sensor data
Federal judge orders Apple to hack iPhone
Apple posts open letter saying, "NO"
X Prize and IBM create an AI contest

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

Monday February 15, 2016

Today is Presidents Day in the U.S. We used to honor George Washington, but somewhere along the line he fell out of favor or something.

Samsung Smart TVs are recording our voices and sending them to a third party. Thwelcome to the world of IoT—no security and no privacy.

Social media invents the experience economy. Old retailers struggle to catch up.

We are living in yet another Aritificial Intelligence boom (we had one in th 1980s) with Google and Facebook in the lead.

Google and other notables have flopped when trying to move into health care. Their employees are too young too rich.

"Learn new skills or find your career choices are very limited."—AT&T's CEO.

Deadpool breaks all the box office records for an R rated movie.

Mattel has a $300 toy-making 3D printer.

Considering robots, AI, lost jobs, and what to do with a lot of people who don't work.

A closer look at Internet.org and Facebook Free Basics. It is all about money.

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Tuesday February 16, 2016

Google finds a balloon design that meets their requirements; the move on to RF testing.

Germany expects another half million refugees in 2016.

The Irish government wants information from Apple about a secret data center. Keep it up, chase away business and jobs and money. Please don't do that to your citizens.

The Grammy awards were last night. Once again, singers call out other singers in phoney battles meant only to get publicity and money.

HBO releases plans to try to compete with Netflix. How about releasing explanations of how a nothing company that mailed DVDs clobbered you in the market and made you a distant second? What happened at HBO?

There appear to be technical and personnel problems at Alphabet's Nest.

I guess this solves someone's problem; Nissan has an office chair that parks itself back under the table.

The $499 electric toy Tesla for kids.

IBM introduces Quarks: an open-source tool for monitoring sensors in the Internet of Things.

Vaio, Toshiba, and Fujitsu are merging to be a great(?) big PC maker.

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Wednesday February 17, 2016

A Federal judge has ordered Apple to help the FBI hack into a killer's iPhone.

Apple posts an open letter to its customers opposing the order.

So we shall see what happens next.

Thoughts on Twitter changing its timeline algorithm.

An error in the GNU C Library has left much of the Internet open for mischief.

Disk drive reliability reported by someone who runs 55,000 disks.

Google takes a step sideways in education by closing Play for Education.

Lesson for Governments: In advertising, big data aproximations work. In killing, they don't.

Mark Zuckerburg proves that rich people think they know what everyone should be reading and thinking.

Google renames its think tank "Jigsaw."

Jobs are all about areas with a lot of college graduates. This was predicted.

Re: education and personal learning. Read, read, read, think, think, think, write, write, write.

Google launches Tensor Flow Serving as an extension to Tensor Flow.

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Thursday February 18, 2016

Google's CEO comments on Apple's situation with our FBI and hacking consumer products.

This article discusses why our FBI needs Apple's help. It also shows why our government, with all its power, can't do everything and is begging companies to build back doors to everything. It also shows the folly of the entire situation.

More on this nonsense. Someone help us if our government wins and has the power to turn us citizens into subjects.

Google improves the Custom Machine Types on its Cloud Platform to include more operating system variety.

A key to Alphabet's success with R&D is stopping projects that need to stop.

Our President's office is twisting words with Apple claiming they don't want a backdoor to iPhones. I guess it's not a lie if I obfuscate so much no one can understand what I am saying (not).

The X Prize Foundation and IBM team to create a $5million AI contest.

Neverware: dual boot a computer to be itself or a Chromebook.

The story of the $5 smartphone in India. I don't quite understand everything here. It seems to be subsidized and copied and all sorts of things.

Google's Translate now covers 99% of the world.

Google is testing some kind of wireless broadband in Kansas City.

Amazon employees are starting to organize for a union. Take care as you could lose your job. Also, Amazon management must be doing some awful things to cause people to seek a union.

Microsoft brings Linux to its Azure cloud. The world is upside down.

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Friday February 19, 2016

Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center paid a $17,000 ransom in bitcoin to a hacker. Health care: it is now where the money is.

Google releases its Cloud Vision API into public beta testing.

For the first time, sales of smartwatches surpasses those of not-so-smart watches.

Facebook and Twitter are also on board with Apple opposing Federal court orders.

Even the Woz is backing Apple in this situation.

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Saturday February 20, 2016

Apple reveals more background on the FBI case, and the details are not flattering to our FBI.

More ugly details. It seems to me that someone in the FBI got a little too ambitious and wanted to be the hero on CNN or FoxNews and tried to push private things into the public and made a big mess and as usual no one in government can admit to any mistakes and I'm sure I sound cynical but I worked in government for 28 years and have seen this happen time and time again...

Seagate ships 2TeraByte disk drives for laptop computers. Two TeraBytes of disk space on a laptop? I suppose this solves someone's problem.

The gullible generation: 18,000+ people apply to NASA to be astronauts. These folks don't seem to understand that NASA just might have the ability to put a person in space by the end of this decade.

Re: really cool and actual space travel—Virgin Galactic unveiled its new SpaceShipTwo rocket plane.

It seems that it is legal to replace qualified Americans with H-1B visa holders. That is a great shame.

The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF)—the latest industry group that hopes to work together of IoT standards.

Is this the future of (non)work? Take Uber and other jobs to avoid loneliness?

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Sunday February 21, 2016

Why Education Technology companies are failing—high expenses and low income.

A proposal to auction to the highest bidder H-1B visas. Let's see how much companies will pay.

San Bernardino County is now disputing the FBI-Apple dispute. Folks, judge the relative competence of the parties involved. Enough said.

The rich-poor divide at Yelp. Employee blogs about low wages and is fired.

All Presidential candidates show their ignorance of technology, the constitution, and just about everything else by their comments on the Apple-FBI dispute. Gosh. How did we get here?

Storing information on optical disks for someone who might find them in a few million years. But are the DOS-compatible?

Some ideas on creating your own, low-cost writer's retreat.

The Huffington Post once again tries to justify why it doesn't pay any of its writers. Sigh.

If you want to write, you must read.

More good writing tips. For me, the best are (1) start writing for one minute and (2) (3) find an accountability group.

This post has some great tools to help freelance authors market their writing.

One writer's system for organizing and then creating vast amounts of content.

How to use your online work to best benefit you.

Some good, experience-based tips on telecommuting or virutal working or whatever we call it now.

A good post describing common mistakes that new freelancers make. Don't be ignorant; proceed with caution.

Even as an impoverished, struggling writer you must still keep the ability to say "No."

A new one for me (the engineer): Heart Maps.

A lot of twists on the idea of brainstorming.

Once you start writing, don't give up. Love it and write to write for fun. Money may never come, but money doesn't make you a writer just as money doesn't make you an artist or an actor or an engineer.

The compulsion to write. Many of us have this.

A production schedule for writers: pick what to write and write it one at a time. Yes, this is sort of like a real job.

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