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: April 4-10, 2016

Summary of this week:

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

Monday April 4, 2016

The Panama Papers: hack leaks 2.6TeraBytes of docs that show worldwide political corruption. The plutocrats already rule.

Great video of this past weekend's Blue Origin takeoff, flight, landing.

NASA puts 16 years of near-infrared elevation and thermal data from ASTER online free. Nice of them seeing how the data was bought with public money.

Pluto continues to appear all wrong. Remote sensing is difficult, and sensing into the remote past is just as difficult, which is why I shake my head at those who know how dinosaurs appeared and what temperature my town was 10,000 years ago.

A new look at construction progress on Apple's spaceship building. It looks like the Pentagon with rounded corners.

The White House gets new computers. Yes, government IT is so, well, you know, that having color printers is a BIG deal.

Apple is likely to close the hole exploited by someone on behalf of the FBI.

HP will introduce a new laptop tomorrow and promises to leapfrog Apple in innovation.

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Tuesday April 5, 2016

Microsoft starts Outlook Premium at $4/month to bring extra features to email.

Facebook introduces automatic alt text which describes photos to blind users.

Microsoft is developing similar software that runs on a smartphone. Point the phone, it describes the world.

MIT's Media Lab launches Data USA, “the most comprehensive visualization of U.S. public data.”

HP shows its shiny new thin laptop, the Spectre. It may have a too many cosmetic touches.

HP also slimmed downs its line of Envy portable computers.

The hottest board game in the world is Go; it is in the wake of Google beating the world champion.

Never known for forward thinking, our Federal government finally decides to make publicly funded software available to the public.

Our TSA paid $1.4million for an app that basically mimicks the flip of a coin. Our tax dollars at waste.

Twitter surprisingly wins the rights to stream NFL Thursday night games next season.

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Wednesday April 6, 2016

Always the Socialist, Bernie Sanders wants Apple to pay its "fair share" of taxes.

Rumors flying about how bleak life is at Nest.

Google is reported to be concentrating on augmented reality vice VR. There is a big market for helping people do their jobs.

Nvidia shows their new Tesla P100 card at the GPU Technology Conference.

Nvidia boosts its high-end laptop GPU capabilities.

Nvidia shows the DGX-1, a supercomputer for deep learning at $200,000. Supercomputers used to cost $6million.

A closer look at the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

A good essay on why our current President is a fascist. Just read the definitions in the dictionary; that is all there is.

Vivaldi: a new browser for "smart" people.

Jeff Bezos has built Amazon on a smart portfolio of projects that includes high-risk ones.

Roku shows the 3rd-generation Roku Streaming Stick at only $50.

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Thursday April 7, 2016

Merle Haggard dies at 79.

Seth Godin offers a suggestion of using Facebook vice the current political primary system. It couldn't be worse than what we use now.

Amazon's cloud computing is a $10billion business by itself. I am a little surprised it hasn't been spun off or that Amazon hasn't done what Google did by creating a parent company over all Amazon enterprises.

How do you fund terrorism? Steal antiquities and sell them.

Facebook updates Live so it is much more like Periscope.

Half of us will pick up a USB thumbdrive off the sidewalk and plug it into our computer. Yikes.

Just because Google does it, that doesn't make it a good idea. Exec reveals stupid questions she asks job candidates.

Hackers in Turkey have released personal information on over half of its population.

The Dutch conduct an experiment with truck platooning on real highways. Autonomous trucks follow one another.

The first trailer for the first Star Wars spinoff movie. The great danger is that these one-off movies will be better than the mainline movies.

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Friday April 8, 2016

Greater details on Nvidia's announcements this week.

IBM, NVIDIA and Wistron team to create more high-performance computing platforms.

In the longest running silly fuss in history, the FBI confirms that its hack of the iPhone is quite limited.

Weather forecasting moves to private industry as government lags behind.

Silliness in crime prediction and the loss of due process. In the end, taxpayers pay all the legal fees. Government workers forget who they work for and make lots of silly decisions. They waste their own money, but don't see it.

Hackers take over radio stations and broadcast other stuff. It was "funny" this time, but terrorist possibilities abound.

A hot job for a while, is DevOps now dead? In case you missed it, the job was the result of poor management.

Excellent lessons from a person who has worked from home for five years.

Amazon moves towards the Google-Alphabet model by promoting division heads to CEO status.

A big hack in the Philippines releases information on 55million people.

How tech companies are employing liberal arts majors to help generate artificially intelligent bots.

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Saturday April 9, 2016

THEY DID IT! SpaceX sent cargo to the ISS and then landed the booster successfully on a barge. I found a lot of blabbing on the Internet about how they "finally got it right" and other nonsense. The difficulty of this is far beyond the grasp of all the pop media and most of the "tech" media. Too bad. Of course, most of the "tech" media is about selling ads on web sites and other non-tech tech.

Google considers using Apple's Swift as a programming language for Android.

Yet another programmer demonstrates how much money our TSA wasted on the Randomizer app.

How they made that unusual POV movie Hardcore Henry.

A look into how our FBI and DHS are flying circles over us to watch us to protect us from ourselves.

Acer introduces an all-metal Chromebook with 14" screen at $299.

Some of our Senators show their ignorance by drafting some sort of encryption legislation.

Google releases Android Studio 2.0.

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Sunday April 10, 2016

ooops, those antibacterial cleaners are doing more harm than good.

Google changes its pricing plans for fiber in Kansas City. It is still a much better deal than I have.

A good look at the barges SpaceX uses to land its rockets.

Given today's technology leaps, "The distance from can to will keeps getting larger."—Seth Godin

A good analysis of how Tesla's 300,000 pre-orders for cars could drive them out of business.

A more in-depth look at chatbots. Good reading.

Stuck? Just start writing. Really, type "blah blah blah..." until real words come out.

The utility of telling stories when you write, when you write about anything.

How writing what you know can help push into writing what you don't.

In writing, it helps to be persistent. It helps a-whole-lot.

Tips to help an introverted writer go out in public and speak to crowds.

How you might encourage your boss to read.

Waiting can be the most difficult while most beneficial practice of a writer.

Resources one writer used on the way to her first novel. Everyone takes a different path.

I cannot overestimate the value of a writing mentor. Good luck, however, in finding one.

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