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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d.phillips@computer.org
This
week: December 19-25, 2016
Summary of this week:
- Apple told to pay EU $13.6billion in back taxes
- A Turkish guard kills the Russian ambassador to Turkey
- California DMV boots Uber to Arizona—good research jobs go away
Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
Monday December 19, 2016
Medical technology, high tech, indiegogo, and our FDA collide. Not a pretty picture.
The big tech companies, workforce diversity, self-reporting, and facts collide. Not a pretty picture, either.
How are we training AI? Through Amazon Mechanical Turk and tech sweat shops. It is just plain ugly.
The outgoing political party in the White House stuggles in vain to punish the Russians who elected Trump (fact or fake news?).
A look into Google's use of AI and its Translate program.
Europe's GPS replacement Galileo comes online. It has better precision than GPS.
Amazon has a Christmas sale. $40 7" tablet.
Google's DeepMind may expand from 400 to 1,000 highly skilled, well paid jobs in London. Brexit?
Apple owes $2million to its retail employees for meal breaks and other basic working conditions.
The Linux Foundation has 50% discounts on training for the next three days.
The EU rules that Apple owes Europe $13billion in taxes. Guess who will win in European court.
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Tuesday December 20, 2016
I am travelling this week. Internet viewing is irregular, so let's see what happens.
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Wednesday December 21, 2016
The world's richest hobby programmer—Mark Zuckerburg—discuss his home assistant project. DIY weekend?
An EU court outlaws UK's snooper law. I thought Brexit got the UK out of this extraterritoriality.
Nostalgia, home computing, and why doesn't Apple love the Mac anymore?
It appears that Apple will be manufacturing products in India.
Uber is everywhere and losing money in all those places—$800million in third quarter alone.
How social media could destroy knowledge on the Internet. I find it improbable.
Tim Cook has to explain the obvious to Apple employees. Odd.
Facebook Messenger now allows split-screen group video chat—with funny faces no less.
Microsoft and our DoDefense are in a $billion partnership.
DeepMind—a UK branch of Google—is hiring Google employees in the US. No, this doesn't make sense to me, either.
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Thursday December 22, 2016
On the road. Little time for Internet viewing this morning.
Intel has a group that is working on quantum computing, but with plain old silicon.
WhatsApp and the immigrant and refugee life.
We can now run the PIXEL OS (from Raspberry Pi) on any PC or Mac.
The government of California wins—Uber stops testing there and moves to another states. Jobs go with it.
Will anyone in California protest this wonderful (not) acomplishment by
the state's lawyers? I doubt it, but I don't live there. Perhaps Uber
will move the testing to Virginia.
Zuckerburg admits that Facebook isn't just for baby and kitten photos, but still don't take them seriously.
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Friday December 23, 2016
Snow in the Sahara desert. Global warm...well call it something else or other.
Governments are increasingly asking (nice way of saying it) Facebook for information on users.
California wins!? (not) Uber self-driving research jobs go to Arizona. CA regulators retain their jobs. This all seems upside down or something to me. Really? You successfully drive high-paying jobs to another state?
The government of Canada declares broadband to be a basic service and funds it for its citenzenry.
Google will release smart watches in early 2017. Watches will have the brand of a yet-to-be-named partner.
Apple has quality problems with its new portable computers. Computer Reports flunks them.
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at
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Saturday December 24, 2016
It is the Eve of Christmas. The Internet is pretty quiet this morning.
Facebook removes feature that provides exact physical location to select friends—too creepy.
A report on benchmark tests run on Nvidia's latest GPUs—supercomputers on chips.
The future of the self-flying car. Regulations, not technology, are keeping us out of the air. The key to allowing the flying car is having a computer, instead of just you or me, be the pilot.
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Sunday December 25, 2016
Merry Christmas
Post(post(post(post)))modern
man declares himself more important than all mankind in declaring 2016
hottest year in history of earth.
Back to the mundane...80% of us are now shopping online at Christmas.
Python 3.6 is released.
This moment of sanity is a surprise as some Congressmen decide that encryption backdoors are a bad idea.
Cyanogen—an Android spinoff—spins off into oblivion and closes all its services.
The killer of self-driving cars (so far at least) is white, snow-covered roads.
You are a writer. Write something to someone as a gift.
A long time ago, I observed that I could write several sentences inside
a Hallmark card and people would cry tears of joy. For 33 Christmases
now I have written such for my wife each Christmas morning. She seems
to like them.
How being organized and self-managing can free you to be more creative. Yes, this type of thing works for many writers.
How one writer uses UpWork to find freelance writing clients.
Tips on romance writing—I know nothing of the subject.
Combining fact and fiction in historical novels.
How one writer used LinkedIn Premium level to find well-paying clients.
This is an excellent post on short stories with links to other excellent posts.
The working title. It can help the writer write. Then the publishers or someone can find another title later.
Lost in the woods? Some woodsman lesson applied to writing.
Writing for fun is often more fun than any other kind of writing.
Writers seem to invent ways to make a mess of good ideas and
inspiriration.
Some thoughts on writing the first draft. People think I am odd,
but I think you can write first drafts that are quite good and 98.6%
usable
.
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