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: 27 February-5 March, 2017
Summary of this week:
- Mobile World Congress is this week
- A new Raspberry Pi with wireless, only $10
- AWS has a major outage
- Nvidia releases GeFroce GTX 1080 Ti (better in every way)
Monday
- Tuesday
- Wednesday
- Thursday
- Friday
- Saturday
- Sunday
Monday February 27, 2017
Mobile World Congress is this week. Lots of product announcements coming.
LG introduces its new G6 phone.
The Nokia brand returns with three Android phones.
Lenovo updates its line of Android tablets with several $100 models.
Google spreads its voice Assistant to all Android phones.
The UK government inches up the number of tech visas available this year.
Over 90% of Microsoft security holes are closed by turning off Admin Rights. Since this is known, why isn't this the default setting? Someone explain to me how this dysfuntion continues. Please.
Amazon Studios won three Academy Awards last night. It must be fun for some nerds to walk about with Hollywood stars.
In case you haven't heard yet, Hollywood flops on its face and announces the wrong Best Picture winner. And these are the enlightened.
Applied Machine Learning at Facebook. Good piece, but what is with the rock star style photos? Silliness.
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Tuesday February 28, 2017
Encryption has become the norm in Washington DC. That is probably good. The bad side is that public business is being conducted in private, non-accountable channels.
One billion hour a day: the amount of YouTube video watched worldwide. That's a big number.
Google bug hunters find a severe fault in Microsoft's browsers. They told Microsoft privately before telling the rest of us.
The Sony Experia Touch: industry's first attempt to make any surface a touch screen in a commercial product. We have seen this technology in experiments, but not a product.
Seth Godin asks, "and then what happens?"
An IoT teddy bear had no security behind it. Two million home conversations leaked to the world.
Uber's sexual harrassment problems lead back to a former Google executive. He is now out.
It is not what you earn, it is what you spend. Silicon Valley salaries are high, but housing costs are higher.
Boston Dynamics' newest robot: Handle. Must see video.
I'd love to see this, but I have doubts. SpaceX promises to send two persons around the moon and back next year.
The Raspberry Pi Zero W: wireless communications, computing power, only $10.
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Wednesday March 1, 2017
New tech companies grow to a point where they must realize that having
thousands of employees has great challenges. Recent examples are Uber and Tesla.
Apple's Tim Cook argues that Apple's supply chain has created 2million American jobs.
YouTube TV—$35 a month, no contract, major networks. The home entertainment market is in flux.
Amazon Web Service has an east coast outage. Major companies go down for a few hours. This is cloud computing. You assume the risk of depending on something that is out of your control.
Nvidia releases its latest and greatest graphics card: 3,400 CUDA cores, lower price, better in every way.
Subway chicken sandwiches contain half chicken and half fillers. Oh well.
Strong rumors about the next iPhone: curved screen, USB-C, and, oh, wait $1,000.
Google launches Meet: a business-oriented video teleconference service in HD. Wear your HD makeup folks.
President Trump signs law to promote women in STEM. I thought this president hated women and the prior president loved them. Is this a fake news story? (not)
NASA is embarassed by the SpaceX plan to send persons around the moon. The project leap frogs over NASA.
The headline says it all: "Google has shipped over 10 million Cardboard VR headsets" The definition of success has changed.
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Thursday March 2, 2017
Facebook inserts AI software to try to spot suicidal users before they commit suicide.
Google raises the file size limits on incoming attachments.
Netflix starts using an adaptive coding and compression technique to keep video streaming over slower links.
ARPA-E (energy research) may cease to exist with looming budget cuts. The research will continue.
Security "robots" are being made to look nicer and give humans a more secure feeling.
The stupidity that passes for job interviews. Really folks, let's act as smart as we are.
And the technical interview stupidity now shows up at airports. Software engineer quized at New York airport.
These two stories must be important because they are all over the Internet:
(1) IBM gets a silly patent on email or something.
(2) Marissa Mayer won't get her $2million bonus because of a security problem.
Learners Guild tries to bring more diversity into Silicon Valley. Discriminating per gender to end discriminating per gender is problematic.
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Friday March 3, 2017
An in-depth review of AMD's new multi-core processor. A better value than Intel's product.
Amazon blames human error for this week big service outage.
Snap goes public, and its stock price rises 44% the first day.
Spotify now has 50million paying subscribers. The definition of success has changed.
The Commonwealth of Virginia is the nation's first state to allow robot home delivery. Little carts running up and down the sidewalks.
We are in a transition period where public officials are stumbling from private to public-only communication.
HP Enterprise announces a Pointnext division.
The 30 richest people on earth. The list starts at $22.5Billion.
Nintendo makes its new game cartridges taste bad. Of course kids put these things in their mouths.
SolarCity, an Elon Musk company, lays off 20% of its workforce.
Let's combine the robot delivery and the 30 richest people stories: robots and AI will take jobs, and the rich will get richer.
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Saturday March 4, 2017
For years, Uber has used software that detects law eforcement asking for rides and ignores them so drivers won't be arrested.
An Uber VP suddenly resigns in the middle of their investigation of harassment in the workplace.
Appeals court rules that Apple doesn't oew $533million in a patent law suit.
Jeff Bezos, not to be outdone by Elon Musk, has his own plan for moon trips. The age of plutocrat rule is here.
HP Inc., the consumer products, is healthy and innovating after the big split.
US government suspends fast processing for H-1B visas. Silicon Valley may actually hire Americans.
A Thiel Capital executive will be the deputy Chief Technology Officer of the US government—largely symbolic job.
Amazon will cover warehouse roofs with solar panels—could generate 41MegaWatts of power. Sensible?
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Sunday March 5, 2017
Targeted advertising: put a camera on a billboard, recognize cars, change the ad. Brilliant.
Facebook starts (slowly) tagging stories as "disputed," a.k.a., fake news.
Analyze your breath to tell how much fat you are burning. This is neither fake news nor science fiction.
Smartify: take a photo of a painting and receive high-quality digital images and information.
It appears that we will finally have some H-1B visa reform.
Do you use a tablet for, uh, programming? How?
THE Bullet Journal video tutorial.
More information on the Bullet Journal for writers.
Memoir or novel: autobiographical fiction.
Some people make a big deal of this. If it is not true, it is fiction.
So who cares how much of it is based on stuff that actually happened
here or there, now or then.
To write is to be misunderstood and rejected. Learning to live with it all.
Excellent web site that states what pulications actually pay. EXCELLENT
Good freelance writing tips from a verteran freelance writer.
Thoughts on reading more and better so we can write more and better.
I like this post about motivation and writing. It helps to have other writers around you. You see them writing and you, well, you write.
Excuse the profanity, but this post contains a couple dozen points of excellent writing advice.
Freedom.to—aside from an odd URL, this is a writing web site that helps you block distracting web sites.
Writers are those who don't stop writing.
Writing short stories: fun and educational and more.
Half a dozen plus qoutes about the value of writing in a journal. I receommend the practice to everyone.
As writers, we tell stories to ourselves all the time. Which stories we tell affects how we write or don't write.
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