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: 10-16 April, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday April 10, 2017

Our IRS was hacked, they only lost the private information of 100,000 citizens, so what's the harm? (not)

The modern data center: $31Billion spent last year by the big cloud providers. The concept is that this is far more efficient than thousands of smaller companies doing the same.

LiveJournal, owned by Russians but hosted in the US, falls under Russian censorship laws. Welcome to the digital-something-or-other age and extra-territoriality.

Tesla offers a new solar panel that simply looks better than the average rooftop monstrosity.

Is Facebook too big and too full of waste? Where are the alternatives?

Everyone on the Internet is talking about the hackers and the air raid sirens. You read it here first yesterday.

Netflix gets Amazon to spend $4.5billion on movies and such. Netflix?

Twitter doesn't make much money. Twitter's executives? That's another story.

Apple, required by local regulators, has more parking space than office space at its new building. Isn't government great?

Hacker archetypes: see yourself? see your friends? ooops, do hackers actually have friends?

The old days of home computers. Yes, I miss them. I used to write the newsletter for our computer club.

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Tuesday April 11, 2017

Minecraft, favorite game of my grandson, is getting its own currency.

This hasn't been done already? FAA to prevent drones from flying over US military bases.

PewDiePie moves from YouTube to Amazon Twitch. As silly as it sounds, this is actually a big deal.

No surprises: teens flock to popular spots like Instagram and Snapchat and leave Kik and Tumblr.

Qualcomm and Apple go at it in court.

Farmers buy their tractors, but are told they don't own the entire tractor.

Airlines, banks, credit cards, and money: how did we get here? I just want to go someplace.

Netflix leads with YouTube gaining in something called over-the-top streaming service.

This has been big news for several days: Carrie Fisher will appear in the Star Wars 8 and 9 films. They have enough footage.

This year's H-1B visas are gone in five days. Too bad we don't have computer science and engineering schools in America (not).

A new world record in dominoes falling and all that. See the video.

Tsk tsk tsk United Airlines drags a doctor off an overbooked flight. Of course its all on YouTube. The Dr. needed to stay on the flight to see patients back at his office. United, well, let's just say they messed up again.

Google responds to Dept of Labor allegations about gender pay inequality. And we will end up in court, and Google has better lawyers than the government and lots of taxpayer dollars will be wasted.

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Wednesday April 12, 2017

An era thankfully comes to an end as Microsoft says goodbye to Windows Vista.

A look at Windows 10 Creators Update.

Power reversed: Western Digital shows an external disk that sends power TO your laptop.

Rumors abound of Windows 10 Cloud and how it will be like a Chromebook. Inexpensive hardware, operating system in the cloud.

Evernote now supports the MacBook Pro touch bar. Maybe something sustainable will come of this.

I love this! Can't draw? No problem, scribble and Google AI will make you a nice little picture.

A person works in an iPhone factory in China and lives to tell the tale. They won't move the factory to the US.

Contrary to oft-repeated stories, our President has not declared war on science. He is, instead, eliminating tax-payer funded jobs programs for scientists who have nothing to do.

Life in prison: build computers and use them to hack government networks.

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Thursday April 13, 2017

Yet another robot food delivery starts in parts of San Francisco. They look like rolling tupperware tubs, not robots.

BlackBerry wins big in court against Qualcomm.

A long interview with Mark Zuckerburg about the future of mankind and Facebook. Maybe they got the order backwards.

Burger King and Google, or just Burger King, make a mess with a new TV ad about the Whopper and Google Home.

Is there no end to the silly things Uber does? I guess it's legal, but ill advised.

Apple is not-so-secretly working on devices to help diabetes patients.

The lowly Chromebook is having a real, economic affect on the PC market.

Who programmed all those work-from-home-enabling software tools? Programmers who want to work from home.

The trouble with machine learning AI: we can't explain why other than, "a lot of people did it that way."

Everyone in the world is watching the trailer for the next Stars Wars video game.

The prototype Samsung Table. Of course it's neat.

Silicon Valley giants don't like Donald Trump. This is neither news nor fake news.

Facebook Messenger now has 1.2Billion users (with a B).

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Friday April 14, 2017

The newest, high-poverty area in America: northern Michigan's "disability belt."

A review of Russia's current disinformation capabilities. Old stuff, still works.

Facebook's M chatbot: there are people helping the algorithm when it is stumped.

The Nintendo Classic Edition is wildly popular. And Nintendo is discontinuing it.

T-Mobile was the big spender in the FCC auction of the 600MHz spectrum.

Facebook has a new effort to find and remove fake accounts (that spread fake news that get Facebook in trouble).

Elon Musk announces that Tesla is building big trucks and pickup trucks.

The story of how United Airlines changed and how all the changes led them to beat up a little old man in front of the world. My wife is flying United tomorrow. I predict she will receive wonderful treatment from everyone.

Machine learning learns from people. If applied to the wrong people, it learns the wrong things. This is simple and everyone involved has always known this. Well, at least they should have always known this.

We have passed a threshold in the US as more people work from home than walk or bike to the office.

It is April, so Ubuntu's April version (17.04) is now ready for download.

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Saturday April 15, 2017

National Security Letters sent to Microsoft have doubled in the last six month.

Fooling AI and those machine learning computer vision systems. Surprise, it's not me.

How to activate something called the YouTube Dark Mode.

The first trailer for The Last Jedi is out. No one knows what it means.

Natural Parks are natural. Nature changes, land erodes, rivers move. Some persons think that is a catastrophe.

The Light L16 camera with 16 lenses is coming in July $1,700.

Recent study shows...social media is not contributing to the polarization of American politics. I attribute laziness in America's elected officials.

New Zealand could be the world's next big tech hub. It is out of the way, quiet, peaceful. Sounds good.

Apple now has a permit to test self-driving cars in California.

The biggest sellers of personal computers in the world. HP regains the top spot.

Solar power may actually have a future. Perhaps governments will stop bribing consumers to try it.

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Sunday April 16, 2017

Cadillac believes its has an early edge in self-driving cars.

This is not a surprise: NASA is behind schedule and over cost on the Space Launch System. NASA may be able to put a person into space by the end of the NEXT decade.

Predicting heart attacks and strokes: of course computers can do this better than people.

Researchers create a novel technique for blocking ads.

Robert Taylor, Internet pioneer, dies at 85.

I like this: the bingo method of starting a project.

A recent study shows...what makes computer programmers unhappy at work. Managers, take notes.

Must see photos of California during drought and now. The margin is small and the difference is great. High risk.

" For me, NOT being a writer would be challenging."—Gerald M. Weinberg

"I nearly always write—just as I nearly always breathe."—John Steinbeck

When you write something and put it out there, you will never know what affect it may have on one very important person.

The power of suggeston and positive thinking in freelance writing.

The veto vote for writers. How to avoid it.

Writer burnout. It may be that you are doing the wrong things all the time. Some organization fuels creativity.

Writers: stop and read this post. These are excellent concepts for writing. Especially the part about write the first draft by hand.

Writer mistakes: these are all related to being attentive to too many little things.

"Every sentence you write should make them want to read the next sentence you write."

It seems that this is National Library Week. I learned to love libraries.

More tips on journal writing. I recommend the practice to everyone.

This is a new one for me: the beat sheet form of story outline.

There are days, now and then, when it is great to be a writer.

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