Summary of this week:

The ransomware chaos is not yet over
Amazon is now worth twice as much as WalMart
Apple starts education at its retail stores—Today at Apple
HPE invents a main-memory-only computer
AMD announces the Threadpiper CPU 16 cores 32 threads
Google has a big event with lots of announcements—many in deep learning and cloud computing
Microsoft to open data centers in South Africa

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

Monday May 15, 2017

Waymo (Google) is fighting Uber in court and is partnering with Lyft in self-driving cars.

Apple acqui-hires Lattice Data engineering talent in the AI field.

More near-term chaos is predicted worldwide this morning per the ransomware attack that is ongoing.

The US is not the only country with incompetent government. See, e.g., Australia and broadband.

Amazon's Echo Show is always on and will detect your coming via motion sensors. Take care.

Neural network, deep learning to fly by crashing. It works. Inexpensive computing rules the day.

Governments are stockpiling malware. Then governments lose copies of that. Then the bad guys take over. This happens—often. I wish people would take greater care.

Perhaps the popular technology press discovers the old field of pattern recognition. A serious problem with the technology press is that they don't have enough old people working there.

CodeCorrect: magic (maybe). Find and correct your common programming errors.

No one would ever use this, right? Microsoft Workplace monitoring tools.

Employment, automation, AI, robots, and questionable unemployment figures. Where are we?

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Tuesday May 16, 2017

HTC announces the U11 smartphone with pressure sensors on the sides—you squeeze it to do things.

Medical technology breakthrough: inexpensive, diamond-based sensors that measure magnetic fields.

The era of the Texas Instruments graphing calculator may be ending. Desmos has a free replacement.

The Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team: a new group at the Pentagon aiming technology at ISIS.

Amazon is now 20 years old and is worth twice what WalMart is. The money comes from the cloud, not the store.

Immigration policy, startup companies, wealth and job creation: the US does this well, but...

SpaceX does a heavy lift to put an Inmarsat bird in high orbit.

Don't look now, but SpaceX posts six successful launches in four months. Not easy to do.

Google's DeepMind and the UK's National Health Service: it sounded good while it lasted, but...

Headline says it all: Windows XP is still the third most popular operating system in the world.

Google-Uber self-driving technology court case has the judge bar a key person from working at Uber.

Virginia Tech and Lowe's have a simpler, non-motorized exoskeleton in use at one store.

Audi and Volvo choose Android to run in their vehicles.

This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important: someone posted the combinations to the flight deck on United airlines. So? Change the combinations; that takes five minutes.

Xiaomi copies the MacBook at a third the price. Government subsidies?

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Wednesday May 17, 2017

A different take on online education—it isn't online, it is in person: Today at Apple.

The AMD Threadpiper CPU: 16 cores and 32 threads of computing power for a home PC.

The story of the Apple spaceship office building. Caution: a magnificent corporate headquarters is often the first sign of a company's downfall.

The Element Amazon Fire TV Edition 4K TV—big specs, starts at $500, watch out Roku.

Slack adds screen sharing (finally).

Facebook's big flop: labeling sites as fake news brings more readers to those sites.

ooops, for literally the tenth time, Facebook admits to miscounting views on ads.

I love today's XKCD comic on Machine Learning.

Henderson Island in the Pacific—covered with plastic trash.

Never a detail too small: Apple designed and patented a pizza box for its new Pentagon west headquarters.

Twitter's co-founder returns to the company. Is this like the return of Steve Jobs to Apple?

Strong rumors that Apple will make lukewarm updates to its portable computers next month.

The Amazon Echo Look and the Internet of Eyes. The future?

Ford to layoff 10% of its North American and Asian workforces.

Let's be clear: US law permits companies to hire H-1B visa holders and pay half wages.

Memory-Driven Computing: HP Enterprise builds a machine with 160TeraBytes of primary memory.

The big five, or whatever we call Apple Google Facebook Amazon Microsoft, are driving the economy and dragging along everyone else.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Thursday May 18, 2017

Google is having a conference this week, so lots of Google announcements.

Facebook tries again and again at slowing fake news and all that.

TensorFLow lite from Google: run deep learning on your Android phone.

Manning released from Ft Levenworth prison after only 7 years (sentenced commuted by our former President).

Google releases the second version of its Tensor Processor Unit for machine learning in the cloud.

Kotlin: yet another programming language that Google now endorses to run on the JVM in Android.

Google for Jobs: Google tries to help us find jobs.

The White House on the Florida Coast has no computer security. Well, it's just a resort.

The TensorFlow Research Cloud: Google offers a free super computer machine learning service in the cloud. Apply for time. Here is the site.

Amazon updates its $50 tablet. A great value.

Governments band together so they can regulate the new economy better, or does that mean worse?

Google's Search for Jobs: lots of empty jobs, lots of unemployment. The problem is with how companies recruit. Their own bureaucracy stops many. Then, they ask stupid questions during interviews and completely disregard part experience. The problem is not technology, it is the people standing in the way of the people.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Friday May 19, 2017

Thoughts on Amazon's dominance in its markets and its drive to innovate all the time.

It is official. The current President disagrees with the last President on FCC matters. Change happens.

Microsoft to open two data centers in South Africa.

Medium adds audio stories for its paid members.

Facebook will show 20 Major League Baseball games this season.

Leaked photos of the next Microsoft Surface Pro. And there are no USB-C ports.

Tesla factory workers are passing out on the job. Elon Musk? He doesn't work there.

The EU fines Facebook over $100million for something or other they can get away with.

Got Windows XP and the recent ransomware? This guy may have a way to recover at no cost.

Wanna avoid ransomware? Run Linux (or maybe even Chrome).

Apple is testing technology to manage diabetes using the Apple Watch.

Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Saturday May 20, 2017

Where do Americans want to work? Google.

One for us—Federal judge rules that we don't have to register non-commercial drones with our government.

Uber revamps the way it decides how much we have to pay to ride and how much the driver doesn't receive.

98% of WannaCry ransonware victims were running Windows 7.

MIT AI researchers make video from drones even more autonomous.

A nice rumor while it lasted, but Windows 10 S won't run Linux distributions.

This must be an important story because it is all over the Internet. The doomsday seed vault in Norway flooded. Climate change blamed; bad design is the culprit. We can't blame the designers for some unknown reason. It is more politically fun to blame the weather.

The demographic time bomb that is China. It is coming.

The end of telecommuting is usually just another name for layoffs.

Six million retail jobs to disappear in the next ten years. Some politicians, famously our prior President, told us, "those aren't good jobs. You don't want them." We should all become computer programmers at Google instead of working at WalMart. Sometimes I wonder where that gentleman grew up. Oh, yeah, he's a citizen of the world or something. Reality isn't always as friendly as theory.

Email me a t d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page

Sunday May 21, 2017

A look inside the car infotainment computing systems. But how do you replace the thing in two years?

The employee-free grocery store from Amazon may appear in Europe as well. They are used to high unemployment there.

The Big Six— Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Netflix—rake in the cash in the last quarter $18billion. That's a billion$$ a month.

Thinking about Google Lens and how machine learning can be the future of Google.

The Kotlin programming language. Yet another one, but this one is worth a look.

And someone with more good words about Kotlin.

WalMart is steadily learning for to do eCommerce. Amazon isn't frightened, yet.

Evan Williams created Blogger and Twitter and admits it all went the wrong way. “I thought once everybody could speak freely and exchange information and ideas, the world is automatically going to be a better place,” Mr. Williams says. “I was wrong about that.” Nice try, but he didn't take into account things like sin (can we use that word anymore in public?).

Strong rumors about Apple in 2017. More computing power, but will they ever bring back Nvidia?

The gig economy. Sorry, it means working all the time and making very little money.

Y our next job in computing? "jobs are changing all the time, and that's a real pain point for tech professionals."

For someone like me, this is fascinating. Ground truth markers in the desert and all the satellites that fly overhead.

Write about what scares you. This is pretty good advice as what scares you brings great, usable emotion.

Must see video of clouds filling the Grand Canyon.

How to use what others have done to find new stories and ideas and be polite about it all.

Time does not appear in our lives. We make it and take it...as in taking the time to write.

Part of this post discusses the role of journalling to help us find and write the stories we wish to write.

Two posts about writing, fear, and confidence. Here and here.

You've written lots of things, now you want to write a book. This post has some good, practical tips to help you start and finish.

Email me a t d.phillips@computer.org
Go to Day Book Home and pointer to previous weeks
Go to Dwayne's Home Page