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 July, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday July 10, 2017

It is Monday. The news is slow.

Poland opens a Mars simulator isolation camp to test human limits of patience.

Google Waymo drops most of its patent claims in its court battle with Uber.

Someone in our government recommends something sensible with computer passwords.

Why does it cost so much to build a subway system in America? Some questions and refutations of obvious answers.

Somehow we have moved from "our military can't write software" to "software is eating our military" in my programming lifetime.

Wolfram Alpha, "cheating", education, learning, and how all this gets mixed up.

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Tuesday July 11, 2017

Censorship and surveillance live on in China with VPNs being outlawed.

Governments worldwide telling international companies what to block online is leading to the lowest common denominator in free speech.

Microsoft wants $10billion taxpayer money to bring broadband to rural America. I thought the prior President took care of that.

Microsoft 365 Business: a bundle of everything for the PC and beyond for businesses to write one check.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution arrives in the MS Windows Store to run in a window. Pretty much just command line utilities, and that would be helpful.

Locally, our Federal government cancels the concept of a new $Billions FBI Headquarters compound.

Got $2,000? Want a real digital camera? Checkout this new Leica.

Got $100,000? Want to drive 235 mph? Checkout this electric motor car.

The main-stream media is upset because Google and Facebook too their jobs from them.

In case you missed all the Internet ads, today is Amazon's Prime Day. Sales sales sales and more sales.

Amazon Prime, all by itself, will soon have more subscribers than all cable TV companies combined. Same with Netflix.

Amazon announces a Geek Squad-like service. Best Buy loses $1billion in value immediately.

Everyone loves Snap, but no one is buying its stock.

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Wednesday July 12, 2017

This hasn't happened already? Micorsoft stops all support for Windows Phone.

Dell brings wireless charging to a laptop. Of course you have a big ugly pad instead of a nice, small wire.

Who could imagine that a Russian tech company would have a contract with the Russian government? Does this kind of thing happen in America? (just kidding folks, right?)

Almost half of us have been harassed online. I must have missed mine.

Fedora 26 is released.

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Thursday July 13, 2017

Another American company bends its principles to work in China. Apple builds a data center there so it can keep all the data on Chinese subjects in China.

Microsoft officially announces a group of AI researchers.

This is news: a French court says the French government cannot extract Billion$ from an American company.

Photos of Jupiter for those who love to look at storm clouds.

Laptop computers in the classroom: yes, the students are bored so they surf social media. Is this bad?

Zuckerburg meets ordinary folks on his I'm-not-running-for-President Presidential campaign.

Hyperloop One did a full-scale test, but only at 70mph (1/10th what is promised).

Audi's A8 jumps ahead of everyone in self-driving car technology powered by Nvidia.

Google releases Backup and Sync: yet another attempt to make it easy to recover things we've lost.

AI, video, lip-synching—believe none of what you hear and only half of what you see.

Amazon's Prime Day was another big success with sales growth over 60%.

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Friday July 14, 2017

Netflix has become an entertainment powerhouse with top Emmy Awards nominations. I am surprised that the Emmy Awards group let Netflix and others into the club.

FanDuel and DraftKings drop their merger plans.

Dev Bootcamp is closing. Maybe someone will know how to make money in this education market.

The Chinese government doesn't trust anyone with detailed road maps. And those are essential for self-driving cars.

AI and the ACLU—it won't be a happy marriage.

The PC market continues to shrink as it reaches an 11-year low.

Amazon becomes what Microsoft was in the 1990s. Antitrust? Antitrust? Antitrust? Here comes Congress.

Now recent studies show that coffee is good for us.

This must be an important story because it is all over the Internet: our Border Patrol won't search our cloud data, just our local data.

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Saturday July 15, 2017

The tech companies are customizing their offerings in India to meet the culture. This is not news, it is smart and polite.

How Android doomed the Windows Phone. I recall how senior managers where I worked scoffed at the idea that Android would be anything and that a phone OS from Microsoft would dominate.

More seeing is not believing. Google has software that mashes Street View photos into great landscape images.

Who might be the big winners and losers in the market of enterprise IT.

We may be approaching a point where airlines are like Google—free services life plane tickets so they can make money elsewhere.

We move closer to storing information in living beings. Sort of like human memory. This could be dangerous.

Google release 20mllion mosquitoes plagued with stuff they made. What could possible go wrong?

Asus releases an education-focused Chromebook convertible computing device.

Fascinating hobby computer build that shows the prices and performance of computing parts that are lying about.

The stuff that engineers take home (and their relatives find in the basement years later. NASA engineer.

The old Galaxy scifi magazine is now available online free.

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Sunday July 16, 2017

Ranking the companies that  make gaming laptop computers. This is not by value. Alienware wins again, but pricey.

Amazon Anytime: yet another messaging app. Amazon is late to the market, but that may not matter with their weight.

Coming soon: the Disney Star Wars hotel. Well, why not. We are all rich these days.

Got a lot of data? Viking Technology has 50TeraByte Solid State Disks.

"Why is it so hard to remember that writing is the good stuff?" It is the dessert of life.

One writer's summer at Cambridge. No, it wasn't all fun and paradise.

Sometimes as a writer you have to spend money to learn how to write and live better.

Writing better is neither easy nor simple. Having others work with you helps, but finding those others isn't easy.

Writing + marketing = blog posts people want to read.

The comfort zone and pushing it to allow ourselves to be more creative. Walk on the other side of the street for a block or two. It might surprise you what you learn.

The benefits of procrastinating.

Can't block the Internet? Get an Internet app that blocks the Internet. Hmmm, there must be a simpler way.

Preparing for success in attending a writer's conference.

Good thoughts on writing fast and with high quality.

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