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: 28 August-3 September, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday August 28, 2017

Limited viewing today.

Most of us use smartphones instead of computers, but most of us don't download new apps. Odd business.

The Chinese government increases regulations on its subjects to make surveillance easier.

Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia is the new CEO of Uber.

It seems that people can hack into AI deep learning algorithms and teach the computers the wrong stuff. This is not surprising in the least.

The eclipse is over and the flood of Texas doesn't matter in Hollywood and the east coast, so Game of Thrones returns as the most important thing in the world.

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Tuesday August 29, 2017

Skydio: former Google engineers attempting to build self-flying drones (I thought drones were self...)

Amazon is reducing the prices at Whole Foods stores. Why were they so high?

Facebook continues its censorship efforts. "Fake news" is often subjective.

I like this post: Math, science, Iranian culture and the emergence of Iranian-Americans in tech business. Immigrate, assimilate, work your heart out, and the American dream. This stuff was supposed to all go away, but it just won't seem to.

Tim Cook on the continuing failure of government and the need for others to do something.

Facebook opens an education center in Brazil.

Western Digital acqui-hires cloud technology company Upthere.

Intel releases Myriad X: the next generation of vision processing unit VPU.

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Wednesday August 30, 2017

Lots of talk on the Internet about YouTube changing its look. Cosmetic silliness.

Intel unveils the Xeon W line of processors for "workstations" (not servers but not for the home).

Google expands its Parking Difficulty to more cities.

Microsoft adds features to Skype so that employers can conduct more bad job interviews. Real-time test? Really?

Microsoft and Amazon partner with Alexa and Cortana. These listening gadgets may become like the browser.

In another odd partnership, Ford and Domino's partner to build self-driving cars that deliver pizzas. Ford can probably make the cars. Will Domino's ever start making real pizza?

NYPD bought 36,000 crummy smartphones for $160million and must now replace them. Tax dollars at waste.

AI researchers teach computers to write simple reviews that are just as simple and bad as most written by people.

Rural America struggles to bring itself broadband. What happened to Obama's $8Billion?

Got $15,000? This is the TV and sound system for you.

Acer is now building an expensive Chromebook. Some of these guys are forgetting what a Chromebook is.

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Thursday August 31, 2017

Auto engineers leave Apple for Zoox after Apple drops the idea of building its own car.

Samsung introduces a new watch and fitness band.

A recent study...fats in our diets don't kill us. Processed carbs kill us.

Best Buy revives the door-to-door salesman. Irritating or convenient?

Robotics has advanced enough so that a robot can sew as fast as 17 persons. Textiles may return to the US.

LG introduces its V30 smartphone, which pushes the boundary of the camera in the phone.

It's just a demo and it's slow, but MIT's CSAIL has advanced speech understanding in a robot.

Nest releases a new, slightly cheaper smart thermostat. Still, at $169? Really?

Got cancer and half a million dollars? FDA approves gene therapy. It may come to something practical.

What a mess. Our FDA recalls 465,000 pacemakers for firmware updates to prevent tampering.

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Friday September 1, 2017

Personal accounts of the flooding in southeast Texas.

Got $1,500? Get a 35" curved Alienware display. Why not?

Got $800 and lots of time? Get this 7,400-piece Millennium Falcon Lego kit.

SanDisk has 400GigaBytes on a microSD card. Now you can misplace a life's worth of stuff in an instant.

The power of large, cash-rich companies to silence critics. They can't silence them, but can remove large crowds of readers.

Somehow Congress has the power to tell states what to do about self-driving cars. Where did they get that?

The opening statement says it all, "Here comes Facebook TV."

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Saturday September 2, 2017

Flooded Houston now has its skies filled with remote controlled "drones" surveying and searching and everything in between.

Facebook claims to have mapped the human population of the planet and know where every man-made object is.

Considering the power accumulated by Google and the "don't be evil" mantra that rings hollow.

Woes on election day and fears of Russian hacking. There are simple solutions to these problems. What the Russians did was wrong. What election officials in the US did was wrong as well.

A tutorial on making copies of your data, i.e., backups.

Linux surges over the 3% mark in the desktop market.

XXVI: this is the name of a holding company that ends the Google reorganization into Alphabet. Confused? I am, but I guess this makes sense to some people who make sense of these things.

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Sunday September 3, 2017

I appears that the merger of two successes—Amazon and Whole Foods—will be a failure for all.

Analyzing the failure of coding boot camps: learn a programming language in 12 weeks? Ok. Master it? No.

The Qualcomm 9150 C-V2X chipset: vehicle to everything everywhere communication.

GIGABYTE has smashed another high-performance graphics processor into a smaller package.

I really like this post about writing an outline of what you have already written. That is a good practice.

One writer's list of favorite books on writing.

A review of laptop computers for writers. Use something with a screen that won't wear out your eyes and a keyboard that works for you.

Thoughts on turning journal writing into a habit that we keep.

Some ideas for writing short stories. I find the article wanting to be on both sides of everything.

A few good reasons why it is helpful to have someone else read and offer suggestions on your work.

More thoughts on "show, don't tell."

Some thoughts on being a "productive" writer (whatever that means).

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