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: 9-15 October, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday October 9, 2017

Microsoft moves away from the mobile OS market.

The pendulum swings back in office design; the door and privacy make a return.

Don't let the dentist keep your wisdom teeth; sell them for the stem cells.

"Facebook is too big, has too much influence, and cannot effectively monitor itself" And Congress can fix it (not).

Get in your virtual line as tickets for The Last Jedi go on sale. Really folks. There are enough seats to see it.

Seagate releases a 12TeraByte drive for the home PC at $530. Wonderful stuff.

Excellent post from Seth Godin on "The engine of our discontent." Old and new media can ruin good lives.

Are we watching the self destruction of Silicon Valley? The million-dollar garage hurts innovation.

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Tuesday October 10, 2017

Western civilization is safe: we have a new Star Wars trailer.

The bizarre: Mark Zuckerburg visits Puerto Rico as a VR cartoon or something.

Those dastardly Russians bought Google ads during the 2016 campaign. So did a few other folks as I understand it.

LeBron James, Intel, self-driving cars: all together in some new ads.

Amazon succeeds at everything, so the myth goes. It has flopped so far in Hollywood, and everyone knows it.

Nvidia shows a new supercomputer than may enable completely autonomous vehicles N O W.

How censorship on the Internet usually fails despite all the public claims. As long as Facebook et al let you signup and post auto-magically, people will post their beliefs. The drive for more daily active users outweighs everything else.

Got $80,000? Want a camera? RED has one for us.

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Wednesday October 11, 2017

International intrigue: the Israelis hacked the Russians and learned the Russians hacked our NSA.

ooops, Google admits its new Home was listening all the time. They claim to have fixed that.

The affect of online dating on traditional social networks is much bigger than generally admitted.

Andela: training Africans to be programmers. Good stuff. Let's not forget this increase the pool of inexpensive labor.

Cultural Hacking: that's what the NYT calls the Russian use of social media. Classic disinformation campaign. Social media companies, eager to raise the number of daily active users, gladly helped.

ooops, Dow Jones' error shows they have software writing news stories for them. Google did not buy Apple.

Considering Amazon's 10", $150 tablet. Of course its a good value, but it isn't an iPad and that is the only thing some people want.

This is significant: MIT researchers are improving sensors that we can digest. This will revolutionize medical treatment.

Steve Ballmer seems to understand fake news, social media, and how they all work. It isn't complicated.

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Thursday October 12, 2017

Not much time for Internet viewing this morning.

Box adds some AI to help tag files and manage content.

Diversity is deeper than skin. A few persons understand this. Apple's new VP of Diversity seems to.

Waymo (Google (Alphabet)) had big demands from Uber in a legal case, and that shows their confidence that Uber stole from them.

NIST releases new password guidelines. Maybe there is h0p3 4us 900r U:$3r5.

I've heard this one before: the future of computer programming involves no programmers.

Amazon's speaker you talk to can now tell the difference between you and me.

California's DMV shows it understands what the modifier in self-driving cars means. Good. I thought they were illiterate, but maybe this is just a show.

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Friday October 13, 2017

The Pi-Top: a Raspberry Pi-based laptop. You can add hardware along the way.

Gluon: Microsoft releases an API for deep learning in its Azure Data Science Virtual Machine.

Samsung expects a record financial quarter with about a billion$ profit a week.

Everybody wants the new Amazon headquarters, and politicians are being silly about it. Why not?

Now we learn that the Russians weaponized Pokemon Go. I don't know what to think about all this. Candidly. I don't.

The Harvey Weinstein story has creeped up on me. It appears that Mr. Weinstein and NBC news are almost as bad as our current President in the eyes of CNN and such.

SpaceX had its 12th successful launch and landing of 2017 this week. We are beginning to be bored by this.

Google to give $1Billion over five years to non-profits to help people find new jobs in the new economy. Good for them, but why so little? They could give much, much more. And what are these new jobs? Where are they? In Appalachia?

GitHub has quietly built a successful business by selling its services to businesses.

Nothing to hide? Facebook has deleted thousands of Russian posts from the 2016 campaign.

Google's Project Loon is now Loon Inc.

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Saturday October 14, 2017

Amazon follows the path of Sears and Penney's by offering its own line of sportswear like Nike et al.

And now we can order Chipotle and other things while on Facebook. Why ever leave Facebook? Endorsed by Russians everywhere.

DigitalOcean: the cloud computing company for the rest of us?

HP, the consumer side, had a better-than-expected financial report.

500Million of us are lending are home computers to cryptocurrency miners. Not sure what that is, but...

Western Digital claims a breakthrough in the size of a disk drive's write head. Here come 40TeraBytes by 2025.

Steve Wozniak launches an education, recruiting, hiring effort called Woz U.

It seems that Twitter, like Facebook, deleted some Russian tweets from the 2016 campaign. Folks, the social media places are just that, fun places to post stuff. Those companies are the New York Times with an ombudsman and lawyers and all that. They were built for fun, not much else. The Russians, along with lots of other folks, exploited them.

And Twitter stumbles and falls into the Harvey Weinstein sexual harassment mess.

The main stream media tries to explain how the main stream media missed the great Facebook 2016 campaign story. Trump wasn't going to win. They all knew that, so why waste time covering these side stories? Well, Trump did win, and they are all now wallowing in embarassment.

Interesting article about sexual harassment and sexual freedom and all that. It is a bit odd that we have the accidental co-occurrence of Hugh Hefner dying and people becoming angry about sex. Hefner espoused free sex. Some fellows are following his example. People are angry. Perhaps Hefner was all wrong. Perhaps that entire 1960s sexual revolution was all wrong.

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Sunday October 15, 2017

An in-depth test of the cameras on iPhones show that there isn't a great reason to upgrade to an 8.

Truth is stranger than fiction: how inmates recycled computers, hid them in the ceiling, and hacked the prison system.

The height of silliness or over-consumption: Microsoft builds three treehouse offices for its employees.

3Million persons in the US have turned off cable and satellite TV this year. Usage at a 17-year low.

One writer's (no longer) secrets to writing a good story.

Don't ask, "Is this story I wrote good?" Ask these other questions instead that cause the reader to think or feel a moment before answering.

Long stories, like novels, have lots of details to track. I use a blank sheet of paper and a pencil.

Write what you know or write about groups of others from the outside, stuff you don't know. That works as well.

Novels take time to write, but this person has be "working on" a novel for 4.5 years. Stop fooling yourself. Write it and move on.

A list of writing sites that actually pay $30 to $50. Worth the while if unemployed or trying to start.

The art and craft of finishing.

The value of spending time with some like-minded people.

One person's experience in becoming a full-time writer and making a decent living.

What it means to emerge as a writer—one person's perspective.

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