Summary of this week:

The iPhone X sells out fast
And it is delivered into the hands of gleeful users
Apple has yet another record-setting financial quarter
Microsoft announces a Surface Pro with LTE
Intel releases fast Optane SSDs
Tesla to manufacture cars in China
Google releases video-teleconferencing hardware

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

Monday October 30, 2017

It's a Monday. The week hasn't started yet. Not much news.

A look back at Google Goggles. Something that worked pretty well and started it all in hand-held computer vision.

Looking ahead to the legal and ethical implications of augmenting reality.

Elon Musk shares a picture of a tunnel. It looks like a tunnel. Earthquakes?

iPhone X preorders: they sell them all in 38 minutes. Gone. Now the wait.

The Kenzie Academy: learn while doing tech training in the Midwest. Maybe some will come of this.

The HP historical archive, letters and papers of Hewlett and Packard, were destroyed in California's wild fires.

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Tuesday October 31, 2017

Facebook brags about the effectiveness of ads on Facebook. See, e.g., Russian political ads. This is the bright side of all this controversy. Facebook, quietly mind you, can tout the influence power of ads on its site. Those ads, after all, brought about the most unlikely presidential election result in history. So, why not make the best of it? Want to change to world? Advertise on Facebook. Need advice on how to do it? Ask the Putin and the Russians. Of course we won't see this as the "wrong person" was elected.

The revolving door works in the UK. Govt official hires Amazon, quits his jobs, is hired by Amazon.

The plutocrats rule the new world as Cook, Zuckerburg, and Xi meet in Beijing.

Waymo (Google (Alphabet)) shows off the state of its art in autonomous vehicles.

Samsung has a record high financial quarter riding on sales of integrated circuits.

Microsoft announces that the Surface Pro will have LTE in December. Finally, people are putting cell phone technology in portable computers. What took so long?

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Wednesday November 1, 2017

Halloween last night. Only 13 kids came to the door. A school two blocks away held a Trunk or Treat, so that probably consumed lots of kids (parents).

Some nimrod terrorist drives a truck into a crowd in New York City. And he had worked as an Uber driver.

Our elected representatives want tech and ad companies to reveal identities of client. But they won't reveal identities of their money sources.

The lawyers of tech companies appear before the Senate. Everyone talks past each other and assumes everyone else is stupid.

AI creates fake celebrities and does as just good a job as our mainstream media. This is what writers do and do well.

Nvidia's Deep Learning Institute expands and partners with Booz Allen Hamilton. Teach people to use your products.

Intel releases its Optane SSDs with speeds approach that of DRAM. This all means more performance at a lower price.

NASA plays with pumpkins. Maybe one day NASA can put a person into space (can't do that now).

I am amazed at the resources being spent examining the last election. I guess if the "right" candidate had won, we wouldn't be wasting all this time and talent. And more and more and more news on the subject.

ooops, the rush to electric vehicles ignores the fact that we don't have the materials to build them. Think things through.

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Thursday November 2, 2017

Why is it that the guy who writes Dilbert seems to understand terrorism better than everyone else?

Everyone knows how to "fix" Facebook. Why fix what is an effective advertiser?

The Russians spent 0.05% on ads as Clinton and Trump. Given the investigations, this has the biggest ROI in history.

This is not news: Twitter offered some Russians lots of ad space in exchange for money. I think that is how this is all supposed to work, huh? What do I know?

Seth Godin on self-publishing and freedom. Juxtapose that with our Congress and current censorship hearings.

Garbage In, Garbage Out: it still holds. That's why data researchers spend most of their time removing garbage from data.

Tim Cook talks about the gross misuse of social media. Solutions? Yes there are solutions. We won't see many implemented.

Tesla announces that it will build cars in China in a couple of years.

Google starts selling video-conference hardware to better runs its Google Hangouts software.

Technical erasers, changing grades, keyloggers, and college hijinks. You may be caught, eventually.

"the site is far too big to be policed by Reddit staff, the monitoring part of the job is delegated to moderators, volunteers" This is social media. The host companies will not pay to do what is their job. That would cut profits. Hence, we have what we have.

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Friday November 3, 2017

Get your $1,000 iPhone X today. Stood in line? It's supposed to be worth it.

Don't want to stand in line for an iPhone X? Steal a delivery truck full of them. Not advised.

If the proposed tax reforms become law, we will stop bribing ourselves to buy electric cars ($7,500 per).

Fly first class on Singapore Air, if you have the $$$$.

A departing Twitter employee disables the President's (Trump) account. This article shows what someone on the inside could have done to plunge the world into a war. Who is minding the shop at Twitter? This is the fantasy that professors in Computer Science always joked. The disgruntled programmer who planted bombs in the software to show "the man" who was really in charge. Federal Prison for the responsible.

Apple flies past expectations. Apple sold 3.5million iPhones a week for the quarter. Slump? Who is POTUS?

No surprise here: our EPA blames all problems on us. Wants us to regulate us. We must make us behave.

Look at the chart in this article. Since what's-his-name has been President, Apple's value sky-rockets. And the Apple execs dislike what's-his-name.

HPE sells the Palo Alto land HP has used since 1957. It's not personal. It's just business. Splits, Spinoffs, etc. Tears from old men.

Our Justice Department wants to arrest Russian government employees for hacking the DNC. Good luck with extradition.

We think we have found a new giant room inside the Great Pyramid.

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Saturday November 4, 2017

Pandora edges ahead of Netflix in revenue from app stores.

It appears that Twitter has known about how a lot of employees could turn off accounts and done nothing.

Broadcom may buy-merge Qualcomm. That would be a big deal.

The iPhone X is here, and so is the tear down to see what is inside.

Some initial impressions of the iPhone X. One writer had the phone delivered to her parents' home. What?

The iPhone X...Apple goes back to video tutorials so users can catch up to the new-ness.

Jeff Bezos cashes in $1Billion worth of stock—he has 94 more to go.

It appears that the Russian Facebook ads supported both sides of just about everything. This seems to pierce the folly that the Russians pushed one side ahead of the other.

Audacity 2.2 is released with significant updates.

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Sunday November 5, 2017

For some reason, a lot of items on this Sunday morning.

Cat releases a new model of their rugged smartphone.

The Rylo video camera. Image processing makes everything you shoot look great.

Fears of tax changes prove that electric cars are not viable at this time. Remove the tax break, no one buys the car.

Adversarial images: how to trick all these pattern recognizing neural networks.

The history of PowerPoint. I used a Mac in 1990 running the initial PowerPoint. We were required to do presentations and this PowerPoint-Mac combination changed everything. Enabling more presentations may not have been a good thing.

Those in power in Saudi Arabia cement their positions by arresting everyone else.

Professional photographer? Need a real display? BenQ releases one.

Western Digital now has a 14TeraByte spinning disk for datacenters.

Don't drop your iPhone X. The screen will crack.

These two are great when put next to one another. Such folly.

Government scientists KNOW that man is changing our planet's climate.

Scientists reject what we always KNEW about human migration.

The art of using distractions, those dreaded things, as an asset for a writer. This is part of the theme that those things we consider bad can often be used to advantage.

Portable Writing Stations, i.e., paper and pen(cil) for writers. Yes, they work quite well, and are proven by many writers over the centuries.

Do it over and over and over to write it just right? There are times for this, but not as many as we imagine. Write. Finish. Move on.

JK Rowling's rules for writing. You have to work. You have to Write. You have to Read.

Draft 500+ words in 15 minutes? Of course we can. 40 words a minute isn't fast typing; do the math.

Tips on moving past doubt as a new writer.

Want to see more people so you can gain ideas about writing? Get part-time jobs where you work with lots of people. This piece suggests some.

Contained in this piece on writing are excellent comments on the value of blogging.

Interesting, at least to me, story of a writer who does a video log every day and a photo log every day and...

Writers, working for themselves, decide for themselves. We decide everything. We make our own rules.

I like this short things that may be wrong with a fiction story.

This is an excellent post on the different types of editors and editing depending on the stage a piece of writing.

"The results will show up if you just keep going." I mostly agree with this, but don't bet your house on it.

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