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: 13-19 November, 2017

Summary of this week:

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

Monday November 13, 2017

The story of how the NSA flopped at its own security and let all its cyber tools fall into the hands of everyone else.

Zuckerburg's Facebook under more criticism for unintended consequences of its use in Asia. Governments there monitor Facebook to identify and round up the usual suspects.

With a human monitor sitting there, self-driving trucks have been roaming remote stretches of I-10 out west. They carry cargo and all that and seem to work just fine.

Sierra Neveda Corp has a successful test flight of its Dream Chaser space, cargo carrier.

So far, Qualcomm is rejecting the buyout, merger, takeover offers from Broadcom.

Linux 4.14 is released.

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Tuesday November 14, 2017

Boston Dynamics greatly improves the appears, maybe not the function, of its four-legged robot. It used to carry cargo, now it looks cute.

Bill Gates gives $100Million to dementia research (Alzheimer's). Cheers for Bill. This could be well used.

Tolkien fans rejoice or weep; Amazon will make Lord of the Rings into a "TV series." (What is a TV Series anyways?)

Contrary to early, false reports, Amazon is not selling its AWS business in China. A few assets are sold to Sinnet to abide by Chinese law regarding foreign ownership.

Women with heart attacks are more likely to die because men don't want to touch a woman they don't know. This is one of the unintended consequences of all this other stuff.

Tesla continues to learn that manufacturing cars is not the same thing as doing R&D.

YouTube increases its censorship. If it is the "bad buys" it is helpful monitoring. If it is the "good guys" it is censorshp. Where we stand depends on where we sit.

Firefox 57 will be released this week.

Vietnamese researchers fool Apple's face ID with $150 worth of mask and paper and junk.

15,000 scientists warn the rest of us about killing our planet. If they are serious, they should do something serious.

China edges ahead of the US in high-performance computing or supercomputing.

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Wednesday November 15, 2017

A lot of notes today. Hmmm, something odd???

Facebook's efforts to battle fake news seem to be nothing but fake news. Persons involved are greatly disappointed in what is actually happening.

Recent study shows...that the Apple Watch and Fitbit and others can detect several maladies. These things might be useful.

It appears to be a reasonable conclusion given some information...the Russians "meddled" in the Brexit vote via Facebook. Shocking (not). Of course they did as did other countries.

Kapersky Lab software is being used by our Federal government agencies.

Google announces TensorFlow Lite: run machine learning on mobile devices.

After a couple years of work, all major browsers are supporting the WebAssembly standard.

The UK doubles the number of visas issued to “the brightest and best” talent to 2,000 while they fear the results of Brexit.

Our Department of Defense will move into open-source software next year (or so). Let us wait and see.

ooops, parents, don't let your kids—many of whom look like you—near your iPhone with face recognition security. Who would have thought this possible? Lots of us.

Former Hyperloop engineer aims to build a much more practical 200MPH car transportation system in Denver. Of course it can work.

Apple regains the lead in wearable computing with shipments of 3.9Million Watch units in the last quarter. 300,000 Watches sold a week–not bad for a flop.

Fedora 27 is released.

Germany, the world leader in the fight against man-made climate something or other, still burns more coal than anyone in Europe. Gosh, the facts crush a good myth.

Another note on high-performance computing or supercomputing: the top 500 computers all run Linux. Hmmm, maybe there is something there.

If you are the celebrity CEO or CE-something of a famous company, take care how you speak of candidates for public office. Some of them are elected. The heads of Ford, GM, IBM, Standard Oil, etc. learned this lesson decades ago. The heads of Google and today's other power companies seem to have forgotten this.

Joining in the fun...governments in 30 nations are waging major social media campaigns. The Ministry of Progaganda reigns supreme.

Firefox 57 is released; Mozilla claims it is the biggest release since 1.0. Look at this update. It has big changes.

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Thursday November 16, 2017

I updated to macOS 10.13, and its seems to have broken my html editor Kompozer.

Apple moves up to number 4 in the world in shipments of laptop computers.

Lenovo updates its line of desktop and portable computers with more processing power and lower prices.

Raspberry Pi supercomputing: Los Alamos National Lab is running 750 node machines made from the little single-board computers.

PNY updates its lines of mobile "workstations."

TechShop closes all its locations. It is gone. No more using their machine shops for a fee.

A large survey shows the sometimes surprising places people watch Netflix. A lot of Americans watch their movies "at work."

"Lobbying" from Silicon Valley shows what "lobbying" can do in the US Senate. See, e.g., tax reform bills.

Next week the Trump FCC will reverse the Obama FCC. When you take the easy route to change, the next person can easily change your change.

Zuckerburg surprised by the national opiod problem. Facebook makes lots of $$$ on opiod ads. Hmmm.

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Friday November 17, 2017

Tesla shows it new semi-truck—all electric. Of course it isn't practical, but we all want to believe it will be one day.

Tesla shows a new car coming in three years for the rich and famous funded by the not so folks who just pay taxes.

Amazon Key—the Internet controlled lock to the front door of your home—is hacked. Welcome, everyone.

A profile of Nvidia's celebrity CEO.

News Flash (not): the government of China floods of media with good news so its subjects will not notice the other kind of news.

AWS joins Microsoft and Facebook in the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) deep-learning format.

Our FCC decides that the Internet is sufficiently well established that it no longer needs tax payer funds to boost its adoption.

Must-see video: Boston Dynamics shows off its latest robotics technology. This is actually a two-legged, free-standing machine doing these jumps and flips.

What's a computer? Ingenious iPad Pro ad. It is some type of universal appliance of information and creativity. It is amazing to see how far we have come.

Take care when doing good. The Zuckerburgs are building a new school. Homeless families are chased away. Let's see, schools are for the benefit of...

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Saturday November 18, 2017

Github announces Teletype for Atom that allows several programmers to edit the same code in real time.

The German government decides that German parents cannot monitor their own children. I guess this is big brother stuff where regulators are experts at parenting.

Inside Amazon Flex: deliver packages for Amazon part time at low pay.

"Turns out, the internet is great for propaganda." This was written by a genius (not). Of course it is. And everyone knew that at the beginning.

Researchers may be able to detect brain damage in living persons. While football will benefit, or cease to exist, the real value in this is for everyone else.

Silicon Valley invents co-living, a.k.a., roommates for rich people.

This one is hard to believe, but it's government so why not? Our military was storing collected intelligence on unsecure AWS S3 buckets. Gosh.

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Sunday November 19, 2017

Apple redesigns, of all things, its retail stores to make the Genius Bar experience easier on customers and the Geniuses.

Believe it or not, people still print photos directly from cameras. So much so that Polaroid and Fuji are fighting in court over the prints.

Being part of a group of writers is an excellent practice. Here are some tips on starting a group.

How to make your own rules. We all have rules with most of them never written. Realize our own rules and change them.

The idea of pairing to write when separated by distance. It can work as it has for centuries.

This is an excellent post on writing details that tell much more story than the quantity of ink suggests. Well worth reading and practicing.

Notes on writing the memoir: "Don’t worry too much about being chronological or being strictly factual: you are not writing an actual history or a textbook, you are writing memoir, which by its very nature is subjective."

Now that Twitter actually has 280 characters for all of us, we can try to write short short 280-character stories.

The uneasy—sometimes downright distasteful—practice of marketing our writing.

Some of the benefits for a writer to have a home website—especially if you are not yet "published."

Writers: practice everyday for years. Be in a place where people can find you.

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