Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 26 March-1 April, 2018

Summary of this week:

• The storm continues with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica
• Apple and Google are battling for the education market with lower prices on tablets
• Apple's Education Event showed some promise
• Commercial DNA testing is as I thought, nonsense

Monday 26 March 2018

Facebook Groups: the good, the bad, and the ugly, and oh by the way, the $$$$ keeps rolling in to Facebook as more and more flock to it and they charge more for ads.

And harsh criticism for Zuckerburg. Hey, it was free. You didn't have to use it.

Calls for regulation of Facebook and others. Since Facebook is already established, the regulations won't hurt. The regulations will prevent new companies from entering the market, so Facebook wins big.

Algorithms and health care. "I'm sorry, there is nothing any of us can do." Sort of like, "You want more?"

A look inside the technology that allows Facebook apps, even simple, silly, little ones, to gather information on people.

Netflix, which doesn't show its movies in theaters, is banned from Cannes. Expect other bans from other awards. You have to play the game and you don't get to pick the game.

People are downloading their Facebook data and are surprised at what they gave away. It is a free service. You don't have to use it.

News Flash (not): Cambridge Analytica didn't do anything new. Marketers have done all of this information gathering since the first time someone bought something from someone else.

A person takes his telescope out in public and let's people look at the moon. The wonder of it all makes us little children again. Yes, there still is hope for us.

Tuesday 27 March 2018

Foxconn buys Belkin (or if approved it will). While not fancy news, these are the folks who make the one device that connects my laptop computer at home and coffee shop to the Internet.

Weinberg finds a way to connect March Madness to the demotivating practices of management. Excellent short read.

Our FTC is now investigating Facebook. This is the American way of government too often. Punish the successful American company.

Google and Acer team to bring us a Chromebook Tablet. A bit too expensive at $329. Amazon's tablets function fine at half the price.

Strong rumors that Apple will introduces lower prices on iPads today at their Education event.

AggregateIQ: the little data science company that created the software marketed by Cambridge Analytica. It is basic data science. Just about anyone could have done this, and I suspect there are several dozen small data science companies who have. Some folks just have fame-seeking CEOs.

Arizona's government suspends Uber self-driving car testing.

Zuckerburg won't appear before Parliament, but will send a few others instead.

Cisco donates $50million to help end homelessness in Silicon Valley. Good for them. I hope the money helps.

Microsoft's stock price rose 8% in one day.

Wednesday 28 March 2018

Apple had their Education Event yesterday. A less-expensive iPad, less-expensive stylus options, and software to enable teachers and students. Where was the $150 tablet???

News Flash (not): Those DNA tests advertised on TV are ... well the word "scam" fits, but may be too harsh for some.

Mozilla announces a Facebook Container Extension for Firefox to help shield some of our lives from you know who.

Nvidia extends its new real-time ray tracing technology past the gamers to the film makers.

A look at Coinhive...a service to steal CPU cycles so that cryptominers can do their thing.

DGX-2: Nvidia updates its "personal supercomputer." At $150,000, I wouldn't call it a personal computer, but it does deliver PetaFLOP performance at an unprecedented price.

Nvidia suspends its on-road testing of autonomous vehicles in light of the Uber accident. Caution is a good course at this time.

Microsoft to ban "offensive language." I guess we will know it when we see someone in court suing Microsoft for deleting their account.

Google releases a more-realistic text-to-speech technology. If a person cannot voice words, this is a wonderful tool. And NO, let's not put it as a telephone answering system where you can never reach an actual person.

Thursday 29 March 2018

"Inside sources" tell us that our President doesn't care about Facebook, but does hold a deep-seated grudge against Amazon and Jeff Bezos. This counts as news these days. No wonder traditional news outlets were dumped in favor of Facebook during the last election. And then the traditional news outlets attacked Facebook as ... well, you know, not being them.

Ripple donates $29Million to our public schools to buy school supplies.

Julian Assange is now block from using the Internet by the Ecuadoran embassy in London where he "lives." This is yet another odd turn in an odyssey.

The BBC is being clobbered by Netflix and all those new, fancy content providers.

China's Xiaomi releases its first gaming PC laptop for about $1,400. Lots of processing and graphics power. 

Microsoft extends its Windows Subsystem for Linux.

Someone seems to agree with me on the damage of "artificial intelligence" on jobs. Yes, new things have disrupted jobs in our history. The speed of change, however, is different this time. The elimination of jobs is so fast that more people are caught being unemployable.

Apple helps move computer programming into schools. I like that, but let's not by naive. Tech companies want more programmers in the US so they can pay them all less.

And to top off the news, we find a link between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica. The vast right-wing conspiracy has become vaster and more conspiratorial (are those real words?). Nevertheless, I am writing CNN's headlines for them.

Friday 30 March 2018

No Internet viewing today as I awoke ill from something and ... well, you know.

....

Saturday 31 March 2018

A California Judge rules that coffee causes cancer. This now allows the State to regulate everything to do with coffee. The fun begins.

Apple releases iOS 11.3.

Under Armour has a data breach and the data of 150Million users ... well, you know, someone else has a copy of it now.

Facebook: internal memos are leaking, and they aren't pretty. Growth at any cost is good. Doesn't sound good in light of recent events.

And all these Facebook leaks are sending the morale (morality?) at Facebook downwards. Can they survive the coming brain drain?

Our FCC approves the SpaceX plan to launch 4,425 satellites to blanket the earth with broadband. I didn't know our FCC had the authority to allocated orbits and such.

Microsoft is painfully but successfully making the move from Windows to Cloud just as it made the move from DOS to Windows.

Our Department of State is about to apply "more rigorous scrutiny" to all visa applicants.

Forget 4K and such...Canon demonstrates 13K sensors.

Rumors are growing that Amazon's next headquarters will be just a couple miles from where I am sipping coffee this morning. Gosh. And what will that do to jobs and housing and traffic and all those things that bother old men like me?

Schneier on surveillance capitalism. Facebook is famous. There are several thousand other companies doing the same thing.

And, oh, by the way...The New York Times, Washington Post, and every other traditional news outlet that has a web site and subscriptions to such is selling our data just like Facebook does.

macOS 10.13.4 brings support for GPUs connected through the Thunderbolt 3 port. Upgrade your air conditioning; you will need it.

Sunday 1 April 2018

Nvidia doubles the memory in the GPU PCI cards. 32GigaBytes of horsepower.

Some Uber backup safety drivers tell of boredom and other safety hazards in Uber's testing.

Some tips of research for writers and other learners.

Discouraged from writing? Write about that.

I don't agree with the concept of "burnout," but I do like the idea expressed in this post of taking a vacation from writing (and just about anything else). Set a time. Do it. Return.

Some good ideas on "finding" time to write. The best tip I find here is "write before you do other things." Write before going to work. Write before cooking and eating dinner. Writer before... it is a pretty good habit.

Notes on attracting an audience for a writer. Again, learn what people want to read and write it. That approach doesn't satisfy every writer. Consider it.

Tips on writing for Reader's Digest. It doesn't pay well, but it pays and there is the prestige that everyone knows the name.

Failing as a writer? That depends on your definitions. This post reminds us that it takes ten years to be published. Published at what?

Ways to say money so that you can write.

Some basic searching tips to help find ideas for writing pieces that will sell. Find what people want to know.

This post is from someone who has written 1,000 blog posts. Come to think of it, I have done that in the last ten years. Come to think of it, I do that about every 2 1/2 years over the last 10 years. hmmm, is that some sort of record or something?

Maybe increase your earnings as a writer this year.