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: 30 April - 6 May, 2018

Summary of this week:

• T-Mobile is buying Sprint
• GPU card prices drop
• F8 is this week and it is much quieter
• Apple again breaks all the good financial records this quarter

Monday 30 April 2018

Facebook claims that 100million persons connect to the Internet via its internet.org service.

T-Mobile is buying Sprint for $26.5Billion. Now too big to fail.

Facebook and its Dark Fake Ads problem. Note the cap letters to emphasize the darkness. Don't believe nothing you hear and only half of what you see.

What perks does your employer have? This one gives everyone $1,500 to spend on "experiences." Some of us are happy to just have an employer.

Good shortcuts for Mac users.

The latest comic book hero movie breaks all the box office records set by the prior comic book here movie.

Blue Origin, a Jeff Bezos enterprise, has a successful rocket takeoff and landing. They are far behind SpaceX, but are moving forward.

Because of a quirk in US copyright laws (Congress filled the laws with them), each January 1 will now bring a large number of books and such from copyright into the public domain.

It appears that for several coinciding reasons, the price of GPU cards is dropping for the first time in a long time.

Tuesday 1 May 2018

Our Supreme Court will review how Google and others pay out class action suits. Often most of the money goes to those already rich enough to hire lawyers instead of those affected.

In China, guys who find and sell cheater codes for games are arrested.

Starship Technologies expands its fleet of delivery machines to business and college campuses. They call them robots, but they look like five-gallon tubs with little wheels.

F8, Facebook's developer conference, will tone it done A L O T this year.

Surveillance reaches new heights in China where the government is having some of its subjects wear brain-scanning hats to monitor their mood.

Rape and abuse in Uber and Lyft cars.

California's Supreme Court pushes the state closer to have gig economy workers (Uber et al) be full-fledged employees. Those workers who can keep their jobs will benefit. Others will lose their jobs.

Who will preserve history now that everything is digitized? Who will manipulate history now that everything is digitized. Making a case for chemistry and physic and photographs and paper.

Examples of wage and real estate inflation in Silicon Valley. Your kids can't afford to live here. They are pushed out of their own home town.

Researchers hack into Volkswagon and Audi automobiles.

Fitbit moves to Google's cloud service to push into big-time healthcare.

Following right after the Gmail revision, Microsoft revises Outlook.

And to top it all off, the government of China bans Peppa Pig videos.

Wednesday 2 May 2018

Facebook now has a dating app.

Google launches Cloud Composer. It uses Apache Airflow to help standardize workflows in the cloud.

Apple has yet another record-setting financial quarter. The profit is over $1Billion a week. Big gains in China.

All the smart people were wrong about the iPhone X. We bought the product regardless of dismal predictions.

Facebook jumps further into censorship, especially political censorship. What could possibly go wrong?

Facebook claims they will hire so many people to work as censors that they will lose money.

ooooops, headline says it all: Australia's Largest Bank Lost The Personal Financial Histories Of 12 Million Customers.

Researchers find that utility power etc. systems are easy to hack. Don't connect it to the Internet!!! How difficult is it to hear that advice?

Gibson—the iconic guitar maker—is in financial trouble. They borrowed too much money and ventured too far afield.

Fedora 28 is released.

Thursday 3 May 2018

Blatant and almost silly age discrimination in the tech industry in China.

Cambridge Analytica folds. Of course they will open again under a different name and with less bad publicity.

The Google Maps Platform: Google does some needed revisions to its Maps API and renames it.

The Stories are overtaking the...um, well, overtaking something as a way to share information on the Internet.

Microsoft, VMWare, and Dell are now working together on the Internet of Things.

Amazon tells city governments why they weren't picked for the next headquarters. And city governments are scrambling to please someone like Amazon or something. The answers are obvious.

Google is building (what used to be) a secret social gaming platform.

Spotify has a lousy financial quarter. Yet another company (like Uber) that has a gazzillion users but can't make a penny.

Friday 4 May 2018

Today's XKCD cartoon is excellent.

Amazon was going to build a new building in Seattle, but then the question of local taxes was asked.

Pirate Radio LIVES! ... on YouTube.

We are witnessing the birth and rapid growth of eSports...yes we are watching each other play video games in large social gatherings.

Predictable and predicted: criminals are using cheap drones as lookouts to preclude law enforcement. The low cost of technology and its consequences.

YouTube now has 1.8Billion (that is with a B) logged on users each month. That is a large number.

Adobe is offering schools its Creative Cloud suite for only $5 a year.

spam (the email kind, not the packaged meat) is now 40 years old.

Saturday 5 May 2018

Truth can be stranger than fiction: a delivery driver for Amazon stole a customer's dog.

It took a few hundred years, but the government of China tries its hand at extraterritoriality by telling airlines from other nations how to describe Taiwan in their marketing materials.

The government of California has just increased the price of homes in that state by mandating solar panels on newly constructed houses starting in 2020.

The pointless job. No one, including the employee, why anyone is doing that job. Look for these to increase as wealth continues to increase.

The increases in how some Americans, those who work for some Federal agencies, believe they have watch the rest of Americans.

Google increases its censorship program (show us your papers!).

While GoDaddy jumps into censorship.

F8 comes and goes quietly, but everyone there knows how Facebook reaches just about everyone just about everywhere.

Sunday 6 May 2018

Our military elevates the US Cyber Command to be on equal footing with the combat arms commands. Let us see how this works. Will anyone have to declare a cyber war before conducting one?

Facebook opens new AI research offices and staffs them by hiring brains away from universities. Go with the money.

The latest comic book super hero movie has now broken all the box office records of all the previous comic book super hero movies.

More excellent advice from Seth Godin: the pre-mortem. Tell us all the ways your proposed endeavor will fail. ALL THE WAYS.

Canada faces a brain drain as its top talent is going to Silicon Valley. This is a bit surprising to me, but much of what younger people do these days is a surprise to me.

This is exciting for some of us...GCC 8.1 is released.

Ever had a character take over a story? No, but sometimes what I really want to write comes out in the middle of something.

First Law of Bad Management: If what you’re doing isn’t working, do more of it, faster and louder.—Jerry Weinberg

History of how Ray Bradbury used to write in a library by renting typewriter time. See my short story using a similar, 21st-century theme.

"Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing
you have to offer."—Barbara Kingfisher

Science proves, well sort of proves, that seeking things to notice is good for us. Notice a few noteworthy things everyday and make a note of them.

Thoughts on growing the "superfan." 1,000 superfans and you have a livelihood.

Move into business writing to supplement or fund completely the creative writing we really like.

Trying to move up in the pay of freelance writing.

Go back through pieces we wrote a long time ago when we weren't writing as well. There are good ideas in them that we can write again and better.

Solitary writing may be the most difficult endeavor. Change things so that we can have a changed perspective. It isn't easy.

Cli-Fi: the genre of climate fiction.