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: 21-27 May, 2018

Summary of this week:

• The lobbying begins to break up Facebook
• The Obamas become super rich with a Netflix contract
• Zuckerburg mumbles before European politicians
• The Qualcomm Snapdragon 710 is here—better everything, lower price
• GDPR is here, and everyone is going a little crazy
• That is government regulation
• Ted Dabney, who co-created Pong and Atari, dies at 81

Monday 21 May 2018

The first Nvidia super-duper monitor is out....only $1,999.

Here come the "progressive" lobbyist, "Break Up Facebook!"

Big brother continues to watch in China. This time they are using cameras and AI and all that.

The German government is trying to stamp out hate speech. Some folks there are learning that censorship is censorship, even when we censor the bad guys, whoever they happen to be this week.

Microsoft buys a company called Semantic Machines (a good generic name) to increase its conversation technology.

Facebook goes to Europe this week to testify before various EU groups.

In the UK, the tech firms haven't policed themselves, so the government will. Hint: money will start to flow into the government.

Tuesday 22 May 2018

Microsoft augments SharePoint with Spaces: a way to create mixed reality presentations.

All of Iceland's electricity comes from geothermal sources. Hawaii could do some of that. Louisiana—not so much. Renewable energy isn't everywhere. Sorry, just the facts.

Our former President shows how to go from community organizer to uber-gallionaire. Just cash in that celebrity "public service."

And "many" people threaten to cancel their Netflix subscriptions because of the Obama contract. I suppose there are less harmful things the Obamas could be doing. What happened to building houses for the homeless and dabbling in oil painting?

The Wintel folks (remember them?) find another security hole in Intel processors.

Comcast xFi pods: simple WiFi extenders for the home.

Uber continues to fall into legal trouble due to jerks misbehaving at work and others ignoring the obvious.

The Facebook-Qualcomm Terragraph technology (wireless curb to home) may actually appear next year.

Our current President rebuffs all those messy security advisors when it comes to what phone he uses.

Recovery groups are populated by many vulnerable persons. Ahhh, says the snake oil salesman and the like.

Forget all the boring computer companies, get a Razer Blade laptop. New processors, new GPU, new display, etc.

And if you want an external GPU enclosure to connect to your laptop, Razer has a new, improved one of those, too.

Wednesday 23 May 2018

"Robots" rolling through crops could reduce the amount of herbicides used by an order of magnitude, and that will be good for all of us except those who make and sell herbicides.

Amazon sells its face-recognition software to police departments. Civil libertarians and other citizens are leery of the possible abuses.

Microsoft has a Chinese-language version of software that makes phone calls much like Google's.

Our FBI exagerrated the number of smartphones it couldn't unlock...by about 600%. What's a little mistake among friends?

Zuckerburg mumbles and babbles to the European Parliament. The news stories indicate that many folks were quite angry at the outcome, but if your a rich, rich guy, well, you know.

The IBM Verifier: a basic smartphone, a little more hardware, and a lot of science allows us to verify the authenticity of materials like diamonds and prescription drugs.

Lots of financial institutions (90% by some estimates) are targeted by ransomware...that's where the money is.

After three years of hype, the $35,000 Tesla is not here and not in sight. These cars are still they toys of the rich. Nothing practical.

Google's autocomplete runs into Europe's censorship and history-erasing laws.

Factories are already cranking out the Apple A12 processor using the 7-nm process. Amazing technology, smaller and smaller.

Thursday 24 May 2018

After 16 years and 60Billion stumbles, StumbleUpon is closing and merging its users into Mix.com.

Uber fakes a profit. In reality, Uber continues to lose more than a $Million$ every week.

How does Uber lose so much money? Spend it researching flying cars.

Qualcomm shows the Snapdragon 710 processor. More AI, More better everything coming to phones real soon now.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: a Federal court rules that public officials cannot block Twitter followers.

Netflix continues to climb the ladder of companies and now surpasses Comcast. I just hope Netflix has real customer support as opposed to what Comcast does.

I guess I need to learn what a "meal kit" is as there seems to be a lot of money in that business. Kroger to buy Home Chef.

The business of being an Amazon merchant is growing with a fifth of them grossing $1Million last year.

"The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them"—Elon Musk

Friday 25 May 2018

Light news day for a Friday...

Pornhub is becoming the leading privacy advocate in the US and now has a VPN service.

And now Netflix is worth more than Disney. ESPNetflix?

The Apple-Samsung trial is now seven years old. This week a court awards Apple $538Million. It will be appealed and the boring story will continue.

Apple runs a free month trial of greater cloud storage. This is all so that we can take more and more photos and videos and won't get them bumped.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: an Amazon Alexa recorded a room conversation and sent that to a random contact. Of course Alexa is "listening" all the time. Of course Amazon accesses those recordings. That is how it works.

In an unrelated news item...Google is now selling more smart-speakers-listeners-gadgets than Amazon.

Saturday 26 May 2018

Officially, everyone is taking this GDPR very seriously. Extraterritoriality reigns in the age of no borders.

The Chromebook is more than coming of age. This is a good article on the latest capabilities.

I you are or ever were a computer programmer, this is a good article to try to see our culture from the outside.

The all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful government in San Francisco just outlawed those electric scooter rental things.

Our Department of Justice is encouraging us all to reboot our routers and such as the Russians have attacked.

General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, is here, now, today. Everyone run and hide.

American news sites are blocking access from anyone in Europe. They don't want to get a $20Million fine from the EU. So, just turn it off.

The new European Data Protection Board, authors of GDPR, scream about the blackout. Well, you wrote the regulation...unintended consequences are real.

Microsoft is settling nicely into the model of two updates a year to Windows 10.

Want to dissipate the heat from just about anything in your home? Use this CPU cooler.

Sunday 27 May 2018

The government of Egypt bans YouTube for a month. Censorship lives on quite well in our century.

Ted Dabney dies of cancer. He was one of the two persons who created Pong and Atari in 1972. He was 81.

Netflix has signed a bunch of top talent to create entertainment. The older studios are joining the bidding war and driving up the fees paid to talent. It is a pretty good time to be a writer. That is if you want to join that crowd and that lifestyle.

This is a good article on the capital expenditures in the cloud computing business. IBM and Oracle claim to be big players in cloud computing, but they aren't.

Microsoft edges into the cloud computing space of our intelligence community.

The US may soon have a Right to Try Law that allows terminally ill patients to try medicine that is not yet approved by our government. Hence, our government is preventing our government from preventing us to try to live. You can't make this up folks.

Former President Obama warns about divisiveness in the US. Is he kidding (apparently not). He was the Great Divider. Some persons are blind to their own legacy.

Writing by the "seat of your pants" or outlining or some combination of those two and a million other things.

Creating a setting or a universe for your fiction.

Got a big writing assignment but just caught a case of writer's block? See how silly that reads? Of course you can write, regardless.

Tips on finding other writers to talk to and share writing.

Put these things on the writer's list of do-not-do.

Audacity and confidence and moving from the back to the front of the group of writers.

How to get a Master's of Fine Arts in writing without going to college. No, you won't have a degree, but you can learn the same things.

How to interview someone as part of an article's research.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this piece on a book's journal and Steinbeck's as he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath."

Thoughts on writing serials: write a short chapter each week and put them out in order...the classic cliffhanger.