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: 20-16 August, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Uber continues to lose $10Million a day
• Apple censors the app store in China
• Nvidia releases its first Turing architecture GPU, 6X jump in improvement
• Booz Allen Hamilton wins $1Billion cybersecurity contract
• I learn about Filter Bubbles
• Reddit users spotted all the foreign influence long before Facebook et al
• John McCain dies at 81

Monday 20 August 2018

Backpacks for adults. Is that a contradiction or an ad?

Apple helps the government of China censor apps in the App Store.

Looking for a portable computer with all the power to play video games? Engadget ranks the top brands.

Google made early visits to Detroit to discuss autonomous automobiles. Detroit laughed, and now we know the rest of the story.

The EU thinks of new ways to extract $$$ from American tech companies. If you don't censor fast enough, you pay.

Let's make pizza more affordable. First, we layoff all the people. Second, we have machines make the pizza.

It appears that a lot of people still don't know about buying refurbished products from Apple.

Uber is losing $10Million a day. That is a day. And how do they do it?

All this streaming means that we don't own the entertainment we purchase. We are renting it all.

Construction begins on the Giant Magellan Telescope in Chile.

Tuesday 21 August 2018

How the government of China attempts to rule its subjects via data collection and analysis.

Facebook, of all people, has AI technology that they are applying to MRI that may cut the time required for an MRI by a factor of ten.

Nvidia actually releases its Turing architecture GPUs. $1200 isn't cheap, but they promise a 6x performance jump for video games.

Stronger rumors about updates to Apple's line of computers coming in October.

News Flash (not): national governments are using the internet to influence public opinion in other countries.

New Flash (not): people share their accounts so they don't all have to pay to watch entertainment on Netflix and other places.

The Hugo Award Winners for 2018 announced.

For those of us who know some history of artificial intelligence, this story is laugh-out-loud funny: Google puts an AI system in charge of data center cooling.

NASA finds ice on the moon. Call me when we are making coffee with it. Actually, call me when NASA can put a person on the moon. Actually, call me when NASA can put a person in space.

Wednesday 22 August 2018

If censorship wasn't enough, Facebook will now rate everyone as to trustworthiness. Okay folks, the "wrong person" was elected President. Let's find a scapegoat! Let's censor wrong persons; let's rate one another so wrong persons are identified. Need a scapegoat? Blame me. I'll take the blame. Leave everyone else alone.

Amazon wants to come to town with a new data center. Local government cuts them a deal for low-price electricity. The costs are passed on to everyone else.

A little less than half of our states want the prior President's definition of net neutrality reinstated. That is expected as about half of our states didn't want the current President to be President.

Booz Allen Hamilton wins a $1Billion cyber security contract. They essentially will assume the responsibility for much of our Federal government that has been assigned to the Dept of Homeland Security.

Broadband throttling and emergency response. Ironically, this was the primary argument for throttling. Everyone's data movement is NOT equal. Emergency medical records moving cross country are more important than watching Peppa Pig; in those cases we should throttle Peppa Pig. And we should throttle Netflix when persons are fighting wildfires and need fast communications.

Somehow, many of us have become accustomed to paying $1,000 for a telephone. Ask me about that in 1980; wasteful opulence.

Tim Cook donates $5Million to charity. Of course it is a small percentage, but it is a large number.

Facebook apologizes for censorship in one case and then boasts about it in another case. As long as you censor the right, or is it the wrong, persons, censorship is okay, right? Huh?

Steam Play—play PC games on Linux—now in beta.

All this rushing around in the gig economy is causing more traffic accidents. Predictable and predicted.

Popular electric cars in the US. Note the numbers: these are tiny. For all the hype, we are not driving electric cars as they are simply not economical at this time.

Walmart's eBook store is now open.

Thursday 23 August 2018

More thoughts on the Filter Bubbles.

Facebook and Twitter continue to have great pride in their censorship. What turned us upside down?

Facebook analyzes data. Facebook reinstates other data analysis companies.

It appears that Microsoft is taking the subscription model (rent something vice buy it) to gaming consoles.

Got a few thousand $$$? Get the new Nikon 45MegaPixel camera.

Iran officially becomes the new world's villain in fake news. It's like the cartoons where we are having a competition to see who is the worst.

News Flash (not): Liars will lie; meddlers will meddle. Adults will ignore (this last one is contrary to popular belief).

The economy is hot; companies are hiring folks who don't have college degrees. I advise against the short cut at this time. The economy will swing again.

Friday 24 August 2018

A memoir about Steve Jobs from his daughter. The good, the bad, the ugly and all that.

Facebook has become an excellent example of how runaway success can lead to collapse.

ooops, 14.8Million voter records in Texas were left out in the open on a server. Who knows who made copies. And we wonder how foreign governments "hack" into our elections.

Social media, the law, and common decency.

A recent study shows that healthy drinking habits (alcohol) don't exist.

HP has a good financial quarter.

Headline: Tech Companies Are Gathering For A Secret Meeting To Prepare A 2018 Election Strategy. (1) They aren't technology companies; they are social media companies. (2) Since we all know about it, this isn't a secret meeting. (3) They have nothing to do with elections.

Proof that good, mechanical keyboards don't have to look electro-mechnical.

For those of us old enough to remember the debut of Windows 95 and start-me-up, Win95 is now an app for Macs and Linux.

We no longer call it CENSORSHIP (too ugly and repressive). Now we call it CONTENT MODERATION (isn't that nice?).

This story is all over the Internet, so it must be important: Microsoft is being investigated for bribing government employees in Hungary. The story alleges that MS paid people to use MS Office. I thought MS Office was pretty much free if you use free OneDrive.

VW in Mexico wants to stop hail before it damages cars. Others protest the attempt to change the weather. Climate change folks take note: you want people to stop changing the climate so you can change it back to 1970 or some other perfect era. You are protesting the very thing you want to do. Hmmm. Life goes on.

Saturday 25 August 2018

Out of no where come a dozen Twitter accounts of Amazon warehouse employees saying how good Amazon treats them. Skepticism runs high at this, i.e., who does Jeff Bezos think he is foolin'?

And now the Russians are amplifying the disagreement over vaccines. Why? Simple, it hurts families. Socialists love to hurt families. Note to Americans currently backing Socialists in America, guess what is coming.

The run-of-the-mill users at Reddit spotted all this Russian and Iranian stuff online long before the gazillionaires at Facebook. Funny how that works. The folks making lots of money ignored trouble in the cash register.

Why spend $300 on new headphones when you can spend $20 on a Apple-connector-to-headphone-jack adapter?

Alienware already has the latest Nvidia GPUs in desktop gaming machines.

And here is a quick look at the coming graphics cards using the latest Nvidia GPUs.

AMD wins a patent case against several televisor makers.

Elon Musk must be laughing as he took everyone around in a big circle.

The city of San Francisco has a number of problems. One is homeless persons and the mess they make. So SF has a poop patrol.

The coming death of Silicon Valley. Folks there live in a fantasy world, and everyone else knows that fantasy isn't reality.

Our current President states the obvious regarding social media and censorship.

Sunday 26 August 2018

It appears that Burning Man is the place that rich nerds from Silicon Valley go to do everything the law and the press won't let them do at home.

News Flash (not): politicians throw away money (not theirs of course) to lure a few jobs into their towns.

John McCain dies at 81. Given his years as a POW, 81 is a remarkably long life.

I love this post: visit a school and talk to kids about your writing. They will buy your writing later.

Instagram as a marketing tool.

This post has some good marketing tips for starting as a writer and finding actual clients that actually pay money.

Guilt and unrealistic  expectations from writers.

A derivation of the eye'n fly'n and buy'n paradigm for freelance writers.

When you start in freelance work, you try several dozen things to make some money here and there. If one of them hits it big, you have to focus and drop many of the others.

Some basic things a freelance writer can do to improve their income. This is basic business practice, and writers are in business.

Listen up: "...the key skills for data scientists are not the abilities to build and use deep-learning infrastructures. Instead they are the abilities to learn on the fly and to communicate well..."

Some thoughts on buying a writing desk.

This is excellent, highly needed, and almost universally ignored: how to take minutes at a meeting.