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: 24-30 September, 2018

Summary of this week:

• The American teen—YouTube at school and rental electric scooters for mobility
• Sirius XM buys Pandora
• Split inside Facebook/Instagram
• SEC charges Elon Musk with fraud
• Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh has sex assault hearing
• The big five are buying all the production infrastructure
• Qualcomm, Apple, and Intel fight in court

Monday 24 September 2018

Today's American teens are turning to YouTube instead of textbooks for learning. Adapt folks, adapt.

Microtasks and the gig economy. We used to call that odd jobs and unemployment. Low pay, lousy conditions, no future. Amazon's Mechanical Turk is the prime example in America.

The government of China has a simple and effective approach to fake news: if you don't like it, censor it openly and completely.

In the opposite direction, the government of Singapore blocks the merger of Uber and Grab and pushes for more competition and fewer mergers.

What could possibly go wrong with those rental electric scooters? Enter the American teenager.

The Android operating system is now ten years old. Senior management where I worked (a famous US government agency) declared it silly and that the world would soon be dominated by Windows Phone from Microsoft. We laughed but saluted their infinite wisdom. They were all promoted for their insight while the rest of us toiled on.

Google asks its employees to tone down the politics. Do they sign a contract when hired?

Tuesday 25 September 2018

Removing paralysis with implanted electronics: it is working. This is what we should be doing in tech, not Facebook et al.

On Reddit, it appears that the Russians are attacking President Trump. And I thought they liked him. I am confused. Who likes whom?

Thank you New Yorker. We now know conclusively that the Russians duped all of America into electing the wrong person. Now all the experts who were wrong about everything can sleep at night knowing they weren't as stupid as they appeared.

Microsoft attempts to solve all the problems with video-teleconference meetings. Good luck with this as the real problem is people don't want to be in the meeting

There has been an internal breakup with Instagram and Facebook.

News Flash (not): a study by adults who can add and subtract money confirms that gig economy workers (Uber) are not making any money. We used to call this "odd jobs," and everyone knew it was something you did until you grew up and got a real job.

Sirius XM buys Pandora for $3.5Billion.

The Internet Arcade now has 1,100 new games.

News Flash (not): a detailed study reveals that today's best computer vision systems are not correct 100% of the time.

Wednesday 26 September 2018

Facebook censors a number of political pages citing they were all traced back to one source. Somehow this violates their policies or something. The folks at Facebook are stepping on themselves and will bring the regulators in the doors. Once open, those doors won't close. See this article on a government meeting on this topic.

An NSA programmer is going to jail for improperly handling classified materials.

The big five—Google, Apple, Amazon​, Microsoft, and Facebook—are buying the tools of production...$80Billion worth this past year. You can't compete if you don't have those tools.

The News Media Association (UK) wants Google and Facebook to pay $$$ to them for all the journalism they post and link.

The United Kingdom has issued a GDPR notice on Canadian company AggregateIQ. This is related to the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica broo-ha-ha. The fine could run into the ten$ of million$.

Facebook and Sphero team to offer schools programming tools and little robotics kits.

The HP Tango printer line: they are becoming smarter. The printer doesn't look like an ugly printer.

Roku releases three new streaming devices. Better performance, lower price.

Amazon ups the pay of warehouse workers—a miserly 25 cents an hour. 

Qualcomm, Apple, and Intel fight it out over industrial espionage.

Know Cobol programming language? Get a job as that expertise is needed. Several groups are training people in the language.

Thursday 27 September 2018

Amazon opens a physical store in New York City and they sell only 4-star products as rated on Amazon. This used to be called Brookstone.

An experiment shows that Facebook shares more user information than it claims.

News Flash (not): Amazon doesn't want any unions in its distributions centers, stores, offices, anywhere anytime.

Once again, George Will provides some pretty good perspective on the "rushed" confirmation of the most recent Supreme Court nominee.

Google in China: the news looks bad as it appears they have helped the government there monitor and control its subjects. All for money. I hope they sleep well at the company that promised to "do no evil" like Microsoft had supposedly done.

There appears to be some disagreement here, but Windows 10 is on about 700million devices.

Friday 28 September 2018

Our Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Elon Musk with fraud. If you are going to a big shot, you do have to abide by a few regulations.

Zeiss—famous for lenses—releases its first digital camera, and it has a 37MegaPixel sensor. No price yet, but expect a couple of thousand dollars.

And Leica has a new camera with a 64MegaPixel sensor. No price yet, but expect about $20,000.

ooops, it seems that those DNA tests in crime labs are flawed. Perhaps we aren't as smart as we think we are.

ooops again, all those appendicitis surgeries were unnecessary as medicine would produce the same result.

Linux is now the most popular operating system in Microsoft's Azure cloud.

Our Dept of Homeland Security is struggling with the face-scanning system at our airports. The difficulties were predictable and predicted.

Caught red handed: Apple had the audacity to cause its selfie camera to auto-magically improve selfie photos.

Another look—this time with lidar—shows us that we missed 60,000 Mayan structures that were right in front of us. We don't know as much about our planet and history as we thought. These things are right in front of us. Some, who have literally walked through these jungles, admitted that they were standing on these things and didn't realize it. Yet, we can state with certainty the temperature of the planet to 1/10th of a degree 10,000 years ago. How are we doing this?

Saturday 29 September 2018

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin just won a $Billion$ contract with United Launch Alliance to supply rocket engines.

Google updates its Wear OS software.

A Federal appeals court rules that Apple didn't violate an University of Wisconsin patent. About $400Million at  stake.

ooops, Facebook has a security problem that affected 50Million users.

The US Supreme Court, the US Senate, Silicon Valley, brogrammers, and lots more nonsense tied together. Here is some sage advice: don't drink. Not a drop.

Google pays Apple about $9Billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices. A nice contract if you can get it.

Sunday 30 September 2018

It hit me early this morning what this past week's Senate hearings etc. were all about...rich people behaving badly, again.

The machine learning workload is shifting to FPGA from CPU and GPU. Programmable hardware has always been more efficient.

Only $250 buys a 960GigaByte external SSD. Amazing price and performance.

Elon Musk and lawyers settle with our SEC investigators: $20Million fine and out as board chairman.

Tim Berners-Lee starts the Solid project in an attempt to give Internet users more control on where, when, and by whom their information is stored.

Amazon partners with Iridium Communications to build CloudConnect for Internet of Things—a satellite system to blanket the planet with broadband service dedicated to devices.

Tech collides with the auto industry. It was inevitable. Let's see what happens.

ooops, a stock clerk at a Best Buy put a yet-to-be-announced Google Chromecast on the shelf, and a customer bought it. Inventory control at its worst.

Somebody in the real world finally contemplates what will happen with someone hacks a drone that carries weapons. As usual, the science fiction writers asked this decades ago.

The Linux community appears to be in a turmoil caused by Linus Torvalds announcing that he will try to start behaving like a decent person.

How do you create a habit of writing? "Make a schedule and stick to it. Pretty soon the schedule becomes a habit."

What one writer does to help write 100,000 word novels. There is no secret. Seat in chair, hands on keyboard. Every day.

A good post with good examples on the topic of writing styles.

Thoughts on the the do it yourself Master's in Fine Arts. Yes, you can learn without going for a formal education.

Jerry Jenkins has 200 published books. I suggest you read this piece about what it means to publish one book.

Thoughts on the crunch to find the time to write. If you have to write, you will write. Otherwise, maybe you shouldn't be wanting to write.

One real-life case of pre-publication marketing.

Another writer's path or transition plan from day job to writing.

One writer's path to full-time writing: writing income exceeded day job income. Time to quit the day job.

"Before signing a contract with an agent or publishing house, you must take off the emotional artist hat and evaluate the offer with a non-emotional, business manager’s eye." Well stated, and I agree.