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: 15-21 October, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Sears falls into bankruptcy
• Paul Allen dies at 65 from cancer
• MIT to open a new computing school focused on the new stuff we focus on today
• Winamp is returning in 2019
• Facebook shows a little of its fake news war room
• World's biggest story(?): Netflix Marvel cancel Luke Cage

Monday 15 October 2018

Sears—the great American retailer for much the the great American century—files for bankruptcy. 100+ stores will close. People will lose jobs and communities will suffer.

The video and stills taken from drones are changing journalism and photo journalism for the better. Will governments allow this?

I wrote a post about The Design Review on Medium.com.

It seems that terror organizations are using YouTube less.

San Francisco is going down the same disastrous path that Seattle did in taxing success to pay for homelessness. Seattle had to back out of their law quickly.

The commercial cellphone network is now 35 years old.

Tuesday 16 October 2018

Paul Allen—co-founder of Microsoft—dies at 65 from cancer.

Google's pattern recognition software is better at reading samples to detect cancer than humans. The technology has existed for decades. Trust in technology has changed.

MIT to spend $1Billion on a new School of Computing "that combines AI, machine learning, and data science with other academic disciplines." Good for them. They have the name right: computing. Few appreciate how difficult it is to have the name right.

A look at the Chinese dot com boom (and coming bust).

A look at Photoshop for the iPad and, the real news, the Cloud-based approach that makes all this useful.

Jeff Bezos and his "willingness" to become richer by winning government contracts. Our government has its faults. Want to work for some other government instead?

The new Palm phone. Sometimes we only need a small phone. This is like a bicycle attached to the car. It is a second phone for the phone.

Yeah, THIS is a MONITOR. 49 inches. QHD resolution. $1,699. New from Dell.

Someone at our TSA has read an article about facial recognition technology and has put together a PowerPoint presentation. That is how thing start in government. Let's hope someone takes a nap and awakens to reality.

We are saved! Facebook has now become the purveyor of truth. They'll ban false photos of long voting lines. Will they soon ban false statements from everybody about everything?

We return to the 1980s. "Everyone wants" AI, but no one knows how to do it. The job market is raging (at least for the weekend ahead).

Wednesday 17 October 2018

YouTube went dark for a little while last night. Somehow we all survived.

Technology and nostalgia has given us something called ghost-acting.

Immunotherapy and the search for treatment for cancer. I hope these people know what they are doing.

Github introduces Actions, "a new way for developers to automate workflows and build, share, and execute code inside containers on GitHub." Not sure what that all means.

Saudi money funds Silicon Valley. Now we don't like the Saudis. Can we live with their money?

Some Amazon employees don't want to sell their facial recognition software to law enforcement. It is a terrible thing when citizens lose trust in other citizens who are employed by that group known as "the government."

It appears that the Do Not Track utility does nothing.

Netflix had a better-than-expected financial quarter. When estimators are wrong in this direction, they are not punished so everyone is happy.

Facebook admits the obvious: its home video chat gadget Portal will collect data and Facebook will sell it to advertisers.

The world is safe. The biggest news on the Internet is that Winamp will return in 2019.

Thursday 18 October 2018

Twitter releases 10Million "election interference" tweets. What is that? Says who? Are any from me?

Now that we have better printers, let's redesign the Hurricane Chart. Good intentions, bad reasoning, but maybe something will come of this.

"There aren’t enough cybersecurity workers out there" (says who?). So let's hire low-cost students. Classic recruiting and hiring practice.

Dick Tracy comes closer to reality as we now have a drone that we can fly with an Apple Watch.

The never-ending hunt for liars and con artists on the Internet.

We may not learn quickly, but we do learn sometimes. The DNC hires people to practice basics of cybersecurity.

How to replace an actor with your favorite to improve a movie.

ooops maybe those cool electric cars pollute more than those old infernal combustion engines.

Magnetic tape is still with us and is still being used for critical backups.

Friday 19 October 2018

Facebook proudly shows a little of its "fake news war room."

Samsung shows the Galaxy Book 2. Now Samsung is copying Microsoft in addition to copying Apple.

Apple announces another big event to occur on 30 October. Perhaps this time they will show a computer or two.

Tesla shows a cheaper car that will travel 250 miles. Only $45,000. Still a toy and stunt for the rich.

OpenBSD 6.4 is released.

The US Army will use leader-follower technology to have convoys of driverless trucks in 2019. The environment is limited, but the technology can soon be extended to the civilian sector.

Amazon is opening a new 600-person office in Manchester in the UK as they push into more R&D in Europe.

The Fischer anti-gravity or "space pen" is now 50 years old. Of course there is a commemorative model.

The coming 5G technology requires many more towers, and smaller towns may not accommodate them.

Chengdu, China officials think they can launch an illumination satellite that will light their city at night.

Comcast claims that, for a fee $$$, they offer 1 GigaBit Per Second speed to all customers.

Saturday 20 October 2018

An truck-size asteroid passes within 10,000 miles of us. That is pretty close (the moon is about 240,000 from us).

After two years of using the MacBook's touch bar...a waste of space and money.

We charge a Russian woman with interfering with the upcoming election. She created Facebook accounts and email addresses and sent stuff to lots of people. I guess I don't understand the Internet, free speech, and international law. It seems she wasted a lot of time and money on the Internet. I suppose that is a crime now.

This story must be important because it is all over the Internet today: Netflix and Marvel cancel Luke Cage.

The Saudis are investing Billion$ in new transportation technologies. The technologists are still accepting the ca$h. Civil right$? well...

Seth Godin has some excellent thoughts on removing the first step that often leads us into folly.

One long-time Mac portable computer user wishes for things that Apple has removed. I have to agree with the thoughts. Ports and memory card slots are pretty useful...even when "everything" is done via IP transport.

Even Tim Cook wants Bloomberg to pull their story on the Chinese supply chain interdiction. Why is it the Chinese don't spy but the Russians constantly interfere?

Sunday 21 October 2018

HP boosts the performance of its ZBook mobile workstations.

Anandtech takes a close look at the new Microsoft Surface Pro 6.

News Flash (not): there are consulting companies who help political candidates run their campaigns. There always have been.

Another News Flash (not): there are public relations consultants who use free speech to boost the relations of their clients with the public (hence the name). You got money? You get good publicity.

Joshua Schachter—the man who invented tags—talks of Del.ico.us (the best URL ever), Yahoo, and mistakes along the way.

A look at games-as-a-service and how that has exploded the financial wealth in the gaming community.

We now have a new type of oven. Brava uses "pure light" or directed energy to cook foods quickly. This is not a microwave oven. This does not have a traditional heating element.

Seth Godin once again has insight into something simple that most overlook: don't spend resources hiring people to tweet etc. about you. Spend your resources on your idea, product, and service. The world will then speak of you.

I like this post: some writers hate the idea of creating an outline and then writing. There are many different ways to gather thoughts before writing. Here are a few.

And a few more thoughts on the outline.

Another writer's experience at "starting to write" past age 60.

Some of the benefits to belonging to a writers group.

One writer's path to being a published writer with a real income.

I like this one. It has 200+ tips on writing. Forget the concept and read through this. One good one, "Use a stack of 3×5 cards to start writing your book. Use on item or idea per card. Stack the card in order and type them in to develop a first draft."

Skip the nonsense, "understand what your readers want and address those wants."

Some things William Faulkner wrote about writing. I love the first one, "Don’t be ‘a writer’ but instead be writing."

Some tips on being better at blogging.

A writing "secret:" Always write to your strengths.