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: 29 October to 4 November, 2018

Summary of this week:

• IBM buys RedHat for $34Billion and cloud computing resources
• Walmart jumps into the automated store experiment
• Microsoft continues to move to FPGAs in data centers
• iRobot and Google partner to "serve" your home

Monday 29 October 2018

It appears that something called Gab was used by the Pittsburgh moron who killed people in a synagogue. Therefore, showing that doing the right thing on time is almost impossible, but posing for affect long after there is no affect, everyone is kicking Gab off the Internet.

Telling fantasy as reality happened on Facebook long before the 2016 US Presidential election. No one cared because no one cared.

IBM buys RedHat, valued at $20Billion, for $34Billion.

The RedHat acquisition appears to be a major shift for IBM away the AI folly of Watson to the cash-rich business of #CloudComputing.

The Chinese space program suffers a setback as a privately owned company had a major anomaly during a launch.

Seth Godin makes a good case for hiring expertise at non-profits.

Everyone in Washington D.C. agrees that rural broadband is failing and needs help. No one is asking, "What happened to the $8Billion the prior President spent on such?"

Bruce Schneier reminds us of the fundamentals of cell phone privacy and security. Cell phones provide neither.

Tuesday 30 October 2018

In Indonesia, where it seems that those in government think those outside of government are easily fooled, a war room of several hundred engineers keeps foolishness off the Internet, a.k.a., squashes free speech.

How the city government of Orlando uses facial recognition (Amazon's Rekognition) to watch everyone. Residents or subjects?

This story is in Wisconsin, but it is repeated everywhere: taxpayers pay for a factory to curry favor with the rich.

WalMart dives into the automated store experience with a Sam Club's Now store in Texas.

Google paid Andy Rubin million$ to leave. Google engineers are trying to orchestrate a women's walkout for November 1st.

Intel claims to have increased its gender and race representation in its workforce. Although this doesn't satisfy some critics, Intel has moved much further in this direction than other Silicon Valley companies. See, e.g., the previous Google story.

The tech crowd in Silicon Valley are volunteering expertise to help political candidates. Not as famous, but just as active are tech crowds elsewhere working for the other candidates.

Want to store energy? Forget batteries and look to compressing air. Yes, it works much better.

Walmart now has its own line of gaming laptop and desktop PCs. They sport the "Overpowered" brand name.

Wednesday 31 October 2018

Apple had a big event yesterday. Here is one summary. Updates to the iPad, laptops, Mac mini, and such.

Apple claims to now have 100million "active Mac users." This is a worldwide number, not just the US. People are using the "old fashioned" personal computer made by Apple.

Microsoft continues the move to FPGAs over traditional servers in data centers. Xilinx is the big winner here.

The future appears to be iMessage, not Facebook. Narrow sharing instead of broad.

Our Dept of Justice charges Chinese government agents and hackers with attempting to steal intellectual property from aviation companies. This is the old fashioned attempt to steal money.

US companies continue to invest more in R&D than others in the world. Hence, the Chinese try to steal the results of the R&D.

Where is the money? Video game$ Red Dead Redemption 2 grosses $725Million in three days.

Electronic Arts, the world's richest video-game builder,  is creating its own cloud gaming platform.

Facebook is displaying the names of those who paid for political ads. ooops, Facebook is being fooled and is displaying the wrong names.

Fedora 29 has been released.

Thursday 1 November 2018

Sometimes XKCD does a great job of highlighting the absurdity of our rules in our lives. Today is an excellent example.

The Kepler space telescope is out of fuel and has been turned off.

This work is early, but the results are amazing and promising. Paralyzed people are walking again via electrical stimulation. This is what we should be doing in technology.

The Roomba knows every inch of the home. Google wants to work in said space. Hence, iRobot and Google enter into what may be a game-changing partnership.

Hungary, Latvia, and Greece deploy a "temporary" experiment in automated, touch-less lie detection at border crossings. What could possible go wrong?

A firm grasp of the obvious: Apple has slowly but surely raised the prices of its hardware. What happened to better computing at lower prices. Yes, it is still there, but inflation hurts.

A newspaper—purveyor of the First Amendment—advances the cause of censorship. Yes, we live in absurd times.

In praise of the daily habit of sharing experience with the world.

I find these thoughts on care and systems from Seth Godin to be spot on. I don't like the terms he uses, but I do like the message. People do things. Let's create situations where people can do things better.

Waymo (Google (Alphabet)) is the first to be able to test self-driving cars in California without a backup human driver in the vehicle.

Various organizations are testing Facebook and proving that Facebook's efforts at censorship fail. Long ago Facebook leared that they could make more money by simply not checking user posts. Their decision was easy—at the time.

The folks at RedHat just got rich by selling to IBM. All those folks who contributed time and expertise to the open-source software RedHat had? They got NOTHING. Such is life or something like that.

Welcome to the age of the cloud kitchens or virtual restaurants. 

Friday 2 November 2018

A city in the UK hosts the world's first, full-scale, robot delivery service. The "robots" look like boxes on wheels and they roll up and down the sidewalks.

Google employees had their walkout yesterday. This article contains their "demands" of the company directors.

Flickr cuts back on its offering to its free customers. They are boosting what paid customers can have.

Apple has thrived with price increases. Flat sales plus higher prices mean higher profits. The stock price fell 7% as several estimators were wrong. As usual, the estimators aren't punished, the estimated company is.

Apple will stop announcing the numbers of gadget sales, so we won't know how many million iPhones they sell a week. They are trying to ease  fears as the smartphone market has become saturated. They need another product line.

News Flash (not): the bigger, more powerful smartphones have less battery life than the older, smaller, less powerful ones.

Folding computer displays are here, and the early models don't look good,

News Flash (not): NASA discovers that the winds on Mars move the dust around.

Saturday 3 November 2018

White Hat hackers (honest to goodness good guys) find major security holes in state voting systems. Don't connect it to the Internet. How difficult is it to grasp that concept?

Churning along...HPE has a "supercomputer" in space at the ISS so that the folks up there can crunch numbers locally instead of sending all the data downwards slowly for processing. Times change. The trade-offs change. The systems engineers do their jobs.

We can make deepfake videos (make a video with anyone saying anything we want). We are having an election. What could possible go wrong? Don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see.

Technologist created the mess, so technologists to the rescue with technology that can spot the tiniest fakes. Of course, this is a contradiction as we know some technologists fake things, so how do we know that other technologists aren't faking the fake detectors?

And now we apologize when people are telling one another real news. I thought we only did that when we repeated fake news.

Google for Education is booming in US schools. Some are suspicious. Whey aren't they suspicious of using Wintel machines connected to Wintel over the Internet?

Despite the high price, the iPad still dominates world-wide sales of tablets.

Sunday 4 November 2018

Amazon appears to have settled on a location for HQ2 in Fairfax County, Virginia (Washington DC suburbs). What is awful is they are picking Crystal City. Terrible location for commuters.

Apple has fallen behind the times with the latest MacBook Air.

Rats! Two weeks too soon. Apple now has refurbished iPhone 8 for $500. I had to buy a new iPhone when the screen fell off my iPhone 5.

Welcome back to Standard Time in the US as we fall back from Daylight Savings Time. Can we end the madness anytime soon?

And now we have the floating solar panel farm.

The three edits:
    Content edit. The big story picture.
    Line edit. The language you use.
    Copy edit. Grammar, spelling, and syntax.

The six-word story.

And something different: science (STEM dominated by men) proves that women are better writers than men.

Changing back and forth between fiction and non-fiction. Some tips to keep the change changing.

Some financial advice for those who desire to have writing as the only income: cut your expenses and save what little money you make.

It is November, and for many that menas it is NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month.

Some things "mentally strong" writers avoid. Strong? or just plain smart?

And a few more of the same type of things.