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: 3-9 December, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Apple's brilliant Christmas ad this year isn't their Christmas ad
• Microsoft adds real-time captions to Skype and PowerPoint
• Nvidia draws worlds for you in video
• Bose starts selling its augmented reality glasses
• Qualcomm officially announces the new Snapdragon
• Broadband availability in the US is much lower than previously reported
• IBM sells big software lines to an Indian company

Monday 3 December 2018

Not much time for Internet viewing this morning. The world turns. We are now in December and the Christmas holiday spending is up again this year. Not a bad economy for the worst President in the history of the world. This week will see the burial ceremonies for George Bush the Elder. We hope to see a quick recovery in Alaska after their earthquake.

Microsoft also updates the icons in Windows 10. Icons are a livelihood for some persons.

Apple does it again with another brilliant ad. This one, however, is not the annual holiday ad (that one is a disappointment this year). See the Elvis ad about FaceTime.

Teasing the release of the next Nvidia super-duper GPU.

Supervised learning is limited by the dataset for learning. Well, no duh, sort of fits the definition. Google claims to have a fix.

Tuesday 4 December 2018

Nvidia's advances in hardware and mostly software have now made it possible for the computer to fill in all the details of imagined world's. Much lower cost for movie and game producers.

Nvidia officially releases its high-end GPU. This isn't for gamers, but for researchers and high-end computing applications.

Microsoft puts real-time subtitles, AI-generated, not human-generated, in Skype and PowerPoint. If this works...a big aid to those who cannot hear and to those who work in places where the noise is prohibitive.

It appears that Microsoft's experiment with the Edge browser flopped. They are building a new browser to replace it.

In the next couple of months, Walmart will literally roll out custodial robots to clean the floors. Jobs?

So much for Jeff Bezos' predictions. He told 60 Minutes that Amazon would be delivering packages via drones by now.

For a moment, Amazon passed Apple as the most valuable company in the world. Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc.

SpaceX has become a satellite-launching factory with 19 launches this year. Yesterday's put 64 small birds into low earth orbit.

Wednesday 5 December 2018

The Bose augmented reality glasses are not ready to order at $199. There is no camera or imagery. You talk, the glasses listen; the glasses talk, you listen. Let's see how this works.

Microsoft and Docker to boost the cloud offerings of both.

Qualcomm officially announces its 855 Snapdragon. It is 5G capable and has lots of processing power for AI and other such things that populate our pocket telephones these days.

New York City may have just killed the Uber et al business in the city. They passes a $26.51 per hour gross pay floor for drivers. Uber can't operate at that salary.

With all the drama in the boardroom, Facebook tumbles out of first place in Glassdoor's best places to work.

Here is the Glassdoor list of best places to work. John Deere is rated higher than Apple.

Right under our nose, we have a new generation of word processors.

Speculation and justification for Amazon letting AWS be a separate, wildly successful company.

Some of us are lamenting this; we are seeing the end of truck driving.

Thursday 6 December 2018

One person's experience in riding in a self-driving taxi in Arizona. Waymo is moving understandably slowly in all this.

The UK government releases a bunch of "SECRET" Facebook documents. Of course these document embarrass the executives and other decision makers at Facebook.

A Microsoft study sharply disagrees with our government's numbers: the percentage of Americans with broadband service is much lower than the FCC reports. What happened to that $8Billion the prior President spent on this?

I thought they were doing this all along! No. Microsoft admits that it only recently began cooperating internally with its different product lines.

The Canadians arrest the CFO of Huawei and will extradite her to the US for trial. This all has something to do with Iran. Try to follow this: Canada, America, China, Iran.

The government of Australia gives itself permission to force companies to help them hack into users' information. They don't have a Constitution with a Bill of Rights there. They did not put limitations on themselves like some in America did way back when.

Why aren't the iPhones selling like they used to? This isn't rocket science: the new ones are over-priced and my old one still works good enough.

And here come the Russians with lower-priced smartphones.

Google employees "demand" better treatment for contract workers, who are not full employees and who do not enjoy what full employees enjoy. It is about money.

Maybe we have a lie-detecting machine that concentrates on the eyes. This may finally push the polygraph machine into the dumpster.

With all this communications technology, we don't have to live where we work. Americans aren't moving as much anymore. They moving industry is dying as a result and real estate is taking a hit as well.

Friday 7 December 2018

No Internet viewing today as I had breakfast with some fine gentlemen instead.

Saturday 8 December 2018

Yesterday was December 7th. I guess I am old enough to remember being told as a child to remember December 7th. Here are some photos.

We once dreamed, and worked really hard at it, that computers could see. Now that computers see pretty well, we want to regulate it. How do you regulate an idea?

And Microsoft joins the call to regulate facial recognition technologies. Take care here as there will be unintended consequences.

Andrew Yang is running for President on one issue: automation and the loss of jobs and need for universal basic income it brings. He is talking about something worthwhile, which guarantees he won't be elected.

WordPress 5.0 is released. This software runs about a third of the Internet or something like that.

Reddit releases its numbers for the year. 330Million active users is about the population of the United States.

IBM sells $1.8Billion worth of software to India HCL Tech.

Seth Godin's altMBA program has created a site just listing Linchpin Jobs. Good luck to them.

Morale is so low here that fill-in-the-blank. At Facebook, employees are using burner phones to talk to each other. Perhaps a new low.

Luxembourg (100K residents) to make all public transportation free. When will they run out of someone else's money?

It seems that Amazon wants to bring its checkout-less (no "annoying" check-out counter employees) technology to airports. There is a market there for people who grab something and want to move on quickly.

Someone does a study that concludes, of all things, that eating bread is pretty good for us.

The case against working long hours.

Sunday 9 December 2018

LG has a thin portable computer with a 17.3" screen. Love it.

How did Alaska repair its roads quickly after an earthquake. They prepared years ago, worked hard, and didn't wait for FEMA to arrive.

Inside sources, on the condition that they not be named, tell of FBI investigating comments on FCC site that used false names. Am I the only one who sees all this as a bit absurd? No names, but investigating false use of names?

Some of the places Tumblr users are going.

A simple solution to falling iPhone sale: lower the price (a lot).

A discussion of the idea of the nation-state of the Internet. It works well, until you remember that the Internet can't protect you when someone knocks on your door.

The laws, codes, regulations, etc.—all created with good intentions by well-meaning persons—that drive up the cost of housing and make it almost impossible to "build your own house."

PHP 7.3 is released with performance improvements and enabling inline C programming. And I thought the C Programming Language was dead.

Healthy work environment? A 22-year-old engineer died at his computer. He worked for Google.

There are words (problem, bug, defect) that Apple store employees are not allowed to say. I have found this in my job. We aren't supposed to admit human frailty as is that would be unique to "us." Hence, lie to your customers, which means we think our customers are...?

What is hot in tech sales: curved LCD monitors built for gaming. When in doubt, entertain.

Need some storage space on your home computer? (for those of us who still have a home computer) Toshiba has new 12 and 14 TERAByte disks. That a whole-lotta space.

Some tips on the form and function of writing dialogue.

Essential: money management for authors. Unless your are J.K. whats-her-name, you need this.

The great book and the idea behind it. The idea is a start. Once famous writer—if you recall his name, please tell me as I cannot—wrote something once about he has great ideas all the time, but that doesn't mean anything if you don't write the great story.

Fiction and changing beliefs. Fiction works have changed nations, peoples, and history. Of course it works.

Headline says it all: The big tech stocks just lost $141 billion in market value. That's enough to buy McDonald's.

Some useful tips to writing your life story. Write what comes to mind. It is right in front of you, push it through your fingers to the keyboard and storage.

This looks interesting: track time on task in the background. arbtt.

I am writing this non-fiction book for ... describe the readers. Not easy, but probably necessary.