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: 18-24 March, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Apple has new iPads at lower prices
• Nvidia releases a new $100 supercomputer
• We learn of a meteor blast 10X bigger than Hiroshima
• Google announces its Stadia cloud gaming service
• FEMA exposes personal information of millions of persons
• Special Counsel sends Russian report to Attorney General

Monday 18 March 2019

Tuesday 19 March 2019

Let's compare things. Hiroshima nuclear bomb—meteor exploded above Bering Sea in December 2018 that no one notice. The meteor was 10x the atomic bomb and it really wasn't a big one compared to those of the last century. Who has the power?

Apple's GarageBand is 15 years old. And yes, a lot of hit music was made on it.

Social media and all such and the role in festering extremes from all sides.

MySpace—yes, it still exists—has a colossal data loss.

Don't like fake news and all that? Move to Russia. Putin knows how to deal with it.

Jetson Nano: Nvidia releases a new $100 supercomputer for edge computing.

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sues Twitter for defamation. Among the allegations are censorship of some folks while refusing to remove content Twitter says it will remove from other folks. Of course there is political bias in Twitter et al.

Apple quietly updates the iPad lineup with lower-priced but still high-performing models. Good for us.

Per some recent testing...American computer science graduates had much more and better skills than their counterparts in China, Russia, India et al. They tried pretty hard to make the testing equal; of course there is some bias, but still...the Americans did better.

Nvidia has found a way to move its new ray-tracing technology back to older hardware that were never made to run it.

Facebook wants local news, but it can't find much of it. Their idea of "news" differs from mine.

Wednesday 20 March 2019

Make a little conceptual (crude like a 6-year-old would do), and Nvidia finds a matching masterpiece to take its place.

Apple updates its lineup of desktop computer (iMac). New processors, better graphics.

Our prior President spent $36Billion on national electronic health records. The money was spent, nothing happened. Predictable and predicted.

Firefox 66 is here. It doesn't play videos automatically. That is a great relief to some of us.

The staff at Kickstarter is joining the Office and Professional Employees International Union. This is a first in the "tech world." Let's see what happens next.

Facebook settles and pays $5Billion to the American Civil Liberties Union over advertising practices.

The European Union fines a successful American company a couple of Billion$$$ for being a suce$$ful American company.

Tornado sirens warn people of impending tornadoes. These sirens are connected online, and yes they have been easily hacked and so some people think it funny to sound them now and then.

Recycling hits a wall. It isn't cost effective, and towns and cities simply don't have the extra money to spend.

San Francisco hits a wall. Even successful tech workers with high salaries can't afford to live here.

Canada's immigration laws are easier to skirt than the US's. Hence, tech jobs are moving there. I guess the Canadians have enough jobs for themselves and don't mind other folks getting them.

Thursday 21 March 2019

Google's Stadia: is it about gaming or simply watching YouTube?

Apple updates its AirPods.

After spending lots of money on lawsuits, Facebook claims to have completely changed its advertising policies.

The number of Fortnite players grows to 250Million. The definition of success has changed.

Bill Gates gives away several Billion$$$ a year, but his wealth continues to grow—he is $9.5Billion richer now than 12 months ago.

A little study shows that folks are failing to remove all their personal data from computers, tablets, phones, etc. when discarding them.

All those electric cars that rich people drive around don't really influence oil demand. The old-fashioned electric buses do much more.

Robocalls hit all of us—including the CEO of AT&T who was in the middle of a public presentation.

Here's a new one: hackers hid cameras in hotel rooms in South Korea... Yes, you can guess the rest of the story.

Intel shows a new graphics control panel app.

Friday 22 March 2019

It appears that Boeing was selling safety features as extras on the 737 planes. The car makers have always done this. Safety costs more, so they pass along the price.

oooops, Facebook stored millions of user account information in plain text with no security and no privacy.

We have passed a milestone where the streaming video services have surpassed the cable TV services worldwide.

On second thought...Facebook admits that earlier reports of Cambridge Analytica weren't quite correct and that they knew of this sooner than reported. Lesson: tell the whole story the first time.

Catch: a new company that packages employee benefits for freelance workers.

Tesla is suing former employees for violating intellectual property.

Looking for new markets, Walmart considers creating its own video game streaming service.

Saturday 23 March 2019

Someone actually does a study to prove that AT&T's "5GE network" is just bologna. Why did AT&T do this? Who thought this was a good idea?

MIT researchers claim to have found a technique that drastically reduces the resources needed to train a deep learning neural network. This will—the claim continues—democratize AI. Not sure what that means, but they intend to convey warm and fuzzy goodness.

Twitter is now giving us tweets from persons we do not follow. These suggestions are to broaden our interest (and increase ad revenue). What could possibly go wrong? (much)

GoFundMe moves into the realm of deciding right and wrong and banning the wrong. This is otherwise known as malevolent censorship.

oooops, our Federal Emergency Management Agency exposes the private information of a few million disaster survivors. And as is often the case, after a disaster you must decide if you will go it on your own or thrown yourselves into the hands of ... FEMA.

"Centralized control is fabulous until it isn’t."—Seth Godin

More murk regarding our Dept of Defense's impending cloud computing mega-contract. It will be ugly. It will be mired in courts for years. And we know who will pay all the costs—us the taxpayers.

Google. Free services. Once again we remind ourselves that there is no free lunch.

News Flash (not): insiders pose greater security risks than any hackers. Do you hire people you trust? Do you treat your employees as if you trust them?

Sunday 24 March 2019

Microsoft shows a few glimpses of its remade Edge browser.

Rankings of programming languages by popular use. JavaScript, Java, and Python are up there as expected. PowerShell? Really? How did...

Putting a leather cover on a laptop computer. RED LIGHTS SHOULD FLASH! Leather is a temperature insulator. Computers need temperature conductors to shed the heat.

And now we can use our phones to charge our other devices. But that would drain the battery... some smart person must have a use for this type of thing.

Nvidia's ray tracing finally appears in a video game.

And lest we forget, our special counsel has delivered a report to our Attorney General about Russians and political campaigns and elections in which no doubt we will learn that the Russians had an interest in the US Presidential election. I wonder if any other foregin governments had any interest in the outcome? (note, being sarcastic in that last question) I am sure there are enough adjectives and adverbs in the report so that all sides can claim victory and defeat and call for more investigations.

The "secret" to writing for major magazines: persistence.

Do not "throw away" your writing. "Put away" some things for now. Come back to them later, maybe.

Some of the benefits of going to a writers' meeting.

The art of "unplugging" (I guess we have to give it a name) and how that affects writers. It takes time to type the words, and it is difficult to do this while...excuse me my phone buzzed, let me...

 Everyone's resources are limited. To write requires spending or sacrificing some of these.

Old note...Perhaps you’ve heard the old publishing proverb: The first page sells the book; the last page sells the next book.