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: 6-12 May, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Hamas launches cyber strike, Israel launches air strike
• Microsoft has built a full online development environment (ODE not IDE??)
• Linux kernel coming to Windows 10
• Google has a big event: good smartphones and other things

Monday 6 May 2019

Our Air Force shoots down some missiles with a laser. I have read these reports for several decades now. Perhaps one day...

VW makes an electric vehicle with everything stripped away so students can see how it works.

Logistics: Amazon has the infrastructure to ship to 72% of the US in one day. Seems like our government could learn a thing or two about how to do this in disaster response.

Real news that isn't news: Facebook has hundreds of persons worldwide looking at everyone's posts and labeling them to help improve the automated scanning and labeling that Facebook is doing. Of course someone is looking at our "private" messages.

Strike: Wednesday the 8th will be a bad day to call for Uber or Lyft.

A look at the Open Compute Project. Founded by Facebook, the goal is let Facebook and others by less expensive components for their data centers.

News Flash (not): battery life on smartphones isn't as good as advertised.

Facebook attempts to predict suicide based on posts. What could possible go wrong?

Once again, someone discovers that smaller, simpler programming languages have fewer problems. The Go language has a 50-page spec. Java's is 750 pages. Anyone remember Kernighan and Ritchie's book on C? Pretty short.

Tuesday 7 May 2019

Peering over the fence at evil: mothers in Mexico use drones to find the graves of the casualties of the drug wars.

An old newspaper studies and concludes that letting all these young social media companies delve into news is hurting democracy. Freedom of speech is good if newspaper do it, but the rest of us need to quiet down a bit.

Have billion$$$ in profits and want to keep growing? Do what Apple does: acqui-hire talent.

Scatter your developers and connect them all online...Microsoft previews Video Studio Online and integrates it with other online tools.

Amazon—the warehouse folks, not the engineering IT folks—fires seven pregnant employees. Let Bezos talk himself out of this one.

Coming from Microsoft real soon new...Ideas: some type of aid for Microsoft Word Online that will suggest ways to improve what we are writing.

Also coming from Microsoft real soon new...a full Linux kernel inside Windows 10.

News Flash (not): Amazon's Alexa has been listening and recording more of our home conversations that Amazon has admitted.

Wednesday 8 May 2019

Google has a big event. Here is one summary.

MIT researchers, working with doctors, have a new technique to detect breast cancer five years in advance.

Where the money is...thieves steal $40Million in BitCoins from someone who is supposed to be keeping BitCoins safe.

Google shows a "smart display" (what is that?) with a camera and all goodness and some privacy ensured as well.

Google's new Pixel camera has high value at a lower price. I hope they take over the market and show those other companies that $1,000 phones were a bad idea.

For the deaf, hard of hearing, and all of us in noisy places...Google has a Live Caption feature on Android that shows captions for just about anything.

News Flash (not): censorship in Europe is censorship. Some persons are discovering that censorship hurts freedom of speech. Will wonders never cease? And these are supposedly adults.

Another News Flash (not): closed in rooms with lots of people—see, e.g., any meeting you are forced to attend—are stuffy, lack oxygen, put people to sleep, and cause thinking to cease.

Big City Life: Uber and Lyft drivers won't be driving today.

Thursday 9 May 2019

Friday 10 May 2019

Jeff Bezos gives a show and tell of his planned lunar lander.

All this ride sharing was supposed to reduce traffic. The opposite has occurred.

Singapore passes a law that...well, it's just plain censorship.

The woes of the celebrity CEO and how their companies fall apart.

Google, that search company, has 15million music subscribers. The definition of success has changed.

Uber reveals that it has 60,000 pending driver arbitration suits pending.

Crime is falling but fear is rising. This is a bad combination for us all.

Saturday 11 May 2019

Trouble looms for Google in India as an anti-trust investigation begins.

Our Dept of Justice indicts a Chinese hacking group. Of course no one will be arrested or tried or anything. I guess there is some good that comes from spending all this taxpayers' money on these investigations.

Uber goes public. It's stock price fell 7%. It sort of lost $45Billion in one day. It is all on paper, but that is an ugly piece of paper.

Henceforth, all Chromebooks come with a Linux terminal window. Just like that—Linux on that $200 computer. Oooh, have to try it.

Windows 10 is now running on 825Million systems. Of course Windows 7 is out there on hundreds of millions as well.

The age of the "Super App" hits India. See, e.g., Facebook.

The ultimate in luxury or waste (take your pick): Louis Vuitton handbags that have flexible computer screens on them.

Some folks at MIT discover that most neural networks have 10 or 100 times more neurons and layers than necessary. We forgot the phrase "good enough for a close approximation."

The end of the four-year college degree is approaching. Want to be a computer programmer. Learn from a book or online. Do it. Want to party and have lots of friends? Go to college.

Amazon buys PillPack. Here come the prescription drug price wars.

Sunday 12 May 2019

Here come the 16TeraByte disk drives from Seagate.

Our Dept of Energy is buying the first exaFlop super-duper-computer from AMD and Cray.

To reduce collateral damage...Hellfire missiles are now going to kinetic energy only. An expensive bullet with no explosives.

Will wonders never cease? Microsoft is becoming an open-source software company.

Apple opens the Apple Carnegie Library in Washington D.C. This was a big charitable work for the District. Locals will chuckle that Tim Cook lowered himself so much as to appear with D.C.'s mayor.

A closer look at Google's new, lower-priced Pixel phones.

Unintended consequences: take down videos and images that bad guys post and you remove evidence and confessions of crime. Yes, bad guys often incriminate themselves online. These automatic censors are keeping the bad guys on the streets.

More unintended consequences: Amazon removes ads that have "religious content." It was all a mistake that is being corrected, but censorship has these types of "mistakes."

A look at the little-known data-hunting community. People used to sit at railroad tracks and watch the trains pass. Now...

Good ideas on what to do with all the blog posts I have written and send them to persons directly.

This is a much-better-than-usual piece on fear and writing.

A look at the character sheet.

A few lessons on life and writing or writing and life. Can they two be separated?

The physical typewriter is making a comeback. There is a quick guide. The hard part is finding ribbons, i.e., the part that puts the black on the page.