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: 26 August-1 September, 2019

Summary of this week:

• Big money for eSports stars
• Andrew Luck retires from football at 29 due to injuries
• Google-Dell produce business-level Chromebooks
• Nvidia-VMware produce more GPUs in the virtual space
• Russia-China produce better spying on their own subjects
• Dell, GD, Microsoft win big on a DoD software contract

Monday 26 August 2019

eSports get real (money): yet another example of eSports participants winning more than the Masters and Wimbledon champions. A cool $3Million.

Take note of Andrew Luck retiring from football at 29 because of constant pain from injuries. If you are worth $20million, life should be fun, not pain filled. And look how you can make big bucks playing eSports.

Where the money is: Chinese hackers are going after healthcare data and the gazillion$$$ embedded in it. Aren't national electronic health databases great?

Confusing outcome with performance. Better performance tilts towards better outcome, but the two are often not correlated.

The experiences of one Uber/Lyft driver. The #1 fallacy is that this person refers to this as a "job." It isn't.

There is a giant chunk of pumice floating in the Pacific Ocean. It was created by an underwater volcano. The system is complex—more complex than we can understand, yet we think we can "fix" it.

Disney has plans for a two-day-long immersive "ride" with a Star Wars theme. People will become restless (bored) and want to get off after an hour or so.

Tuesday 27 August 2019

Nvidia nad VMware partner to bring more virtualized (what a word) graphics processors to the virtualized computing world. I think this means rent instead of buy.

France retreats a step or two on taxing successful US companies. Some new Internet taxing plan is forthcoming.

The BBC is preparing a speech-understanding system for Brit-English as opposed to Amer-English. There are significant differences.

Plant-based meat substitutes come to KFC. These are soybean patties. They aren't vegetarian. They aren't low-calorie. They are new American versions of centuries old Chinese meat without bones or tofu. They actually use more land and resources to produce than meat. What are we doing?

Bell moves forward with testing of its drone that will deliver 70-lb payloads of cargo. This will be good for disaster recovery efforts.

Netflix just mailed DVD number 5 Billion (with a B). DVDs are still here and will be for quite a while.

Oracle takes legal action to re-enter our Dept of Defense's cloud computing contract (JEDI).

A group of highly successful American companies are criticizing a group of super highly successful American companies for uh, er, ... being more successful than they are, I think.

Felix "PewDiePie" Kjellberg has reached 100 million subscribers on YouTube. The definition of success has changed. This is a bigger audience than Lucy and Desi.

Somewhere at sometime we all went in the wrong direction when it comes to hiring and training law enforcement officers. It is a problem that we all caused and own.

If we redefine Agile Development as watch, learn, and improve, then we have been doing it since we moved from rock to bronze to steel.

The Russians and Chinese partner to spy on the Russian subjects as part of a coming "census." The Chinese can teach everyone a few things about controlling their subjects.

Wednesday 28 August 2019

Microsoft to hold a big event in early October with new hardware coming.

What are we doing at US airports in that space where you aren't yet in the US?

Are tech companies really tracking us as much as claimed or is it just hype explained away by how communication protocols work?

Not everything at Google works in the marketplace. Google Hire is closing next year.

Canon releases two cameras using their new 32.5MegaPixel sensor.

Must-see video: SpaceX Starhopper completes a hover test.

People line up around the store as KFC sells out their plant-based fried chicken in five hours.

Free speech can be annoying and downright insulting. Adults choose their listening habits. YouTube announces it will go with Free Speech.

As Peloton heads toward IPO, it reveals it is $500Million in debt. Super-charged online exercise is still exercise.

The College Board decides not to include "adversity scores" in SAT scores.

Bernie Sanders, never shy to use others' money for his agenda, wants to tax Silicon Valley to save real journalism (the kind that agrees with him).

How to introduce random places and events into our lives and experience someone else's reality. I curious idea.

Thursday 29 August 2019

Our government doesn't want private enterprise to finish a use a new undersea cable that runs from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. Who runs the world? States or companies.

News Flash (not): Retailers want us to buy their own products before buying someone else's products. Sears, Penneys, et al have always done this. Somehow it is bad for Amazon to do it.

Sexual assault in the video game industry. This is more than boys being boys. It is criminal.

Apple is still dependent on factories in China to bring us the best products. And then we have a trade war, and then...

Google moves some phone production from China to Vietnam.

Doing it backwards or something: big big celebrities start their own vlogs.

Speculating on Disney futures: buy three years in advance of Disney+ for only $4 a month. Will the service still exist in three years?

The world's largest conference for women in tech drops Palantir as a sponsor. Did anyone discuss this with the many women who work for Palantir in tech jobs?

What is a week without a TSA story. This week we ban Star Wars coke bottles because they look like bombs. Given the photo, a nerfball also looks like a bomb as does any sphere.

Friday 30 August 2019

Dell has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

How to deal with groups and industries you'd rather not see: buy them and close them. I can't believe this doesn't happen more often as it is a simple solution for rich people. Don't like a gun maker? Buy the company and close it. Don't like a newspaper? Buy it and close it. Don't want a polluting factory near you? Buy the land so they can't.

And the opposite: don't like a product of any kind? Organize a campaign to have thousands of one-star reviews tell everyone it is bad.

Sony celebrates 40 years of the Walkman and portable stereo music. I still have a 1981 model.

One small but big step forward: MIT researchers build a robot the size and shape of a thread to slide through the brain and remove blood clots.

Dell and General Dynamics are awarded a $7.6Billion cloud software contract from our Dept of Defense. Microsoft is also a big winner in this as Office 365 is a major part of it.

Former FBI Director James Comey was found to have violated FBI policies concerning retaining and releasing information, but hey, if you are a special person these things won't send you to jail.

Hundreds of dentist offices in the US are being held for ransom this week. Don't connect it to the Internet.

Saturday 31 August 2019

We have Hurricane Dorian heading for the Atlantic coast of Florida. It is scheduled to arrive late Monday or early Tuesday.

The makers of self-driving cars—which we have yet to actually self-drive—want our regulators to remove the requirement for a steering wheel. There is much that can be done with the passenger compartment. See, e.g., a train.

In California, the Department of Consumer Affairs and the Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education is after the Lambda School—a well-backed coding bootcamp—for violations of this and that and some other things.

A growing number of international airlines are banning MacBook Pro portable computers in checked luggage. I guess carry on is okay?

Google will pay a $150Million fine for YouTube and privacy violations. Of course the $$$ "goes to the Treasury" and no one will ever see a penny of it.

Facebook and MIT are working on a system that will learn from persons who are playing simulations (games). They have chosen Minecraft as a early experiment.

This is a pleasant history of the UNIX operating system—now 50 years old. UNIX led to Android, iOS, MacOs, Linux, and a few other things (too many to name). Great photo of a PDP-11.

Sunday 1 September 2019

The costs of same-day and next-day delivery of everything to all of us. It isn't free. Traffic congestion and serious and fatal accidents due to long hours on the road. A network of subcontractors keeps the big companies out of court. Dominoes pizza and others escaped liability a generation ago by having delivery drivers be subcontractors instead of employees. Amazon and others learned the lesson.

Researchers recently uncovered hundreds of websites that were able to hack into iPhones. Now we learn that the government of China was behind most of them with the intended victims being the Uyghur subjects of western China.

How volunteers keep a college football video game going years after EA Sports stopped producing it.

What to do with all that cardboard.

The low-risk joy of avoiding the (b)leading edge of technology.

Forward to the past: from Agile to the Studio Model. This model was described over a generation ago. Nice to hear from it again, although this writer sort of claims to invent it.

And now we have a camera with a 64MegaPixel sensor with a smartphone attached to it.

An attempt to show a best-selling novel in an infographic. They got it wrong. Step 1: write a book. Step 2: convince a million people to buy it. The End.

Some thoughts on having a company sponsor your non-fiction book. Write on how MS Word helps software engineering. Contact MS marketing with the idea.

Writing can be draining, leaving one limp and drenched in perspiration. Take breaks. Walk away from the agony.

Readability and those readability scales. Write well and write so that people enjoy what they are reading.

Writing the romance novel. Lots of money there and lots of satisfaction as well.