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: 30 December 2019-5 January 2020

Summary of this week:

• Amazon opens a homeless shelter in its office in Seattle
• Russia claims a hypersonic missile
• Several announcements come out a little before next week's CES
• LG shows 8K TVs
• Dell has laptops with 5G
• The US kills the top general in Iran, what happens next?

Monday 30 December 2019

Facebook and Twitter succeeded wildly in the last decade. Did success cause failure or more success? The definitions keep changing.

Startup companies continue to succeed beyond all expectations in Israel where the per capita measures are the world's best.

ooooops. Beware those Internet of Things devices as another security hole leaks data on 2.4million persons.

We aren't good at predicting the future. It is almost 2020, and this post lists all the predictions of experts that were just plain wrong.

Russia claims to have an operational hypersonic missile.

Microsoft pushes hard into the education market with lessons embedded in Minecraft.

Open-source software has become the norm.

Tuesday 31 December 2019

We are destroying our own lives at a younger age with social media. There are no age limits, no licenses required for a world-wide audience and a permanent record.

The business of spying in an age of data leaks and all such things. The nation states are trailing technical and social change (as usual).

Uber and Postmates sue the state of California over the "gig worker" law.

Microsoft, with a court order in hand, takes down 50 domains run by a North Korean hacking group.

Want a luxury airplane and have a cool $400million? Buy a 747 and pimp your ride.

NASA shows its new Mars rover. Wow! Now all NASA has to do is put it and a few persons on Mars. That is asking a lot for a government agency that cannot put a person into space.

The regulators in Brazil fine a successful American company $1.6Million. Seems like while they were doing this they would have come up with a much bigger number.

Nvidia pushes the envelope in a system-on-a-chip for the automotive market.

Wednesday 1 January 2020

Thursday 2 January 2020

One informed review of the Terrible Tens, i.e, the past decade. Machine Learning replaced Big Data. The rich got richer. Half the world's poor became middle class. The middle class stagnated. And we have Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook.

Income Tax season is upon us. If we aren't too wealthy, we can file taxes for free. Let's consider that a while. We have to pay so we can pay.

In the San Francisco area, thousands of Google contractors have joined unions. Let's see how long they have jobs.

In China, the masses have moved from the small farm to the big city. China now has 130 cities with at least a million residents.

In India, the richest person there is now battling Amazon and Walmart in the world's second largest retail market.

 Strong Rumors: CES is coming, and one of the hot areas should be in gaming computing.

Friday 3 January 2020

Dell shows a few portable computers with 5G communications built in.

Google updates its edge computing Tensor Processing Units.

Where the money is: ransomware was a lucrative business in the US in 2019.

A little ahead of CES, LG shows new 8K televisors. No prices yet, but great screens.

This story has been everywhere for a week, so it must be important. Google's AI can spot cancer in images better than most persons most of the time. The surprise to me is that this tech was available years ago.

Unintended consequences: the gig worker law in California was to affect 70,000 independent truck drivers. A judge intervenes.

The large number of everything in China bodes ill for the rest of us. Disease killed 40% of the pigs in China last year. That was 25% of the pigs in the world.

Now that copyright law has settled for a while, works from 1924 are in the public domain. "Rhapsody in Blue" is one of the better known.

Saturday 4 January 2020

Kohler (they make faucets and showerheads) teams with Amazon to bring Alexa into the shower. Do we want this?

Samsung shows super duper extra mongo wide curved monitors for playing games and reading email or tweets or something that we can get by with a lot less. But this is extravagent F U N.

Not to be completely outdone by Samsung, Lenovo brings big curved monitors to us at CES.

Lenovo introduces a new all-in-one PC.

NEC laptop computers return to the US with the LaVie line of extra-thin and extra-light machines. Very high style.

Mike Bloomberg runs for president the old-fashioned way—spend more money than everyone else, lots more of it.

The Verge looks back at what happened to the big announcements from last year's CES. Some are actually products now while others were just eye candy at a show.

Governors adapt to changes. Taxes are certain. The incentives to go electric will disappear while taxes on electric this and that will appear and rise.

Fry's closes its Palo Alto store after 30 years. Is this is the start of the end?

Sunday 5 January 2020

Are Chrome OS and the Chromebook dead? Ten years after introduction, they are big in the US education market, but...

We have a flood of old Cambridge Analytica documents and cries that we didn't pay enough attention and homage to some persons. Connect everything to the Internet and be shocked that someone will use everything. We reap what we sow or something like that.

Mob rule, large-scale franchises, and the nanny state. Want attention? Prod someone at McStarA to insult you and there you have it.

Games? Fortnite had $1.8Billion in sales in 2019. That is not a game. The definition of success has changed.

Mark the calendar for February 11th: Samsung will have a big smartphone event.

Apple dominated the most recent holiday smartphone marketplace.

This is one of the better posts I have read on how to write and improve writing. There is much reading (content of the writer's choice), and that is an important part.

How one writer filled ten journals, worked with them for three years, and had a novel.

The route of serial writing that becomes a novel. This is what Dickens did. It is not common today, but it still happens.