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: 27 January - 2 February, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Kobe Bryant dies in a helicopter crash at 41
• The iPad turns 10 years old
• Atari to open gaming themed hotels
• And the coronavirus spreads
• Maybe news of the coronavirus spreads more than the virus itself

Monday 27 January 2020

This is complicated, but important. Persons challenge the constitutionality of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA). The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has upheld the challenge. More legal hearings to come.

I'll just quote from this post: "BlueDot uses an AI-driven algorithm that scours foreign-language news reports, animal and plant disease networks, and official proclamations to give its clients advance warning to avoid danger zones like Wuhan."

340 Amazon employees risk their jobs by protesting their employer's environmental efforts. Don't be surprised if one by one, slowly, they all lose their jobs.

Activision Blizzard creates an eSports league for Call of Duty. Twelve teams each paid $25million franchise fees. The NFL, NBA, MLB, et al take note.

Google is removing some of last week's changes that made ads look like everything else.

Somehow, with the cold war over, the Doomsday Clock moves closer to midnight. If you are young(er), you should look up the Doomsday Clock on Wikipedia.

Tuesday 28 January 2020

Our FCC opens the 3.5GHz band for OnGo and other mobile services.

The Chinese governors attempt to keep their subjects quiet about life where 35million people are under house arrest. The Internet and other communications services are too wide to block.

The iPad is ten years old. It hasn't replaced the PC (sales peaked seven years ago), but it has altered the market.

GM will spend $2.2Billion to remodel a Detroit factory for building electric and autonomous vehicles.

Atari moves into the hotel business with "game themed" hotels. If you love gaming, you will vacation there.

Hillary Clinton (former or maybe still reigning) world's smartest person, explains how Facebook and Zuckerburg elected Donald Trump (not her as rightly should have been) in 2016 and will do so again in 2020. Perhaps she is correct, then again maybe not.

Jeff Bezos hosts a party of the Alfalfa Club. This is where the really rich and famous meet. And demonstrate that they are NOT like the rest of us.

Believe it or not...more Americans still go to the library than to the movies. Some publicly funded buildings are worth the effort and cost.

The Linux 5.5 kernel has been released.

Running Linux on one of HP's best laptop computers. It works.

Wednesday 29 January 2020

Thursday 30 January 2020

California state employees (Judges) rule that Apple and Broadcomm owe $1Billion to California state employees (Cal Tech). Any conflict of interest here?

Apple pulls one of its recent acqui-hires (Xnor.AI) out of the DoD Project Maven.

Samsung's profits dropped last quarter. They are still quite profitable though.

Nintendo has sold 52.5Million Switch units, and that passes all other consoles in their history.

Cryptocurrency hacking: the number of attachs is up, but the amount of money stolen is down.

Canada's policies and politics are attracting new tech talent—many leaving the US using it as only a way station for education.

Google claims that its new AI-powered chatbot—named Meena—is the world's best ever.

Another human-safety use of robotics: delivering food and other essentials to persons quarantined by illness.

This is a high-resolution (highest ever) image of the surface of the sun.

All the big tech companies are moving persons away from Wuhan, China and halting business travel in the region.

SpaceX launches another group of StarLink satellites and lands the launcher for reuse

Friday 31 January 2020

Amazon has a good financial quarter.

Amazon claims 150Million Prime members. I guess they need a new name as there is nothing special if there are 150million others in the program.

Google shows a number of its AI projects. Some welcome these advances while others are afraid of them and are calling for regulation. Next thing to do is ban the FFT.

Baby Yoda figures go on sale for $350. This is life-sized and good enough to use in your own movie.

IBM replaces its CEO. Arvind Krishna: remember that name. He is coming from the Cloud business to head the corporation.

AT&T's DirecTV continues to lose subscribers

Saturday 1 February 2020

After a week or so of posturing, it appears the great impeachment of 2020 comes to an end. Members of Congress of both parties are amply illustrating that they are members of both parties.

Researchers in AI have made big strides the last ten years in understanding human text and speech. Still, the mistakes show how it really doesn't work as well as a six year old child.

Let's have another round at throwing billion$$$ at rural broadband access. This time the Democrats are saying it won't work. Where were the Democrats when the prior President did the same and failed.

The worldwide market for tablet computers continue to decline with the notable exceptions of Apple and Lenovo who had good growth.

One second thought...maybe planting a trillion trees is a bad idea. Maybe it is a good idea but there are "gooder" ideas out there. Sigh. We rush to conclusions.

Google and Facebook to our rescue to tells us the truth and nothing but the truth about the coronavirus. Good intentions, let's see the results.

Our current President increases a ban on travel into the US. Just trying to keep an infectious disease out. Good intentions, let's see the results.

There seems to be a trick to being successful but not too successful. See, e.g., Mark Zuckerburg. I guess he was too successful when he started his little social media company.

In China, where there is no end to surveillance, the governors are using drones to note the subjects who are not wearing masks and "scold" them appropriately.

The current administration puts a ban on permanent (not tourist, medical, and other temporary) immigration from Nigeria.

With the almost-universal use of https (not just http), using public WiFi hotspots is far more secure than ten years ago.

At CIA headquarters, there is a sculpture with an encrypted message. Government employees—at taxpayers' expense—have wasted countless hours at billion$$$ trying to figure it out. Stop the nonsense already.

Sunday 2 February 2020

Microsoft's value rises after a good financial quarter. The driver is (what else?) Azure cloud computing.

How to make a living doing stunts in the year 2020. Well, at least you can get money from investors, so you maybe make a living.

Techniques developed in machine learning now enable researchers to create medicines much faster. It's a simple matter of having computing power at low cost.

Twitter bans a noteworthy finance blog for misinformation about the coronavirus. When did we appoint Twitter et al. as purveyors of truth?

Due to the coronavirus, Apple basically closes all of its business in China. I suppose there is much commentary to provide on all this. Rumors—that's what we now call it when it comes from the Washington Post, we call it misinformation when it comes from elsewhere—are that the Chinese governors stopped early information about the situation. Those actions amplified the effects of the virus. Human suffering didn't garner the attention of the governors. Perhaps a slow down in commerce will.

As the cost of technology plummets,  jobs that involve tech are moving across the fruited plain where the cost of living is much lower than Silicon Valley and the I-95 megalopolis formerly known as the east coast.

A CMU study claims that there is no large gap in programmer productivity. We're all about the same, so the best thing to do is raise the lower-performing programmers and manage the work better. As the diet commercials say, "Individual results may vary."

Dire predictions for the future of IBM: there is no future for IBM. The name will disappear just like the names of many IT companies did.

One method of moving into a new genre or non-fiction area of writing.

California's governors enacted a law to make Uber drivers employees instead of freelancers. ooops, as usual, governors reach beyond their limits and restrict other freelancers, like writers.