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: 10-16 February, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Slack wins a big, big IBM contract
• Sanders wins the New Hampshire primary (they managed to count the votes)
• The coronavirus is chasing people away from MWC
• UPDATE: MWC is CANCELLED Unprecedented
• A day later, Amazon cancels a trade show it was holding in San Francisco

Monday 10 February 2020

Online dating is mainstream with over 10% of us claiming it as the source of our long-term relationships.

Netflix won its first Oscar after a big-budget lobbying campaign among academy members.

Tuesday 11 February 2020

China's TCL dominates the US television market. Now it wants to market inexpensive smartphones.

It seems that the Republicans are winning some type of tech war over the Democrats. What happened to the party of Obama—the person elected with better use of tech?

Daimler (Mercedes) readies to layoff 15,000 people as it moves to electric cars. I guess all these car companies know what they are doing by abandoning the internal combustion engine now that they have become good at making it.

The coronavirus is costing Apple billion$$$ with closed factories and such in China. It may be time to think about where you have factories.

Bill Gates orders a $650million yacht. It runs on hydrogen fuel. I suppose you need to do something with your money.

It is possible that America will regain the ability to put a person into space in May via SpaceX.

An example of how the software world has been gobbled up by its own terms of service and worries about everything.

Oscar winner criticizes Apple for its keyboards. Funny how a company that excels with user experience would forget the importance of the keyboard.

oooops, "A software flaw exposed the personal data of every eligible voter in Israel"

The latest budget proposal from our President includes hundreds of million$$$ increase in AI research.

Wednesday 12 February 2020

More top tech companies are not going to MWC because of the coronavirus.

Software is making better stock buy and sell recommendations than expert humans. Of course the software was written by humans. And, then again, the software can consider more data than the average person.

A major story in the history of intelligence and diplomacy as it is revealed that our CIA and the West Germans owned a Swiss company that sold encryption systems to governments worldwide.

Our Federal Trade Commission is investigating deeper into the successes of successful American tech companies. The trick is to succeed without succeeding too much.

KDE's Plasma version 5.18 is released.

 Andrew universal-basic-income Yang drops out of the presidential primaries.

Car and Driver shows that a $1,000 add on performs almost as well as all that fancy and expensive self-driving car technology.

NASA says it needs $35billion to send people to the moon. Double that and add 20% for G&A.

Mail deliveries to China via the USPS are slowing to a crawl.

Thursday 13 February 2020

A look into income sharing agreements (ISA) and online coding schools. It is unfortunate that many of these are the same old scam. Proceed with caution.

About a third of us use online streaming. About 11million of us mooch of a family member's plan (sharing their password withtout paying $$$).

Several of our Senators have proposed an Ethical Use of Artificial Intelligence Act. Perhaps they could propose an Ethical Use of Political Office Act first.

Neighborhood information-sharing apps help local law enforcement capture bad actors. Yes, of course they can be abused. Solution? Only hire ethical non-abusive persons into law enforcement. Not as easy done as written.

Where the money is: Google Health expands it number of employees and products.

A piece of software created by the Swedish physicist Sverker Johansson is "written" 24million entries into the Cebuano edition of Wikipedia.

Jeff Bezos spends a tenth of one percent of his wealth on a $165Million Beverly Hills house. Next to the Clampetts I assume.

We have crossed a threshold as Mac computers now have more malware than their MS Windows cousins.

WhatsApp now has 2billion (with a B) users. The definition of success keeps changing.

The Federal workforce may be over age and over educated. Or maybe not.

Friday 14 February 2020

Curtailed Internet viewing this morning.

Boston Dynamics will have one of its robo dog robots on a north sea oil rig performing dangerous inspections instead of humans.

Broadcom shows a new processor that handles the new WiFi 6E signals.

Researchers easily hack into a new mobile voting app that four states want to use.

In no surprise, a judge has blocked Microsoft from working on the Pentagon's new $10Billion cloud computing contract. The protests will drag on for several years to come.

Roku has a better-than-expected financial quarter and now has 37million active users.

Nvidia also has a good financial quarter.

The cybersecurity skills gap remains wide and is widening. It seems some of the employers would simply train their own competent employees. If they don't have competent employees, their problems are obvious and elsewhere.

Saturday 15 February 2020

Another international conference and trade show is cancelled due to coronavirus—Facebook cancels its Global Marketing Summit.

Facebook banned gun sales four years ago. Silly. The practice continues.

Printing 3D objects in a fraction of the time. A new technique is developed. Its application is still limited, but there is promise here.

Seth Godin's recommendations for workplace guidelines: "We agree that all of our interactions are off the record, unless we agree otherwise." I like this, as long as everyone knows this prior to interactions AND agrees with it.

"It’s a bit like giving every kid in the class a valentine’s day card. Some say that it cheapens the sentiment because it’s not about selection, it’s about inclusion. I think we’ve got plenty of selection already."—Seth Godin

The news about this crew ship docked in Japan must be incorrect. Lock everyone on the ship until all 2,000 passengers are ill? Must be disinformation.

Want a 583-inch television? Samsung has one.

Look at the night sky (if you are fortunate to have a view not occluded by man-made lights) and you see man-made lights. I guess this is progress.

Nvidia updates its low-end GPUs intended for the lower-priced laptop computers.

Someone notices that if a startup company is headed by a married couple instead of a single person or the traditional business partners, the company does better.

A laptop computer with 28TeraBytes of disk. At 1 MegaBitPerSecond download, it would take about 7 years to fill the disk. That assumes you do nothing else (like actually use the laptop) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Hmmm. I guess someone has a use for this.

Sunday 16 February 2020

The Ring doorbell cameras aren't solving many crimes. That is probably because people who can afford them live in neighborhoods with almost no crime.

In Pakistan, where there is no bill of rights, the government claims authority over what is "published" in social media. Free speech advocates need not apply.

Fighting malware attacks with AI-based security tools.

The Overwatch League is moving its postponed eSports contests to South Korea instead of waiting for China to ... well, recover from its coronavirus.

WeWork attempts to change the direction of a company run by an extravagant person to a real company. They are losing billion$$$ in most places around the country.

Who is in the photo? No one. The algorithm made up a face. "Progress" shown over the last five years.

Our Army has its own eSports team. This is all part of a recruiting push to fill vacant positions.

We have a $650Million retraction: it appears that Bill Gates didn't order one of those yachts.

"Do just one thing." Excellent advice when nothing seems to be moving or just or sane or anything other than awful. Great for writers and anyone who finds themselves working alone.

Scared an editor or reviewer will steal an idea. They might, but they can't steal your words. Make a copy. It is copyrighted.

How one person went from a novel in seven years of work to one year of work to two months of work. Practice, confidence, and lessons learned. AND writing quickly does not mean writing poorly or writing well, it just means writing quickly.

One researcher's bag of tools. Good stuff.