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: 9-15 March, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Coronavirus still dominates the tech and other news—society panics
• Bill Gates leaves Microsoft's board
• All schools close in the US
• SxSW cancels
• People learn that working and conferencing remotely doesn't work as well as hoped
• The NBA suspends its season
• NCAA basketball tournaments to be played with no fans
• Then NCAA cancels everything
• AWS announces Bottlerocket OS that helps with containers

Monday 9 March 2020

It appears that processors from AMD share one trait with their competitors from Intel: they have security flaws that are difficult to correct.

"Let's all work remotely and stop you-know-what." Easier written than done.

A fitness app put a person near the scene of a crime. Said person became a suspect with warrants to Google for his information. What could possibly go wrong with all this tracking and data and such? Sure, the person won't be wrongly convicted of a crime (this time), but his life will be a mess for months, and he may have to pay big legal bills for nothing.

Given we are scared to death of any human touch, person-less delivery of everything is booming.

It appears that we are having a real pandemic...with early onset dementia.

Wikipedia is still trusted. It takes no ad money and has no stockholders. That is what separates it from all the social media companies.

Tuesday 10 March 2020

More and more companies join the parade of "stay home, don't work from the workplace."

SxSW lays off a third of its year-round employees. It will be difficult to calculate the economic impact to Austin, Texas of cancelling SxSW. The money is staying in someone's pockets.

Amazon "wins" in an early round of its protest of our Dept of Defense's award of cloud computing to Microsoft. There will be many rounds and many winners and losers.

Billion$$$ have been "lost" on paper in the last week due to you-know-what.

This is hard to fathom, but Apple has done extensive testing and now says it is okay to use disinfectant  wipes on Apple keyboards.

High school students, who arguably are the smartest and most creative persons on the planet, figured out how to post negative reviews of distance learning apps so that schools wouldn't use them and they wouldn't have to do homework when their schools are closed.

New terms for an old man: cuddle party, social distancing, organized intimacy. How did all this appear on a technology news site?

Wednesday 11 March 2020

Strong rumors that Google will update its Chromecast real soon now.

VMWare moves towards incorporating containers. This is an attempt to avoid being clobbered by containers.

Security researchers show once again that medical devices (x-ray machines, etc.) are not secure and are easy to hack.

As more women are earning MBAs, the business school has become the hot dating place.

Some actual data—I know that is strange in today's world—confirms that 14 days of isolation makes sense for you-know-what.

Firefox 74 is released.

Apple, which has always been in schools first, has a contract to teach West Virginia teachers how to teach the Swift programming language on Apple devices.

IBM releases much of its Debater AI technology for natural language processing.

Thursday 12 March 2020

The NBA has suspended its games while it tries to figure out what to do with you-know-what. Let's just all take a vacation. Wait, who'll cook for us? Who'll deliver the food? Who'll keep the lights on? I guess we can't all suspend life. Well, us rich folks can.

Advertising fraud and such is huge business on the Internet. We used to call it false advertising, and stores did it all the time to bring you in and buy something. People learned to recognize and avoid it.

Microsoft gathers engineers and others from different companies to create an AI ethics checklist.

The governors in the UK are spending $1billion on an xARPA to fund research. Better late than never.

AWS announces the Bottlerocket OS that makes running containers easier.

Our President bans travel from most of Europe for non-US citizens.

Seth Godin has lots of good advice about working from home, e.g., "With all the time you save by not going to meetings and not commuting, you can run with the opportunity. Turn the freedom into responsibility instead of fearing or hoping for authority."

Our President asked Google, Apple, et al. to help spread info about coronavirus. Note how the world changed. At one time, CBS, NBC, ABC, Walter Cronkite, Johnny Carson would have been asked.

Google employees work from home, and no one cooks them free meals. There were big benefits to going to the office when you worked with plutocrats.

Friday 13 March 2020

It will be difficult to find any college that is having classes in person.

Panic in the streets. This is a bad plot to a bad movie.

In Italy, where everyone is locked in their homes, Internet use explodes as adults and kids are playing games.

Someone might as well write it...with all this locking ourselves in our homes, look out for a baby boom around Christmas.

Strong rumors that Apple will have some new laptop computers with better keyboards real soon now.

Slack has a good financial quarter, but its stock price, like that of everyone's stock price, drops.

Apple reopens all its stores in China. Perhaps one day the US will reopen, but we will close first.

Singapore handles you-know-what well. It is only one city, so that helps, and they are fastidious when it comes to cleanliness.

The polygraph, a.k.a., the lie detector doesn't work well. Now we are attempting to use machine learning and other sensors to detect lies. Those attempts haven't worked well either.

Disneyland and Disney World close for the rest of March.

AT&T and Comcast are giving customers a little more bandwidth and such as persons are staying home.

Russian trolls and election meddlers are leaving their St Petersburg IP addresses and moving in the West Africa.

Google's G Suite now has 2 Billion (with a B) monthly active users. The definition of success has changed.

Saturday 14 March 2020

Several sites I have visited are advocating reading while locked in our homes. These all involve ordering books and having someone deliver them. Instead, go to gutenberg.org and download older books and read them to your kids. Of course, the Bible, a.k.a., the Holy Bible is online good to read.

I like Seth Godin's comments on insight, intuition, and real science.

Since everyone is staying home anyways...Disney+ will stream "Frozen 2" on Sunday, three months early.

Bill Gates resigns from the board at Microsoft. Except for his stock ($$$), Gates is now completely separate from his old company.

Facebook is telling its employees to work from home, but requiring its contractors to show up in the office.

Apple will attempt to holds it WWDC in June online.

Google is building a website that will have information and forms for taking a coronavirus test. Our current President and Google worked together on this one.

Lest we forget, when Mr. Obama was President, we had a pandemic where several thousand Americans died. We did not have all these closings and media reports. Odd?

Zoom gives schools free accounts to its video conference tools. If your school uses Blackboard, which most do, they already have video conference tools.

The world turns upside down: Apple opens its retail stores in China and closes them everywhere else.

The world turns upside down: the Chinese are sending US aid in the form of testing kits and masks.

The governors in San Francisco have banned gathers of more than 100 persons. Of course this is blatantly unconstitutional (something in Bill of Rights about Assembly and Religion and such).

Our Dept of Defense "wishes to re-evaluate its decision to award the Pentagon's multibillion-dollar cloud contract with Microsoft."

Always on the leading edge of something or other, our TSA now lets us carry 12 oz of hand sanitizer on the plane instead of the old 3.4 oz.

Sunday 15 March 2020

The governors of Santa Clara County, a.k.a., Silicon Valley cancel all mass gatherings (1,000 persons). WWDC could go on with 900 persons, but...

Stronger rumors that Apple is about to change its laptop computer line. This is the don't-buy-now warning.

Amazing story: the provide information in places where information is censored, persons built a library in Minecraft where persons can get information. Minecraft isn't censored.

I just learned a new word: Coronapocalypse.

Who is hurt most by you-know-what? The poor. fill-in-the-blank from home only works if you have. The "have nots" are shut out.

If you want to stream live on YouTube, this person has published a guide on how to do it. Thank you.

Joe Biden attempted to hold an online town hall. Good idea, but ideas don't implement themselves. Some persons have trouble understanding the difference.

Microsoft advances its Windows Subsystem for Linux 2.

Some positive ideas on what to do during the current situation. Share with those who need.

Microsoft gives a little with Minecraft Education accounts.

How to use bleach to kill you-know-what.

Some writers have habits that appear peculiar to others. They are constantly finding and processing ideas.

Writing involves many things other than writing words on the computer or paper. Just because you are not writing words today does that mean that you are not writing today.