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: 13-19 April, 2020

Summary of this week:

• 5G towers still being burned in the UK
• Apple announces the new iPhone SE $399
• Contact tracing is all the rage this week
• 500,000 Zoom passwords bought for a penny each
• Google is designing its own processors
• Folding@Home passes ExoFLOP mark
• GitHub lowers prices, makes features no cost to users
• May 27th: NASA and SpaceX to send persons into space (we shall see)

Monday 13 April 2020

We have a new technical or medical term: contact tracing. If someone follows your phone around and follows the phones of everyone else as well, we can tell who has been close to whom. This will then give us more data than we can use. It has become a jobs program for tech companies that are already rich and can work from home and make more money. Hate to sound cynical, but in all this exercise, follow the money.

I like Seth Godin's comments on the move to remote work now when everyone is doing it instead of years ago when we had good reason to do it. Many don't want to be on the leading edge of anything.

In the UK, where they have more 5G towers, those towers continue to be burned. The first were about a theory linking virus to them. Now people are doing it for the fun of it. Never underestimate what some persons consider "fun."

Everyone needs or has a hobby. Here is a look at those who comb the Internet for old shows and store them at home on TeraByte disks. One day, perhaps, someone will want those historical things.

Tuesday 14 April 2020

Amazon is hiring 175,000 people. The US economy lost 16,000,000 jobs. The numbers don't balance.

In an election year (remember, this is an election year), Reddit will divulge those who buy political ads on its site.

Tracking global food production and shipping from overhead.

Someone is making ventilators that use the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero as the controller. One outcome of the Wuhan virus will be that we discover medical equipment doesn't have to cost as much as it does.

Google is donating $1million; its CEO is donating another $1million. These are good things, but inadequate. Perhaps, one day, we shall find the persons responsible for hurting tens of millions of persons and do something. I doubt it.

Success leading to failure. Zoom was everyone's darling for a couple of weeks. Some still use it. Researchers buy half a million passwords for a penny each. Yikes.

Much of the world's IT runs through India these days. Workers there still go to the office everyday. Interesting to see if an absence of social distancing led to mass deaths as that predicated the US shutdown.

Wednesday 15 April 2020

GitHub reduces prices and makes many features no cost to users.

YouTube releases the YouTube Video Builder that makes it easier to make and release short videos. It is aimed at small businesses.

Google announces TensorFlow Lite Model Maker. Yet another tool to make it easier and less expensive to build and deploy machine learning tools.

Folding@Home, a 20-year-old distributed computing project from Stanford's Chemistry Department, blows past the ExoFLOP mark with the Wuhan virus.

Ugliness in the Amazon shipping world. Workers complain publicly and are fired. Denials ensue. Here come the lawyers.

Considering the power of today's big 5 from Silicon Valley. At a time, CBS NBC ABC had this power. Before them, newspaper conglomerates had the power. Before them... Nothing new here folks. This too shall pass.

Fairfax County Virginia, one of the riches places in the world, stumbles through its first day of online school and has to delay its second day. Contrary to popular belief, their has been no school for a month. Tax refunds? Doubt it.

Big companies and universities have 3D printers. They are now making face shields. Prediction: in a month we will have a glut of things. Of course we can use them in the next crisis, but the next crisis will need something else.

More signs that politicians have destroyed the US economy (economy=the lives of millions of persons). Disney World lays off 43,000 persons. The shipment of personal computers collapses in the first quarter of 2020.

Let's face it: rich people spread a disease by traveling the world and attending parties and conferences. Then rich people flattened the curve as well as the lives of tens of millions of poor people. History will judge us. It won't be pretty.

Thursday 16 April 2020

Our Dept of Defense's Inspector General finds no undue influence in the $10Billion cloud computing contact award to Microsoft.

Apple announces the iPhone SE (2020 edition). At $399 it is the same size and shape as the iPhone 8 with much better components.

And, yes, the ability to have an iPhone at this price shows that Apple could have been selling all its iPhones at a lower price.

Speaking of over-priced items from Apple, how about $699 wheels for the Mac Pro?

A closer look at this year's Dell XPS 13. This is the standard upper-middle-class laptop computer. No one gets fired for buying a Dell.

This is how bored we are: great excitement for Disney's eight-part "the making of" Mandalorian.

It appears that everyone is checking their banks accounts online all the time to see if they have received a stimulus check. Bank websites are collapsing under the load.

Friday 17 April 2020

Unable to deliver orders (success leading to failure), Amazon is making it more difficult to buy stuff.

Facebook, having already cancelled its big F8 conference, cancels several smaller conferences.

Amazon improves its Alexa voice when reading longer pieces of text. It sounds a little less robotic.

ooops, a big security hole exposes ClearView AI software and data. Companies promise security to users, and then...

In praise of the value of the new iPhone SE. Simple formula: use the body of an older camera and put new processors in it so it can run current and future software.

Google is adopting features for its Meet meeting software. It is copying the features from competitors that users like. Again, a simple formula: offer what people like.

Microsoft wins a contract with the NBA similar to what it has with the NFL.

In California and Washington, tech companies implemented work from home long before government regulators jumped on the bandwagon. I guess that shows that big companies are not all run by monsters who only look at profits or something along those lines.

Saturday 18 April 2020

Microsoft claims to have an AI model that detects 97% of security errors in software.

The Raspberry Pi is becoming the second computer in homes during the Wuhan virus shutdown. They had a record sales month of 640,000 unites in March. The most successful education technology project of all time, Nobel Prizes are in order.

Our FBI reports a spike in cyber crime reports coinciding with the Wuhan virus shutdown.

For the first time in 50 years, the original Comic Con is cancelled.

May 27th, mark the date. NASA and SpaceX will send persons to the space station. This will be the first time in ten years America puts a person into space.

The Gates family has a rather large basement full of food stored. They are preppers. Rich folks, and they admit they are blessed and rich, can do these things. All of us can do better at these things. Being prepared to care for you family is a good thing. Some religious groups practice this. 

We must be really bored: a big story all over the Internet is how Samsung designed its box for its TVs so that we can make houses for our cats.

GM delivers the first of a 30,000-unit order of ventilators. All these orders from all these suppliers will make a stockpile that will never be used. Cynical? Drive around the South and see pastures covered with FEMA trailers that were never used. Taxpayers are still paying to store these trailers 12 years later. History tells us of the incompetence of such government rescue programs. We seem to happily repeat history.

The ACLU points to the obvious: these technologies that trace the movement of persons in the name of public health stomp civil rights. Same old story about liberty and security.

Sunday 19 April 2020

HP updates its ZBook laptop line.

Intel updates to its ninth generation of the Next Unit of Computing. The chassis grows just big enough for a small graphics card.

Amazon is using infrared cameras to check for fever among warehouse workers. The science has many faults, but if someone tells you it will work and you desperately want something that works, you go for it. See, e.g., about 300million Americans staying in their homes for the past 30 days.

Going back to work in the offices. No guarantees folks. Ease into it in phases. Simple.

I love Seth Godin's post on experience asymmetry (you purchase a funeral a couple of times while the funeral director sells half a dozen a day). "it pays to hire a local guide"

What stands in the way usually is our inner critic, the voice that says, "Isn't that too different? If that would work, wouldn't somebody else have done it already?" I think the best strategy for overcoming that is to tell yourself, "Let's play with this for a while and see what happens."—Jurgen Wolff

Make a list. Repeat. Simple. This works for some of us. If it doesn't, forget it.

Are you a developer, what we used to call a computer programmer? Do you know of Donald Knuth? You should.

Excellent thoughts from Johanna Rothman on working in the new normal of remoteness when schools are closed and grocery stores close early and...

Want a job? Learn to program in COBOL. Here is a textbook with plenty of practical exercises.

Some goals and not quite goals for writers during the great Wuhan virus lock in of 2020.

Want to write a mystery? Plenty of people have and plenty have made a lot of money. Here are some ideas.

A few ideas on creating focus for writing or just about anything else.

This piece has several ideas. One is the Vision Board. To help write one of my management books, I covered a wall with notes. I had to finish the book to get rid of the mess.

Interesting, how to use Jupyter notebooks as a writing and formatting tool.

I like this one: the concept of growing as a writer or a person.