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: 20-26 July, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Major League Baseball starts its season four months late
• Top US tech companies heavily loaded with H1-B visa holders
• AMD releases 7nm processors for desktop computers
• Microsoft has a good financial quarter
• Tesla's next factory will be in Texas
• Intel hits more delays in 7nm technology

Monday 20 July 2020

How America's top tech companies are increasingly using foreign labor instead of hiring Americans.

The United Arab Emirates launched a Mars mission from a facility in Japan on a Japanese rocket.

Netflix adds 10million subscribers, but forecasters said they were to add more than that. Hence, forecasters are wrong, but Netflix value drops $19billion. Why is it we don't punish the forecasters?

Finally, a photograph of one of Google's Project Loon balloons with its equipment suspended below. They are operating over Kenya at this time.

Microsoft studies how their employees are working from home. The one-hour meeting is going away in favor of 30-minute meetings. And people are "on the system" much longer, even though they are not "working."

Tuesday 21 July 2020

IBM has a mixed financial quarter.

The Linux Foundation jumps in to help public health officials with software. They are contributing the software that Apple and Google developed to trace persons and their contacts.

In the year of the virus, smartphone sales have fallen over 20%. The one bright spot is the Apple iPhone SE, i.e., the one with the lower price.

SpaceX catches the fairings after a launch. Sounds silly, but they save about $6million a launch by doing this.

Amazon postpones Prime Day again; this time it is indefinite.

Must watch video. Deepfakes makes a video of President Nixon announcing that the first moon walkers would not return to earth. It looks absolutely real.

Wednesday 22 July 2020

AMD releases its 7nm processors for desktop computers. We can only buy them in already-made systems.

Our Dept of Justice, in a symbolic move, charges two Chinese subjects with hacking coronavirus research centers. Of course these persons were working for the Communist Party of China, a.k.a., the Chinese government.

Not spending enough time in Microsoft Teams? The release of Dataflex allows us to build databases while still in Teams.

Major League Baseball will depend on Apple, Google, and Sony to make it through its little season this summer. Sony will add the crowd noise to the telecasts—audio augmented reality.

Stanford et al. has a report on China's information and propaganda efforts.

SpaceX plans to put a StarShip prototype a few hundred feet in the air this week. Should be exciting.

We begin to learn of the side effects of the coming COVID-19 vaccines. Several persons I know who are rationally cautious in the year of the virus are so because of side effects of other medicine.

SUSE releases its Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15.

We had a major earthquake this morning off the coast of Alaska.

Thursday 23 July 2020

The superstars and celebrities of online learning.

A look at Palantir and its recent contracts with Federal agencies. Simple, Palantir can do things that the government agencies cannot do for themselves. That is how government contracting works.

Microsoft has a good financial quarter.

Ahhh, now that I have a new MacBook Air, let's add a GPU supercomputer to it.

In the year of the virus, California closed factories while Texas didn't. Hence, the next Tesla factory will be in Texas.

Researchers believe they found a blood test that can detect cancer four years earlier than today's best tests.

Friday 24 July 2020

Twitter added users, but had a mixed financial quarter.

Intel falls on hard times as its technology is failing. They delay the release of their 7nm processors another six months.

China launches a mission to Mars. Landing is scheduled for February 2021. The mission includes a small rover vehicle.

Beware when a large company with lots of money visits to talk technology. They may simply steal your ideas. See, for example, Amazon.

How the big stores that sell everything and groceries had a boom in the year of the virus selling books. The book stores were not essential and were closed by government order. The libraries ... the same. Big hint: if you sell anything, sell a few groceries as well.

Saturday 25 July 2020

Amazon claims to have done something wonderful with their cardboard boxes.

Only in the year of the virus, but Jaguar and Cambridge University have a contactless touchscreen for cars. It helps keep you from making yourself sick because you won't touch something that only you have touched or something. Perhaps I don't understand all I know about this.

Someone had too much time on their hands. We can book Windows 95 inside Minecraft and play Doom on that ... well, I don't know what you call that.

Must see video. Someone else had a lot of time on their hands. They made this detailed commercial of how Zoom would advertise in 1998.

Lives of the plutocrats in the year of the virus: go to Hawaii; ride a $12,000 electric surfboard.

Bad news is good news (for some). Intel's tech problems announced this week cause AMD stock to rise 17% to an all-time high.

Now we have an AI program that creates new lyrics to existing songs, a.k.a., a parody. As usual, the recording industry sues.

The year of the virus will lead to the year of the commercial real estate collapse as companies plan to vacate office buildings.

A tale of money and whim. $75million, the name on a building, a doctor, a lot of doctors, and charges of being the worst person on earth since...well, ever.

Sunday 26 July 2020

Here come the augmented reality fans. I watched baseball on Fox last night, and there were no such fans in the broadcast.

Must see video. You have to click a few times, but a Dutch group has changed Apollo landing video from 12 to 30 frames per second. Great results. Also see on their site and this improvement of the scenes in "Jason and the Argonauts."

Technology writing sites.

"Memoir is what you know after something you’ve been through. It requires that the writer change, and that we get to watch that change."—Marion Roach Smith

Thoughts on writing a novel.

A panic list: a list of phone numbers and supplies she keeps handy in case of emergencies.

"If you’re going to work with me, look at it like we’re working in a bank. We get in at nine, we have a cup of coffee, we say good morning, then we go to work. etc."—Screenwriter Michael McDowell

When writing fiction, we can have characters who talk any way we want them to talk. It's only fiction. They aren't real.

"If you remember that 'no' is the rule rather than the exception, the process gets a little easier to bear."