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: 17-23 August, 2020

Summary of this week:

• The rich-poor divide grows with online school attempts
• IBM shows its Power10 processor
• Nvidia's cloud gaming service now runs on Chromebooks
• Apple hits $2Trillion in value
• Nvidia data center revenue passes that of gaming revenue

Monday 17 August 2020

I had problems with my iMac that disrupted Internet viewing and this blog.

In the year of the virus, let's all go to school online (take II). Not enough computers.

And the divide between rich and poor grows as millions of kids don't have the Internet access to go to school online.

Federal spending on AI and quantum computing research is rising.

And now we have micro influencers and even nano influencers, too. Something about finding people who have small but loyal groups of followers.

Sorry to burst the bubble, but self-driving and all electric cars don't have a rational future.

"Who wants to pay $25,000 a year for glorified Skype?" Good question. The year of the pandemic magnifies much of the folly of the rising costs of a college education. Burst another bubble.

Tuesday 18 August 2020

ZTE finds a way to put the selfie camera on a smartphone under the display. Many have worked on this idea, ZTE is the first to make it work.

IBM shows the Power10 processor family. It uses 7nm technology and is a leap from the Power9 (introduced in 2016).

In the year of the virus, more college students are taking a gap year and doing something else. Perhaps next year we will act normally again.

Back to college. College towns: Ann Arbor, MI, State College, PA, Blacksburg, VA, etc., depend on students returning. This is money and jobs and family support and a decent life. It must be nice to sit in Washington, D.C., collect a paycheck regularly, and tell others they should just behave and go broke.

Whew! Just missed us. A car-size asteroid missed earth by 1,800 miles. This sets some kind of record as the closest miss that we've ever noticed.

Yet another new programming language: this one is designed for teaching younger persons programming without overwhelming them with where to put the semi-colon.

When the year of the virus is over, what will we remember? Not much really.

Securing an election: paper ballots counted by hand. Some of us hate to admit this is true. We want some magic computer thingy to do it.

Wednesday 19 August 2020

Nvidia’s cloud gaming service, GeForce Now, is in beta testing on ChromeOS. Grab a Chromebook, play games.

Another industry that is doing well in the year of the virus is Education Technology.

The year of the virus has been very good to Elon Musk $$$.

Amazon is hiring 3,500 persons to work in offices, not distribution centers.

oooops Cense AI leaks 2.5million medical records.

Thursday 20 August 2020

Polls say...most of us know that Facebook et al. aren't "fair." That's life.

It appears that their are problems with Google services, e.g., gmail, early this morning.

Apple is now worth $2Trillion (with a Tr). It went from $1T to $2T in two years. I think that is accelerating wealth or something.

Once again, the BlackBerry phone is back. Just in time for a renewal of the Obama administration. Remember when President Obama couldn't part with his BlackBerry?

A Stanford Economics professor, who drove for Uber as part of his research, isn't in favor of California's recent moves against Uber and Lyft.

The latest in the "democratization of programming" or the "citizen programmer." People who aren't "real" programmers have always used tools to do things for themselves.

Germany begins a small, three-year experiment with universal basic income.

The bygone era of the computer club. I was in one 1988-1989.

Nvidia has a good financial quarter and passes a milestone where data center revenue surpassed that of gaming.

Friday 21 August 2020

The intellectual property rights and wrongs of online university lectures in the year of the virus.

Uber and Lyft continue to operate in California—at least for today—as an appeals court gives them a break.

It appears that the rulers of China are running a world-wide recruitment operation to bring researchers and their knowledge to China. This is a round about way to steal intellectual property.

Ice is melting in Greenland. Farm land is recovered. I guess we have to decide which story we want.

More news on the Google training programs. They claim that if you pass one of these, their hiring managers treat it as a college degree.

Palantir moves its headquarters out of Silicon Valley to Denver.

Saturday 22 August 2020

Intel shows its Xe-HP Graphics processors and the out-of-this-world performance numbers. I love, "This means support for the types of calculations involved in simple graphics, complex graphics, ray tracing, AI inference, AI training, and the compute that goes into molecular modelling, oil-and-gas, nuclear reactors, rockets, nuclear rockets, and all the other big questions"

ooooops Data leak exposes 235million accounts from various social media sites. That is 2/3s the population of the US.

Sex-selective abortion: it is a big item in India, China, and the rest of Asia. What are we doing to ourselves?

Will you catch the Chinese virus on a flight? Like most questions related to this, no one has done the experiment and no one knows.

And we find  300-million-year-old animal footprints in the Grand Canyon. I could comment on what we think and what we know and science and junk science and all that...not today.

People are paying money to sit in fake airline cabins and be served in-flight meals. Really? The seats are bad and the food is worse.

A look at mechanical keyboards for those who want to type faster. I use one at home; it helps.

Microsoft is working to translate its big DoD cloud computing win into contracts with other national governments.

In the year of the virus, we accelerate changes—many of them bad. American kids are probably using computers made by other kids forced into mining and other labor.

Sunday 23 August 2020

Well said, "In open source, the maintainers working on the source code are the scarce resource that needs to be protected and nurtured."

Title says it all, "Blockchain, the amazing solution for almost nothing"

oooooops, solar panels are reaching their end of life. Uh, now what do we do with the toxic waste?

Sierra Nevada has an unmanned space plane ready to shuttle cargo to the International Space Station. Take off vertically, land on a runway, reuse.

We are trying to learn how to work remotely with online meetings. Sometimes we stumble and grumble at one another.

Take for granted the ability to stand and walk. This $80 prosthetic enables 2 million persons in India to do so.

Tech for (Democratic Candidates') Campaigns: 13,500 volunteers helping the Democratic party. They get the attention. There are similar volunteers for the other party. Wonder why they aren't mentioned?

Thoughts on starting a long-stalled habit. Sit down, put hands on keyboard, press keys.

The concept of the Minimum Daily Productivity Requirement for writers and other freelancers. Don't stall at zero.

Some advice on being productive as a freelancer. Sorry, some organization of your life is required.