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: 7-13 September, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Labor Day holiday in the US
• Disney having all sorts of trouble with release of "Mulan"
• Google releases Android 11
• Red Hat Marketplace opens
• Apple globe store in Singapore opens
• Bose has new noise-cancelling ear buds
• The Gateway brand of PCs is returning
• Nvidia close to buying ARM

Monday 7 September 2020

It is a Monday and a holiday. Slow news day.

Samsung, based in a democracy in Asia, signed a $6.6Billion contract to supply 5G technology to Verizon. I think this is a good thing. Do we want to buy from a country controlled by the Communist Party? A country where millions are put in concentration camps based on their religion?

The concept of racecraft and detecting it in the words people use.

And we have a new term: computational storage. Somebody has to invent something, I guess.

I guess they pass laws in California quickly. Governors in California continue to tweak their law aimed driving Uber out of the state as they define more freelancers to be exempt from prior versions of law.

Tuesday 8 September 2020

Tabletop games and digital augmentation are booming.

Netflix CEO: no benefits to working from home. He has a point or two there. Many of us have been home now for six months. Many persons are not working as they work from home.

Disney is having all sorts of problems with its release of "Mulan." Dealing with China at this time brings lots of problems. Lots of problems. Stick to animated films. The actors and shooting locations don't bring as many problems.

The rulers of China have banned access to MIT's programming language built for kids to learn.

Wednesday 9 September 2020

The year of the virus has not been good for tech companies. Slack isn't doing badly, but not as well as the others.

Engineering beats style in car production: VW to build more electric cars than Tesla by 2023.

Rumors are that Microsoft is building a mid-size, lower-price laptop for the holiday season.

Google releases Android 11.

Google introduces "Verified Calls." When an actual business calls me, a message will verify that it is an actual business, not some con artist.

Tests of early 5G systems show that they are early 5G systems, i.e., they don't work well and don't deliver the speeds they should.

Amazon, Apple, and Google continue progress on an open home standard due out next year.

Researchers at Stanford have built a "camera" with 3,200 MegaPixels (I think that is 3.2 TeraPixels). It is built to capture images of deep space from a telescope in Chile.

"the best way to make a hit is to build something for the smallest viable audience and make it so good that people tell their peers."—Seth Godin

In the year of the virus, an unlikely hit on the Internet is watching other people play chess.

Variolation: this is an old and proven idea of exposing a person to a little of a virus so that they build immunity. Hmmm.

Thursday 10 September 2020

Using drones that carry 6 lbs up to 6 miles, Walmart is testing drone delivery of groceries.

Motorola shows a foldable smartphone with 5G and better cameras. If you have $1,399, you can have one.

The revolving door of the high and mighty: Former NSA chief Keith Alexander has joined Amazon’s board of directors.

New, Red Hat Marketplace: an app store of sorts for hybrid cloud software.

Seth Godin has a good post on how we blame our feelings on a situation. Often, the feelings are there anyways regardless of the situation.

In what must be the most expensive retail space ever built, Apple opens is floating globe store in Singapore. Must-see photos. And by the way, in 20 years people will see these beautiful photos and ask why everyone is wearing a mask.

Friday 11 September 2020

Bose upgrades its line of noise-cancelling ear buds.

Oracle has a better-than-expected financial quarter.

MIT researchers have a new sleep-position monitor that doesn't use cameras or wires attached to our bodies. It is a basic radar system. You wonder why it took this long to use this technique.

Facebook—long ago created for college students only—launches Facebook Campus for college students only.

Real news that is not news: Microsoft researchers find that persons from Russia, China, and Iran are hacking into the IT systems of American political candidates.

Coming next week to Apple retail employees: the Apple Face Mask. It allows you to see that mouth of the person and enables lip reading and other aids to communication.

Coming in October: AMD will show upgrades to its consumer-grade CPU and GPU lines.

Saturday 12 September 2020

A couple of blasts from the past...

Blast from the past: Vinyl record sales surpass CD sales. An accidental co-occurrence of one rising while the other falls.

Another blast from the past: The Gateway brand of computers returns with the cow spot boxes and everything. Thank you Acer and Walmart. I was an early and long-time buyer of Gateway computers—the computers from Iowa.

The Microsoft Windows System for Linux 2 (WSL 2) continues to expand and now allows attaching an external disk drive with other file systems.

Why is it than in 2020 we still cannot run GCC in MS Windows without installing a bunch of workarounds and such?

As we pass the six-month mark of the alternate work location in the year of the virus, Ars Technica shows some gadgets that make it all easier. Note how they begin with I/O devices like monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

Archeologists spot a 3,000-year-old settlement in Kansas. Drones and other from-above sensors are showing us lots of things we didn't know.

Sunday 13 September 2020

The C++ Language is being updated to "C++20." It promises to be the biggest update in a decade. We shall see.

What is a library and who can have a library? The Internet Archive is going to court over these and other questions.

At appears that Nvidia is about to buy ARM for a cool $40Billion (with a B).

Excellent post on AI and control in China. The post gets one major point wrong: the people of China are not citizens, they are subjects.

This post on marketing yourself as a freelancer is unusual in that it has excellent practical tips.

The concept of finding a niche where you can write and earn money.

How the story must be off and running on the first page. This isn't new. See, for example, Genesis chapter 1, verse 1.

Excellent post on how writing success or any other success won't fix your life.