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: 14-20 September, 2020

Summary of this week:

• NFL and Premiere League start seasons on time
• Oracle to buy TikTok
• Microsoft pulls datacenter from seabed, declares success
• Apple's big event: no 5G iPhone, but updates to Watch and iPad
• Nvidia's new 3080 is sold out, getting triple prices on eBay

Monday 14 September 2020

The National Football League began their season yesterday.

The Premiere also began their season recently.

GitLab has always been a work-from-home company. They have no offices. 1,300 people work in 67 countries. Their culture shows how to do it. Don't expect others to adopt this style anytime soon.

It now appears that Oracle, not Microsoft, will own the US operations of TikTok.

The year of the virus has been good to Peloton and its owner.

Coming real soon now from Ikea: gaming furniture as they partner with ASUS’ Republic of Gamers (ROG) division.

Lack of technology for many is growing the divide between the rich and poor in the year of the virus.

ooops, missed this one. Yesterday the 13th was the Day of the Programmer. The 256th (2**8) day of the year.

Tuesday 15 September 2020

Strong rumors about Google's September 30th event: 5G Pixel phone and a new Chromecast.

The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission finds that IBM did discriminate against older employees during layoffs from 2013 through 2018. Perhaps there is hope for prosecution of other companies doing the same.

Never going back to the office? Then why did Facebook just buy REI's new building and 400,000 square feet of office space?

Microsoft pulls a data center from the sea floor. The computers under the sea had 1/8th the failure rate of those in regular datacenters. Credit no oxygen in the sea container and no people bumping around.

We find some phosphine on Venus and speculate that there is life there. Remote sensing is difficult and fraught with error.

LG shows a smartphone with a second screen that appears when the main screen is rotated. There is no folding with problems inherent in folding.

Microsoft's game streaming service, xCloud, becomes real today. Microsoft promises over 150 games on day one.

YouTube announces "Shorts:" a 15-second video feature that is an obvious TikTok copy. The market is there.

This story must be important because it is all over the Internet: Google claims to have eliminated all of its carbon footprint going back to its founding. I suppose this is important in some way.

Wednesday 16 September 2020

Apple updates the Watch series.

Apple updates the iPad series with a new processor and other goodies for the low end of the product line.

Apple updates the iPad Air.

The real announcement from Apple is its new A14 processor.

Strong rumors that AWS is working on an AI/ML service aimed a industrial users to help predict maintenance.

The Trump campaign is vilified for the 2020 version of giving teens part-time jobs to stand on the corner and hand out leaflets.

Adobe has a better-than-expected financial quarter as they join the long list of companies benefiting in the year of the virus.

Our Federal Trade Commission is building some sort of anti-trust case against Facebook.

Thursday 17 September 2020

Facebook updates the Oculus Quest to model 2.

Facebook is working with Ray-Ban on some sort of smart glasses due out in 2021.

Here is one in-depth look at Nvidia's new GeForce RTX 3080 card. It really is an amazing leap ahead of last year's 20xx models. And it only costs $699, which is less than last year's models.

The PlayStation 5 will be available on November 12th (hmm, one week before my birthday).

It is no surprise that younger persons are "considering" moving away from expensive cities to less-expensive ones. If you are "working from home," why not have a less-expensive home and a higher salary?

In the year of the virus, the sales of bicycles are way up. Also up are the sales of those $2,000 and $3,000 bikes with electric motors.

Headline says it all: The Majority of 18- To 29-Year-Olds In the US Are Now Living With Their Parents. The year of the virus has driven many "back home" as they were going nuts all locked up alone in their own apartments.

Friday 18 September 2020

IBM launches an autonomous research vessel, i.e., a small ship. It will cross the Atlantic next year all on its own (they hope).

AnandTech takes a close look at Intel's 11th generation processor.

Nividia's new 3080 GPU is already sold out...everywhere. Good luck.

People who were able to buy a new Nvidia 3080 are selling them on eBay for triple the price.

A little more information from Qualcomm on its "Cloud AI 100" inference processor.

Here is a list of 50 programming languages to learn this year. I guess you can learn a language a week? I doubt it.

Saturday 19 September 2020

The Internet Archive signs a partnership with Cloudflare that will that will improve its Wayback Machine and copies of lost websites.

An in-depth look at Samsung's latest Galaxy Tab tablets. They are far behind Apple and Microsoft in sales and quality, while still costing over $600. Where is the $100 tablet like the one from Amazon?

Researchers at MIT make a flat lens that brings in 180-degrees view like a bubble or fish-eye lens.

A few experiments show that updating a Wikipedia page can bring more tourists into town. Simple. Of course it works.

NASA will start recording video on the space station to be used in commercials. Companies will pay. Of course this bring to question who in the government will be deciding which companies can use publicly funded platforms for profit.

Sunday 20 September 2020

Who returns to the office building first? Safety and ego are involved. Companies are turning to software to decide. Of course the software was written by someone, so some programmer out there in a basement is deciding.

Big News: (not) Sony's coming Playstation 5 is really big...literally...it is a mid-size desktop computer.

Maybe we’d be better off saying, “I need to get back to making magic.” Because that’s what we’d actually like to be getting paid to create.—Seth Godin

In the year of the virus, we discuss pay based on where you live. The Federal government has done this for decades with locality-based pay. If we could just have the IRS adjust tax rates based on location...

It appears that all that promise of 5G was mostly hype. The speed improvement will not appear. Years ago, I was talking with a group of xG expert engineers. 5G was written by the marketing department, not the engineers.

Yes, writing is work. Writing well is harder work. Writing that brings in piles of money may be play.

A successful daily practice.

Some thoughts on marketing as an outlet for freelance writers.