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: 5–11 October, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Nvidia has a week-long event with many product announcements
• Google rebrands the G Suite to Google Workplace
• John McAfee arrested for tax evasion
• Apple to hold an iPhone event on 13 October
• Intel 11th gen processors coming in first quarter of 2021
• AMD announces new CPU and GPU
• Alienware has desktop machine with the new, impossible-to-buy Nvidia GPUs

Monday 5 October 2020

We begin the week with the President still hospitalized with the Wuhan virus.

Otherwise, nothing in the news this Monday morning. Nvidia has a conference this week. Let's see what Mr. Huang announces today.

Looking at the latest Razer Blade gaming laptop.

Tesla claims that it delivered 140,000 cars last quarter.

Tuesday 6 October 2020

Nvidia Maxine: GPU-powered, AI-technique using software to enhance video teleconferencing. All the Zooming and Teaming and such we've been doing could have been so much better (huh?).

Nvidia announces the A6000—its newest professional visualization card. I am not sure what a "visualization card" is, but this one has more computing power than last year's model.

Google Workspace: the new name for what was the G Suite.

Warner moves the release of "Dune" back a year to October 2021. Its just a movie release, but it shows how all this "stay at home" continues to cost persons their livelihoods.

Microsoft renames its Bing browser to "Microsoft Bing" browser. I guess this is significant.

Success leads to failure: Nvidia announces that shortages of their new GPU cards will continue through all of 2020.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: John McAfee has been arrested in Spain and is facing extradition.

I like this little drawing on how to pick a college major. Find something you like, few people are choosing, and is not likely to be replaced by a computer.

Nvidia announces the Jetson Nano 2GB. For $59, we get a practice development kit that has more compute power than anything else available for experimenting.

Wednesday 7 October 2020

Apple will hold an event on October 13th. The 5G iPhone is expected to be the centerpiece.

Google releases Chrome 86.

SpaceX and L3Harris win contracts from the Space Development Agency to build satellites for early warning of enemy missile launches.

Who spreads fake news? The people with the biggest audiences. That happens to be the older, larger media sources like CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox, the Washington Post, New York Times, et al. Simple math.

Thursday 8 October 2020

The GPT-3 machine learning system posted on Reddit.com for a week. Other posters were amazed at how fast the "user" was able to write long posts in response to questions.

Intel announces that its 11th generation processors will be available in the first quarter of 2021.

Americans pay state and local taxes to fund local schools. Local schools across much of America failed to provide online learning during the year of the virus.

The supersonic transport and airliner. Maybe we will have one again in the future. This company now has a small prototype.

Rumors that Qualcomm will have its own line of smartphones.

Friday 9 October 2020

AMD announces its new Zen 3 Ryzen 5000 processors—CPUs for desktop computers. AMD claims they are the world's best gaming CPU.

AMD also announces a new RX 6000 “Big Navi” GPU.

It appears that AMD will buy Xilinx for $30+billion.

Our DoD awards several companies a total of $600million for 5G testing.

Note the two prior lines. While DoD and our government spends a lot of money, the sums pale in comparison to what is happening in the tech industry.

Amazon shows its new electric-powered delivery vans. They appear just different enough cosmetically to let us admire themX.

Alienware shows a new line of gaming desktop computers that have the impossible-to-buy Nvidia 3000 series GPUs. I guess Alienware and Nvidia had a contract for delivery of the first GPUs off the assembly line.

"Attitudes are skills"—Seth Godin

Saturday 10 October 2020

Microsoft greatly expands the number of employees who will be allowed to work from home forever and move to a lower-cost-of-living area without penalty.

Google Meet is adding "breakout room." At first, this feature will be for education users only.

The mobile Internet and growth in distrust. It must be great to blame your own failure on technology. Major journalists were caught lying often enough that people turned elsewhere for news. Voters know that political candidates lie. There are no surprises there.

Strong rumors that Apple will introduce computers with "Apple silicon" in November.

Sunday 11 October 2020

The murder rates in America continue to fall. At the same time the number of persons carrying firearms continues to rise. Let everyone argue about coincidence or cause.

Minorities are creating new websites similar to LinkedIn to help one another with professional development. Good for them. Let's keep it positive and encouraging.

The year of the virus has revived the sales of the good old Personal Computer.

The exuberance for the Julia programming language. It deserves a deeper look.

The results of giving money ($5,700) to homeless persons. Of course the "study" only include 50 persons, so the results are questionable.

Python 3.9 was released this week.

Something I missed during the year of the virus. Motels are renting rooms for the day. Tired of working at home? Go to a motel for a day. The FBI recently released warnings about using motel WiFi systems. Nothing is perfect.

Forward to the past: we have rumors of a "Microsoft Linux." I used Microsoft Xenix a few decades ago. That was a Linux distribution from Microsoft. It worked well enough.

I like this post about excuses for not writing and how to use them as a benefit. Any information provides a topic for writing. Find an excuse and write about it. Turn it around and write about it. The possibilities are practical and endless.

Ask, seek, and knock.

A review of an important fundamental: the paragraph.

Controlling our bias while writing.

Freelance work and rejection. If someone reads your work and rejects it—stop. They read it. You have at least one reader. Rejoice. Keep writing.

How one freelance writer has used the Upwork site to earn $100,000 a year. Upwork takes a percentage of your pay as a fee for connecting the writer to the client. The fees start at 20%.