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: 11–17 January, 2021

Summary of this week:

• The Consumer Electronics Show is this week
• Alabama wins the national championship in semi-pro (college) football
• New processors from Intel
• Roll-able smartphone from LG
• Roll-able screens from TCL
• Less-expensive smartphones from TCL
• New GPUs from Nvidia—but the crypto miners are buying all of them
• The House of Representatives votes impeachment of Trump again (Unity?)

Monday 11 January 2021

CES 2021 is on (online only), so here come the new products.

Lenovo shows new smart glasses: ThinkReality A3. No, you would not wear this to Starbucks, but you might wear them most of the day while working from home.

HP has a group of new products including a laptop with a 14" screen.

One HP machine has the leather cover and a Qualcomm processor.

Strong rumors that Nvidia will announce a better GPU for laptops.

Parler—an alternate social media site—is basically gone. A victim of mainstream media hyperventilating. Odd how a group of persons who live by the first amendment attacked a group of persons who lived by the first amendment.

Lazy security at the Capitol extended to computers. Many were left "unlocked" for intruders to plunder. No one knows what public information was revealed to the public. Recall, this is all public information.

Believe it or not, the US Intelligence Community now has 180 days to tell Congress everything about UFOs.

Depending on the product that you want to return for refund, you can receive the refund and keep the product.

The hyperventilating continues this week with calls for impeachment and resignation and forcible removal from office and the like. These action done by persons claiming that "the other side" has created a Banana Republic here in America. Calmer heads are difficult to find.

Tuesday 12 January 2021

Intel shows four new processor families. These will span 50 variations and eventually reside in some 500 new PCs this year. Will the year after be as good to PCs as the year of the virus?

Facebook bans all "stop the steal" for its pages. Interesting experiment in thought control or something. Oh, by the way a man in Chicago ran around killing people this past weekend. Didn't hear anything about that in national news.

LG teases a "rollable" smartphone.

How good was the year of the virus for the PC industry? Best in a decade.

TCL is stepping out of its roll of cheap TVs into high tech as it hints at a display that unrolls like a scroll.

TCL shows their line of less-expensive smartphones.

The folks at Parler sue the folks at AWS for denying them servers etc.

Western Digital puts 4TeraBytes of space on its new portable SSDs.

Distance sometimes enables rational thought. Leaders in France and Germany—not Trump fans in the least—express disagreement over social media banning the President.

Consolidation coming in the office supply market as Staples offers to buy Office Depot.

ooops, researchers find that the United Nations' cyber security has little security.

Wednesday 13 January 2021

AMD shows new processors aimed at portable computers and gaming for those.

As expected, Nvidia announces new GPUs for portable computers: RTX 3060, RTX 3070, and RTX 3080.

Alienware is putting the new Nvidia GPUs in their gaming laptops real soon or right now.

In accordance with the National AI Initiative Act of 2020, we now have a National AI Initiative Office.

Somehow the clown show at the Capitol last week has been called an "attempted coup." Really folks? A coup?

ASUS shows a smaller laptop aimed at gaming. Thin and light and all that.

Razer shows a transparent, hi-tech N95 mask that will solve all sorts of problems that I'm not sure exist. You will be the envy of the neighborhood in some neighborhoods.

Nvidia and AMD have no good news for gamers wanting the new GPUs. The crypto currency market (BitCoin et al) is hot, and miners are paying double prices for GPUs.

Thursday 14 January 2021

America produces the RISC-V open-source computer architecture. China is taking advantage of the royalty-free design.

Asus shows new laptops that have a second screen that is sort of part of the keyboard.

Asus shows two new Chromebooks—one students and one for business users.

Pat Gelsinger will become the new CEO of Intel in mid-February.

A Hong Kong company shows a laptop made specifically for video meetings. It has built-in lighting and three cameras facing the user.

DropBox lays off 11% of its workforce. The new administration is coming. Grow accustomed to layoffs.

Google trains a trillion-parameter AI model. This breaks all prior records. Google cites a method that is much more efficient.

Qualcomm is acqui-hiring NUVIA for $1.4Billion (with a B). NUVIA is not quite two years old and has experienced CPU designers who changed Apple's direction in processor when they worked for Apple.

Got $2,100? Get Dell's new 40" curved monitor. It starts to creep around you.

Friday 15 January 2021

There was also a third precedent concerning AWS and Parler. This affects church whose main source of knowledge, i.e., the Holy Bible, states, "Happy is the one who takes your babies and smashes them against the rocks!"—Psalm 137:9. Explaining the language will be in vain.

Samsung shows their new $1,000 smartphones.

How many image sensors can you put on the back of a smartphone?

Logical fallacy at work: this digital vaccination passport. Recent reports from reputable sources state that vaccinations will not prevent you from catching and transmitting COVID. The vaccinations prevent the illness. Hence, being vaccinated does not make you a safe traveler. If you know otherwise, please comment.

“Have you tried to moderate 15 million people?” MeWe now has 15million users.

We have yet another precedent. You cannot have large groups of people gather in public or online and expect civil behavior.

IBM acqui-hires Taos Mountain, a company that helps organizations migrate to the cloud.

Samsung shows their first 5G-equipped laptop.

Intel updates and expands its NUC lineup.

Strong rumors about 2021's MacBook Pro computers from Apple.

Magnets don't coexist well with heart pacemakers. Some of the newer smartphones have....you guessed it, powerful magnets.

Saturday 16 January 2021

A call for "community owned" social media spaces. The trouble is, who represents the community? We recently saw a person who was elected to represent the community banished by a small minority of the community.

I find it regretful that some Americans are gaining skill at censoring other Americans. While it may be convenient this week, the future has the great potential for more abuse.

Our FAA has granted the first license for a small company to operate a fully autonomous flying vehicle for commercial deliveries. It is quite limited, but a start.

Packing pork into what is supposed to be a COVID-19 relief bill. Lessons unlearned.

"The pandemic allowed America's wealthy elite to pull off the greatest economic grift in history"—Scott Galloway. And the next COVID relief bill unfortunately continues the practice of the prior ones.

For those who may think that Wikipedia was always here, this is an oral history of the thing.

Sunday 17 January 2021

Note to self—Joe Biden and Democrats are scientists. All others are, well something anti-science and stupid.

Concerns of just plain folks using the Internet to chase criminals. Those criminals may knock on your door. And, just plain folks make mistakes and finger the wrong person from time to time.

DuckDuckGo—a privacy-based search engine—hits records for use. Other privacy-based services are seeing similar growth. The crowds on the Internet are dispersing. Let's see what happens next.

Mining for BitCoin and other crypto currency requires a lot of electrical power. In Iran, the governors are blaming legal miners for causing black outs.

Writing is one of those professions or pastimes that can be "started" at any age.

The many different activities that are called "editing." It is a good practice to ask what a writer expects when they ask you to "look at" their draft.

How one writer marketed a self-published book and made a lot of money.