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: 26 April-2 May, 2021

Summary of this week:

• Apple announces tech center in North Carolina, $1billion, 3,000 jobs
• Zoom releases Immersive View
• Lyft sells its autonomous vehicle tech to Toyota
• The year of the virus brings unbelievable profits to some
• Microsoft is changing the default font in Office

Monday 26 April 2021

Typical Monday, little news to view on the Internet.

American social media companies participating in government censorship. If you criticize the government, you are silenced.

There was an Academy Awards ceremony last night. There were a few "movies" released in the year of the virus. The video game industry won its first Oscar with "Colette."

"If you can't influence something, why are you yelling about it?"---Seth Godin

A silly video for an otherwise slow Monday morning.

Netflix dominates its market, but as usual others are gaining.

Tuesday 27 April 2021

Zoom releases its Immersive View where meeting participants appear to be seated in the same room.

Apple updates all its operating systems. Big Sur 11.3 comes to the Macs.

And Apple updates iOS, iPadOS, and WatchOS.>

TSMC announces that its 3nm and 4nm products will appear next year as planned.

Where the money is: ransonware attacks are on the rise as well as the money paid.

Apple to build a $1billion tech campus in North Carolina. Where were the governors of Virginia? Why did we land a piece of this?

Lyft sells its autonomous car capabilities to Toyota.

Promise unkempt: Tesla has been unable to deliver on its solar panel-roof tiles.

An in-depth review of Microsoft's Surface Laptop 4.

Luminar partners with Airbus to bring its LiDAR technology to aircraft.

Fewer babies: US population growth slower in the last decade. Slowest since the Great Depression. Thank you President Obama.

Wednesday 28 April 2021

Sometimes I think this guy should be on the editorial board at the Washington Post. Most days I think he would do a much better job than the current persons.

The prolonged year of the virus continues to be good financially for Microsoft.

Google Cloud has a great financial quarter. You just don't jump up 46% everyday.

AMD has a much-better-than-expected financial quarter.

The prolonged year of the virus: Microsoft Teams doubled its users.

The prolonged year of the virus: Microsoft gaming TRIPLED its users.

Among the too-good-to-be-true numbers from Microsoft is they now have 300Million Office 365 paid subscribers.

LinkedIn: $3Billion (with a B) in ad revenue last year.

The money continues to flow: Alphabet rolls in a record financial quarter and year.

Strong rumors that the next generation of the Apple Silicon processor will be in Macs this summer.

Play at home: Sony has sold 7.8million PS5 consoles.

Popular Science magazine, first published in 1872, stops paper publishing and is now digital only.

Thursday 29 April 2021

Our current President launches a new tax and spend program. We now wait to see if their is a Democratic Senator who plays the role that John McCain used to play.

Sony has a good financial quarter.

Samsung announces a few new laptops with OLED displays, big improvement.

A company called Mighty has a new browser that uses some different ideas to speed access and lessen the workload on the computer. See mightyapp.com.

Samsung shows a new gaming laptop that will be available real soon now (late summer?).

Qualcomm has a good financial quarter.

Apple has a a good financial quarter as well, breaking a few records.

And Facebook rolls in the money with big ad revenue.

After 15 years of Calibri, Microsoft will change the default font in Office next year. They are deploying five new fonts and will ask for our opinion.

Friday 30 April 2021

Deepfakes plus readily available satellite photos equals all sorts of possible mayhem.

We have 5G phones (true); we have 5G networks (not quite as true), and we use the two together less than 1% of the time.

As expected, Amazon continues to ride the year of the virus with another good financial quarter.

Twitter has a good financial quarter. It wasn't as good as some predicted, so instead of firing the predictors, Twitter's investors suffer.

As noted by me many times the past 14 months, big tech has experienced almost-unbelievable growth in the year of the virus. Is it possible...naw, couldn't be.

If you watched our current President's speech to Congress this week, you may have noted that he doesn't seem to know much about guns and such.

It seems that the idea of planting trees to offset carbon was a lot of hyperbole and scam to get rich.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Microsoft cuts its share of PC game royalties from 30% to 12%.

Our Secretary of Labor crashes the value of several large companies by stating that "gig workers" (part-time employees) should be full-time employees.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will be selling tickets for rides into space real soon now.

Saturday 1 May 2021

COVID-19 has eliminated the flu. Perhaps if you have the flu, it is called COVID as that brings more money. Perhaps closing all restaurants and theaters and killing 40million jobs is the ticket to stop the flu.

Some calculations on landmass required to reach carbon neutral something-or-other. It "doesn't close." That means with current technology, forget about it.

Real news that isn't news: a European regulatory commission fines a successful American company for being successful.

Another wonder: in California, Disneyland reopens.

The prolonged year of the virus has been good for cloud computing in general as it reaches $42Billion in only one quarter. Now if our President can tax all of that, we will still need decades to pay for one year's deficit spending.

Facebook's researchers have a breakthrough in computer vision research with DINO, a silly name for a semi-supervised learning approach.

Sunday 2 May 2021

Creative work, getting things done, and mind management.

Take a writing sabbatical. Just do it by yourself. No expense needed. Just do it.

Tips for finding writing jobs on LinkedIn.

Some writers share their experiences of writing for "content mills." They weren't paying for their coffee and gas.

This is a good post on writing white papers and case studies. The pay is real and so is the writing.

Affiliate marketing: what it is, how it works, and maybe brings in money.

For some reason, there are several stories today stating the obvious: Tim Cook has been a good CEO at Apple.

A good comparison for consumers: how about buying a Mac Mini and a monitor instead of an iMac. Same basic technology at a much lower price.