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 July, 2021
ooops, researcher finds that a percent sign in a WiFi name breaks iPhones and iPads.
A deeper look into the COVID situation in India. The key factor in India was a press that reported what was happening. There are many other countries that had much better and much worse situations, but they didn't make it into the news.
An in-depth look at Apple and spreading out. One stroke of "genius" is "Geography plays a role" in recruiting. It is about time someone admits that.
Facebook, Twitter, Google et al "threaten to leave Hong Kong" over pending regulations. The governors of China won't lose any sleep over their departure. I wrote many years ago that American companies needed to take care with working in China.
"We have rules for ourselves, but one of the rules is to adapt."---Seth Godin
We now have yet more proof of something we already knew: viruses mutate.
And this news story mis-spells the Bible quote. Oh well, ignorance reigns.
Some thoughts about the police use of cameras that read license plate numbers. Of course the data can be misused, and we find that 99.5% of the data leads to no gain in public safety. It is the tech version of the random traffic stop.
....No Internet viewing today.
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Email me at d.phillips@computer.org
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Our Dept of Defense cancels the $10Billion JEDI contract for cloud computing. It was stuck in court for several years with no end in sight. Back to the drawing board.
Our reaction to the virus crashed into the gig economy and large Federal unemployment benefits.
Coming this autumn, an updated Nintendo Switch.
Nvidia builds a super-duper computer in the UK called the Cambridge-1 at $100Million. They will allow researchers to use it at little cost.
Ms. Shlomit Weiss returns to Intel. She was one of their best IC architects.
We have fear and loathing with the audio editing software Audacity.
During the year of the virus, we chose to stay home. Fossil fuel use dropped to some kind of historic low.
In upstate New York, BitCoin miners are warming a glacial lake. This is all legal and permitted. There are better uses for the heat, but governors are behind the curve on this one.
.....We now have resumes on TikTok. They want to be the LinkedIn for Gen Z.
Our former President is suing social media companies for banning him.
Restaurants are increasingly turning to automation as workers are not coming back to work. We chose this route with how we reacted to the virus.
The leaders in autonomous weapon systems are seeking to ban them. No one, however, can define what they are seeking to ban and these systems have been used for decades.
Most of America sues Google for antitrust violations in its app store.
VISA partners with over 50 crypto-currency companies. Here we go folks. I trust they know what they are doing.
.....I am behind in Internet viewing. Maybe on Saturday I can regain some momentum.
The billionaires race to space, well, sort of.
The NFL continues its partnership with Twitter for live talk during games.
We have a chip shortage. Hence, we have chip smuggling.
Microsoft has rewarded bug finders over $1million per month the past year.
.....AI is "preserving" the sound of the voices of expert speakers. This goes back to the preserving of experts via expert systems of the 1980s. Government will never use this as its employees do not seek to preserve someone else. That someone else had "their turn" and now it is "my turn."
We have a report from the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory stating that renewable energy is good. I trust we didn't pay much for this report.
Our President signs what must be the longest Executive Order in history covering a wide range of details. There are parts about the FCC and "net neutrality" and other parts about what corporations can do with their profits.
A quick trip into Starbucks yesterday brought a pleasant surprise: some of the familiar folks are back and sitting and talking. The panic is subsiding. Sanity is returning.
Samsung extends its TV streaming service to everyone on the web.
North America has its hotest June ever recorded. We have recorded about 200 of the 2Billion years of the continent's history (0.00001%). No serious analyst would draw any serious conclusion.
When compared to Federal unemployment subsidies, the pay of gig work is not worth the effort. This comes as a surprise to some adults, and that is surprising to some of us adults.
An engineer finds a way create energy from human excrement. Of course it has no practical application here and now. Given, however, extreme conditions such as space travel or colonizing other planets, such techniques may be worthwhile.
Google puts its Android machine learning platform onto is Play Store. They want more programmers to use more AI on more devices.
.....Observation from Starbucks: a few plexiglass barriers set on the floor far in the back of the store ready to be tossed into the dumpster. We will have mountains of plexiglass in landfills in a year. I wish these will not leak toxic waste as they degrade over the next thousand years. We had alternatives, but we chose these toxic landfills when we chose our reaction to the virus.
A closer look at how Waymo (Google) is using simulation instead of actual streets to practice its self-driving cars. While in San Francisco last week, we met a Waymo car with its spinning, roof-top lidar sensor.
The "Back Widow" movie brings in $60million in its opening weekend on Disney.
Tesla updates its software to something closet to full self driving.
Seth Godin reminds us that a good idea is much better that lots of hoopla.
Microsoft's Edge is now #3 in the browser market behind Chrome and Safari and ahead of Firefox.
The story of how one writer used self-publishing and self-marketing to reach financial success.
One writer's experience at a first novel and the lessons learned about writing something that long.
Want to sell some of the books you have written? Get on TikTok.
Ten lessons from a decade of helping writers earn more money.
After success comes the blues (often).
Steps for outlining not one but a series of books.
Tips at creating a community of writers online.
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