Dwayne Phillips' Day Book

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.


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This week: 23-29 August, 2021

Summary of this week:


Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Sunday


Monday 23 August 2021

Strong rumors of a much more powerful Mac Mini this Fall. More ports, too.

Game developers talk about why making games is so difficult.

Graph theory meets big, big data.

Our Secretary of Defense activates the Civil Reserve Air Fleet (CRAF). US commercial airlines will fly evacuees from US military bases in the region to other places. The airlines won't fly into Kabul.

We are approaching a point where office buildings will be closed two years. Reverse this? Yes, it will happen one day. Perhaps ten years from now. The economic damage to those who serve office workers is far worse than those who track such things will admit.

Intel shows its Ponte Vecchio processor with 100Billion (with a B) transistors.

We have reports that "everyone" in the tech industries is hiring.

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Tuesday 24 August 2021

Intel and our Dept of Defense sign a contract to be part of the Rapid Assured Microelectronics Prototypes - Commercial (RAMP-C) program.

Samsung announces that it will hire 40,000 persons over the next three years.

SpaceX announces that it has shipped 100,000 Starlink terminals.

Our FDA has approved Pfizer's vaccine. I cannot find if Pfizer is still free from liability.

The CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Google will visit President Biden at the White House. I'm a little surprised they have the time to meet with someone down at his level.

We seem to have a competition for the world's biggest windmill. At this moment, China is ahead. One point is that a 20% larger wind turbine generates 40% more power.

Researchers find a security hole in Microsoft's Power Apps portals platform. 38million records exposed including a lot of COVID vaccination records.

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Slow news this week. I guess these are the dog days of summer.

Wednesday 25 August 2021

Cerebras claims its new AI-specific hardware can run models with 120Trillion connections (more than adequate for any models calculated so far).

Tim Cook has been the CEO of Apple for ten years. It is arguably the most successful company in the history of the world. NOTE: Cook is not one of the richest persons in the world. Paid well, he is not an ego-driven celebrity founder.

Coming this Christmas from Microsoft: Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Waymo will expand its self-driving car rides in San Francisco. A person will still sit behind the wheel, so this is still a small experiment.

Google employees don't have a right to fuss about the company's clients. This comes as a shock to some employees. Strange that adults wouldn't understand this simple idea. And if you don't like your boss' choice of customers, you can quit your job.

Advances in micro-super-capacitors move us closer to being able to power tiny machines that can float around inside our bodies. This is still science fiction, but points to machines that clean our bodies and remove illness.

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Thursday 26 August 2021

Here we go with super duper computing: Nvidia Corp., the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. are building Polaris. This has 2,240 Nvidia A10 Tensor Core GPUs squeezed into 560 total nodes. Coming in 2022.

Nvidia and VMWare release the Nvidia AI Enterprise platform.

Accomplishing the opposite of the objective: when Twitter labels a tweet as "misinformation" it spreads far further than when left alone.

YouTube avoids the scrutiny of other social media sites for a simple, difficult reason: it is full-motion video (FMV).

Wing (Google and Alphabet) has delivered by drone in the air 100,000 little packages in Australia.

After meeting with our President, the CEOs of the big tech companies pledges to spend billion$ to provide better cybersecurity tools and train hundreds of thousands of persons.

Got $549? Like Halo? Microsoft has the X-Box console for you.

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Friday 27 August 2021

TSMC announces price increases. This will make consumer electronics more expensive.

We still have adults running Reddit. "dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy."

The governors of China declare their own 12-hours a day six days a week work schedule illegal.

The dysfunction that is our Federal government. A case in point is $42Billion for broadband.

Panasonic puts one person's head on another's body for ads. Some of us remember when this happened with Oprah Winfrey and Ann-Margret. Where are the adults?

More angst about facial recognition and law enforcement. Lest we forget, such found the bombers at the Boston Marathon.

Tim Cook gets about $750Million as a bonus from Apple. That is a lot of money, but pales in comparison to what other founder, celebrity CEOs have.

Our Supreme Court steps in to remind some Federal regulators that shouting "Public Health!" does not give them powers not granted by the Constitution.

A shame that neither some writers nor some government regulars understand mental health.

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Saturday 28 August 2021

Targeted Ads: yet another thing we despised before the year of the virus, but we love 'em now.

In a "do duh" move, Microsoft to allow installs of Windows 11 on older computers.

China claims to have a billion Internet users. The definition of success has changed.

We hate it when reality clobbers our most-loved ideas. Facebook data shows that the most popular posts are copied from somewhere else.

The governors of Chicago seem to want GrubHub and DoorDash to go away. The rich don't need these services. The poor saps who work at restaurants? Well, they are poor. The year of the virus further divides the haves and have-nots.

Our high-minded Congress members want the social media companies to give them everything related to January 6th, 2021. This will take staff and lawyers years to "analyze." The cost$ to taxpayers will be a large number. The result will be, well, just about nothing. This is bad for all of us.

Amazon disables ISIS propaganda website. And please explain why they allowed one to exist in the first place.

We have reached a milestone with 100million persons using an Apple Watch. Not bad for an experiment.

A California parole board recommends that Sirhan Sirhan be set free. I am old enough to know that name.

Our Intelligence Agencies offer no conclusions as to the origin of our current virus.

The Whole-Mouth toothbrush: I guess I gotta' get one of these.

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Sunday 29 August 2021

I feel that the great tragedy of the year of the virus is that we have chosen to place unbearable pressure on ourselves. "The survival of mankind is at stake." I'm not sure how we reached that conclusion, but we act as if we did. "If you don't do fill-in-the-blank in the next ten seconds, we are all doomed." The fill-in-the-blank changed from month to month. We cannot live under this type of pressure month after month. We crack, even if just a little crack. We act badly towards one another. Friends and relatives become enemies. Please, let's stop this, "Do fill-in-the-blank or someone will die."

"There are still cultural weather makers, but they might not be the people we think they are."--Seth Godin

It appears that a bout of COVID makes a person more resilient than a vaccine. I guess I don't understand all this vaccine stuff. I thought a vaccine gave you a little disease so you had antibodies. Again, I just don't understand the word "vaccine."

I suppose we will all be more cybersecure now.

The (no longer) silent majority want to return to the office building. There are large percentages of the workforce who are being injured by working from home. It is a pain to commute, but the gain is there as well.

Social media continues to change. As a writer who wants to earn money, how to keep changing with it.

The concept of the Resources Page on a blog system so that readers can go to one place to learn where I learn.

How one constantly moving couple earn good money as writers.

Some tips on creative nonfiction.

Some good tips on writing an outline of a book.

Finding the time to write. When I had a much busier life, I wrote more than I do know (I think). Writing was breathing. I had to do it.

I like this post of being a career writer. Substitute just about anything for "writer" and it still works.

Thoughts on "hunger" or desire to do it.

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