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: 2-8 May, 2022
In China, increased regulation by the governors has greatly decreased funding of new tech companies. I don't understand what their governors are doing other than simply going crazy with power.
Wikimedia will no longer accept donations in crypto currency.
The Russian army "captured" a John Deere tractor dealership in Ukraine. They took all the tractors back home. John Deere remotely disabled all of them. I am sure the story will continue with Russian hackers (those who are still left in Russia) trying to reverse engineer the computers and software so they can activate the tractors again. I give the Russians a good chance here.
Some thoughts on why we tend to like characters that really aren't likable.
How the word "elite" became a political one that connotes bad things.
Some thoughts on how writers can and should not use social media.
....Strong rumors that the US Supreme Court will overturn the Roe vs. Wade decision. Note, this does not mean that abortion will disappear from America. That is one of the more media-induced disinformation campaigns ever seen.
We operate on the premise that its okay to do bad things to people who are worse than bad. The Russians are currently the world's worse something or other. Therefore, all hackers are allowed and applauded for hacking anything Russian.
Amazon builds in the ability to convert EPUB files to be read on its Kindle. If you have and use a Kindle, this is a big deal.
The website for Google's program is here.
Those who study addiction claim that cryptocurrency trading is highly addictive.
Remote and hybrid working arrangements may bring a boost to the camper van and camper car market.
A look at smartphone that cost less than $500 and do everything.
A look at the state-of-the-practice in laptop computers. Leading the way is the Dell XPS 13. We live in a time when no one is fired for buying a Dell.
When did Google AI researchers become celebrities whose hiring and firing make the headlines?
.....Warehouse workers at a second Amazon Staten Island location vote "no" on a union.
The sales of non-fungible tokens has dropped greatly. I guess there are enough people who "just don't see the emperor's clothes."
Manufacturing chips requires chips which requires manufacturing chips which... Someone really goofed five years ago.
Pandemic prosperity continues for AMD.
After six months of waiting, PCWorld still sees Windows 11 as an unnecessary upgrade.
Mozilla releases Firefox version 100.
The Russians update the labor camps of POWs to include IT work.
.....Dish Network completes (sort of) its installation of 5G systems in Las Vegas.
Researchers at Meta have built a custom processor that advances hopes of their VR headsets that actually work. Notice: since "researchers" did this, they are far from bringing this to real devices on the market.
More and more and more...Samsung has new memory cards for dashcams that hold 16 years worth of data. Of course that is much more than anyone can practically use.
Does your company have its own little unique cute personality or is it just a plain cult?
Depending on what you count and how you label it, the US now has 1million COVID deaths. If this number is accurate, why is it that Nigeria does not have double or triple that number. I lived in Lagos, Nigeria. If all this is accurate in the US, Lagos itself would have had a million COVID deaths.
Coming next year from AMD, processors that enable better and better laptops for playing games.
The pandemic was and is a demographers delight as they track the quick drop and revision to the birth rates in the US. This, however, was just a blip in the declining birth rates among the affluent (all of the US).
Qualcomm releases its Wi-Fi 7 products.
.....AMD releases new processors specifically for Chromebooks. I believe we lost sight of what a Chromebook was supposed to be: an inexpensive web browsing machine. Now we have moderately expensive think clients.
All the tech companies take losses in the stock market. Time to buy.
Meanwhile in China, the governors order all government to replace foreign-made PCs with China's own. This includes an Chinese operating system. Will Microsoft Office be banned as well?
We learn that we don't know much about Antarctica.
Microsoft and VolksWagen are working together to make the Hololens function in moving vehicles.
.....Strong rumors that Intel will sell subscriptions to computer vision software in the fall. Intel is trying to move beyond just hardware to other areas where it has expertise.
I suppose that some persons in the legal profession will understand this. It appears that Nvidia was fined because it didn't explain all the possible uses of its products. Again, perhaps some understand the fine points of the law in this area.
Basic business at Amazon. Workers at a warehouse formed a union. Ultimately, that is a signal that the managers at the warehouse were doing a terrible job at leadership. Hence, Amazon has fired those failed leaders.
24 years ago...we saw the iMac. Things changed.
.....Ian Goodfellow is leaving Apple over its return-to-the-office policies. Goodfellow is quite famous for his accomplishments in artificial intelligence. He is one of the younger superstars in the field.
It appears that there is a market for really big, really good computer monitors that cost over $1,000. Alienware shows theirs. These are technical marvels. I would love to have one. I'm not sure where in the house I would put it.
Microsoft releases the code for the 27-year-old program 3D Movie Maker. It is now open source.
In a cave in Alabama that is only about four feet high, people find 1,000-year-old carvings on the ceiling. These were found decades ago. It was only recently that the technology existed to photograph the six-foot-long carvings. There is much we do not know about where we live. Yet we claim to know the temperature of the earth to a tenth of a degree 10,000 years ago.
In the UK, new regulations are in place that could fine American tech companies tens of billion$$$. Anything to extract taxes money for the politicians to spend.
The LSAT could be on its way out as a prerequisite to attending law school.
.....