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There is a buzz recommending feature that learns what you are interested in and filters for that.

More, there are a suite of mobile, location based features, in luding google maps integration with what’s buzzing around you.

The rumors have been swirling, it’s official now. The Obama administration has canceled the Constellation program.

If you didn’t know, this program is the shuttle replacement. AKA, the only way we (the U.S.)  have to get people into space once the shuttle retires. Without this, we will be reliant on the Russians to get us into space. Or maybe the Chinese once their burgeoning space program can handle it.

What the heck?

This is particularly galling since President Obama, when he was candidate Obama, came to the Space Coast looking for votes. At that time, he made the promise to promote space advocacy.

My favorite quotes:

“Here’s what I’m committing to: Continue Constellation. We’re going to close the gap (between the end of shuttle flight and the next program, Constellation). We may have additional shuttle flights,” he said.

and

“Under my watch, NASA will inspire the world once again and is going to help grow the economy right here in Brevard County,”

Obama is, supposedly, all about job creation… well, that is “saving or creating jobs”. Funny that. There were already going to be 7,000 jobs lost on the Space Coast because of the end of the shuttle program. There are countless others that will be unemployed with the Constellation cancellation between NASA and contractor employees.

What we get instead is a light rail project from Tampa to Orlando. Great, thanks for that. We can put our hypergolics, cryogenics, and rocketry engineers to work digging trenches and laying rails in Tampa. But, obviously, they’ll have to move to Tampa to do that.

When the Apollo program ended, the Brevard County economy collapsed. That’s what we can expect when these thousands of people receive their pink slips. We are a space center with no space vehicles. A launch facility with nothing to launch. Is that what the Obama administration really means? Kill off the good jobs to be replaced with low paying, low skill construction jobs? Kill a local economy or two in the mean time??

The administration is trying to soften the blow to our national space interests by saying they will support private companies trying to go to space and that these companies will create jobs. It’s crazy. A favorite saying, “Tis better a bird in hand than two in the bush” applies here. We have thousands of highly trained, high paying jobs right here that will be eliminated, to be replaced by some nebulous plan to employ some in the future.

This is a travesty. It isn’t even about the jobs or the money. This is our future as a people. 40 years ago we could send men to the moon. Soon we won’t even be able to send them to space. Is this what has become of the greatest nation? Is this the legacy we want to leave our kids?

Not to gloat (ok, maybe a little bit) I called it on December 26. The iPad would be just a big iPhone. I even managed to post the name they would eventually use, the iPad.

Looking at the device now that it has been released, it does have some new native apps but for all purposes that count it’s a big screen iPhone. And that’s in the expensive version, it’s  just an iPod Touch in the cheaper version.

They brought it out. That’ s what matters.. it’s a real product. Hopefully there will be advances in the coming versions and I hope they do really well. As I said in my other post, I’m hoping this brings about a rash of competing devices that will eventually give me “The perfect hardware device”.

We had an awesome time and I wanted to share with the world in case anyone is thinking of staying there.

We were planning on checking into the hotel, having a nice dinner and then hitting Universal Citywalk for the New Years party. The Gaylord was so awesome, we ended up never leaving.

We had a nice room, with great amenities… but you could get this anywhere. The real highlight of our stay was dinner at the Old Hickory Steakhouse. There we were treated to a meal that only kings should aspire to. Kristen had a fillet that was melt in the mouth smooth like butter. I had a cowboy bone-in rib steak that was, to put it mildly, the best steak I have ever had. And I’ve had a lot. It was a black Angus, dry aged, piece of heavenly goodness that I’m unable to sufficiently describe in words. It was so awesome. The service was great and everything we ate was to die for. We totally recommend this restaurant.

Besides that, we decided to hang out at the hotel bars to welcome the new year. They were nice and we met some fun people.

We ordered the in-room breakfast service the night before. It was totally worth it.

All in all, I recommend the Gaylord Palms to anyone looking for a very nice hotel stay. It’s pricey, but you get what you pay for. There are much more expensive hotels in this hospitality rich area. Some are better and some are just over priced. I can confidently say that this one is definitely worth the money. I wasn’t disappointed with anything.

I’ve been looking for a neat Netflix streaming set top box for a bit. Been toying with the idea of building a boxee box for the living room. So far, I’m making due with hooking the laptop up to the TV. It’s a decent enough solution but I don’t have a way to get sound through the TV with it. The Roku has a wireless connection and HDMI to the TV. Pretty good.

So yes, I want a set top box, should this finally be it? I notice the default channel lineup on the Roku isn’t that great… basically just netflix and a few other not-so-great channels. But for a hundred bucks, can it really go wrong?

Anyone have any other great suggestions?

UPDATE: Of course, I posted this, then just saw the news that the XBMC has just released a new build…. looks tempting.

I’ve talked about what I want in The Perfect Hardware Device and, clearly, this is not exactly what I described. I want an open device. We don’t know much about this tablet, but if wild speculation can be trusted, this will be another walled garden…. if my supposition is correct, its just going to be a bigger iPhone. And while that would be cool, it’s not what the industry needs.

I believe this is a good step though. In the same way that the iPhone revolutionized the category of phones, the iTablet or iSlate or iPad or whatever they call it will revolutionize the tablet market. This will usher in plenty of new competitors that maybe will finally give me the device I want. Open, portable, always connected.

Indeed, if the Apple product does exist and if it is successful, it could change the way we use computers. That would be a great thing, even if we don’t all end up with the Apple device, the second and third movers will have a good time of it.

Hmm… a Google tablet anyone?

The analogy is thus(here slightly modified): Google is building an infrastructure on the web that rivals the importance of the Roman highway system and, in this scenario, Google is the Roman empire.

Between ChromeOS and Android, with Google’s steadily growing suite of web-apps, Google is re-doing the idea from some years back that “the network is the platform”. In this case the network is the general web and, if Google has their way… they will be the platform. They are trying to re-invent the way people use computers. Gone is the paradigm of a PC running all the applications, replaced instead by the thin-client doing all the important work on the big servers(you know, like how it used to be before PCs). In this case, the thin-client is basically a web browser and the servers are web-apps.

Now,  this is all well and good on the Joe-Schmoe consumer level. I,  as an individual,  would and do frequently rely on Google to handle and store my data in exchange for scanning it and displaying a few ads.   Guess what, though? Me, as network administrator in an enterprise environment would, no way in HELL, trust my confidential company data on servers that are not under my control or, at least, guaranteed to be available by some major service level agreement contracts replete with disaster recovery, encryption and all that.

And that’s the downfall of this web-app only plan. Without the corporations buying in, it will never come to full fruition. After all, corporations are where the money is at. What I want to see is the world shift away from the Windows desktop. I want to see ChromeOS and other thin-clients succeed and succeed in a big way. Web based apps are awesome and their time is coming BUT for corporations to follow this model, the apps are going to have to come in-house in a BIG WAY. That means enterprise support.

As I see it, for the dream of a Windows-desktop-less world, enterprises are going to need a robust web platform that can be self-hosted or alternatively, securely hosted in and ASP SLA-bonded model. The suite of apps must include at minimum: email, calendar, docs and spreadsheets. They should come in a turnkey solution that encompasses security and access control. They should have easy portability to mobile devices and should be modularized to support integration of a wide variety of applications. Larger companies with dedicated IT resources should be able to self-host these and smaller shops can sign up on an ASP model.

There are already many enterprise-grade applications that are browser based. Kronos and Peoplesoft come to mind. There are many others that have browser interfaced reporting systems. And some of these even integrate with your Active Directory, Exchange and eachother. But this is far from what I’m envisioning. The goal from what I’m saying is to unite  these applications around a common enterprise login/credentialing  system such that a user can log in through his thin client browser and have the necessary accesses to any and all of his critical apps and data right through the browser. Additionally, features for document management, email, calendar and will all be tightly integrated in the way we see in the google apps suite.

Better yet, would be that these are open source applications that all revolve around this common system. This platform exists, at least, in one form that I know of… Zope.  There are probably plenty of others but in any case, there is much development to do before this will be full featured and totally enterprise ready. But at minimum a common platform exists. Let’s make others!!

I am calling for all forward thinking open-source devs to come out of the woodwork and support these type of projects. Linux on the desktop may never really take off as a full-blown replacement for the Windows OS on it’s own, but with a full suite of apps available online, the web could fully replace the Windows desktop. This would allow the general public to use linux based thin clients on the desktop and finally put the last nail in the Microsoft coffin.

We need a platform, we need the apps. We need a company that can provide enterprise support and sell the corporations on the platform. We need ASPs.

I’m willing to put real work into help bringing this about. Please, hit me up in the comments and retweet if you agree.

The iPhone is great.  I carry mine with me wherever I go. It’s got the durability and ever connectedness that I need in a portable laptop (really, that’s what it is… I almost never actually talk on the phone) and does ALMOST everything I would want it to do. Yet, the iPhone disappoints because it exists in Apple’s walled garden. There are apps for almost anything you can imagine but they are encumbered by Apple’s draconian controls of the app store. There doesn’t exist a vibrant community of free software development on the iPhone as we need to see. Furthermore, why do we need apps for everything? The reason is the same controls that Apple has put in place. Apple has disallowed Flash on their platform. Flash would be the killer app on the iPhone, but you won’t see that any time soon. Apple won’t allow just any old website to now run rich client apps on their phone. Hell will freeze before we see Flash on the iPhone. There are big name developers leaving the platform for good reason. It’s a great piece of technology and it has pushed the envelope, there are even rumors of a tablet in Apple’s future, but the writing is on the wall… unless there are some drastic policy shifts the iPhone is a dead platform. Android and ChromeOS are about to eat Apple’s lunch.

Android is going to change the mobile landscape. Apple had the first mover advantage with their groundbreaking mobile device, but it won’t hold a shadow compared to what is coming. The perfect hardware device, as I envision it, is now possible. It  just needs someone to make it. And I’m sure someone WILL make it, because if I want it… so do 60 million other consumers. Here is my shot at making the perfect device, and here’s hoping I’m describing is what finally comes out of the G-phone rumor.

Form factor will be like the Archos Tablet. I’m sorry that that Archos couldn’t get the formula right…. their device has a lot going for it (including now, a limited Android) but their life-cycle and support sucks. My perfect device will not be tied to a carrier. It will be cheap enough to allow mass adoption, but I’m willing to pay a fair price for the hardware. The standard 3G, WiFi, bluetooth complement will be there. As will all the same sensors/camera/GPS like the iPhone. It will run Android. And after that, it will do NOTHING. It will get out of the way.

The ultimate device will be completely hackable. It will allow anyone to write apps for it. But that won’t be a big deal because apps will mostly go away. Why? The web will be the apps. Google has the right idea here. You can see it in the ChromeOS implementation. The web is the platform. It makes even more sense on mobile devices, especially this tablet I’m dreaming up. With full Flash support, and a handful of native apps, the world is in your pocket. You have access to the whole world of rich client applications, sandboxed in a safe browser session. You can have all your data available wherever you are. And it won’t just be the basic suite of Google apps either, huge swaths of the net will optimize for mobile in a way that we haven’t seen before. The web and mobile will merge in a symphony of yummy goodness. It’s too great to imagine.

I will buy this device when it comes out. My wallet is on the table. Please, someone develop this.

Businesses seem to be pretty much the same idea as in Cuba where they produce money over time. Job levels are split up into episodes, it seems, with chapters in each episode. So far in Episode 1 I mastered a few jobs, then had to pick between the Vory and the Mafiya, and apparently the jobs are different depending on which path you choose.  Some of the loot drops reveal getting a Dossier on Dmitri, like we’re going to end up whacking him later.

I was able to vault the first collection pretty fast. It’s a prison tattoos collection. Funny enough, just yesterday I was watching a program on the History channel that was all about Russian prison tattoos. Apparently it’s all very symbolic with each tattoo actually meaning something important. The stars on the knees mean you kneel down for no one… basically you are very high ranking in the criminal organization. Funny that exact program was on yesterday.

Anyway, looks like a fun little expansion, I’m looking forward to playing more.

More details when available….