Quick Rant

I HATE our government. How we ever went from the noble ideals of our countries founding and the codifying of those ideals in The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights, to our current bureaucratic morass of a government, is a mystery to me. Some would say this is the result of necessary changes to accommodate our times. This is Bullshit!!! Honestly even if that were the case there is no reason for the level of bureaucracy we now have. The fact that there are more people working for the government than in the private sector is sickening. Is this a communist state? For it is in a communist state that the government owns everything. Which has happened in sector after sector of our economy. First it was academia, then it was agriculture, and now it is healthcare. Soon it will also be banking, and this take over has already happened in subsectors. Look at retirement, or at the ever expanding penetration of the FED into private firms (Goldman Sachs anyone?).

Outside of the take over of our economy is the rape of our freedoms. No longer can one own a gun in anonymity. One has to register that gun. No longer can protesters freely assemble. Protestors are cordoned off far away from what it is they are protesting. The list goes on.

Please wake up people. We need another revolution. Not necessarily one like the one that started this grand experiment. One of arms and bloodshed. Maybe that will not be necessary. I hope it won’t. Hopefully we will be able to have a revolution of the mind and of information. One that causes those entrenched in power to join the masses or risk losing everything.

Please wake up.

Holiday Blues...I Think Not

Actually I don't have the blues at all.  More or less I am disgusted with the commercialism of the holidays.  Why do we have to have Christmas commercials not even a week after Halloween ends?  I mean we haven't even bought our turkeys yet but we are supposed to run out and put our Christmas shit on lay-away?!?  What ever happened to enjoying the company of our families and spending time with the ones you love? 

I lost my thrill of the holidays when the Cabbage Patch Kids caused riots and people were getting beat up just to get the latest toy for their over privleged rugrat.  Who says Christmas means seeing which parent got their kids the biggest present under the tree?  Man this is just insane.  More and more parents are no longer parenting in an effort to buy their kids love and affection.  May the biggest bank account win.  The funny thing is that those who claim to be Christian and are celebrating Christ's birthday, are some of the biggest ones giving into the commercialism of the holidays.  They go to church then run home to unwrap their gifts and fawn over what they got.  They are the first in line on Black Friday to get the deals of the day and get the Wii or Xbox for a steal.

I myself have settled for the no frills Christmas and just enjoy the time with my family.  Sure we give gifts but we don't set up the ostentatious tree or the electricity sucking lights.  We don't drain our power to fit in with the other sheep on the block who have an over abundance of lights on their porch, in their window and on their tree.   We don't run out to try and find the biggest tree on the lot.  And no we don't spend a small fortune in purchasing decorations that we can only use once a year.  We just find each other a meaningful gift and then spend the time together enjoying each other's company.  No we don't miss the commercialized bullshit that comes with Christmas and the kids are just as thankful without all the hype and pompous circumstance.

So this year when you are sitting in a house full of sickening pine and your kids have forgotten you exist because they are inundated with gifts they don't need, ask yourself, how did it all come to this?  The answer you will find is because you gave in to the commercialist bullshit that used to be Christmas.

Now I am not saying that we should not celebrate Christmas just that we don't need the best toys and gifts to do so.  Back in the 1940s and 1950s families wanted to be home for the holidays because it was about being with your loved ones and not the latest game system or toy.

What I am asking folks to remember is the real meaning behind the holiday.  Remember your family when you are buying that Wii and ask yourself which would they rather have, you or the Wii.  And remember the ones serving their country in faroff locations and ask yourself, if they were given a choice, what would they rather have?  I bet you they would would rather be home and they wouldn't give a damn about the Wii!

Merry fucking Christmas!

Chrome OS: What is Google's Plan?

I cannot claim to know what Google is planning with it's recently "released" Chrome OS. But I do have some ideas on what they might do, and if they do not have these things planned then maybe Google should consider what I propose below.

First of all the Chrome OS is about putting Microsoft on edge. But that is obvious. So why do I mention it? Well I mention all of this since on top of challenging Microsoft they are also putting MacOSX and other the greater Linux movement on notice. In some ways they are challenging Ubuntu and the other Linux distros more than they are challenging Windows. But this is a good thing because for the first time there is enough weight behind a client based Linux distro in the Chrome OS. Before there have been other companies that have pushed or contributed to Linux (like IBM or HP) but it was always half hearted. So now if Google continues to devote resources to Chrome OS they will continue to act as the epicenter of the open source OS movement. Also, with Google's add business it can make an open source OS actually profitable. This is the key to open source taking root. Do I think that adds should be in an OS? I could live with it if done similarly to Google's text adds in search. In other words if they were limited and targeted to the user I think that they would not be a distraction. So to wrap up my first point is that Chrome OS needs to position itself as "The Open Source OS". 

As for uses for a web based OS, which Chrome OS is I can think of several. It is in this field that I see Google really getting leg up on Microsoft. I say this because Microsoft has been trying to get the "Smart Home" going with computers in every room. But Microsoft has the wrong implementation. it is trying to put a desktop into every room and that simply will not work. Just like trying to port the Desktop experience to a phone has been such a spectacular failure. But the Chrome OS which does everything on the web lends itself very well to this "Smart Home" idea. Think about it. A television with the Chrome OS built in. Such a device could allow you to have access to all of the wonderful content that is on the web. Which for Google is HUGE! It finally gets YouTube into the living room and when this happens it makes sense of Google's decision to purchase YouTube and their decisions to keep upping the quality of video. Without being able to view 1080p on a TV it does not make sense to support it. In addition to allowing for a 10 foot UI it also would allow for a host of applications to be viewed from the couch. From weather apps to Netflix, to social media, to anything that can be hosted on your home network or the web. In addition to the television with Chrome built in you could have refrigerators and alarm clocks all with a lightweight client OS that ties you in to the internet all the time.

Lastly, I will address what is the difference between Chrome OS and Android. There is no difference in the end. The two will converge and allow for a seamless integration of the Home with your life on the go. One will begin with the home and the other will end on your phone or in your car. This is not to say that the phone will run Android and the Home platforms will run Chrome OS. Overtime the two will become one in the same and there will be no distinction between the two as far as the end user is concerned. How this shakes out will depend on what the users want and need. So think of the two OS's as different starting points heading towards the same goal. And that goal is...

For Google to funnel more people in more ways into their online services so they can make more money. Which I am all for if it works, if it makes my life easier and assuming Google continues to allow me opt out if I want to.

4 Things That Need to be Added to the Palm Pre

In my piece "5 Great Features of the Palm Pre" I mentioned the one major problem I had with the device and the rest was about the features I liked on it. Which is what it was supposed to be but now I am going to give you five things that need to be addressed with the Palm Pre and the WebOS that runs on it. So....

1. Send Meeting Requests From the Device – You can respond to meeting requests. You can add items to your calendar. You can even notify those invited to a meeting that you are running late. So why can’t you actually create a new meeting and invite people to it from the phone? How hard can this be? I know Windows Mobile can handle this on both Exchange accounts as well as its Live Accounts. I am pretty sure the iPhone can do this as well with Exchange and Apple’s Mobile Me service, and maybe even with Google as well. Certainly Blackberries can do this with Exchange in a BES environment. So why can’t the Pre figure this out. Come on Palm, we are at version 2.10 and it has not been fixed yet.
2. Back Up Text Messages – I hate to say it but there are times when you need to reset your phone. Overall Palm makes this a really smooth process, with its Palm account and the Pre’s Backup feature all of your Email Settings, Contacts, Calendar and even Programs are all restored seamlessly. However, even when doing a non destructive restore that saves everything on the “USB Drive” portion of the device (like pictures and music), the text messages are lost. I do not understand this. Your email can all be resynchronized along with your Contacts and Calendar but yet they cannot have you text messages restored in the same manner?
3. Video Capture and Editing – Now this is not an essential but it is something that we were told the Pre would have down the road when it launched and it is still not here. With the iPhone 3GS having very cable video capture and editing built in and Android based phones like the Motorola Droid having some amazing video capture abilities (if not the editing capabilities) it would benefit the Pre and its WebOS with many customers.
4. More Customization – This is something that is needed on the Pre in some areas more than others. The first thing that I must have in terms of customization is the ability to choose different sounds for text messages, emails, and calendar alerts. The fact that the Pre makes the same sound for all of the above is annoying. Better still would be the ability to assign specific sounds in all of the aforementioned areas for specific people or at least accounts. So if I want a sound for an email that comes from my wife or my personal account to be different from the sound for an email that comes from my boss or my Exchange account, I should be able to do so. In a similar vein it would be nice to change the Home screen beyond the background and the 4 items on the quick launcher. In this latter area I think this was Palm trying to distinguish their home screen design from that of the iPhone and the Android that they went too far in the area of simplicity. If I want more on my home screen I should have that ability.

To finish I think that we will see most, if not all of the features listed above either from either Palm directly in updated versions of the WebOS or from the rapidly expanding App Catalog. I just hope that we see these features sooner rather than later.

Windows 7 is Great But Vista Was Too.

In the last week and half since Windows 7 has came out (actually for months leading up to the release as well) people have been going on and on about how great it is. Which it is great, but so was Windows Vista. Vista has been unfairly maligned since it came out and most of which was completely unfair. I will admit that there were some issues with device support but as I have said elsewhere, at least half of the fault for that lies on the device manufacturers as it does Microsoft. Moreover very quickly Vista shored up those problems and at which point it passed Windows XP in usability, design, security and function. Which to me is all I needed.

There are those that will still say that it was a resource hog, and all I have to say to that is that it was not designed to be run on old hardware nor was it designed for low end netbooks. So what can we say about this? At worst we can say that Microsoft did not anticipate what users would want with hardware. Others will say what about “User Account Control”? I personally thought that it was a great feature, that isolated administrative functions from those that did not need them. Additionally in the time I have had Vista I have had no serious Virus’s (I qualify it with serious simply because I have gotten minor spyware all of which was easily removed by my Anti Virus) and at least one time it actively stopped a script from hijacking my browser. The one thing I wish it would have done to make it better is the old software firewall trick of the checkbox to “Always Do This.” I did not think that the minor annoyance of having to click the Continue outweighed the benefits in security.

So is Windows 7 better than Vista? Of course it is. It took everything that was great about Vista and made it better. Then it threw in a bunch of new amazing features. Just remember it took Vista to get to 7.