The Grand Design

Just finished "The Grand Design" by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Have to say, I was not that impressed. I read "A Brief History of Time" and a re-read in "A Briefer History of Time" and felt much of the time the reading of "The Grand Design" was like reading the same material for the third time. Then, in the end I found the conclusions less perfect than I had anticipated from the author. His next book will have to have some really good critics for me to buy it.

Go NASA Go !

Last summer, just before the final Space Shuttle mission, Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator, held a remarkable talk where he outlined the NASA future of human spaceflight. Firstly, he firmly confirmed NASAs commitment to human space flight.

He then outlined his believe that privately owned american companies should be transporting astronouts to the ISS, instead of foreign governments, and from there NASA will continue its deep space explorations. For this to be possible NASA will be providing the Commercial Orbital Transportation Service to their partners. Sounds smart, why continue to spend money on something we have done many times? Lets go further.

Then for the future, one of NASAs goals is to orbit Mars and eventually land on it. Another one, asked for by the president, is a mission to an asteroid, which, I guess, they are starting to plan. Finally, he mentions the Moon as one of their ambitious human destinations. What a set of goals.

"To boldly go where no man has gone before" - thats more or less it! :-)

Exciting news from NASA will contain the Juno mission to Jupiter, Dawn satellite orbiting asteroid (july 2011), The GRAIL probes studying the Moons interior (september 2011) and The Curiosity rover heading for Mars (november 2011).

Looking forward to it.

For the complete transcript of his talk see here.

Windows 8 coming features

Just learned about Windows 8 new features at CIO. In his great compilation Howard Wen claims the following features are coming:

1. Windows Phone 7's theme and UI - this is a really big change. Take a look:

2. Ribbon User Interface in Explorer - not really a biggy, always expected the next versions of Microsoft products to have the ribbon user interface.

3. Cloud Integration - using Windows Live Mesh to move files between my computers already, but no SkyDrive yet. Of course it will be cool to get better integration but I always thought the Cloud to be more, much more, than the Mesh and SkyDrive. :-)

4. Windows Live Integration - more? Using my Windows Live account to log into my computer, how will that work in a domain? Intriguing.

5. Built-In PDF Reader - this will be done using Microsoft Modern Reader. Good, but where is XPS?

6. ISO Mounting - been using a third-party solution for this for a long, long time. It will be great to get an integrated solution.

7. File Download Verification - more malware security

8. Aero Auto-Colorizaton - no need.

Then Howard Wen mention the rumored features of Windows Store, ARM Processor Support, Factory Reset, History Vault, Instant-On, IE 10, Multi-Touch and Really Fast Install. You should take a look at these, this is great compilation.