25 December 2001
Today, on the holiest of Christian days, I want to wish for peace on earth and good will toward men.
What is it with international tensions and countries that start with the letter "I?" I read the paper and it sounds like we're looking at tensions between India and Pakistan, between Israel and Palestine. Not long ago, it was Ireland and England. Iran and Iraq have been warring with their neighbors and each other during the past 20 years.
Does the I stoke the ego to the point of insanity? Who, in a rational mind, willingly chooses violence to improve his political and economic circumstance? When it's so easy to vote with your feet, why don't more people seek a peaceful resolution to their problems? Heck, you don't even need to follow the immigration laws to live and work in this country, come over here! If yu're stopped for a traffic offense, as I often am, they won't even arrest you here!
We should keep an eye on Iceland, Indonesia and Italy.
Or is it the combination of "I" and "P" that is somehow more lethal to peace? Panama, Paraguay, Peru, the Phillipines, Poland, and Portugal are all potential blood enemies of the I-Lands. We should separate the P's and I's the best we can, I suspect. Based on my cursory examination of the world map, I think that the Phillipines and Indonesia are too close. Portugal is not as likely to have troubles with Iceland or Italy - there's really a lot of stuff between them. I worried about Poland and Italy for a while, but I reasoned that they are separated by otherwise level headed peoples and not so likely to engage each other directly.
Okay, I get upset when people say that Columbus discovered America. Discovering a place where millions of people live is hardly discovery, in the truest sense of the word. And in the same way, I can't say that I've discovered Hide Itoh this week, but that's what I want to say. if you go to www.pixture.com, you can discover this artist. His medium of choice is the 32x32 pixel icon. I'm slack-jawed at the results.
Every once in a while, I see someone do something so well that I am humbled, and want to slink back home and hide. Hide Itoh lives on another plane from me, and I'd like to feel what it's like to be Hide for a day, someday.
In the meantime, please enjoy the opportunity to view his work, and to find a cool AIM icon or two.
Let's put together a few things: DIVX, the IBM Microdrive, and the current PDA Displays. Add a pair of headphones and a pair of gloves and you've got the makings of Movies On the Go.
First, let's take the hardware. Current PDAs have screens with 16-bit color (that's 65,000 colors, like the old VGA standard) and 240x320 pixel displays. SONY has one with a 320x320 display. These displays are Reflective Thin Film Transistor (RTFT) displays, which means that you can see them great outdoors and indoors. These machines also feature CompactFlash Type II slots, which can hold a 5mm thick "card," such as the IBM Microdrive.
| The IBM Microdrive is just what it sounds like, a hard drive. It comes in three sizes, 340MB, 512MB, and 1GB. This danger puppy takes a CFII slot, and then it starts converting your battery to heat. Remember the gloves I said you needed? They're for holding your PDA while you run this drive. | |
DIVx is also called MPEG-4. It's a video compression technology. You can read about it (and download software for using it) at www.divx.com. It's a cool site besides. With DIVx, you can reduce a DVD small enough to fit on a CD. I don't want to trivialize this task - it takes a lot of processing power to convert 8GB of data to 700MB of data. But, it actually happens. There is already content on the DIVx site that a person can download. Full screen, full motion video.
As I watch these trends - miniaturization of the hardware and greater compression of the data, I feel like this is just the first step in a progression toward an amazing difference in the way that people communicate about the world. I'm reminded of the True Witnesses in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. There might be a day in the not-too-distant future when you might carry chips in your pocket, similar to today's coins, with events from your life, or entertainments, and be able to use and share them as easily as we tell stories now.
I'm beginning have a vision of an office where seeing the vacation slides has crossed over into an entirely different territory. Maybe some technologies should only be allowed in the hands of people who can use them without boring people.
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