Headworx

I remember back in 1987 at the university, we had a lecture on liquid crystals. Two weak points were mentioned in reference to this technology: first, the LCD displays were monochrome, and second, they were too slow to be used to display motion pictures. Five years later I bought my first color LCD laptop (so called active matrix those days) and it had bright and clear and fast LCD display, violating just about everything I had learned about liquid crystals a few years before. The drawback was the price, something in the range of 10 thousand dollars. And today? We have LCDs everywhere. From watches to mobile phones to digital cameras to MP3 players to computers to TV sets... And now even the photo frames have LCD displays. That is natural... why use paper to print digital photos, when you can upload them directly to a "frame". Or a couple of them. As I write, a typical, decent 7 or 8 inch photo frame costs some 100 dollars. They used to have fairly low resolution (480 horizon

For years ATI and NVIDIA, known for their high performance graphics boards, have been the synonyms of fast games. Recently everybody have been talking about Sony PS3 and its ultra high performance graphics based on the NVIDIA RSX engine coupled with the Cell processor. And suddenly it looks like what was initially designed for games finds its way into high performance servers. A few days ago Wired reported about an astrophysicist who replaced his number - crunching supercomputer with a cluster of PS3s. This trend becomes even more mainstream, as some serious companies offer serious programming tools. Terra Soft Solutions has a version of Linux tailored for the PlayStation and RapidMind offers its stream programming toolkit for the console. This year's acquisition of PeakStream (a competitor to RapidMind) by Google amplified the trend even more. All these platforms and solutions share a common paradigm - multiple processing cores and parallel execution of tasks. What seems now a

Exactly a year ago I posted about GPS devices. Part of the post was about GPS - enabled cameras and how automatic geo-tagging of pictures would streamline the process of sharing and storing the pictures. Now after a year the GPS technology has made inroads into many consumer products, but I am still not aware of any consumer photo camera with built in GPS unit. On the other hand as some of you already know, I have been shopping for a new DSLR camera recently. I finally settled on the FujiFilm S5 Pro and one of the important contributors to my decision (versus Sigma SD14) was the GPS support. The FujiFilm S5 Pro is an interesting design, as it is based on the Nikon D200 body (I posted on the S5 Pro last month), and supports most of the accessories designed for the Nikon, GPS being one of them. I was naive to expect the Nikon GPS solution would be elegant. But the reality is Nikon is not an iPod and while being a "professional" it is quite often bulky and conservative. So how

I was completely surprised when I learned last week that copying music I owned was actually stealing music. Jennifer Pariser, the head of litigation for Sony BMG, during her testimony on October 2nd, 2007 said "When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." and then that making "a copy" of a purchased song was just "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy'". First I thought I misunderstood something, so I kept on reading... So for all my life I have been purchasing CDs just to learn when I rip one to my iPod, I am stealing? Seems like a good reason to stop buying CDs at all. I do not remember when I listened to the physical CD I had bought. I buy them, rip to the iPod and put back on the shelf. Listening to a CD is so inconvenient these days... I think not many people do it the way it was originally designed. But if this is a crime, then fine, I will not buy a CD anymore. At least not a "legal&