The One About Many Things

(Updated) Even people living in the mountains probably know by now that grief spread across the planet yesterday when the Gunman who was 'Always by Himself', took with him 32 people. mlq3 blogged that one of those gunned-downed by that lunatic was a heroic-professor named Liviu Librescu who barricaded the door to his classroom until all his students could escape. He was a holocaust survivor. (added this:) The International Herald Tribune has an article on Liviu Librescu.

With regard to the heroic professor, I couldn't agree more with mlq3:

"Now that was leadership to the point of the ultimate sacrifice."

Indeed.

Speaking of the Holocaust, over at Slate, Clive Jones talked about the Poet-Warrior Isoroku Yamamoto, better known to us kids, as the dude who planned, orchestrated and attacked Pearl Harbor.

In his essay, Mr. Jones mulled this about poet-warriors:

we need to ask ourselves whether a flair for the poetic might not be a limitation to generalship, in which a considered appreciation for the mundane is essential. A poetic flair has an impatient mind of its own: It likes to make an effect, and it has a propensity for two qualities that can easily be inimical to a broad strategic aim. One of those qualities is what A. Alvarez called the shaping spirit, and the other is what Frank Kermode called the sense of an ending.

In the world of Technology, Intel announced in Beijing its plans for the next 2 years beginning with unwrapping Penryn. They also announced among others, a gaming platform code name: skulltrail and the introduction of an ultra mobile line.

Looks like my search for the Holy Grail will be realized in 2009 (or thereabouts) when, if all plans are good to go, mobile quads will be mainstream. Now, if only RAM prices could drop to go with those fast processors... after all any computer dude worth his salt knows: never, ever scrimp on ram; more is good.

Slight snafu that Apple has already corrected: WWDC Keynote on June 11th--- is set for the traditional 90 minutes and not 3 hours as previously noted across the web. WWDC is Apple's developer conference and this year, they plan to talk about Leopard, the Cupertino-based Mac maker's next operating system scheduled for shipping in October this year. Leopard is Mac OS X 10.5, and it is expected, when released, will have features that surpass its troubled rival Vista. WWDC is also the event where Apple is expected to announce when iPhone will ship.

I may have a slight bias when it comes to Macs. I switched to the platform early last year and never plan on going back to Windows. The Mac is an excellent platform for everything between work and play. With the shift to using Intel Processors, the Mac is an even more awesome platform because it has opened the door to run Windows applications via software like Parallels or Apple's free Boot Camp. Not to mention a lot of Apple software is being used to deliver New Media, some of it, comes freely bundled like garageband with every Mac. Just ask the boys and girls of PhilMug, a community of Mac Users and they'll tell you about their Mac experiences.

Stranger things have happened before, so notes Rachel Rosmin of Forbes who fantasized about Goopple--- an Apple-Google Mashup.

Speaking of everyone's favorite search giant, Chief Google, Dr. Eric Schmidt, put to rest the powerpoint-killer-app-from-google rumours with an announced presentation software to go with Google Docs & Spreadsheets.

For those of you who are big fans of Reality TV, iJustine, Mac user, blogger, internet lover and new media connoisseur of Tasty Blog Snack and Mommy, pack my lunch fame took over for a day wearing the cam over at justine.tv. (I don't know if, when you're reading this you can still catch her as she moves about San Francisco). As justine.tv's blog noted: guess the best man for the job... is a woman.

If you're into Parkour, be sure to check out this video by Desiree and Justine from their Mommy, pack my lunch site:

Guess I wouldn't end this post without a bit of Philippine politics: Avigail Olarte of the PCIJ wrote about 2007 Senatorial Candidates. Interesting. it'll help me to decide whether or not to vote.

Uber-Genius Einstein predicted that mass warps space-time and recent experiments have proven that he was right.

Speaking of bending Space-Time, for those of you who are addicted to Heroes as I am, wishing they could bend space-time to their will like Hiro, Comic Book Resources posted these video snippets (spoilers warning) of Heroes Vol. 1, Chapter 19 ".07%" which will air on April 23. What's it about, you ask? Why, Nathan discusses the future with Mr. Linderman. Claire has that talk with Grandmum Petrelli, who wants to ship Claire-Bear to Paris. Issac gives away his sketch pad and talks about Hiro and 9th Wonders... i guess you can figure out what happens to him. D.L. and Jessica have the talk about Micah, then Jessica is called to meet with our new favorite villain, Mr. Linderman. Lastly, former baddie Mr. Bennet is in Parkman's head.

The Search for the Holy Grail

Wouldn't it be way cool to bend space-time to your will and peer into the future or stand witness to the past with fresh eyes? Though as Master Yoda would say from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away, "Always in motion the future is". Yet the allure of peering into "what's next" is just so captivating and exciting.

Take my initial reaction to Appleinsider's post on Intel's next generation mobile chip based on Penryn that is expected to come out sometime next year. It is quad core and it is mobile.

What's so exciting about this is that finally--- power comes to mobile. it caught me by surprise because a few weeks ago, i've been looking at the Intel roadmap to help plan for future technology purchases. The illusive holy grail (i.e. wishful thinking on my part) is to consolidate all my technology needs into one device, preferably one that I could take with me anywhere, where i could work anywhere. It would be nice to just have one box that does it all for me--- raw power to do all my "playing around with," and mobility.

If you've been looking at new PCs and Macs, you'd find the world to be moving towards Multi Core. They're essentially many "cpus" in one. The technology enthusiast may find this Ars Technica article to be of interest, where they mull over the implications of leaping ahead to an 80-core chip world.

Anyway going to back to the here and now: sadly, the ranges of laptops across the mobile computing spectrum (yes, both Macs and PCs) are so disappointing. Which is why for me, the mobile quad is a welcome product in spite knowing that at least for the foreseeable future, will affect only a tiny bit of the computing population. Mobile Quads are for people who would trade battery life (never a good thing when going mobile) versus performance and most people--- who browse the web, who do word processing, spreadsheet, presentation work wouldn't benefit from such technology at all. Though I have my reservations about it, still it would be worth considering in 18 months.

While we're in the topic of mobility. I remembered coming across this video on YouTube. It is from Intel, and their vision for the UltraMobile PC. Their vision of future computing is that you get to wear your device.

ultra mobile pc

Sounds a bit too impossible? Hey! Flying cars are here now and... they sort of work. So why not wear your device? come to think of it, with the iPod shuffle, isn't that the beginning of wearable devices?

The technology in the video is actually here now. Well, maybe you can't command your computer to do stuff as depicted in the video and today's ultramobilepcs are just plain ugly (even from guys like Samsung).

Still, much of the underlying infrastructure is here, which translate to knowing it is do-able. With devices like iPhone (which makes the whole umpc genre look sexy as well as useable) and many other similar devices approaching us on the horizon, expect this future to begin to make an impact in our lives in as little as 5 years.

Speaking of the iPhone, David Pogue of the New York Times blogged about Multi-Touch screens, which is one of the features of iPhone and of future UltraMobilePCs (as seen in the video). Multi-Touch is a fascinating piece of technology, right out of Minority Report. And yes, it is a viable piece of technology that is here, just not in the hands of ordinary consumers.

jeff han and his multi-touch screen

If you must ask, the YouTube video above is indeed real. This technology exist now and one of the pioneers is Jeff Han of New York University. You can find him narrating this bit of technology over at lastminuteblog.


Another appealing piece of technology coming to town is Joost. It is, as the proponents behind it have called it: TV, the way you want it. It combines old school television with business-model disrupting new media of the Internet. The idea isn't really new. Just ask the Bittorrenting, TiVo cradling, DVR/PVR running crowd. It is however an excellent one.

Upon joining joost beta (i had to wait a few weeks for the registration to be approved), you download a client and you create a username. You then get to channel surf. Pick one and it gets sent to your Computer. Now, i've had problems trying it out when what i wanted to watch wasn't available. I suspect it is largely because my Internet connectivity (in the speed-of-molasses-range of 370kbps down, dsl and); joost recommends at least 1Mbps down.

I don't know yet if this is a feature. I haven't explored joost enough to know, but it would be really nice if joost would be more TiVo/MythTV/Bittorrent like that you get to choose before hand what you want to download and it fetches it in the background while you work and watch the video when it is done downloading or after you've done your work.

It would be nice if Chad Vader from Blame Society Productions could automatically be sent to say Joost or MythTV automatically upon subscription to them.

chad vader from blame society productions

Though I must admit such thought really breaks the whole joost-paradigm. The beauty of joost is that as long as you've got internet connectivity, you can watch the tube. Expect joost or joost-like business to be the norm in a few years.

In medicine, Osirix is this open source project that lets docs and medical personnel share your medical image data. It lets them create their own PACS-server. A few years back this would be a difficult thing to do. But Siemens and their ilk are standardizing over DICOM to deliver those high quality images and across the network.

I started writing this post because of my search for the illusive (and admittedly, futile search for the) Holy Grail: consolidating my tech needs into one platform, one device to rule them all. What i ended up doing was googling the Internet for all those links about upstart future technology. One of the fringe benefits of living in this nascent Age of Information is that power is decentralized and democratized (i.e. handed over to people)--- to do-it-themselves, to collaborate, to form communities, to build exciting new technologies. May be the Holy Grail isn't one device to rule them all, it is about making sense of what is today and what is to come and that may be the zeitgeist for now.