21st Century Musings.

We should really stop making obsolete technologies. Some people just have the right mentality lately when it comes to hyper-modern cutting edge technobabble-esque inventions. For example, take making a cure for cancer. Sure, you could do all that boring stuff in a lab, with proteins and… biology, but hey, Antimatter is cool! Why not use antimatter to cure cancer? Anyway, while all this may be a bit over the top, we -are- pushing our technologies to the next level, whether it is necessary or not, we always want to explore new frontiers.

Take, for example, Resolution Independence. I’ve seen the KDE 4 icons today, and well, they are svg’s! For those MIME-Type challenged among us, that means Scalable Vector Graphic, which means as much as that you are now officially able to print out the icon for whatever in whatever format you want, there is no quality loss in the traditional sense of pixelation and distortion. Now, GNOME 2 can do this as well - it’s GNOME icon set has a very nice scalable set that works great in small and big sizes, but these icons, well, let them speak for themselves;


Courtesy of the Oxygen icon suite - in SVN repositories near you! Anyway, this is awesome stuff. The Iconfactory has a post on resolution independence, but they used a PDF standpoint, which did offer a huge speed disadvantage. These streamlined SVG’s are superfast in rendering, and the detail is considerable. Of course, things are moving towards the resolution-independent UI now, with Leopard probably being the first OS to ship with a truly resolution-independent UI in April or so.

In the meantime, Microsoft is doing their usual ‘innovating’; attempting to introduce a new image format; HD-Photo! Buzzwords, anyone? The format, which is already obsolete, is supposed to be some sort of JPEG replacement, and of course, has nothing to do with High-Definition at all. I think this is very much in line with Microsoft’s confusingly-named OO-XML ‘replacement’ (slash competitor slash killer) for the Open Document Format, which is being required by law soon. For those new to the war, we don’t want .doc files littering public services anymore, as they are not public formats, but proprietary, courtesy of daddy Bill. So, there is an initiative to store -all- office document data in one format, so that would be your contemporary Powerpoint, Excel sheets, Word documents, anything, in an XML container. And the good thing is, everyone can read it! Unless, of course, Microsoft finds some way to get into the legislation. It’s the war of the times, and I strongly hope this is a war Microsoft doesn’t win, because the implications could be dire.