Time to give up on Haiti?

Maybe this is too soon to be considered politically correct, and maybe you can call me a heartless bastard, but I find myself wondering if it wouldn't make more sense to stop sending money to help rebuild Haiti and instead get the UN member nations to collectively offer a Get Out of Haiti Free card to all Haitians. There's only 9M of them, and if spread out throughout the world, they wouldn't create too much of an economic impact on any host countries.

Haiti has been stripped of its natural resources, now has practically no exports, and it's only significant industry is manufacture using imported parts. The country is over-crowded, and its citizens live in abject poverty. Why would anyone want to waste their money rebuilding it, if it's not going to change anything for the people living there? The best thing anyone can do for Haiti is to abandon it and give nature time to restore some of its original beauty.

Some great political cartoons...

I received these in my e-mail, but since I'm not a fan of chain mail, and never forward them on, I figured I'd share these in a less annoying way...

HTML5 and H.264 vs. Ogg. Can't we all just get along?

For those of you who aren't in the know, the next version of the HTML specification, HTML5, includes a couple of new and extremely useful tags -- video, and audio. These tags are intended to allow developers to directly insert video and audio content without having to use a plugin system. There's all sorts of reasons why this is useful, but I won't get into them.

The problem is, there's this big debate going on around which video codec to support. Mozilla and Opera sit firmly in the Ogg Theorea camp, while Apple only supports H.264. Google Chrome will support both, which is great, if you ask me. I'm not going to get into all the details over which codec is superior and why browser makers need to figure this out. If you want to know more about all that nitty gritty, read this article.

I just have one simple observation. This whole debate seems silly to me. Years ago, browsers only supported GIF files. Then, as the browser wars heated up, Netscape and IE and the others of the day started adding support for more and more image formats, including JPG, PNG, BMP, etc.. Nobody was really sure what format to use. Each one had its own advantages and disadvantages. But over time, all browsers eventually added support for virtually every image format out there, and as new image formats emerge, new versions of browsers add support for them. So what's the big brouhaha over support for different video codecs? Add support now for the most common ones, and as new and better formats emerge, add support for those. Yes, there may be licensing issues, but I seem to recall there were licensing issues with the GIF format all those many years ago, and yet all the major browsers still support them today.

It just seems simple to me. What about you?

iPhone 3GS - Will I or Won't I?

So the latest iPhone has been announced. And the Internet is buzzing about it. Some folks are trying to decide whether they'll purchase an iPhone 3GS, or a Palm Pre. Personally, I don't think I'll be switching to Palm. In fact, I can't, since I don't live in the US anymore, and the Pre is only available on Sprint -- at least for now. So the question is, will I drop my iPhone 3G in favor of an iPhone 3GS?

Short answer, No. I don't think the 3GS offers enough benefit to me to justify the cost. I'm happy with my 3G. It was a huge improvement over the original iPhone, both aesthetically, and functionally. It's fast enough for my needs, and it offers 99% of the functionality I want. Yes, video is a cool new feature, and one I'm sure I'd make use of. Yes, a built in compass is cool, and I could potentially make use of it. It'd be nice to have a better camera, too.

However, I'm disappointed in Apple. I was expecting some really significant advancement. Where's the front-side camera enabling video calls? Why didn't 802.11n make it in? Why didn't they change the case even just a little to make it better? It's just not enough of an upgrade to make it worth the upgrade.

I'm not specifically ruling out the possibility that I'll upgrade. My current iPhone 3G is still locked to AT&T, since I updated it to the latest firmware and modem baseband before I knew I'd be moving to Panama, so it doesn't work as a phone for me here. But I'm holding out hope that hackers might soon release a software unlock that'll work even with the new iPhoneOS 3.0. If not, I have plans to purchase a Rebel SIM, which could give me a hardware unlock solution. The 3GS's arrival at Movistar (Panama's only iPhone carrier) will probably take a couple of months, and let's face it, Movistar SUCKS! They're probably even worse than AT&T. They give me very little motivation to sign a contract with them, even for a working iPhone.

Of course, if I can't get my iPhone 3G unlocked, then I'm forced to either purchase a Movistar contract and iPhone 3GS, or abandon the iPhone. I will never return to Windows Mobile (Microsoft is dead to me since I switched to the Mac two years ago). I'm not a real fan of Blackberry. Palm hasn't yet announced a GSM version of the Pre. And to my knowledge, Android hasn't yet made it to Panama, although I'm sure it will eventually. So what's a bleeding edge technophile like myself to do with so little access to bleeding edge tech? I guess I just have to wait and see. I'll probably end up getting a 3GS, but maybe, just maybe, I can get my 3G to last me another year until the 2010 iPhone comes out!

I just hope Apple doesn't disappoint me again in 2010!

Testing out ping.fm