The Wall Street Journal has a front page story on the X Prize tiff between Benson and Rutan. This was pretty heady in 2004 on October 3 when Discover aired its special and Rutan’s team poised to win the $10 million suborbital prize. It’s probably pretty rare in NASCAR for the engine maker and the team to make dueling announcements on the nights before the race. I got to talk to Benson the night before the X Prize during the commercials while he was watching the Discover special. He had the restaurant at the Mariah Country Inn & Suites decked out with a big-screen TV. Benson’s group was already touting its Dreamchaser vehicle which was designed as an orbital vehicle, but was also being offered as a suborbital vehicle in direct competition with Space Ship Two. Benson was moved by the visuals in the Discover special. This was the culmination of his victory over eAc to win the engine contract.

Alas, Space Ship One did not enter passenger service. Perhaps because of the shudder or the cost of the hybrid motor, Paul Allen decided it was wiser to sell it to the Smithsonian.

WSJ’s lateness is forgivable. The story has never really gotten wide circulation. And Rutan, Benson and others still have not tested their passenger spaceships. On the other hand, mistakenly calling the suborbital fight an orbital fight is 25 times as bad.

Want a 2048 x 1536 monitor? They sell the medical monitors at eizo.com

Try to drive it with a laptop though. If you have a laptop, it likely has an analog VGA cable. The 17″ Mac has 256 MB vram and a mini DVI. I asked sales at Eizo if they pair up seeing as they drive their monitor with a DVI-2. Dell has the video card, but not the dvi plug. There’s a PCI card and dongle to drive a couple more monitors, but they top out at 1920×1200 per monitor. I saw mention that Lenovo has a DVI on it’s Thinkpad, but I couldn’t confirm it in the specs or in the picture or on their sales support.

I don’t want to go all the way to the 30″ apple monitor. I am thinking there is room for a 16:9 monitor at 3 megapixels. What should the resolution be? We know we can drive 2048×1536 (at analog VGA speeds) on a regular laptop, even the Toshiba Portege. So what 16:9 can we fit in that? 2360×1328 is 3134080 pixels which is less than 3145728 pixels in the 2048×1536. That gives us a near perfect 16:9 to four nines at 1.777 ratio.

Can we do better? Yes. 2368 is divisible by 32 which is true of the long dimensions of our favorite resolutions {640, 800, 1024, 1280, 1440, 1600, 1920, and 2048}. But what about the memory management? They chose 2048*1536 because it is a multiple of 1024*1024. They were trying to get inside 3*2²⁰ or 3 MB which is 3 * 1048576. And if we divide that by 2368, we get 1328 with .43 of a column of pixels to spare. A little wider than 16×9, but what’s so magical about 16:9? The Golden Square is 1.618 anyway if we want to be classical. Let’s optimize instead!

If you want a Golden Square and long dimension divisible by 32 and stay in 3 MB, you have to choose between 2272×1384 (1.641) and 2240×1404 (1.595). They bracket the Golden Square ratio almost in half (divisible by 16 anyone? 2256 x 1394 just like fire wire), but 2240×1404 only leaves over 1/3 of a column of pixels so I prefer that vs. 4/7.

So build me a cinematic display at one of these resolutions, build me a laptop with a 256 MB card to drive it at 75 Hz, a port to get to the monitor and a video driver to drive it.

In 1992, I got so disgusted with my monitor’s native flicker that I installed Linux and wrote my own video driver for it, ultimately settling for 1152×720 (1.6 aspect ratio anticipating by a few years a VESA standard resolution) which was just the right number of pixels so my 386SX20 could refresh at a 72-75 Hz speed so I wouldn’t see the flicker. Without that sensitivity to flicker, I might be much more shy about optimizing and programming projects. I might be more trusting in big corporate technology machinations. 15 years later we are ready for the (almost-)quad version of VESA 361. Lay it on me. $4000 is a smaller share of my income now than the hundreds of dollars to get a 15″ CRT was then. Hit me with it. I will bet you $100 it will be mainstream in 5 years. 1920×1200 is so yesterday’s news–1200 scan lines is part of the 1994 VESA standards to be precise.

check out freespaceshot.com

Should be an interview at Out of the Cradle and the essay at The Space Review is up.

In October 2000, I left IBM Research to form a company, First Intellectual that would build “patent walls” of hundreds of patents to protect financial service companies’ service offerings, create a tidy royalty stream, parry any future efforts by competitors to collect royalties and preempt many “patent trolls” from doing the same thing. This is common practice in technology businesses, but new to services. We did OK. We got some meetings with the heads of IP at ML, MSDW, Qualcomm, JP Morgan and a few others. They didn’t really want the service we were providing, but would buy IP consulting services. After a few months, we realized that to be freelancers we’d need a big war chest to file suits. That the war chest alone was a viable business and that invention alone was not. That is, that good patents are inexpensive. We also learned that financial services are a cooperative network because for an offering, one needs the customers of all entities to participate to make the float successful. Playing mean doesn’t work well. These aren’t the kind of folks that thought they needed protection. Certainly not from each other. Trolls had not yet arrived to break up their club. We closed up shop.

Fast forward five years. On December 30, the front page headline on the Financial Times is “US financial service groups rush to join patent stampede”. Sort of. 238 patents, while up 3-fold, is nothing. IBM gets 3000 alone in their sectors. It’s still early. If you want me to be your hired gun and file 500 patents in financial services and get $1 billion a year in royalties, give me a shout. But anyway, I was there over five years ago with the answer.

One gets more myopic with time, so maybe Space-Shot.com is only a few years ahead of its time. Certainly, we don’t need to spend $1,000,000 to stay open for five years waiting. It’s run mostly by robots. First Intellectual needed people. If one comes too early to the battlefield, there is only half a decisive win. As Sun Tzu puts it, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I knew the answer, but not the people who didn’t care for the answer I had. I suffered a defeat despite having the billion dollar business. My buddy who said next time I had a billion dollar business, I should let him syndicate it passed on this one. His loss. Life is a repeated game though.

I gave $15,000 last week to help morale in a unit in Iraq. Here’s why.

(more…)

I went to Mexico City to do a sneak preview of Space Shot 2.0. It will be an all ages game. The kids in Mexico City were really excited about science: both meteorology and space. We have cracked the code for how to interest kids in science. Even kids 10 and 11 years old.

During the course of the trip I lost my passport. American Express Global Assist said that I did not need a passport to board. That was not true at Continental Airlines. They sent me to the Embassy to get an affidavit of citizenship. Unfortunately, it was inauguration day so the embassy was closed. The gate person and the duty officer both said that I should wait until Monday when they opened. How about that for service! I checked out my options. American Express Global Assist said that I did not need a passport at the border if I drove across. My concierge at American Express Platinum said it’s 15 hours to the border by car. Now to Amex travel. They could book me a flight on Southwest from El Paso to Austin, but to get to Ciudad Juarez, I would have to buy my own ticket at the airport. Back to the airport, domestic. It’s now noon and I grab a cuarto libre at the McDonald’s and headed for Ciudad Juarez on Aerocalifornia. Amex (concierge, not travel) comes through with an El Paso driver to come pick me up at the Gonzales airport. Not too easy to walk across and get a cab on the other side.

is here.