I’ve been in Cambodia long enough to miss the iPod revolution which has now taken place in nearly all four corners of the globe and is now starting its Indochina campaign. I have watched them increase in popularity amongst the western populace along the usual channels i.e geeks then trendies then non-trendies then my Mum. When I was back in the UK at Christmas literally everyone and their dog had an iPod.

Uncontrolled consumerism which I call the ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ mentality is one of the aspects of UK living which I despise the most, on every trip, there is always one item which for me symbolizes this mentality, when I went last summer it was thousand dollar baby strollers which looked more like moon buggies than push chairs, which everyone had through fear that using the traditional four wheel type would have you branded as an ‘unfit parent’ resulting in social services confiscating your kids. 

On this last trip back to the UK at Christmas the new item was the iPod. If you didn’t have one you might as well start wearing animal skins and living in a cave. For this very reason I raised my defences and proclaimed to myself that I would not follow the other lemmings into to this new marketing induced hypnosis.

I was recently engaging in an IE7 vs Firefox 2 debate on a popular programmer chat forum (no prizes for guessing which side of the divide I was on), during the debate one of the Microsoft sympathisers argued one of the reasons that IE7 was better than Firefox is the fact that it incorporates ClearType technology and Firefox didn’t. When he said this I thought to myself; I’ve never heard of ClearType, I wonder what it does?

A quick Google revealed that ClearType is Microsoft semantics, and they are in fact referring to anti-aliasing.

“In digital signal processing, anti-aliasing is the technique of minimizing aliasing (jagged or blocky patterns) when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution.” Wikipedia. In plain English it makes your lines and text look smooth and is a technique that has been around since the 70’s. So Microsoft true to form have taken an existing technology, given it a funky sounding name and given the impression to the uneducated that they invented it.