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Works fine for me, and is a very interesting read.

Yeah, I thought about mosaic art too... Although it wasn't always pixellated, most of it was tesserated.

methinks a mosaic is more 'free-style' - it's not like the stones are arranged in a matrix with equal numbers per line; or without straight lines of stones all together.

But they are not on a grid, right? That's a huge difference.

To be even more precise, J.M. Jacquard "only" automated the pattern transfer into the fabric by using a mechanical device with punched cards.
Manual creation of such fabrics existed for over two thousand years. To make any such fabric, a sketch is necessary, since it is impossible for a weaver to make complex designs out of his/her head.
The "pixels" in textile sketch are rectangular, to reflect the density of weaving. So pixels can also be square, but more often they are not.
Weaving of carpets also requires the same kind of pixel-based sketch.
Check the wikipedia entry on tapestry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tapestry
for some pictures of old tapestries.

As does needlepoint. A friend of mine got me into needlepoint (briefly) some years back, claiming that it was "relaxing". Unfortunately, I did not find it so. It's essentially turtle graphics. Invariably, during a session, I would make a mistake, and then do about a hundred more stitches before I noticed... at which point I would have to tediously back the "turtle" up 100 stitches to correct the error and then redo them all correctly. If I wasn't in an aggravated state at the start of the session, I was surely so by the end.

Latch-hook rug making might be more to my liking. I had not considered it before, thinking it similar to needlepoint. But rug making is essentially raster graphics with random access to individual points. Maybe I should try it out?

Edited 2008-11-23 18:11 UTC

It sort of reminds me of the article I read once about the Egyptians somehow "using" Pi to construct their pyramids. Turned out that they didn't have direct abstract knowledge of Pi, but were rather using measuring wheels to set the massive construction dimensions. The wheels then forced Pi's relationships into the pyramids. Here you have a craftsman faced with the challenge of making an image from interconnected yet discrete pieces. He does the (repeatedly) logical thing, and bam! You have "pixels".

I wonder if he thought, "Wow! This would look great on a properly-designed OLED screen!"

Nihil nova sub sola.

Actually there was no J or W in the Latin alphabet. Hence the letter W is called (and often written as) 'double U'.

Italian doesn't use J either. The letter G is pronounced like the English letter J.

"I wonder if this is one of the patents Microsoft has claimed they innovated."

No, this patent is held by ISI. Google is your friend...

Looks to me like there are far more pixels on earth than ever before. I think the author means that they are so small that we no longer have to care about them, or exactly how they are positioned. Right... Then why are are the OSNews right side bar fonts so grainy when I view them in Opera? And why do we argue back and forth about whether antialiased fonts are better or just blury? And why do we use things like subpixel smoothing? And why did the otherwise seemingly non-technical woman ahead of me in line at Whataburger yesterday make a casual comment about her 1080p TV? Far from dying, nontechnical people are *learning* about pixels. About megapixels, even. It seems to me that pixels are poised to rule the world, or at least demand the vote. ;-)

Edited 2008-11-24 17:01 UTC