Wednesday, March 11, 2009

A Penny for your thoughts

Finally got a back up drive and backed up our music, photos and movies. I had that feeling - you know the one - 'I should back this stuff up' - the feeling you get just before your computer fails and you lose everything. Thing is I had that feeling a year ago and have been living in a state of fearful anticipation ever since.

Luckily and despite all the various technological permutations of Murphy's law nothing bad happened to my irreplaceable data in the meantime.

So I got a 1.0 TB drive from Amazon for 100 bucks.

Yeah that's right.

1 Terabyte for 1 hundred dollars.
1000 Gigs for 1000 dimes.

100 MB per penny.

I remember spending more than a hundred dollars on 60 megabytes. It doesn't seem that long ago.

I went to college with a manual typewriter. I remember when my friend Tony got a Brother Typewriter that could remember the last 8 letters you typed. That was super special. It meant you could correct typos as you went. 8 letters is approximately 8 bytes.

When we were young there were no answering machines. If you weren't home the phone would just ring. And there were only 3 networks and two UHF stations that showed the Brady Bunch, Gilligan Island and Hogans Heroes on a continuous loop.

My father tells me that he didn't have television when he was growing up but I don't believe it.

What will things look like in ten years? In twenty?

There are those that think we are headed toward a singularity. A point where computers will be able to design the next level of computers and that the ensuing progress will instantaneously leap out of human control and then out of human comprehension.

On the other hand people don't really change that much. I don't think people are any different than they were when I was a kid. Maybe I've become an old idiot who can't recognized change when it's happening all around but my thought is that these tools are super advanced but they are really just tools and they are limited by the hairless apes that use them. We use massive computing power to create incredible interactive environments for Grand Theft Auto and Madden 09. Incredible special effects don't help bad movies be good (well okay, a little bit) and I don't see how twittering is gonna raise us to the next level of human evolution.

But of course technology makes a huge difference in our experience of the world. It's foolish for me to argue that. I guess I'm wondering what the difference really is.

I can listen to music while working out without it skipping.
I can easily find information and directions.
I can communicate with old friend.
I can reach people no matter where I am or where they are.
I can watch movies and tv shows a million different ways almost as quickly as I can think about wanting to do it.
I can play games

Is there something big I'm missing? Please let me know how technology is changing your life or the world around you.

Check these out
http://www.kurzweilai.net/
http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/history.html
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/02/technology_timeline.html

There is one huge thing that could be impacted in a huge way by technology.

Education.

More on that later.

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