A skeptic is impressed
The other day we had snow in the Santa Cruz Mountains (a fairly rare occurrence), where a friend of mine lives. I was watching the news and heard that Highway 9, a principal avenue to those mountains, had closed. I stepped over to our computer and sent an email to my friend, asking about the snow. Within five minutes, he'd responded with a picture taken on his iPhone from outside his house, showing a beautiful winter scene of house and trees with a light blanket of snow. He was fine and, as was evident from the photo, the snow was nothing more than picturesque.
I am stubbornly resistant to "personal tech", but vignettes like this give me pause. Some of this stuff is truly remarkable.
Thinking about the role of technology in our lives is much like discussing the present age in historical terms: we're too much in the middle of things to have any perspective on long-term effects and on which way we're headed. Still, as creatures who love a good story, we try to make sense of our lives.
I still pitch the microwave oven as the most overlooked star in the modern technology firmament, that and ABS brakes. But I have to admit, the internet, with all its attendant applications, is right up there. For the contemporary American of a certain socioeconomic status, it has become an integral, and nearly indispensable, part of life.
Given the utility-like characteristic of the internet, it makes a lot of sense that companies, including Sun, are seeking to provide a utility-like infrastructure for 'net. Further, it makes sense that cloud computing should supersede locally-based resources.
