‘Technology’s
iffy.’ ‘No, it does things in a jiffy.’ Presenting both sides of the argument...
AD: Hi, how’s your new laptop doing?
BC: Good, but it takes the same time to
boot up as my old laptop…
AD: Ah, technology is in the dock again…
BC: You recall the original IBM PC that was
launched in the early 80s? It used to take a minute or so to switch on, for DOS
to boot up and for me to open Wordstar.
AD: So?
BC: The 8088 processor has evolved to an i7
Processor, the measly 256 kb memory replaced by 2GB RAM and the 10 MB hard disk
by a 500GB HDD. Swap DOS with Windows and Wordstar with MS Word – but it still takes
the same time…
AD: Are you trying to...
BC: What I'm saying is that for all the
talk about technology, nothing much has changed. Operating systems and applications
are getting bigger and more complex, and require more hard disk space and RAM
capacity to operate. So, while machines are becoming more powerful, the time
taken to start up remains the same...
AD: Look, machines that are shut down go
into a cold state. Getting them back to working condition takes a few seconds,
but that's getting shorter all the time...
BC: How is that?
AD: Scientists are toying with bacteria - Magnetospirillum
magneticum - that eats iron and gets magnetized. These living magnets are being
used to create high speed hard disks which could speed up your computer.
BC: Doesn’t that strike you as ironical? You
protect your machine from virus and then add some bacteria to it…
AD: Forget what strikes me, but it might be
of interest to you to note that computers have been struck by a thunderbolt...
BC: The only thunderbolt worth being struck
by is the one that struck Michael Corleone in the Godfather...
AD: This one is even better. Thunderbolt is
an input-output technology, and the result of a joint collaboration between
Apple and Intel. True to its name, it makes computers lightning fast.
BC: But the operating system…
AD: Even operating systems are evolving to
stop people like you from cribbing... Windows 8, when used in test conditions
with a solid state disk, has been reported to enable system boot up in just a
couple of seconds...
BC: Sounds impressive, but what about those
who don't have solid state disks?
AD: Well, one option would be to use the
hibernate feature in Windows. You can power the system off and go back to your
previous session the instant you turn it on. It’s similar to the resume
function in Macs.
BC: Everything has to be instant in today’s
world, right?
AD: It’s a demand-supply thing. Technology
has even made alcohol available in the form of mouth spray for an instant high.
Apparently, the effect is very temporary...
BC: I always knew that the highs of
technology could never be permanent…
AD: But technology's on a mission to speed
up things - there's so much to be done and so little time to do it in. Do you
know that we sleep almost a couple of hours lesser than the generation a
century ago did?
BC: At this rate, I foresee a future where
computers have a sleep mode, but humans don't...
AD: I give up - aren’t you happy that
technology makes the world go faster?
BC: I get slightly out of breath when
people say that technology runs our world. I would be happier if, for a change,
it could just walk alongside us for a while…
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