20060418
Smaller and Smaller
    Maxtor just announce the release of a 7 ounce 100GB portable storage drive. Storage technology continues to shrink in size and grow in capacity, almost with each passing day. With today’s technology, it is literally possible for a person to carry his entire information life in his pocket with his keys.
    Such advancements are both good and bad. The advancements are good because all of the information we collect can be stored and backed up with greater and greater ease. The same advancements are bad because they indicate the nearly unending proliferation of information under which we can be buried everyday.
    At any rate, we can now back up that avalanche on a mini drive that weighs about as much as a full pack of cigarettes. That’s just too cool…
Trying to Out Stradivarius Stradivarius
    I am as great an apologist for technology as any who exist, but sometimes I think that technology goes too far. There are some things that are better left to the whiles of human creativity and genius, mostly because those are the things that truly define us as being human, which no machine, however advanced, will ever be.
    I enjoy music, especially classical music, and while there are some technologically outstanding reproductions of such music done with technology, not a single one of them have the feel, the heart, the very soul that makes a performance of a classical piece by a virtuoso what it is to the ear, the mind, and the heart.
    Even if technology does some day produce something like music that appears to have those same characteristics, I suspect that I will still seek out the virtuoso instead. I can’t say why, but it’s just better.
DLH
