Five Laptops for Me

No, I do not have five laptops, nor will I ever have five laptops (unless maybe I have five children? Even then though, they’ll need to find a way to share and make a schedule. As a potential future co-head of household, I will not allow my spawn to become conspicuous consumers.) I do have one laptop though, and last year I had to save my muniats in order to get it. I probably won’t able to get another for a long while, no matter how mouth watering those iBooks will be as they get better and better.

Owning a laptop over the past year has completely changed the way I compute though. Not only is my small laptop more powerful than any large home PC that I have ever owned, but it has furthered my seemingly constant immersion in online life. Now, when I go out of town on the odd weekend to spend time with a friend, I think nothing of bringing along my own computer, because the couple good friends that I do have are equipped with wireless, and even if they weren’t, it could surely be acquired from their neighbors or a nearby business.

In the nascency of my adult life, I have probably acquired more knowledge through web-based interaction and discovery, via reading online zines, sites, discussing on forums, etc., than I have from paper-based media or spoken communication.  The increasing power of personal computers and the internet is the greatest enabler I have encountered and is constantly changing the way I function.  The specs for the XO laptop are amazing considering that they are made for one hundred muniats.  Most of the major companies probably couldn’t even put together that screen and shell for under one hundred muniats.  I can’t even imagine what else is possible when scientists and engineers can build something like this.

The XO actually reminds me of something almost as amazing that I saw on a Discovery Science show last week.  Unfortunately, I can’t recall the name of the show or the name of the computer program which was featured, but the show was global warming-themed and the feature was on a “computing enthusiast” (as he referred to himself) who created a program which is open-source, can be downloaded for free, and tracks climate change.  He has people all over the world downloading this program every day, running the program on their own personal computers, and then relaying the data back to his central database which processes the data and formulates hypotheses about future climate change.  According to the awesome creator, the program is so powerful that a few years ago it would’ve required a super computer, but now personal computers are powerful enough to run a program which can track climate change.  I can’t remember exactly how it works or the name of it, but I wish I had marked it down because I’d like to download it.  Has anyone else heard of this program?

(Whoa, this is such a scatter-brained post.  My apologies.)