The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Is it just me, or is technology news everywhere these days? When I first started writing this column about four years ago, it seemed like a lot of tech news needed dredging out of the depths where it was lurking on geek websites. But now think of everything that you've seen over the last few months: Microsoft's release of Vista, Apple's iPhone, everyone bashing Vista, the release of Halo 3, the hacking of the iPhone, and now Apple's release last week of Leopard, their new operating system, not to mention Microsoft buying part of Facebook. Tech news seems like it has emerged from the dusty corners of websites onto the front page of almost every major news source on the planet. This tells us about the importance that technology has in our lives. It used to be that technology news would surface every now and again and then head down under cover again, where it would affect few people. I still remember when Windows 95 came out with the Rolling Stones providing the music and Microsoft paying to have advertising shone up on world landmarks such as the CN Tower. These days, we have almost the opposite situation. When any of the new products I mentioned above came out this year, all of them made front page news online, in newspapers, and even on TV news. The line-ups of people waiting to buy Playstation 3's and Nintendo Wii's last year only reinforced this idea. The occasional movie used to get its own video game as an add-on if the production companies thought it had an opportunity to wring a few more dollars out of an already long-ago released product. Instead, we now have video games that are released even before the movies. Technology in general, and the Internet in particular, has become absolutely central to the way that we live our lives. For example, there are over 2.5 billion inquiries asked of Google each month. Where did these questions go before Google? We use technology to organize our lives, to communicate with people in faraway places and to go shopping. We play games, are entertained and are kept both informed and safe by our technologies. In ways that we probably will never understand unless we have some type of catastrophic failure, most of us will never know much about the blanket of technology that we are wrapped in. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
