I am sitting in a cafe in Prague typing this in Open Office Writer on an Asus eeePC netbook running Ubuntu 10.10. I was thinking about working on my old Amstrad CPC 6128 in Edinburgh back in 1986 and the fact that the future has come like that famous frog, the one that doesn't notice it is being boiled alive because the water around it is being heated so slowly. It's small changes here, small changes there and then without ever really realising it, you are living in a science fiction world. I think of this netbook as being an underpowered cheap machine but it is monstrously more powerful than the CPC 6128 I wrote my first stories on. I mean it has something like 10000 times as much RAM,  the processor is many orders of magnitude more … [Read more...]