Thoughts on tech

I was looking at my camera last night, and wondering at what this little box will do. Here's technology that ten years ago would have been government agency level or major business level only, and some of it may not have been available to them then. A few years ago this would have been a thousand dollars or more, now it's about a third of that or less. It's a Fuji S5000. 10x optical zoom, 2.2x digital zoom, macro mode, multiple picture quality settings, various light & exposure adjustments, LCD screen or viewfinder to aim, built-in flash, and a chip to hold the pictures. Different capacity chips available everywhere. The chip in mine is 128 meg; at max picture quality it holds 82 pictures, at lower quality this little piece of work holds more than 200.

Don't want to use your battery power to download to your pc? For $20 you can get a chip reader that takes care of that. For that matter, you can view the pics on the camera LCD and delete any you don't like before you download them.

Oh, let's not forget that with this chip the camera can shoot about 3.5 minutes of video- with mono sound.

Then there's the fact that you can now get a damn good DVD player for $40 or less. If you want to really test out your firearm with different loads, you can get a strain guage to tell you pressures for not too much; that used to be done only by copper-crusher or lead-crusher equipment using a test barrel and receiver. Digital scales accurate to +/- 0.1 grain for a hundred bucks or less. Digital readout torque wrenches and micrometers and calipers. Your own heat-treating oven with a computer-control more sophisticated than home- and some industrial- computers were just a few years ago. Motorcycles with computer-controlled fuel injection and cruise control.

There's a word coined to describe technology that changes so fast you just can't keep up with it, and I can't even remember the word now. Things are changing real fast, and it's not going to slow down anytime soon.