And time goes by

I think I tend to be rather aware of how fast time passes, how our precious minutes get consumed, but even with this in mind, sometimes something comes up that makes me even more conscious of this fact.

Yesterday, one piece of news that probably will have gone unnoticed for many people (that increases that feeling of time running away), clearly reminded me of it. Napster is over. Napster, the first P2P application, the one that opened a new world of unlimited access to music to many of us, is no more. I remember getting late to a Saturday night meeting with friends cause I was eagerly waiting to see if I managed to finish the download of a much desired disc (through my old good 56 kbits modem with flat rate connection only from 18:00...). It's been 11 years since that, and many, many things have changed. Drawing up from Napster's success many other P2P sharing applications flourished (and rapidly faded away): Kazaa, WinMX, AudioGalaxy, eMule... BitTorrent seems to be one of the few that is still in pretty good shape.

I would say we've almost reached the point where we're not aware of how things (in the technological world, unfortunately other areas have not nearly seen this level of evolution) have improved, how now we take for granted things that just 5 years ago were unthinkable. We're in the middle of an Accelerating Change, just think for a moment:

• Online video (YouTube, DailyMotion and so on...) in 2003 the common perception would be that there would be no bandwidth enough (not at home, but in the internet itself) for transmitting all those bytes.
• Free WiFi in almost every coffee shop in town (well, I'm talking about my town, oddly enough, it's harder to find a Free WiFi in London or Berlin that in Xixón)
• Dual core 1GHz processing monsters weighting just 200 grams and living in your pocket. It's funny when I look to the heavy and bulky old desktop PC lying in a corner of my room, with 392 MBs of RAM and a 800MHz processor and think of how well it served me as my main Programming and "multimedia" platform until 8 years ago.
• With those 1 and 2 TBs external disks sitting on your desktop, do you remember the last time you burnt a data DVD? Did you ever use your old PCs as "storage server" in your local network? It seems like an odd occurrence now
• Do you remember those times when owning a laptop was only for wealthy guys or for the "important people" of the company?
• Internet everywhere thanks to affordable 3G data connections. This is something that left me astonished 2 months ago when I switched to my new Mobile phone operator. They have a monthly flat rate data plan (even for pre pay users like me) for just 9 euros. I don't need that service, it would be useful to me only when I'm abroad (I guess that's one of the pending things that we'll see changing in a short time, flat rate data access everywhere, at least in Europe) but if you need it, it's rather affordable.
• GIS for the massess!!! Google Maps, Bing... and one million applications based on them
• Home bandwidth. I've got now a 15 Mbits (download) connection at home. This is how my bandwidth (download) has evolved ever since I have internet at home:
  • 2000: 56 Kbits Modem (I think there's a generational gap between those who are familiar with the noise of a Modem when dialing and those who aren't)
  • 2001: 128 Kbits with my Cable operator (the only one I've had so far)
  • 2004 (August), 160 Kbits
  • 2005 (May), 640 Kbits
  • 2007 (February), 1Mbit
  • 2009 (June), 10 Mbits
  • 2011 (May), 15 Mbits (not an advertisement trick, you can see below that you really get that speed )
    

The other day I was chatting with a friend (a C++ guru, not a "humanities" guy) and he told me with his brand new smartphone on his had "I'm fed up with 3G, it's so slow that I have to use WiFi when I'm at home". I was astonished, we've grown so accustomed to the marvels of technology that we expect more and more from it, and dare to think that 3G should be as fast as our home WiFi!!!

I can't close this post without saying a clear and loud THANKS NAPSTER!!!