You know, I've been using computers for 20 years, and now in 2009, this is the first time I've ever felt like ordinary desktop computers are fast enough. With the introduction of the Core 2 Duo, I feel like we've arrived. Sure, there are faster and slower versions available, but who cares? They're fast enough.

Ordinary, reasonably-priced consumer PCs are shipping with 4GB of RAM standard. Dialup modems, IDE and SCSI, floppy and Zip drives, serial and parallel and PS/2 ports have all been eliminated. The mainstream crappy OS used by the masses who don't know any better doesn't normally crash, and soon will ship with a web browser that doesn't completely suck. Fifteen years ago I carried floppy disks around with me everywhere I went and I looked like a dweeb; today I have 4GB of storage on my keychain (and it's a lot smaller than my car keys).

You can even buy music over the Internet, in a standard format that will play on a wide variety of portable devices as well as computers. Wikipedia has an article on just about anything I might be curious about. Nobody uses AOL anymore. Over-the-air network television is broadcast in perfect digital widescreen high-definition, and looks great on the seven-foot-wide screen on my wall. Children entering the world today will never have known a time when you couldn't just whip out your cell phone to take a picture, then immediately post it on your blog for all your friends to see, while on a camping trip far from home.

Sure, we're in the middle of a depression, the national debt is over eleven trillion dollars, entire industries are collapsing, and a viral pandemic will likely kill thousands before the end of the year. But isn't technology great?