What’s a ‘petaflop?’ Answer at the end of story

It has been light years from the day Thomas Edison said into his new invention, the tele-phone, “Watson, come here, I want you”. Those words morphed into ‘Can you hear me now? to ‘Can you produce a video on your phone, release it on Youtube and get a 100,000 hits before lunch now?

Soooo…..are you over-communicated now?

With thousands of ‘apps’ covering every aspect of life, anyone may now reach everyone anytime with anything. Of course, if you’re a person who uses your cell phone to make and receive calls you are in the extreme minority.

You can now score a symphony, ‘find’ Pokemon, pit your skills against thousands of others in real time and when someone starts to ‘poke’ ‘tweet’ text or ‘Twitter’ you, based on today’s proclivity for speed in social media, if you don’t get back to them rightnow, you’re yesterday’s app.

‘Quite frankly, I’m over communicated!’

Some folks think that progress is when you can text your neighbor and bounce that signal off of a $100 million dollar geo-synchronous satellite sending that call into space and back as opposed to opening the window and calling their name.

The world is moving too fast.

China has built a processor capable of 93 petaflops or a million billion (one quadrillion!!!) floating point operations per second of sustained performance. That may mean your next smart phone is going to be so smart, so fast and so advanced that even an 11 year old can’t manage the process. That’s scary.

Can you keep up with me now?