Wherefore Art Thou, Technology?

For the first time in a while now I am feeling technology-starved. Not just in what I have, but in what is available anywhere at any price. As usual, software is the culprit. Throughout the history of computing, software and its potential have periodically outrun advances in hardware technology. I was sailing happily along using five computers for business and pleasure, and then along came Microsoft Virtual PC. Magic. Now I can run several different test systems without having to use Ghost to switch back and forth. That starts me thinking about virtualization and its future.

My wife and I want, at some not-too-distant point in the future, to be able to live at maybe three different places around the globe at different times of the year. I figured on consolidating my business down to three notebook PC’s: server, workstation, and test bed. Well, now that I am using Virtual PC, it occurs to me that one notebook could do. I could even have more than one virtual server to ease the headaches of managing servers that manage to find conflicts between server components. For instance, I could keep MS SQL Server in a little padded cell of its own, so it doesn’t eat the lunch of every other process on the system. I could have a dedicated virtual server for a copy of each of my client’s applications, so I won’t get any cross-over interference. My only problem now is finding a notebook that can provide the horsepower to run all these virtual machines. I figure I need several gigs of RAM and probably 200GB of storage to pull this off adequately, not to mention some pretty swift processors.

Looks like I might get a little help from Seagate on the storage front. CNET News reports that Seagate has started to ship a 160GB notebook drive based on perpendicular storage technology. Keep ‘em coming, Seagate. Competitors welcome, too.

What might also help: could Microsoft make Virtual PC able to share memory between virtual machines? They did it with storage: you can have a 16GB virtual hard drive that really only eats up the 2-4GB actually used by the machine and grows as you need more. I think the hurdle with memory is that the OS’s wouldn’t understand how to address a variable amount of RAM. So, perhaps the next generation of OS’s can be made more virtualization-aware? That’s my wish, as I expressed in my comments on apotheon’s blog on this subject.

Of course, as soon as I get this setup perfected, we’ll get another round of software innovation that renders it perfectly unusable.

On a slightly different subject, TDavid laments about ‘coming soon’ technology in his blog. He hints at the (IMHO)inevitable merging of TV and PC media. I see no reason why this shouldn’t happen, other than the significant investment of providers in their existing networks. Not to discount the power of money, but when the gold dust finally settles and the market demands that these artifical boundaries be overcome, they shall. The only question is, how long will we have to wait?