people still like to actually feel stuff >>

I had a strange but enlightening moment today when one of my students with about 20 pieces of paper (printed out work) said 'this the most work I have done for ages'. the strange thing was he hadn't really done any more work that usual but because he was holding it in his hands he felt that he had worked harder?

I thought that most people under the age of 20-25 would consider things created stored and read, seen or watched didn't have to be 3-dimensional to realise they had achieved something. after all you can't hold a web site or a blog for that matter.

I remember probably 6+ ago now, I was at a seminar run by intel where one of the their development team was expressing his enthusiastic ideas of the future and that they had already developed a P5 to a P10 chip and dual core was the way forward, even mentioned that the reason we couldn't use them then was because good enough software hadn't been written yet?

then he stopped for a moment and said sadly of course we will never be able to reproduce the feeling of standing in the middle of a pond digging in the mud no matter how fast their processors get. the man was right.