Sorry -- maybe as a geek this impresses me more than it would other non-geeky types. I just found it impressive that if, say, I entered "Cirrhilabrus rubriventralis", it's guessed at what I'm probably going to type in by the time I've hit the 3rd or 4th letter. Obviously the technology isn't that earth shattering, i.e., google keeps a record of all the things people search on, and thus can offer suggestions as you start typing. However, when you think about all the different things that could be searched on, by all the different people who use google ..... that's, ah, rather a lot of text strings to store. I guess it illustrates how much technology has become more and more accessible over the last few years, the cost of memory and storage media having fallen so dramatically. I can think back to a time when I bought a 1 Gb hard drive, I spent over $1500 on it, an entire summer job's earnings essentially -- and I was mocked by friends and family alike, because "who would ever need so much disk space." I can think of a time before that, when Bill Gates himself said "640k ought to be enough for anybody." 640K! (Ok, I was a wee lad when he said that ... but the point is, I remember it.
) I'm sure someone has invented a... a paper clip nowadays that has more memory than that.
The Matrix reference was just -- again probably just something a hard core geek might pick up on -- that reality is just an illusion. Or "alien technology" -- another obscure reference -- ie., aliens landed and are sharing their far superior technology to some folks. Ok maybe that was a bit of a stretch, but basically, whenever you see some new whiz-bang technology that seems ahead of its time, you hear the expression "it must be alien technology."
