Ian Bell wrote:
All pretty standard and fairly middle of the road, boring motherhood etc. Not really sticking his neck out is he?
Due to the general lack of technology news over the Christmas/New Year break there have been quite a few of these "Predictions for 2004" by various people. I've read a handful and I reckon I have 2004 just about sussed:
I predict that Microsoft will go bankrupt and mobile phones will be entirely replaced by a long distance whistling language I heard about on Five Live by mid 2004.
I also predict that BT will declare that the use of its telephone lines is completely free of charge and will sponsor the rolling out of a wireless telecommunications system run by communities and based on the 802.11h standard wifi kit that the IEEE will verify a hundred new products per week.
By late February new Spam laws will have almost completely iradicated unsolicited emails and ISPs will drop the amount they charge by 93% due to the decrease in traffic and the sudden availabilty of a cheap and reliable network.
The RIAA will buy out magnatune.com and offer all of its music in ogg vorbis format under creative commons licenses with a voluntary donation for each album. This will cause the end of Pop music as we know it and Simon Cowell will get a job in Macdonalds which will have switched to selling only organic salad dishes and mineral water.
SCO will release all of the code it has ever written under the GPL and offer a free plush penguin to all the people it asked for money from in way of apology.
RedHat will implement Debian's package management system and the KDE and Gnome projects will start a joint effort to make Linux more user friendly than Apple Macs causing all the Apple developers to leave their jobs to help out.
Elvis will finally return to earth in his pink space ship to be at the official opening of William Fences' new ice rink in the fiery depths of hell, funded entirely by Disney on Ice.