Windows Vista will die while XP Pro will continue to rule

COMPUTER CURRENTS

What's in store for 2008

Windows Vista will die while XP Pro will continue to rule

JAMES HEIN

It is that time of year when I look forward into 2008 and try to predict what is going to happen in the IT and technology worlds.

My first and rather bold prediction is that Vista will go the way of Windows Me and instead of Vista 2 a convergence product will appear to terminate the Vista line. The problem is the poor adoption of Vista by organisations and the issues that administrators are having with it. XP Pro will continue to rule until a replacement product along the same lines is introduced by Microsoft.

Linux will continue to make inroads this year, with products like Ubuntu getting easier and easier to install, configure and use. As much as I would like to see it, however, Linux will not move into a more dominant position unless Microsoft makes some significant mistakes with Windows, such as making SP3 for XP too much like Vista for comfort.

People will continue to get the biggest screen they can afford and the price point will be in the 22-24 inch range locally and bigger in places like the US. Plasma will all but disappear this year and OLED will start to become more common in the smaller panel sizes.

Hard drives will continue to grow with the 1TB becoming very common in Thailand and standard in PCs in the US with the 2 and even 4 TB drives available by yearend. Laptop drives will enjoy the same growth with something around 300 GB in the smaller range available in laptops.

The HD-DVD versus Blu-ray war will be decided this year with one of two outcomes. HD-DVD will dominate or both formats will fail as dual players appear and a newer technology taking the limelight. It will all depend on the best price points as consumers will not care about a tiny difference in quality.

Memory chips and thumb drives will continue to grow in size with 4 GB drives as common as floppy disks used to be. The upper limit will be around 64GB this year but will still continue to grow after that.

2008 PREDICTION Vista will go the way of Windows Me. — AFP

While music players will evolve with the upper limits increasing, the sweet spot will continue to be in the 1-4 GB range for the music player with video players growing in capacity, but not selling any better. The real improvements will come in format support for both music and video.

The big entry this year will be the media box. This is a device built around a DVD player or on its own that will accept a USB drive, a LAN or wireless connection, with or without a hard drive that will allow media to be played on your new HD panel. The unit will contain the Codecs and software necessary to play the media files be they FLAC, MP4 or a DVD rip through HDMI and other connectors.

Major companies will be slow to respond but will be forced to provide at least USB hosting to a HDMI output. This is the device that will finally drive better sales of digital downloads as either music or video or both. The longer the big companies delay in this the longer that will take. I also predict that Sony will be the last to implement these features.

Printers will not change much again this year but I do see more and more of those photo-sized printers appearing in various formats and price points. None of them will beat the local photo printing stores, especially in Thailand where they are as cheap as film printing now. Printer consumables will still be ridiculously high in price. There is really not a lot that can be improved with current printer technologies, so the move will be towards more of the all-in-one printer, scanner fax units with more features.

Some predictions, like the memory and HDD ones above. are easy, as is that there will be improvements in CPUs and graphics cards. More and more multi-core CPUs will appear this year and in greater numbers on a single chip. I'm not sure why it didn't happen last year but this year we will see dual core graphics cards, which is the logical extension of the dual card models we see today. It might start with two cards on one board but the natural result is multi-core graphics cards.

Four-core CPUs will be the standard this year, but until application software catches up, first in games and then other applications, there's no real point in moving up any further for most.

The one area where we most need help will be sadly without any: that of malicious attacks through e-mail and when surfing the Internet. I include spam here because it falls under the same issue, which is a lack of countries prepared to take a unified stand.

What we need is something like the UN, only actually effective, to coordinate attacks on the distributors and originators of all malicious software. Any time an e-mail attack occurs it would be tracked back to the source. No matter where a server that is sending out spam is located it would be shut down. Sadly, this requires legislation with teeth from everyone.

Instead, personal level attacks will continue to rise, web sites will have more and more payloads when you surf them and identity theft attacks will increase everywhere where personal information is kept and where people are happy to give out personal details across the Internet and on phones.

This will also be the year when a more concerted effort will be made to improve the overall WWW infrastructure in terms of bandwidth and cross connectivity. Thailand, as ever, is ideally positioned in this region to play a major part in this process - but they won't. For some reason successive governments have talked about it but have never done anything about it for some reason.

Bandwidth improvements are necessary to move towards the goals of Web 2.0 which require much faster connectivity for longer times. I do not expect to see ADSL 2 appear in any capacity other than perhaps for testing here in Thailand in the same way that I don't expect to see download limits vanish in countries like Australia, but for different reasons.

Here is what I would like to see happen this year, i.e. my dream list. First of all, I want media companies to abandon DRM, is it happening in Europe through legislation and it only affects the average citizen who does not pirate media. Those that pirate have cracks and hacks lined up fore the next 100 years to be able to do what they want with DRM materials so it cannot ever work as advertised.

I would like to see groups like SAT-ED achieve the same educational goals I wanted to see last year. It may not happen in Thailand but there must be some countries who really want to see their populations improve their education levels.

Finally I'd like to see progress halt just long enough so that I don't see a cheaper and better product a week after I bought one. No, just kidding, bring on these changes for the better 2008; I hope that all our readers have a great year.

Email: jamesh@inet.co.th