Month: December 2008

2009 tech predictions

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

2008 is over in a couple of hours. Time to make a few predictions for 2009:

  • Desktop sales will continue to decline, with Notebooks out-selling Desktops at least two to one in the consumer market. Netbook sales will increase dramatically.
  • The PC game industry will ignore this, and continue to target the high-end desktop.
  • Touchscreen PCs will be a short-lived fad because there are no applications for it and will likely never be. We’ll be buying even more touchscreen phones instead.
  • There will be no new console annoncements this year, although rumors of Microsoft’s next console will pick up.
  • There will be no new traditional MMORPG launch which has more than 500,000 customers after 6 months. Churn wil be high for all new MMORPGs.
  • The number of Vista installations at the start of 2010 will still be lower than the number of XP installs. DirectX 10 will continue to be a feature for less than 30% of the potential market share. Multi-GPU will continue to be irrelevant.
  • At least one Unity3D game with a decent business model will be released and make money.
  • The great trend in Indie games will continue, and at least one will be making serious money on a console or Steam.
  • CD/DVD game sales will decline. One of the big publishers will finally launch a platform that’s a direct competitor to Steam. Just like in 2008, I will not buy any games that are shrink-wrapped.
  • The Flexus ticket system on the Oslo subway will not leave the testing stage.

Happy 2009!

Audiobooks

~ Enno ~ Leave a comment

I’m listening to the Ender’s Game audiobooks over the holidays. What I found really helpful with that is the foobar bookmarks plugin. When I turn of the computer, listen to some other song, or for some other reason stop listening to the audiobook, it bookmarks the last position.

This makes listening to them on the netbook a superior experience even to listening to them on the phone or on an mp3 player – in a twelve hour mp3 file finding the position you were at the last time by slowly fast-forwarding through it, is completely impossible to do more than once and stay sane.

About those audiobooks: They are brilliant. Unabridged and wonderfully read. Thank you, Morten, for pointing them out to me.