10 Types Of People

Time for my review of 2011′s tech predictions. Wide range of predictions, from gaming to phones to…well snarkiness. And I think I did not too bad last year. Let’s have a look.

• There will be at least 1 upgrade to either ps3, 360 or wii at E3. Most likely will be the wii, as I think it is the 1 most needing an upgrade. We haven’t heard any rumours yet, but that makes this one more fun. PS3 will hopefully not, as it should have a long time left in it as we haven’t reached its potential yet (and I’ve only had 1 for a year…) 360 will probably get 1 next year.

Wii U was announced. Wasn’t released, but I think that counts

• Google TV will have its Hero moment (arguably the point when android on phones became properly usable for everyday users). It will have a couple of upgrades, and actually start to be usable by normal people. This will then cause people to buy it, and make it useful and fun.

Well, I was right about the update. It was quite late in the year, but the Honeycomb update for Google TV made it really nice and useful and fun, and people are starting to like it. But still…not many people are buying it.

• We will drown in tablets and e-readers. The first colour e-reader will be released, and this will be kinda rubbish, cause the refresh rate will still be pretty crap. Better devices will not be released until 2012 (probably until after an Apple colour eReader, an i-nk-pad perhaps?).

Hmmmm. Ok partly right about the first bit. Wrong about the second bit. But technically probably will be right about the last bit? (not the Apple bit though…).

• The Notion Ink Adam will be released?

It was. And what an anti-climax that was. I never ended up getting one. Got a transformer instead.

• New iPad, iPhone and iPod touch (pretty obvious…) No MacBooks this year though. They seem to be going off MacBooks and releasing them with more than 1 year gap. They will slowly be turned into the iPad with a keyboard.

I was right, right and right. But then I was wrong. There was a Macbook refresh. Maybe even 2…can’t quite remember.

• Windows 8 will be announced, but will not be released till either the end of 2012, or beginning of 2013, but they will say beginning of 2012. It will look exactly the same, but will have great “security” features. Including, but not limited to, something “unhackable” and also a new “uncrackable” activation code system, that they seem to spend a lot of time on…

Right to start with, but then very wrong. It is nothing similar in look and feel…hello Metro interface.

• Commercially available 4K tv. People start to hear about it, forget about 3D. Although, people will continue to say that the number of pixels I have just now is fine, thank you very much. But they will buy one eventually anyways…

Nope. Sad times. Sometime though.

• Android 2.4 and 3.0 will be released within the year.

Hmmmm. Well, I was wrong about the numbers…but 3.0 and 4.0 should count I’d imagine. Who would have known exactly what would have happened with all this crazy tablet only version of Android and stuff. But I’ll take that as a win.

• Canonical will continue alienating people and projects, and will continue on its mission to mac-ify the Linux desktop.

Hmmmm wow, I was feeling snarky that day wasn’t I. I’ll just leave this one at the side for just now.

• Hulu will get off their backside and start their UK service. People celebrate…

Nope, and we didn’t even get Netflix last year In fact, apparently, Hulu just gave up. This is weird, and I wonder whether Netflix got some of these deals and managed to make them exclusive first? Who knows what actually happened. I guess we never will. The whole industry seems to be giving up on Hulu anyway.

All in all, a reasonable year. Lets just look forward to another year of awesome technical innovations. I’m excited. I hope you are too

Time for my review of 2011′s tech predictions. Wide range of predictions, from gaming to phones to…well snarkiness. And I think I did not too bad last year. Let’s have...

First of all, happy new year .

Second of all, you may be reading this thinking “Man alive, this is quite late for the predictions.” and yes, you will be right, the 3rd year running I have done predictions, and its the first that I have posted them after the first few hours of Jan 1st (UTC). I am a failure, I apologise. More than 24 hours late, but ahhh well..

Anyways, last years predictions were, lets say debatable at best. But partly because they were so vague. This year may be better, may be as bad, let us see. I will do my review of last years 1 in a few days, but I wanted to get this years ones out first.

1. There will be at least 1 upgrade to either ps3, 360 or wii at E3. Most likely will be the wii, as I think it is the 1 most needing an upgrade. We haven’t heard any rumours yet, but that makes this one more fun. PS3 will hopefully not, as it should have a long time left in it as we haven’t reached its potential yet (and I’ve only had 1 for a year…) 360 will probably get 1 next year.
2. Google TV will have its Hero moment (arguably the point when android on phones became properly usable for everyday users). It will have a couple of upgrades, and actually start to be usable by normal people. This will then cause people to buy it, and make it useful and fun.
3. We will drown in tablets and e-readers. The first colour e-reader will be released, and this will be kinda rubbish, cause the refresh rate will still be pretty crap. Better devices will not be released until 2012 (probably until after an Apple colour ereader, an i-nk-pad perhaps?).
4. The Notion Ink Adam will be released?
5. New ipad, iphone and ipod touch (pretty obvious…) No macbooks this year though. They seem to be going off macbooks and releasing them with more than 1 year gap. They will slowly be turned into the ipad with a keyboard.
6. Windows 8 will be announced, but will not be released till either the end of 2012, or beginning of 2013, but they will say beginning of 2012. It will look exactly the same, but will have great “security” features. Including, but not limited to, something “unhackable” and also a new “uncrackable” activation code system, that they seem to spend a lot of time on…
7. Commercially available 4K tv. People start to hear about it, forget about 3D. Although, people will continue to say that the number of pixels I have just now is fine, thank you very much. But they will buy one eventually anyways…
8. Android 2.4 and 3.0 will be released within the year.
9. Canonical will continue alienating people and projects, and will continue on its mission to mac-ify the Linux desktop.
10. Hulu will get off their backside and start their UK service. People celebrate…

Feel free to agree, disagree, moan, shout at me, tell me I’m getting boring, whatever. Thats what the comments form is for I think I’ve found a middle ground between outlandishly crazy, and boringly predictable.

First of all, happy new year . Second of all, you may be reading this thinking “Man alive, this is quite late for the predictions.” and yes, you will be...

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see…

2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do. – Turns out I was right with this one. They have released the iPhone 3Gs already, halfway through the year
5. I will get my computer working again. – This one did happen, but I didn’t update you with it. I got my money back for my old motherboard, and bought a new one.
6.Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version. – Turns out this one is right as well, with the release today of the HTC Hero
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something. – This one happened as well. As we all know, it is called Karmic Koala
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough. – This one might happen soon, as we currently have the Beta 2 of Thunderbird, and mozilla don’t do many betas (ha…)

So, looks like a very successful year for me so far in predictions. More to come people…

Ok, some of you may remember I put down my 10 predictions for the coming year. Well, a few of them have come true. Lets see… 2. Apple won’t wait...

Let me say before any of this – this is not an UbuntuOne rant, like everyone else seems to be doing over at Ubuntu Planet. It just so happened that I just found out about this today.

I have used dropbox for a while – I use it to share things between my Desktop and my uni laptop, and also as a sort of document backup thing. Now, this is all very well and good, but what if dropbox dies? (I know, very unlikely thing, but ya never know, you can never be too careful). Well…Canonical just released UbuntuOne. A cool new dropbox-esk thing.

There are a few problems with UbuntuOne. First of all…it currently runs only on Ubuntu. It can be packaged for, say, fedora or opensuse or something, but as far as I can see, noone has done that yet. Also, it doesn’t run on Windows or Mac, and although I don’t like them as operating systems, we still need to agree that they do actually exist, and we need to create apps for them. They are not my choice of OS, but isn’t diversity everything that Linux stands for? The choice? So we need something that will run on more than just Linux.

Second of all…and I know…this sounds like a pathetic thing to say, but the back-end is not opensource. Now, yes, one might say “Neither is Dropbox”, but dropbox don’t say they stand for freedom and opensource. Canonical have said that it would be easy to create a server very similar to UbuntuOne, because it is based on, I think they said iFolder, am not sure though.

In this case, why the heck is it closed? What is the point in closing it, if it is easy to put the exact same thing together? I do use some proprietry things (dropbox, nvidia drivers) but I object to a company saying “We do opensource” and having something closed. This is, IMHO, pathetic.

So, I’m not happy with UbuntuOne, so what will I use as my dropbox’s “backup”? Well, Paul Mellors posted about SpiderOak, a new dropbox-esk filesharing backup thingy.

So, I tried it out, and I’m very happy. I much prefer it to dropbox, in fact. First of all, you have none of this dropbox folder nonesence. That drives me insane. I don’t want to link everything to my backups, thats stupid. I want them to backup where they are, and SpiderOak does this. Which is brilliant.

SpiderOak, like dropbox, comes with a free 2GB (which is all I need for my documents and pictures just now) and has a paid 100GB service (and 200GB, 300GB etc etc) for $10 per 100GB that you want. As mentioned, this works out at under £7 per 100GB of space that you want. Not bad, one has to say. Better than dropbox anyway.

SpiderOak allows you to add as many computers as you want to your account (Windows, Mac, Linux) and just syncs whatever folders you want on all your computers, and puts them wherever you want. I think you can also choose NOT to sync specific folders with specific computers, but will have to test this out (Ooooo…I can feel a sequel post coming on).

Finally…it is not opensource, but they are going to opensource it soon, which is good. So…for everyone who wants a (soon to be opensource) alternative for Dropbox, but isn’t running Ubuntu (or doesnt want the limitations of UbuntuOne), but doesn’t have the money to spend on their own server, I would recommend this highly.

Let me say before any of this – this is not an UbuntuOne rant, like everyone else seems to be doing over at Ubuntu Planet. It just so happened that...

Right, ok, so its that time of year when everyone tries to say what they think will happen with tech in the next year/few years.

Now, I don’t know why people keep doing this…because they are almost always wrong. Let me give you a few examples.

Bill Gates 1982 – “640K is more memory than anyone will ever need”
PC World in 2000 – “Within 3 years we will have PDA and phone batteries that last a year, like watch batteries.”
Alan Sugar 2005 – “Next Christmas, the ipod will be kaput”

If you want more you can go here http://listverse.com/history/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/

So…the question we all ask is…why on earth do we do it?
I have an answer…because its fun.

I am not expecting anything I say to be correct…but at this point in time this is how I feel it will go this year.

1. Microsoft will postpone their deadline for Windows 7. (Currently at 3rd quarter of this year)
2. Apple won’t wait till Christmas to release their new Iphone, which is what they said they will do.
3. 10000 people will once again say that this is the year of linux.
4. This will be the year of linux.
5. I will get my computer working again.
6. Google will release 2 more versions of their G range of phones, taking as long to release the source code as they did with the first version.
7. Canonical will make an increasingly stupid name for version 9.10 of Ubuntu. Kranky Kangaroo or something.
8. We will see the start of the silicon -> something else switchover, near the end of the year.
9. Google will release a desktop OS, because they don’t have one yet.
10. Thunderbird 3.0 might get released…that would be nice…taking long enough.
11. 3d desktops will become all the rage, and noone will believe linux users when they say we’ve had the cube for 6 years.

Ok, these are my predictions. If I think of anymore, I will put them in, but I will post one at the end of the year discussing what was right, and what was wrong.

Maybe I’ll be quoted as one of the top 30 worst predictions ever. Nah…that crown belongs to the people in the link above.

Right, ok, so its that time of year when everyone tries to say what they think will happen with tech in the next year/few years. Now, I don’t know why...