2005: the year to come.

• In response, watch for TVoIP from the TeleCom's. One question is how aggressive will it be promoted. MTS all ready covers 75% of Winnipeg with their offering.
  
• The TeleCom's are still hoping to use regulation to delay, but are a least talking about some (long overdue) infrastructure upgrades.
  
• StratSat's (high altitude blimps) used as communication platforms and/or WiMax will allow wireless VOIP , TVoIP and internet but not till 2006/7. Cable and Telecom companies have that long to get their act together. (StratSat's also make great surveillance platforms in warzones or for borders/coastlines. This is where they will show up first)
  
• As a side effect, the new end broadband speeds will be ~20 Mbps down.
• HDTV and new display technologies will slowly rollout but not become the norm until you can get a 40 inch HDTV for ~ $1,000. Late 2006.
• MultiCore chips designs become commercially available in 2005, first from AMD then Intel, Sun and IBM. Thread Level Parallelism will be very import in 2006. Multicore and 64 bit will be standard for servers in 2006 and desktops in 2007. 64 bit is important because to support more than 4 Gb of ram.
  
• +1 Gb ram, +200 Gb hard disk space is stardard for your AMD/Intel desktop.
• The floppy disk is dead. Booting off cheap 256 Mb flash keys and/or USB card readers to 1 GB memory cards (take your pick but I prefer CompactFlash or SD cards) is the way to go.
  
• IBM Cell processors will ship before the end of the 2005 in Sony's PlayStation 3, as will Microsoft's Xbox2 will also ship (using IBM's PowerPC chip design).
• Linux and OSX will make major gains on the server and desktop.
• Microsoft's Longhorn will be further delayed and ilrelevent.
• Microsoft will not ship a IE 7 till the end of 2006. Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird will make major gains. Only full Xform (+fully stardards supports) support might allow IE to make a big come back.
  
• Intel will be having another bad year.
• Hand held devices will continue to morph. PDA's without phone or always on email functions are already low end commodities. If it ain't connected it's ilrelevent. (That could be the theme for the next 5 years).
• Digital Cameras will show up everywhere, standalone and on celphones, better and cheaper than ever. Look for mp3 players showing up on high end celphones using flash memory or robust mirco harddrives. Privacy prudes and security squealers will have a very bad time.
• Bloggers will continue to confuse the mainstream media and upset more privacy prudes and security squealers.
• I will have a better year. Somewhere, if not by March. (I promise ET).