As predicted by many logical people, the world did not end on January
1st. To many other cultures in the world, that date had no
significance. In most Asian counties, it wasn’t even a
holiday. What really gets to me now is noticing the amount of
money we spent on Y2K compared to
other countries. Granted, we have more computers than any other
country, but the American way has always been (at least in my eyes) to
get the job done, as quickly and efficiently as possible, without
leaving any mistakes. I’m now starting to wonder exactly how much
the Y2K “bug” helped the US economy…
What can we expect for this year?
No real surprises in this category. We will see faster
chips, lower prices, more capacity, and AMD breaking 1GHz at room temp
faster than Intel. Don’t expect to start e-mailing me with all
your Pro-Intel/AMD bashing crap. I’m not a total Intel
hater. I’m typing this right now on a Dual Celeron system.
The CPUs cost me $100, and they are running at 550 each. I don’t
dislike any company randomly. I dislike the company that purposely
tries to subdue any competition in the market, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean I don’t like their product. I know some of you may think
I’m mildly insane when I say that, but if you think about it long
enough, it’s true (if you think about anything long enough it’s
true.) Take M$ for example. I hate the executives of the
company, and, given the chance I would severely injure them for what
they have done to competition in the industry. But, their
Operating system is still the easiest to use to the newer user.
Windows NT is a innovation in itself. The stability of UNIX with
the GUI of Windows 9x is simply great. I’m running Windows 2000
(which was meant to be Windows NT 5.0) right now. It’s a super
OS, and I’d recommend it to anyone with a computer powerful enough to
run it.
As for software, we can expect to see
software, as always, get bigger and bigger. Because of that, we
might even see the CD-ROM slowly start to die out in favor of the GB+
DVD-ROM drive. The floppy drive, if you don’t already know, is
on it’s last leg. The only reason I have one in my system is
because the thing beeps every time I start it up if I don’t have a
floppy attached. That, and I’m too lazy to turn off the Floppy
drives in the BIOS. In the 3D world, which I know nothing about,
I’m expecting to see some great things from 3Dfx in their new line of
Voodoo4 and Voodoo5 Cards. Even though I never have played a 3D
game for more than 30 minutes at a time, I’d sure like to have a quad
GPU 128MB graphic cards in my AGP slot to brag about…wouldn’t you?
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