Crashed Pips - Computers, politics, emetic trash

2008 was designated the International Year of Planet Earth, as well as being International Year of languages, the potato, sanitation, the frog, and the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue.

So, it’s Boxing Day. And, in my opinion, good riddance to 2008. In some ways. In some ways, 2008 was brilliant.

In political circles, for example, we proved that a mixed-race gentleman from Hawaii could fend off a grumpy old man and a hockey mom who believes dinosaurs were around 6,000 years ago, and that the secret ballot is one of the things that’s “really cool” about America. We also managed to get the LHC started up (even if it did fail afterwards), and we showed that the eucharist is what everyone thought it was already: a cracker and some dilute wine. On the technology side of things, all was not doom and gloom either: the superior format won for once in the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray format war, the MacBook got its first substantial update since 2001, WordPress got a brilliant new admin panel, Linux’s hardware support came along in leaps and bounds, and big media is finally getting the hang of using these modern TVs with typewriters attached to deliver media.

However, this was also the year the recession started to bite: with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, AIG, MFI, and, most recently, Woolworths, it’s been shown that the economy desperately needs some TLC. For the first time in my life, I found myself agreeing with George Bush on the financial bail-out plan - although it was unpleasant, it was necessary to stop things going from bad to worse. (As I thought that, Satan shivered and put on an extra layer of clothing, probably nabbed from the Woolworths closing down sale.)

In this blog’s métier of technology, not all has been very rosy either. Abit is to cease trading, and Microsoft is hurrying past the mess that is Vista and opening the pumps full-on to concentrate on Windows 7 - which is what they should have done with Vista. Ubuntu has released two rather disappointing releases, and Apple has also disappointed in some respects, even announcing it’s going to pull out of Macworld.

The games console front was not particularly healthy: with release after release of recycled Mario and driving material by Nintendo, who seem to have been attending the Peter Kay school of re-releasing and copying, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Wii’s programmers are starting to find their idea wells running dry. The PlayStation 3 has dominated, and Microsoft has failed to incorporate a Blu-Ray drive in the Xbox 360.

Now, I’m not famed for my gaming ability. I don’t even own a games console currently. The height of my gaming prowess extends to getting to Level 7 on Vortex, the iPod’s implementation of Breakout. However, I do know that Microsoft needs to do something about the Xbox 360 in 2009 to adjust it better to the world.

Firstly, it has to sort out the disk scratching problem, and it also has to rally behind Blu-Ray. There’s no point standing on a sinking ship: although the HD-DVD peripheral has been discontinued, they need to move to Blu-Ray. However, there’s something far more major than that.

In previous years, the Xbox 360 has had major releases every year. Call of Duty 2 and Gears of War in 2005/6, Halo 3 in 2007. This year’s flagship game, I think, was meant to be Gears of War 2 - but just compare that to previous years. Halo 3 was being released after years of hype, and Call of Duty 2 bathed in the post-launch honeymoon after the X360 was released in 2005.

So, a charismatic and historic game, about life-like soldiers from the most bloody war in Earth’s history, and a rip-roaring sci-fi adventure about a ’space marine with really cool green armor’ (their words, not mine) have been followed by a game about a fat man, whose face looks like Steve Ballmer’s office chair, where you have to look over his shoulder to see the damn targeting reticule. Ridiculous. They need to find a decent flagship game for next year.

Apple’s announcements have also been noticeably low-key this year. Steve Jobs seems to have been assigning a lot of the work at the Stevenotes to Phil Schiller, Scott Forstall, and Jonathan Jony Ive, who appears to have changed his name by deed poll into something that makes absolutely zero sense when read and mispronounced.

Apple’s product turnout this year has also been noticeably smaller: last year, we had the iPhone, new iMacs, Leopard, new iPods, iWork ‘08 and iLife ‘08. This year, we had updates to the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the Time Capsule, updates to the Apple TV, new MacBooks and 15″ MacBook Pros, and the usual crop of new iPods. It seems that Apple misfired a bit this year, but with rumours circling of a new Mac Mini and new iMacs, and possibly a netbook, at Macworld 2009 (notably without Steve Jobs, presumably much to the disappointment of his stalkers) we can only hope it gets back on track next year.

All in all, therefore, a pretty sombre year for the technology industry - the only real source of excitement has been the sheer number of ridiculous web 2.0 startups. Was it the recession? Possibly. Here’s to a more exciting 2008.