1. You'll personally sponsor a couple of 100 dollar laptops

I don't currently know how to sign up to do this -- but by the end of the year I will know how. And i will have done so. Several times. And I predict you will too.

I currently sponsor a young girl through world vision and find it an excellent past time (suggest you do the same -- my rich, intelligent, well-fed reader) but i think this hundred dollar laptop is a specific new way of helping the world in which we lucky programmers will lead the way.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Now, onto some less-preachy predictions for the year ;-)

That crusty fiend Ajax Ninja says:

'...2008 will be the year that pissed off angel investors scream "show me the money" and MBA types go running over the cliffs...'

I still fear that this will be the year when Steve Ballmer will grip Bill Gates in his mighty bear-like arms and, with one powerful lunge, bite his head off with mighty iron-enriched jaws. We all have our fears, right?

I figure the most interesting predictions are around the possibility of an ongoing oil crisis, and maybe where economies like US and China are headed. And how many hurricanes will the northern hemisphere see this summer? But I'm no eco-financial pundit so i have to leave that topic alone.

Apple: Less than Inflation

Let's talk Apple. Sell your shares now, people. It could be a long time before they look anything like this healthy again.

2008, Language of the Year? AAAAAAAAA!

RoR is so 2006, and you know that already.

Haskell is so... 1906 or something and most people think you've said Pascal when what you said was Haskell and you have to repeat it "No, Not Pascal Pee but Haskell Haitch," and then they google for it as Hascal, and think "what the hell?" so no not haskell either, and no no no, Scala is so bourgeois it makes me want to swallow my own adenoids. The language -- the ONLY language to be seen tappety tapping in 2008 is AAAAAAAAA!

Concurrency won't go away

While the trickle of anti-Ror hate speak will grow to a roar (and fade away as the 'plateau of productivity' emerges) you can be sure that the pro-concurrency mantra won't dissipate before the year is through.

Of course all of the examples will centres around 'embarrasingly parallelizable problems' (you down with EPP? yeh, you know me) while the real world is of-course bound in the "non-trivial legacy enterprise hell," the NTLEH, pronounced antler, because it's almost cute.

Facebook is evil. And sh*thouse at contextual advertising

Hang on, that's not a prediction, that's a statement. And yes, I still use them.

Being sh*thouse at contextual advertising is going to hurt them before being evil hurts them. They might get better at advertising. But they'll still be evil.

How did last year's prediction work out?

Most importantly, my riskiest prediction of all turned out to be correct: There actually was war in the middle east. And some peace too. Incredible stuff.