Yes, so it is christmas... what a lovely time of the year, right mstarch? ;-)

(Whom am I kidding? I bloody hate christmas. I hate the fact that everyone seem to be having a great time, except me...)

Ermn... never mind that little rambling, talking about christmas gets me sidetracked. :) What I really wanted to comment in my diary today, is mstarch's little comment about we building railroad tracks:

Yes, I suppose you're right to a certain extent. But dont worry, there is still a long time to anything remotely like that will happen. It may seem like even Microsoft are having a hard time figuring out what to add to their operating system these days. Been running with WinXP here for a week now alomst, and yet, I've not seen one single really good reason to upgrade from Win2k. All that seem to be new in WinXP, besides minors like faster booting and other finetuning, is bundling of misc. new markets Microsoft desire to capture (eg. the IM market).

Hardware companies like Intel also seem somewhat screwed these days. It doesn't make much of a difference wether you have a 1 ghz machine or a 2 ghz machine. Both are 'fast enough', just like Windows 2000 is 'good enough' as an operating system (at least for the most common tasks).

So does this mean we're at the end of the railroad? That we've built every track worth building? No, luckily not. The problem for Intel, as well as for Microsoft's OS department, is that our hardware and OS is more than good enough for the classic 'office' usage. But it is still not fast enough for really bandwidth requiring things - eg. television over internet. We may embrace how gigantic our discs are these days, but think about it, how big are they really, if we want to store DVDs on them? Our ADSL is pretty pathetic if you try to stream live video in DVD quality, not to mention the bandwidth required for the server, if only 100 people were watching it.

You also do not have to worry too much about productivity tools getting completely done. While the basic packages might end up like that (eg. the Office package. I'd settle for a Office 95. It more than covers all my needs), you'll always see management screw up. See them spend tons of money on some AMANDA project, just to realize it will not do. Or the system might actually work just fine, but then management changes their mind on how everything should be structured, and the system renders useless.

But... let's assume I'm wrong. Then there will always be one thing left to code, that will render old and useless over and over again: games. :)

So why not turn this fear into an advantage? Start coding on ClanLib again! :)) Lets make ourselves famous and known in the gaming industry, so when the mass layoffs of coders start, we can quickly plant our boots in some game company, where code never grows old. :)

(Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation... hehehe)