The Dark Balloon

A weblog by Hao Lian.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
A note that thanks you for being born, all those years ago.

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Update #1 from the 2008 psychic frontier

Google’s suite of office software will continue to suck.

dotfloofy dotblog

TRUE. My psychic predictions are coming true earlier and earlier each year. Soon, they will happen before I predict them. Or did I just blow your mind? Anyway, Hank Williams agrees that Google’s suite will soon cede to Adobe’s plans for world domination. And, in the weblog tetrahedron (Contrary to your stupid and tiny-minded thoughts, it’s not a sphere.), two people agreeing on something is tantamount to it being true. You know, I should start picking stocks. I hear chicken looks good this time of year.

[(2008 April 2) • .]

Recent comments (Ethane, General announcement.) • (HAO, Jammies.) • (Tim, Jammies.) • (Prashanth, Wedding.) • (Hao, Hands.).

Recent posts (10/06, The myth and the man.) • (09/13, 2011 Sep 13.) • (08/21, Indifference and neglect often do much more damage than outright dislike.) • (08/21, Failing beautifully.) • (08/18, Shameless.).

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The definitive list of what will happen in 2008

dfdb is proud to expand to politics and music and culture and current events this year.

  • Despite the best efforts of America’s women, Obama will become president of the United States and, by proxy, the world. His vice president? Some white person nobody cares about.
  • The Funnelwhich will get a quantity of updates that is a multiple of three. Maybe.
  • New Amsterdam will get canceled even though it’s a damn good show.
  • Google’s suite of office software will continue to suck. TRUE
  • Apple will learn how to make iPod nanos not look like the fat chick nobody likes. Also, gray? Seriously? Gray’s going away.
  • People will continue to enjoy pornography in novel and exciting new ways despite the best efforts a new production company, n-girls + n-1 cups.
  • foobar 0.9.5.2 will be released to much “fanfare.”
  • Franz Ferdinand and The Fratellis will release their new albums. Somebody will make yet another postmortem album for Elliot Smith.
  • There will be no new Windows OS release because most scientists agree such an event would cause a permanent rip in the very fabric of Bill Gates’ pants. And nobody wants to see his butt.
  • That’s right, I’m making this public: Bill Gates goes commando on a daily basis. ♫ Thonnnng. ♫
  • House will get renewed despite crappier writing and even crappier medicine.
  • The next version of Mac OS X will contain, let’s say, Firewire support. And better icons than those in Leopard. And a TCP/IP Stack®.
  • People will continue to not care about any of the Linux operating systems.
[(2008 April 1) • • • • • • .]

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2007 predictions, final updates

Let’s wrap up the 2007 predictions with as little crying as possible, OK?

[Mac OS X failing], with Vista, will leave a power vacuum in the OS market, one that is not filled by Linux, which will lack an OS to copy from which to copy any more features.

TRUE. 2007 was not a good year for operating systems. Unless, of course, you count the release of Emacs 22.1. What happened to version 22, you ask? It’s currently lost in the beard of Richard Stallman, and no amount of open source communism is enough to entice anybody to go and retrieve it.

Web 2.0 will stagnate.

TRUE. Web 2.0 is no longer cool. Lame Internet fads are cool again.

Language interpreters will become a bottleneck.

TRUE. Python is cool now. We all know Python is not interpreted; it’s, in fact fed through van Rossum’s head before he manually flips the diodes in your monitor. That’s right, I’m making this public: Python only runs on LCDs. Deal with it, bitches.

Perl 6.0 will not be released. Python 3000 will not be released.

DOUBLE TRUE. Perl now has Rakudo, Pugs, and about twenty other mini-languages. Apparently, “focus” in the Perl community is a weird way of spelling “vapor.” As in vaporware. MORPHEME BURN. Sizzle sizzle, bitches. (Seriously, when C++0x adds a whole bunch of unnecessary features, it’s lame. But when Perl 6 does it, it’s “Come on, we have nightly builds?”)

dotfloofy dotblog will reach its fourth anniversary.

FALSE. We had a continuity jump and we are, indeed, in our sixth anniversary by now. Scientists, with their sciencing, widely believe this is due to anomalies caused by the pesto sauce I spilled back around June of 2007.

[(2008 April 1) • • • • • • • • .]

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2007 predictions, part two

There will be no iPhone release. If there is, the name will be much lamer than iPhone and it will never achieve the popularity of iPod. TRUE.

iTV will fail. Miserably. iPod succeeds because it satisfies a cultural, commodity niche. You cannot carry a TV around. TVs do not make people cool. Nobody has made a better TV in decades; we have only merely changed what produces the picture over and over again. TRUE.

Mac OS X will languish as Apple runs out of 10.* releases. Lack of planning for the next version of Mac OS (11) will cause Apple to exit the limelight. TRUE.

This, with Vista, will leave a power vacuum in the OS market, one that is not filled by Linux, which will lack an OS to copy from which to copy any more features. TRUE.

Web 2.0 will stagnate. Language interpreters will become a bottleneck. (Ruby 2.0 will not be released until Christmas 2007, anyway.) TRUE.

Perl 6.0 will not be released. Python 3000 will not be released. Haskell will continue to kick ass in Pugs, and nobody will notice. TRUE.

dotfloofy dotblog will reach its fourth anniversary. This is called “juxtaposition.” TRUE-ish.

[(2007 January 7) .]