[citation][nom]digitalzom-b[/nom]Given the gas price forecast this year... I'd say electric cars/alternate energy transportation needs to evolve quicker.[/citation]
They did evolve. The US government was bought out in the 80s / 90s by big oil to cut funding for electric car research. OPEC wants gas prices high and a state of artificial scarcity since they have a nigh monopoly on our entire transport infrastructure.
@ the list : I don't want new features in Firefox, I just want it fast, reduce the memory footprint, etc, and let the add ons do any additional features. As is, firefox works great. I have never had a reason to migrate to Chrome because I never felt Firefox was worse than it.
Windows 8 is going to fail bad. Microsoft is trying to push touch screens and tablet interfaces onto mainstream computing (again, they did some of this crap with Vista) and it will fall on their face. The OS is still bloated as hell and slow, and I intend to completely switch over to Debian with Wine to play games this year since DX12 is no where to be seen so Wine is mostly usable with modern games. Anything else, I'll use my old copy of Vista I'm still on. No reason to upgrade Windows when all new versions do is shove crap down ones throat.
The rest of it I really don't care about. I want to see fiber networks deployed more rapidly globally, but monopolies in the US are putting a damper on that.
I don't expect much tech innovation to happen this year. We are aiming for another recession, and the US dollar might hyper inflate any day, so as long as Kepler, Southern Islands, and Ivy Bridge come out at reasonable price points with all the new tripping features like PCI3 for an upgrade this summer, and LED LCD prices stay low, and hopefully the mechanical disk market rapidly returns to old cost levels to complement rapidly dropping SSD prices, it will be a great summer to build a new PC at least.