little addone from me
1. future cpu will be amd64 not ia64, due amd is faster in gaming,encode, has 1/3 faster sse2/3 instruction, still is risc, doesnt have fucked up instruction like inc,lea that were 1 tick now 4 clock ticks in P4, another thing amd64 has 8 more general purpose registers for use for coders, so wonder what will they choose? 8 from ia64 or 16 from amd64, ia64 has only faster fpu and is faster in office apps, but who will use old 64/80 bit fpu if we have 128bit sse floats

2. .net i hope it will die, i hate this crap even when i see vb proggy and someone gives it to me i will delete it because why he havent compiled it into normal exe, just requieres me to install 50mb of that VM crap, other things many programs come out in that(due its easier,faster, easier to due network things), but after that someone writes a better proggy in normal pure C or C++ and have more options, is faster.
Microsoft we can bet will try to promote it, Vista will have it by default, but another question who will use Vista until not fully cracked with that DRM crap all inside, so only solution for me now i XP64, best system from msshit so far, fast stable if you know how to tweak it, and doesnt require you to have pixelshader 2.0 or 4.0 soon to draw window like Vista, and 2 TB of memory to just run system