By James Turner
Senior Editor
First off, some comments about this morning’s article. As is
usually the case with things I write at 5 in the morning the day
after a long plane ride and a major time zone shift, I’ve already
noticed a few typos in the report. Rather than considering them
journalistic failings, I’d like you to see them as your own
personal treasure hunt. See if you can spot the missing nouns and
the verbs with the wrong tense endings.
All I can pledge is that, since I’m dashing these off at a
breakneck pace every morning before heading out for my first
appointments, that the typos will continue! Don’t blame the good
folks at Linux Today either, the value of this material is
timeliness rather than spotless grammar, so a few grammatical
blemishes come along with the territory.
Meanwhile, let’s start by talking about the man of the hour
yesterday, he who stands as a captain among mere privates, who has
created an empire out of nothing, and whom every man wants to be.
Yes, I’m talking about Tom Brady. Seriously, I spent the morning
writing up the report on Saturday finalizing my schedule, and then
watching the Patriots/Jets playoff game, first on the big plasma
display in my room (which, oddly, was not HD), and then down in the
sports book in the casino while munching a couple of hot dogs.
Great game, especially since the Pats covered the spread and netted
me a little early Vegas bonus.
Then it was over to the Venetian for the evening keynote. Bill G
was set to speak at 6:30 PM, so why was I heading over at 1:30 in
the afternoon? Well you can’t just walk in to the Gates keynote,
first you need to get a voucher, the magic golden ticket that lets
you in the door. For press and VIPs, the vouchers were going to be
given out at 3PM, and I wanted to give myself time to park and get
over there. Thus began CEA’s masterful execution of what I’d like
to call Operation Cluster F**k.
First off, press had been told to wait in a specific area to
receive our keys to the presence of the Great Gates, but when you
got there, there was no signage or anything telling you where to
wait, just a huge snaking line of the Great
Unwashed CES Attendees waiting to get their hands on general
admission vouchers. After meandering about for bit, with the clock
approaching 2:30, I happened upon a member of the press who already
had a voucher. WTF? He told me that the vouchers were being handed
out down in the press room, and “were almost gone.” So me and some
fellow writers go booking down to the press room (land of no cell
phone service, BTW) to find the receptionist has a whole drawer
full and is just giving them out to anyone who asks. Way to
implement a consistent policy, CEA!
So, press voucher in hand, I suddenly have two and a half hours
to kill. You see, even though the keynote is at 6:30, you need to
be lined up at 5:00 for seating. Yep, you get to sit on your butt
for 90 minutes waiting to hear the Great Man speak. I wander some
more, get a nice USB drive/MP3 player from a Samsung press
conference table, check my email, smooze with fellow members of the
press, and around 4:40 head up to the staging area to try to get a
good spot so I can throw tomatoes at the Microsoft CEO. I guess a
few other folks had the same idea…
Mooo! Mooo, I Say! Mooo!
Mayhem is too mild a term to describe the churning
fire hazard that was the multiple lines for the keynote. The choke
point for entry was the escalators from the 3rd to 4th floor of the
ballroom (the keynote itself was on the fifth). This meant that
every living person in Las Vegas seemed to be standing in front of
the escalators, facing the security contingent. It got so bad that
the hotel security folks threatened “to call off the keynote if you
don’t clear some space,” which may go down as the most empty threat
ever issued by anyone, anywhere.
All the press were asked to line up against the wall
(the revolution must have come without us noticing), and then we
waited. The problem was, new press didn’t seem to get the “line up
against the wall” message, and filled the empty space back in, thus
insuring that the last were first, and the first (and
order-obeying) last. The floodgate was finally opened, and people
who had gotten into the press group mistakenly suddenly found
themselves swimming upstream against a torrent of rabid journalists
as they were turned away at the checkpoint. Once upstairs, we found
ourselves in… another line. Yes, having been granted special
access to Nirvana, we got to stand in another rope line for a good
20 minutes or more, until the doors were opened. At least they
served wine and beer to assuage the masses.
You Are Now 90 Minutes From Pirates of
The Caribbean Redmond
Once finally in the room itself, we settled in for
the Long Wait. In additional to the standard Slide Show On The Big
Screen, there were a few live entertainers to try to keep us
amused. Most were Italian-style clowns, with one pretty good
juggler thrown in for good luck. Unfortunately, there’s only so
long you can watch a guy juggle…
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One of These Things is Not Like the Others…
Yes, it’s the Juggler, He’s Not a Clown
One other thing of note. Remember that mysterious
“Digital Freedom” booth at the Innovations event? Well, a variety
of slides along the theme of the one shown belong were running in
heavy rotation during the preshow. It appears that CEA has decided
to make the goal of keeping digital media unfettered a top priority
for the year. Of course, the irony of running these slides just
before a presentation on an operating system that is going to do
more to lock down media with draconian DRM than any before it is
sweet.
Finally, finally, the great moment arrived. After a
brief trip down memory lane by the CEA President (it being the 40th
anniversary of CES) Mr. Gates took the stage to describe how
Microsoft is going to give us all “Connected Experiences.” As the
video that then ran seems to indicate, only pretty people below the
age of 35 seem to require connectedness, perhaps the rest of us are
to be rounded up agrave; la Logan’s Run and zapped by
lasers. Of course, this is a blind spot of the consumer electronics
industry in general; someone might want to remind them about all
those aging boomers.
After years of embarrassing technical glitches
previewing cutting edge products, Microsoft seems to have found a
way to prevent these kind of goods. Don’t show any cutting
edge products. That’s right, nothing new of any substance
was shown during the keynote. Instead, we got basically 60 minutes
of Vista demoing. First, we got to see how you can apply canned
Microsoft document styles using the new version of Word. Next, we
were treated to a virtual flythrough of Las Vegas using the new
Microsoft 3D Mapping Software, which looked suspiciously like
Google Earth.
Um, Google Earth Got Demoed Last
Year…
The next section of the presentation was Media Center again.
“Look, we can view HD content. Look, we can watch HD video in a
window inside Vista. Look, you can track your fantasy sports stars
and be alerted when they make a play on a channel you have
available (okay, that’s a little cool, but hardly going to cure
cancer…) In an effort to demonstrate that Vista is in fact being
accepted by the hardware vendors, Bill then highlighted a series of
PCs that took advantage of new Vista features. HP will have a PC
with touch-screen technology, Toshiba has a laptop with the
SideShow window on the back, Sony has a media PC that’s… round,
and Medion has a UMPC.
Vista, Vista Everywhere…
The next half hour or so can best be described as
“Isn’t Gaming and the X-Box 360 Cool.” We saw a bunch of titles
that will run on Vista, part of an effort to revive the PC as a
gaming platform. Bill seemed particularly proud of the fact that
Halo 2 will run on Vista, which is funny given that it’s been out
forever, and Halo 3 is due this year. We saw that the XBox 360 can
run as an IPTV and view streaming content from Media PCs. And in a
genuinely new announcement, the Windows Home Server from HP was
unveiled. It’s basically a big RAID box that’s been made
Windows-friendly, so that it can automatically back up all the
content from all the PCs in the house, and make it available
remotely. So just think, when someone breaks into your Windows box
now, they can own all your private content… Of course, in keeping
with the Cover-Thy-Ass theme of the evening, this new technology
wasn’t shown, we just got a commercial about it.
Announcing, but not showing…
The last announcement of the night is that Ford is
teaming with Microsoft to integrate mobile devices like PDAs, cell
phones, and media players directly into vehicle sound systems.
Interestingly, Mark Fields of Ford explicitly mentioned the iPod as
a supported device. Thankfully, the integration is limited to the
stereo, which will also be able to read your mail and IMs using
speech synthesis. I can’t wait until the first time someone gets an
erotic IM while transporting the kids to soccer practice.
Have You Rebooted a Ford…
Lately?
Last year, Bill started out his presentation with a
“House of the Future” demo, and the glitches he encountered set the
theme for the rest of the presentation. This year, the gee-whiz
content was moved to the end, when people were already bleary-eyed
and less likely to notice problems. When Bill has to actually demo
product without a prompter, he gets noticeably less slick. And
essentially what he showed this year is what he showed last year,
wouldn’t it be neat if your digital world followed you around where
ever you went? Yes, Bill, it would be very neat. It also seems to
require that your entire digital world run Windows…
It’s Time For Cooking With Bill: Today,
Decimated Apples in Zune Sauce
After the keynote let out, I dragged my weary butt
over to a party at a private house hosted by a bunch of social
networking companies. The house itself was not in what I’d call a
posh neighborhood, there were several RVs parked out in front of
houses and it became pretty clear that the house had been rented
sight-unseen. However, they had food, single-malts, and a couple of
interesting if not spectacular products to look at.
Everyone Can’t Afford the Bellagio, I
Guess
Well, I’m already running late for my appointments today. I
should have a bunch of real products to show tomorrow, including
the OLPC, the South Hall vendors, and the Show Stoppers
exhibits.