Thoughts and pictures on Comdex 1999

I left for Comdex Monday via Southwest flight 117 at 7:00 AM. I also arrived at the Las Vegas airport at 7:00 AM (instantaneous travel is just great, isn't it?) It was way too early since the show didn't open until 10:30 AM, presumably for the sake of morning-haters like myself; so I should have taken advantage of it and slept in a bit more. Had a nice breakfast at the Hilton buffet though.

I was really proud of the Linux Business Expo exhibit hall this year; it was a huge improvement over the pathetic little cluster of cubicles they had at the Sands last year. VA Linux Systems set up an "email garden" with a couple dozen or so machines that had just the basic necessities... Enlightenment, Netscape, SSH and a couple others. Novell had set up a couple of similar clusters of Windows boxen in the main hall and in one of the exhibit halls but they were useless to me without SSH on them (I currently SSH to my home server to read email with mutt - totally removes the need for any client configuration on whatever machine I use, anywhere, except that the client machine must have ssh.) I have a Windows version of SSH available on my home web server but the machines would not allow me to install it. I even tried hitting F8 while booting to try safe mode but that didn't work either. They had CD drives so if I'd had a LinuxCare boot CD on me it might have been handy. Anyway... the Linux boxes did the trick. I was able to exchange email with a friend from Phoenix whom I met for dinner Monday evening.

Corel had a demo very similar to the one I'd seen at the spring LinuxWorld thing in San Jose. Corel Linux is looking very good, probably the one I'm going to pick for my mom's computer if I ever get around to finishing that project. I was very excited to see a demo of an alpha Linux version of CorelDraw, my all-time favorite graphics package. Alas they said it won't be released until late next year or the year after that. The demo looked pretty good for an alpha to me. Nothing else in the Linux area really caught my attention that much, but mainly because it was like going to LinuxWorld again.

As last year, Dragon Systems and Lernout & Hauspie were both there showing off their continuous speech recognitition systems. For me being able to dictate to the computer is still a dream; I haven't tried ViaVoice yet, which AFAIK is the only full working Linux speech rec. system (but one must use it through an API... IBM has not released any apps which use it on Linux). So I saw both demos again, and they didn't change that much from last year's Comdex. The same demo guy was doing the L&H demo and the software made similar kinds of mistakes. He kept telling it to "stop listening" and then a few seconds later it would start listening again on its own and start trying to interpret what he was saying to the audience. OTOH Dragon Systems had two demo people - one to preach and one to talk to the computer, so we didn't get to see how well the software could switch between listening and non-listening modes or if it even had such concepts. Both systems are now capable of continuous recognition of normal speech provided the speaker trains the system for a few minutes. Both systems transcribe whole sentences or large phrases at a time, giving an impression of slowness but of course that is intended to improve the accuracy based on contextual clues. It can't be sure of the spellings of the words until you have finished the sentence. Both systems still require the user to speak the punctuation marks; they can't infer the need for them based on grammar. I think it seems like an easy feature to add; if word processor grammar checkers can point out mistakes and recommended corrections, then speech systems should be able to just put in the right punctuation most of the time. Both systems allow the user to operate the applications via speech as well as dictate text. Both allow some flexibility in command phrases. Both allow navigation of the web via speech, but with L&H it puts little numbers beside each link on a web page, and you can say "go to 3" or whatever to go there; or you can speak the linked text itself. Dragon Systems doesn't desecrate the page but you can only navigate links by reading a unique subset of the link to it. All in all the DS demo was more impressive but I can't say which one actually works better without trying them. Both systems run on Windows but the L&H guy said that an announcement had been made that very day about Linux. However I don't see it on their web site. I got a free limited-time trial of the L&H product.

Little mini pager-sized MP3 players were everywhere. With all the manufacturers they should be showing up at Walgreen's for $20 any day now. I-Mac inspired colorful PC cases were also ubiquitous (even though Linus says "who cares!"). After all the hype it almost seemed anticlimactic... but Hitachi really does have a DVD camcorder now! It uses 3 inch DVD-RAM discs. The booth guys barely spoke English so I didn't waste a lot of time trying to get more specific info. The camera also had some kind of wire interface, probably FireWire, for doing direct capture on a PC (that's what they were demoing rather than its ability to record to a disc). The disc is in a caddy which is easily removable for insertion into non-caddy type drives but I'm not clear on which drives can read it. DVD-RAM technology uses different laser wavelengths and in the past at least, full-size RAM discs would not work in first-generation DVD drives, and to further complicate things, the Hitachi drive has a motorized tray which is designed to accept a full-size DVD-RAM caddy rather than a bare disc. I'm also not sure if this camera records video which is compatible with standalone movie players or not. Anyway... I still want one. Someday.

VR and 3D stuff were mostly absent. I saw one booth for a goggle-less 3D display but the line to have a look was really long and slow-moving and I didn't get around to checking back later like I intended. Since the booth was dark I suspect it's one of those prismatic type displays like I saw another time (I think how they work is that the face of the display has miniature vertical prisms etched into it, which refract the light so that your right eye sees one set of pixels and your left sees another). They seem to work best in darkness. It's the first time I didn't notice at least one HMD, 3D tracking device or some such.

Plasma displays were everywhere in abundance, both as specimens and just to show propaganda in lieu of regular monitors, projectors or TVs. But who cares. Projectors will continue to be better for sheer size. I only want a plasma panel if it has a touchscreen, and I didn't notice any of those this time (but they were probably there). There were several projector manufacturers. All projectors are now high quality these days; they're a commodity with only brightness, bulb life and resolution being the distinguishing factors. When my old Electrohome CRT projector develops a problem or I get rich, I'll check into them more thoroughly. For now the highest-resolution ones still cost several thousand bucks AFAIK.

Speaking of touchscreens ELO had a nice booth.

Be (as in BeOS) was there. I didn't stick around because I saw the demos at Comdex last year and was duly impressed. But I see they're making hardware again. The machine is called the iGeek. It didn't have a GeekPort though AFAICT. Bummer.

The Salutation Consortium was there. They are pushing an alternative standard to JINI for devices to discover and communicate with each other. Now personally I favor JINI (so far) but it is ironic that in this day and age JINI is not able to claim to be Open Source, and the competition is. That sucks, especially for Sun whose lightbulb of enlightenment would otherwise seem to be very slowly brightening. It really sucks in that infrastructure code is the most likely to succeed as open source. It is important for infrastructure to be adopted as widely as possible, because it makes it more useful; interoperability is paramount. Every healthy infrastructure market is ultimately dominated by a single 800 pound gorilla. Protracting this eventuality hurts the whole market and delays the perfection of the technology. So Sun could become the 800 pound gorilla by doing the fashionable thing and releasing JINI as open source. This among all the other wonderful aspects of open source software. Oh well. At least they are now working on interoperability with the other threat, Sony's HaVI (not sure which letters are supposed to be capital but it's not just the first one, I know that much).

Speaking of devices being left to their own devices, probably the biggest hype of all was about BlueTooth which as I understand it is a wireless protocol for devices (the canonical example being the connection between a cell phone and an PDA... sort of ironic that would be the example. Personally I'd rather see the two devices combined. But convergence is anathema these days. The marketroids have decided that since it didn't sell for all those years, people must really want to have a beltful of separate single-purpose gadgets rather than one all-purpose one. If nothing else, people can afford 10 $50 gadgets over time more easily than a $500 all-purpose gadget. Once again elegant technological progress is defeated by human nature. Sigh.) There was a big booth. However it's still at the bits-and-pieces stage; there were ICs and little demos but I didn't notice enough real-world gadgets to go "wow". Maybe next year they will have figured out what to do with it.

There were home networking demos. Ho hum. More Windows specific trash to be obsolete as soon as bought. The real news was last year when it was a new idea. But at least they're up to 10 Mbits over existing phone lines, rather than 1 Mbit like last year.

There was an absolutely mouth-watering booth for the empeg car audio player. I want one but not quite $1100 worth. Anyway I'd rather have a multipurpose PC in the car (HUD, security, GPS and mapping, monitoring health of the car, packet radio, ... there are so many uses besides music.) There was an SUV with a custom paint job and an empeg on display. No drawing to win it AFAICT. They had empeg units on display separately, playing music and showing animations on their displays. They are just so elegant... the unit is DIN sized, with the front dominated by a glowing bitmap display, either amber or blue (and maybe green although I didn't see any at the booth). There are only about 6 buttons. Yet it can access a whole library of mp3's on hard disk and also function as an FM radio. The amp is external (makes sense on a high end device like this... you would want to pick your own amp anyway). They are very well built with heavy metal cases. What goes in the dash is a docking bay and you can remove the unit itself so you can take it in the house to transfer new music onto its hard drive.

Honorable mention for "trinkets 'n trash" goes to rhic.com for their 4x5 tile-scramble puzzle thingy (the kind where there is one missing tile and you have to move the others around one square at a time to reconstruct the picture on the tiles). It kept me busy for 20 minutes or so, provided a nice excuse to rest my feet while sitting solving it on the couches they thoughtfully provided next to their booth, and then when I solved it I won a stress ball, which was just what the engineering manager at work had requested I bring him back from the show.

My room was at the Stratosphere, on the 13th floor. These pics were taken from my window. If only Linux had some stitching software I'd make a panorama of them. Nice smog eh?

There was this ergonomics company... they make a comfy chair with a footrest and arms to hold the keyboard and monitor. I think I have a better idea... I'm going to build monitor and keyboard arms and just sit in my recliner. The pic of the guy strapped into the rings was what they facetiously claimed was their first idea for a workstation. Whatever. Good excuse for fun for people who are into that kind of ride I guess. Finally here's a last pic of one of the cute booth babes.

There were digitizing whiteboards as usual. I took pictures for the benefit of a coworker who hadn't heard of them. Mimio on the left, eBeam on the right. These appear to be RF or ultrasonic rather than the optical kind I've also seen.

LG had an interesting prototype folding computer.

I got to see a KryoTech system up close and personal.

The Corbin Sparrow electric car was on display by a company that Corbin invested some money into as part of a venture capital fund, or something like that. The Sparrow's small size allows you to register it as a motorcycle in some states so registration is cheaper and it's legal to use the HOV lane (not only is it environmentally correct due to being electric, but since it only carries one person, if anybody is driving it's "high occupancy" as well). It is freeway-capable and gets a lot of range for the number of batteries due to light weight and good aerodynamics. It is also relatively affordable.

"MadDog" Hall introduced Linus at the Monday night keynote. From the picture it looks like Linus moves almost as fast as his OS. But I was way too far back to get a picture of him, had to just take a picture of the video screen, and evidently the camera decided to take an extended exposure time. The Comdex planners don't know how to properly handle a large crowd for keynotes; they make you wait in a queue, to make sure that anyone who is not early is guaranteed to always get a bad seat, or no seat at all; and then it takes so long for everyone to enter the room single-file that by the time everyone gets there the speech is already underway. Why they couldn't just open the room an hour early is beyond me. At least then you could be comfortable while you wait, and have an equally good chance of getting a good seat by being early. Not only did they make us feel like a herd of low-brow cattle, they wasted my time and for no good reason at all. Such idiots. If it weren't for the mythical man-month, 7000 geeks being idle for half an hour would have amounted to enough brainpower to get the next release of Mozilla out, or something. Anyway there are articles on the web regarding what Linus had to say, which cover more material than I could hear on the underpowered PA system. It was a little less technical than usual. The main point was that for Linux to become more mainstream it needs better usability. There was the usual Q&A session afterwards. Linus also revealed more than he had to date regarding Transmeta - that they have designed a microprocessor which relies heavily upon software to give it increased flexibility (and we know from patents that this flexibility means ability to emulate other processors), and that full disclosure would happen January 19.

Consensys Computers has an interesting Linux-compatible IDE RAID called the Raidzone. It holds 5 drives and fits in three 5 1/4" drive bays. Maximum data rate is well in excess of 100 MBytes/sec but more typically around 66 as tested on NT by the Computer Reseller News crew. The guy on the right is a CRN geek. The guy on the left is the Consensys CEO I believe. The black box in front of him on the coffee table thing is a standalone Raidzone, and the tower system in the middle has an internal Raidzone in it. You can see the NT setup GUI on the projector. Fully loaded with the largest available IDE drives it holds 1.4 TB and costs about $4000 if memory serves.

I totally skipped the Microsoft area (they had a big part of the show floor for their "partners"). I think they were trying to show Winblows 2000. Wonder how many blue screens per day that caused.

Overall it wasn't worth all the walking. I developed some scary-looking blisters. I don't think I'll bother going back next year. After going 3 different years I'm kinda bored with it.

Afterwards I had a lot of time to kill because my flight didn't leave till 10:00 PM and I was too tired to walk anywhere else except to the nearest taxi. So I had Hilton buffet for dinner again and then got a ride back to the airport. I found a bookstore in the airport, got a copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide (the original Douglas Adams book), then found a bar in the airport and had a nice mug of Sam Adams. What a great book. I got 3/4 of the way through it by the time the plane landed, and finished it Wednesday night. A number of jokes are making more sense now.