CES is as Dull as Predicted

Funny, but the way I heard it Sun had already downgraded Goldman Sachs!

I was wondering when would the death of the OLPC (dead before it came out) be declared. Hopefully, they’ll all get a clue.

Was at CES today and anyone who doubts the Recession has hit the consumer electronics industry should go there. No idea what the attendance is this year but I’ve been going for close to a decade now, and first thing in the morning on the first day South Hall is always a mob scene. Today? Plenty of strolling room. Companies have cut way WAY back on promo items, they seem to have figured out that t-shirts don’t bring them any increase in business. Very weird at huckster booths like Creative, which is usually one huge shill show hustling people from one exhibit to another in other to fulfill some obligation to vie for prizes; this year rather than pimping all Creative’s wonderful toys, their “show” featured a guy explaining why some chip that will eventually come out – with a weird stem cell analogy – will change the face of computing. That was it. One door prize, no admonition to check out Show Specials because as far as I could tell there weren’t any. Etc. Every booth was like that. Microsoft, which usually has all kinds of weird giveaways, was pretty much display only with not much emphasis on previously predominant Microsoft partners. If you strolled casually through MS’ booth, you’d probably get the idea they sold flat screen TVs. Strangely, the exhibitors generally seemed really upbeat. No idea why. Weirdest booth was NBC-Universal. I don’t recall them being at the show before, but they held a “contest” where they gave out a large book-of-matches looking thing and you threw it down on a “Microsoft screen” (maybe they do sell flatscreens…) to find out if you’d “won.” Of course, everybody “won.” Inside every “matchbook” was a really tiny flash drive, which you then took to a kiosk to select promotional material (I picked the Wanted videogame promo) to put on your flashdrive. So it was one big gimmick to get people to look at their promo videos. So why’d they restrict to one? My drive was 2 gigs – very cool, and thanks, NBC-U – and the promo was maybe a tenth that. Why didn’t they let people fill their sticks with ads? Oh well. But that’s the kind of show it was.

BTW, there goes Ballmer saying they’ll go after Yahoo, again…oy!

#4
A clean install of the latest Windows 7 build takes up slightly more space than Vista. 7 is bascially Vista with some performance enhancements and some new interface stuff. The official system requirements for 7 are identical to Vista.

Not saying that Vista is a bad OS, I’m quite happy with it, I just think its interesting how these trends develop out of misinformation. The common perception of Vista is that its slow and bloated (even though its not, its faster than XP in many cases), while Windows 7 is “Vista done right” even though its barely any faster.

#10
I’ve run it on machines as slow as a laptop with a 1.7 GHz Pentium M and 512 MB of RAM. It was very slow to boot up (just like XP), but once you were at the desktop it was perfectly fine for office applications and web browsing. It would even play a few fairly modern games like Age of Empires III. More RAM gives Vista more room for superfetch, but the OS itself doesn’t need a whole lot more than XP.

Not to toot my own horn, but I just did some benchmarks comparing 64-Bit XP an 64-Bit Vista and posted it on the [H] forum:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1381631

Nice benchmarking Somebody_Else,

I’m currently running the 64-bit version of Vista Ultimate, it’s runs really great.

I highly doubt Toshiba putting CELL chips into their new TV will turn them into video game consoles. The Cell chips have been touted as powerful scalable CPUs by Sony long before the PS3 was even in the market. But hardly anyone else has had any interest in using the Cell in their product, probably since there are cheaper alternatives.

Toshiba will like use the chip (probably single core versions) for video and/or audio processing for their new HDTVs, and up-conversion for DVDs. Which is what the PS3 is already doing with DVDs and BluRay.

But seeing Sony’s brain child being used for mundane tasks like this really does put hamper on how good the Cell CPU is supposed to be. I bet an Atom chip could do this with how much problem, and consume less power too!