SuitWatch:

Deserted in the Desert: Linux at CES

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CES is the largest of the three shows. In fact, since their schedules overlap, you can think of Macworld as a one-vendor CES pavailion inconveniently located at another city in the same time zone. You might also think of Macworld as Steve Jobs' hack on the consumer electronics business. To synopsize my take-away from Macworld (The New Economy Hack: Turning Consumers into Producers), Jobs is using free (as in beer) multimedia authoring products (iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and GarageTunes) to turn consumers into producers, redistributing market power from the few to the many. On the consumption side he's giving consumers the power to produce their own entertainment. (The iPod today is no less revolutionary and culture-changing than was Sony's first "pocketable" transistor radio in the late 1950s.) On the production side he's giving consumers the power to create that entertainment as well. Flooding the world with music and movie producers is one huge hack on both Hollywood and the consumer electronics industry that delivers Hollywood's goods.

So where does Linux fit in? Everywhere.

One year ago, Kunitake Ando, president and CEO of Sony, gave a keynote speech at CES explaining how his company would lead the rest of his industry's giants into an "always on" and "interactive" future built largely on a cooperatively developed embedded Linux distro. Six months later, in July, the CE Linux Forum (CELF) was formed by Sony, Matshushita, NEC, Philips, Samsung, Sharp and Toshiba. IBM and a pile of other companies also joined at some point. As CES approached, I saw that Montavista had lined up a hundred or more consumer electronics partners. The Embedded Linux Consortium had five programs in one session track. So I expected to see some results out there on the show floors.

Instead, what I found was something completely different. The narrative that follows is an account of that discovery. (Many of the links below point to my photo gallery from the trip.)

The Massive Market

After picking up my badge and my rolling Toshiba backpack (one of thousands handed out to badgeholders in the press room), I looked at the four show guides and wondered how I could begin to cover even a fraction of the Linux that was surely at the show. The show's massive sourcebook was thick as a brick and 530 pages long. The showguide was another 160 pages. The addendum ran another 70 pages. The visitors guide added another 104 pages. Total: 804 pages. I was one of 4000 press badgeholders among 129,000 attendees spread across 1.1 million square feet or more of floor space across seven massive halls. I say "or more" because reports on floor size vary. The new South Hall, which has 1.3 million square feet all by itself, brought the whole Las Vegas Convention Center to 3.2 million square feet -- and the whole LVC was packed wall-to-wall with CES exhibits, including two floors of exhibit space in the South Hall and more across town at the Alexis Park Hotel.

Although the CES Web site was pretty helpful as convention sites go (as a breed, they suck), it didn't provide a way (that I could find) to search through all the show guides for the word "Linux". Fortunately, they did provide touchscreen kiosks that let visitors do exactly that. After looking in despair through the show guides and the Web site, the kiosk was a huge relief. It got me straight to the information I needed.

So here's a question. Out of 2300+ exhibitors, how many do you think mentioned "Linux" in their descriptions of what they were up to at the show? A couple hundred? Fifty?

Try eleven.

Worse, the only brand name among them was Real Networks. No Sony. No Toshiba. Not even Transmeta, famous for years as the employer of Linus Himself (who is officially on a leave of absence from the company). Transmeta had a good-size booth in the South Hall and lots to talk about. Yet nothing in Transmeta's promotional poop at the booth mentioned Linux (that I noticed, anyway). One of the guys there, John Heinlein, explained that plenty of Linux ran on plenty of Transmeta chips. We talked about how Linux runs on many RLX blade servers, for example. I saw racks of those when I visited DolphinSearch in Ventura last year. But, while Transmeta wasn't showing anything with Linux this year, there was nothing to stop anyone from putting Linux on Transmeta-based hardware (he showed me some samples that were, indeed, cool).

Another chip company, VIXS, which makes wireless video chipsets and software, took a similar stance. They mentioned nothing about Linux in their booth or their literature, but they explained that they went out of their way to support Linux as a primary system platform choice made by their OEM customers, which include Toshiba and other major brands.

When I walked into Netgear's booth, again I saw nothing about Linux. Yet when I asked if they were using Linux, I got an affirmative reply and an in-depth look at their latest Layer 3 switch.

DLink had a similar story: Sure, they said. They have Linux in their stuff. It was like, why even bring it up? You'd think I was asking if their gear came with ethernet jacks.

Thus it quickly became apparent that this is what World Domination looks like: a quiet and promotion-free form of ubiquity. Not the worst of all possible worlds; just an increasingly invisible one. Linux, it became clear to me, was becoming equally useful -- even necessary -- and invisible. Like atmosphere, or the core of the Earth.

From Taiwan with Love

Over in one of the International halls, two Taiwanese companies

What's left of Radio

Sometimes, to make clear the career vector from which my tech knowledge originates, I'll call myself an "old radio engineer" or something like that. It's a stretch. While it's true that the only code I know is Morse, and that I once tended transmitters and other hardware at radio stations, my interest in radio technology has mostly been avocational since Linus was in grade school. Still, I always hold hope that the broadcast business will someday get its clues together and again resemble the golden age when AM was king and FM was challenging its empire.

At CES, that golden age was represented entirely by two small adjacent booths: one for C.Crane and one for Sangean. C.Crane is the best radio store in the world. Sangean makes some of the world's best radios. (I have two of them.) I love both companies, and enjoyed talking radio trash with them (the President & CEO of Sangean was actually manning the booth at the time); but it was hard not to see them as relics. All the action was at the Automotive expo in the North Hall., where booming media systems in sharp-looking cars (the '63 Caddy convertible was my fave, though the one I want is the boxy Scion) and satellite radio dominated the space.

XM Satellite radio was the biggest presence, with Sirius close behind. Nobody at either booth knew if Linux was involved in their systems; but at trade shows like this one, what sells isn't tech. It's girls. XM drew a long line of fans looking for autographs by Juli and Tiffany, the "seductive hosts" of Playboy's Night Calls show. Over at Swiss Audio, the biggest draw was the same miss featured in their huge booth displays. I didn't catch her name; but she patiently paused for photos with ogglers-by.

I did get to talk tech at two booths, however. Ibiquity is the company behind the conditionally-approved IBOC (in band, on channel) "HD radio" digital transmission system that will eventually be used on both the AM and FM bands. Licensing isn't cheap on the transmit side, and it's totally proprietary, having been developed (and, no doubt, patented) by a fleet of broadcasting's big boys. I knew at least one Ibiquity engineer had posted a question to the Linux Kernel mailing list, so I assumed something was going on there; but nobody at the booth had a clue about Linux' involvement with the company's tech. They were, however, able to demonstrate AM and FM in both analog and digital form. The sonic difference on FM was apparent, but far less dramatic than the difference on AM, where mass-market high-fidelity receivers haven't been marketed for decades.

The people over at Delphi (formerly GM's Delco division) went quite a bit deeper into that issue, showing me the chipsets and boards that are the current prototypes for those likely to go into production car radios in 2005-2006.

One reason I went by Delphi was that I really like the car radios they make, and wanted to thank them for taking the trouble. The radios they supply to GM cars, for example, actually have knobs with nice little click-detents for each channel on the dial, making them much easier to tune than any of the push-button alternatives in the aftermarket. It was fun to listen to HD radio on the AM band, thanks to KNXT/840 in Las Vegas. HD radio has the capacity to display call letters and much more information on receivers. But since it takes years to roll out monopoly technology in the marketplace, it's unlikely we'll hear much more about it for a long time. If ever.

Movian

Big one; Interact-tv

Magic eyes mesdigital.com

Nisis, from LA. www.nisisusa.com...

Neutrino Technologies

Eff at macworld.,hrrc.org at ces

Carly Fiorina speech transcript.

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/speeches/fiorina/ces04.html

Today, HP is stepping up its commitment to building, acquiring or licensing the best content protection technologies for our devices that will set secure copyrights without sacrificing great consumer experiences. In recent years, we’ve cancelled planned products because we weren't comfortable with the level of protection. We've been active through the Business Software Alliance to educate consumers and businesses that digital piracy is a threat to economic growth. We've worked in cross-industry efforts like the Secure Digital Music Initiative to develop a solution to digital piracy. And in partnership with Microsoft, our Media Center PC responds to a copy control flag embedded in current generation TV signals.

Starting this year, HP will strive to build every one of our consumer devices to respect digital rights. In fact, we are already implementing this commitment in products such as our DVD Movie Writer, which protects digital rights today. If a consumer for example, tries to copy protected VHS tapes, the DVD Movie Writer has HP-developed technology that won't copy it – instead, it displays a message that states, "The source content is copyrighted material. Copying is not permitted." And soon, that same kind of technology will be in every one of our products. HP will also work constructively with technology and content industries to implement Broadcast Flag into some of our products this year.

Later this year, we’ll also introduce a new protection technology that encrypts recorded content. Going forward, we will actively promote the interoperability of content protection technologies to ensure that content protection becomes the enabler it was intended to be – not the obstacle to compelling content that many fear. And we will also step up our efforts to work with anti-piracy industry advocates and consumer advocates.