Hunting Penguins in the Desert: The CES Report

The second in Doc's series of reports on Q1 trade shows.

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One year ago, Kunitake Ando, president and CEO of Sony, gave a keynote speech at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) explaining how his company would lead the rest of his industry's giants into an "always on" and "interactive" future built largely on a co-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. Today the membership roster.also includes IBM, Mitsubishi, Metrowerks, Motorola, Nokia, LSI Logic, HP, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Phoenix, Samsung, Sanyo and Montavista.

So, as CES approached, I looked for signs of World Domination at work. Sure enough, Montavista had lined up a hundred or more consumer electronics partners, and the Embedded Linux Consortium had five programs in one session track. So it made sense to expect to see plenty of braggage about Linux among CELF members out on the show floor.

What I discovered something else. 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. Here's the rundown:

• Sourcebook: 530 pages
• Show Guide: 160 pages
• Addendum: 70 pages
• Visitor's Guide: 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 in seven exhibition 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, brings the whole Las Vegas Convention Center to a total of 3.2 million square feet. That would still be south of CES' total square footage, since 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.

No exaggeration: The central aisles in the South Hall are so long that they feature green road signs like the ones on interstate highways.

Although the CES Web site was helpful as convention sites go (as a breed, they're usually just brochures), it didn't provide a way to search through all the show guides for the word "Linux". Fortunately, the CEC people did provide touchscreen kiosks in the hallways; and, thankfully, those 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.

The only brand name among them was Real Networks. No Sony. No Toshiba. No Philips. No IBM or HP or Dell. And no CELF members other than Softier, whose booth I couldn't find.

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. In fact, I ran into a couple of Linux hackers there: Karim Yaghmour and Greg Ungerer. Yet nothing in Transmeta's promotional poop at the booth mentioned Linux (that I noticed, anyway). John Heinlein, the Director of System Marketing at Transmeta, said plenty of Linux was running on Transmeta chips old and new -- RLX blade servers, for example. I saw racks of those when I visited DolphinSearch in Ventura last year. There's nothing, Heinlein said, to stop anybody from putting Linux on Transmeta-based hardware. He showed me one Linux-ready tablet device that was, indeed, cool. Still, it was running Windows.

Another chip company, VIXS, which makes chipsets and software for distributing video by wi-fi, took a similar stance. They mentioned nothing about Linux in their booth or their literature, but they said they went support Linux as a primary system platform choice made by their OEM customers, which include Toshiba and other major brands. In fact, they said hey had to, since so many OEMs were building set-top boxes and similar devices that run on Linux.

When I walked into Netgear's booth, again I saw nothing about Linux. Yet when I asked if they were using Linux, they said "Sure. Come over here and look at our Layer 3 switch".

DLink had a similar story: Sure, 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 power cords or ethernet jacks.

The strange discovery was that Linux' visibility seems to decrease as the inverse of its ubiquity. Linux is fast becoming a pure infrastructural commodity — like the air we breathe, or the core of the Earth. Why promote what's best taken for granted?

Hack your tube

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.

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.

Looking around

As you might guess from the photo galleries I publish along with articles like this one (e.g. Linux Lunacy Geek Cruises (2001, 2002, 2003), OSCon, Apachecon, Digital ID World, et. al.), photography is one of my main avocations. In fact, my journalism career began when I was a newspaper photographer, as well as a reporter, more than 30 years ago. My main interest is still candid photography, although I enjoy a nice sunset a much as the next lens wrangler.

I've avoided getting a good digital camera for years, however; partly because they're expensive and depreciate rapidly after purchase, and partly because my practical needs are outside the scope of most normal digital cameras. That's because I shoot a lot of presentations at trade shows, and I need a long zoom lens to shoot whatever the presenter puts up on screen -- which is an enormous help for note-taking.

At shows like Macworld and CES, however, I like to visit the booths of the big camera makers -- Nikon, Canon and Olympus -- to see their current offerings. My base requirements are simple: 1) Long zoom, 8x optical at the minmum; 2) Flip & pivot monitor, so I can shoot without holdin the camera to my face; 3) Small size, so it's easy to carry in a laptop bag or a large pocket; 4) Ability to shoot good pictures in low light. So far, the only cameras that do all those things have been video cameras that also shoot stills. That's what you see in most of those links above. The resolution is only 1.5 megapixels, but that's good enough for the Web, most of the time. The optics are good on my Sony DCR-PC120BT (they're Zeiss), but the processing has a lot of compression artifacts and is