A couple of things have changed this year at the LVCC; most notably, the construction that hampered transportation around the center last year has been replaced by new construction that accomplishes the same snafu. Before the addition to the front of the LVCC, cabs had a clear, circular-type, driveway of sorts to queue up at, making for an easy way in and out of the show. For the past two years, however, they've been forced to take a circuitous route through the back streets around the convention center and, frankly, it's a mess. I walked over to the press tent to check my email and could already tell the place was going to be a disaster by the time the other quarter of a million people showed up.

Inside the hall, which was mostly shut-off until Monday morning, Digital Domain was selling computer books and vendors were rushing around with huge mounting kits trying to get their booths completed. I grabbed a couple of copies of the excellent Mr. Bunny's Guide to ActiveX (Web site), easily the funniest computer book ever published. I strongly recommend this title, assuming you do have a sense of humor (it's even better if you're a programmer) and I'll be reviewing it for WinInfo soon.

Killing some time, I headed back to Excalibur to eat, finally checked in around two, watched my beloved Arizona Cardinals lose a nail-biter to Dallas 35-28 on literally the last play (and, yes, that was pass interference, thank you very much). By the time the game ended (and my nerves were shot), I was ready to head out to the Gates keynote.


Bill Gates keynote address
The Gates keynote was the first of many serious problems with this year's Comdex, and it was an instant--and painful--indication of the way things were going to go. Maybe my throbbing head added to my perception of the problem, but if anyone from Ziff Davis and/or Microsoft reads this (which is virtually assured, these days) then here's a heads-up: You need to get your act together. Your treatment of people, particularly the press, has hit an all-time low. I'll provide some sickening details over the course of this show report. Consider the following:

Because of the destruction of the Aladdin, the Las Vegas Hilton hosted the keynote addresses this year. I arrived a good hour and a half early and moved over to a small crowd that was waiting in the press area. Normally, the press is allowed to sit in a designated area down front, and we're also allowed to go in early since the crowds at the Gates keynote are similar to what you'd see at a popular rock concert and it's easy to get knocked around in the mob. As time went by, more and more press and VIP types showed up and the time we were supposed to be allowed in came and went. No one provided any information why and no one had any information when we asked. Then, huge groups of people started rushing into the hall from another door. In all, three large groups ran into the hall, pushing each other like children diving on a pile of candy. The mumblings started. Questions were asked. No one knew anything. Finally, I asked a guy who looked like he was in charge what the deal was. He assured me that we had a designated section and we were all set.

Wrong again: When we were finally let in, our "press section" was way over on the side of the hall, and was already three quarters full. I'm still trying to imagine where all those people came from, but I grabbed a seat as close to the front as I could and sat down. Between my throbbing feet and throbbing head, I wasn't in the best of moods. I was beginning to doubt that anything was going to turn that around, but the keynote finally began and Gates arrived to a thundering standing ovation.

"Good evening," Gates began. "As you know, I'm simply the first of nine keynotes. In fact, at this Comdex you need a web search engine just to figure out which keynote you ought to go to."

Ugh. I started eyeing possible exits from the room.

"It's been full of a lot of neat events, and you might not even remember all of them," he continued. "So, I've put together a short video that captures some of these things that have gone on. Let's take a look."

Ah, excellent. This began a video segment similar to last year's, that included clips from Gate's grand jury testimony with Scott McNealy and Jim Barksdale, the pie-in-the-face incident in Brussels, Gates' "appearance" on the Claymation "Celebrity Death match," the DOJ announcement of the Microsoft lawsuit, and more. The best part was an updated spoof of the boys from "Night at the Roxbury," the two club-headed characters from Saturday Night Live, this time played by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. The final segment included the Windows 98 crash at Spring Comdex earlier this year. Things were already getting better. Much better.

"Well, fortunately, everything you saw either has had or will have a happy ending. In fact, the bug that caused that blue screen got fixed that very night, and the person who helped me with that demo is still working for Microsoft," Gates said to laughter. In a rare George Castanza moment, I actually called out, "Of course, he's parking cars," which got even more laughs in my section than the original joke. It must have been the drugs.

Anyway, the actual speech portions of the Gates keynote were pretty boring and apparently involved something vague about the future of computing. I seem to remember "smaller, faster, cheaper" as a theme of sorts. It doesn't matter: As with all Gates speeches, the highlights of this one were clearly the demonstrations and video clips. And unlike most Gates keynotes, something was introduced that will, quite literally, change things in a huge way. Here's how the keynote progressed:


SGI Visual Workstation/1600SL flat-panel display
Silicon Graphics (SGI) senior vice president Tom Furlong introduced his company's upcoming Visual Workstation and 1600SL flat-panel display. The workstation marks SGI's entry into the NT market and, as you might expect, it's a sweet piece of machinery. The 1600SL is, well, gorgeous: 1600 x 1024 resolution, and proportioned like an HDTV panel. Simply beautiful. Furlong demonstrated some incredible real-time graphics that included mapping live video from the show onto a spinning computer-generated workstation.

"And then we've got our flat panel display," he said. "Now, going into that flat panel display, what you see is a video stream. It's you and I mapped onto that flat panel display. And for most companies, a demo like this really taxes the system. It would be, you know, the final grand finale, the piece de resistance. For us it's our screen saver."

And he wasn't kidding. To the astonishment of the crowd, he clicked a key and that incredible demo was revealed to be--literally--a screen saver. The place went nuts. SGI will be introducing the full system in January for under $4000. This includes a 32MB 3D video card and the works (including the flat panel display).

"Awesome, incredible," said Gates as the audience just ate it up.


ClearType
ClearType was clearly (ahem) the biggest announcement at Comdex, period. It was also the most unexpected. When Gates started a segment discussing electronic books, I thought he was out of his mind. Anyone who's tried to read a book on a laptop knows what I'm talking about: It strains your eyes quickly and is basically impossible.

"About six months ago one of our developers sent me mail saying, what was the key challenge, what could he work on. It was Bill Hill. And I said to him, help us tackle the idea of readability [on the computer screen]," Gates said. "Let me know what we need to do to make this a reality, and don't pull your punches, really tell me when is the hardware and software going to come together? And even though it was only six months ago, they've actually made a breakthrough in this, and so I've asked Bill Hill to come out and show us tonight what he's done, and how readability is going to get dramatically better."

This little setup didn't really prepare anyone for the demo to come: Bill Hill, a burly bearded Scot, dressed in a traditional kilt, stalked onto the stage and discussed the technical hurdles of text onscreen display. He showed some text and how it was jaggy, and showed that anti-aliasing, which uses gray dots to clean up the jaggies, really just blurs the text, making it hard to read at small point sizes (8-12 point).

"See, the problem is that the pixel, the individual dot on a computer screen is far too coarse, we don't have the resolution. So it's basically like somebody asks us to paint a picture of the Mona Lisa, and they hand us a paint roller," he said. "So what we did was we started looking at this to see what we could do in software, and what happened really was something that happens very rarely in your life. You get a group of people together, and they all have different pieces of the puzzle, and then magic happens. We did some experiments, we had an idea and we did some experiments. And the very first piece of text we saw just stunned us. We couldn't believe what we were seeing. The great thing about it is it works with existing LCD devices, and basically what we do, the technique we use, triples the resolution of an existing LCD screen in software. "

Uh-huh. Sure, I thought, at the time.

And then he put up a piece of text. On one side, the standard jaggy text we've all come to know and love. On the right side, something•else•something•clean. It was almost perfect looking, like the text in a finely made book.

"Now,