| Wednesday,
January 5, 2011 .I got up early to get to the Intel press
conference at 10. Got to the Venetian at 9, and into the Press Room, which
was unimaginably crowded (pictures in the Chaos Manor Reviews report I am
writing) and nothing to eat, although there was plenty of coffee due to the
valiant efforts of the Venetian/Palazzo/Sands staff, who really worked to
keep the coffee flowing. Afterwards I went over to the LVCC South hall
looking for Leo Laporte but I can't figure out where he is and they are not
letting people onto the floor today.
I sent the following to some friends:
I was over in the South Hall Press Room which is
not crowded at all, but the Venetian / Sands press room is entirely
filled even to the floors. Found Doherty and Larry Magid in there. We all
were invited to the Intel thing at 10 am but we could not get in -- there
were a thousand bloggers waiting at 0900 or earlier. The press conference
room held 600. It was filled way soon. Lots of the old time Press
can't function like this. The kids hustle.
Worth discussing. It may be a Good Thing. No more
privileges for the old gang with credentials. Now everyone has to hustle.
Which means I won't since I can't hustle like that so I have to make do
with what I can pick up other ways.
WHEN EVERYONE IS PRESS, NO ONE IS PRESS. That is
the theme this year. It may be a Good thing. It's the end of CES as a
Press event, really. Except for the big TV crews anyway. The rest of us
can't get in. That may be a good thing; but it's a bit like self
publishing on Kindle. There's good stuff but there is a lot of slush,
too.
I intend to develop that theme. It's a kind of press egalitarianism.
Competition. Be interesting because everyone has access now, both to
publication and access to the information, only they have to really want
it to get in early, like yesterday afternoon at the Pre-Show. A thousand
and more were in line for hours to get in early. Whether they make
anything of that opportunity I don't know; it will be interesting to see.
The show people say this creates an Internet buzz that's important. A
thousand bloggers with 200 readers each is still a lot of people.
We are I think seeing a new development in the whole concept of "the
press" and where that goes is not easily predictable. I suspect that once
the novelty wears off there will be new elitism since no one can read all
the output of a thousand blogs, and the good writers with hustle will get
most of the readers -- but how will they be able to stand out from the
great mass? I never did try to compete with breaking news; my
specialty was informed opinion, strong opinion but, I hope, reasoned
and founded on information. I think I can still do that.
But it's an interesting journalistic world out there. Just who is
Press? CES is saying almost anyone who says he/she is Press is Press
indeed.
=================
CNET coverage of the Intel announcement on Sandy Bridge:
http://ces.cnet.com/8301-32254
_1-20027402-283.html?tag=mncol%3btxt for those who just have to
have "breaking" news. It has long been known that Intel was improving its
on-board video capabilities. Gamers will have none of that, of course, while
Intel on-board has long been Good Enough for office, many games, and
most casual photography work.
I saw the La Cie $1000 flat screen monitors last night.
They're worth it -- if you need that color quality. Most of us don't and I
doubt I can tell the difference between La Cie and Acer for the kind of work
I do, but if you need La Cie you will need it bad. I wonder where the
new Intel on board graphics will fit; I suspect you will not need a La Cie
monitor to take advantage of it. Intel has built DRM into the
system: for the movie industry that's a plus and tells us what market the
new chip was designed for. For some of us that isn't a plus at all. It will
be interesting to see how secure movies will be from copying now.
==========
Live blogging of events is pretty standard now. I was one of
the first to do it, way back when: I sent stuff about Gates' keynote as he
was giving it at a WinHEC and at the next WinHEC the high speed Internet
coverage was turned off during his presentation. Now all that is
encouraged. I am not sure how valuable it is -- I did it because it was a
lark and new and cool, but now everyone does it. But then I never was into
breaking news. As I've said, informed opinion has been my shtick, and much
of that was based on actually using stuff to get the informed part of
the opinion. A live blog of a press conference isn't likely to be something
to base your buying decisions on, but it is interesting I guess. Sure is a
lot of it here at CES.
==========
One reader comments on the Intel announcements:
Intel has feared Nvidia's encroachment for some
time. Recall Nvidia makes motherboard chipsets. Apple uses them. Intel is
always willing to fight. They now want Nvidia's market share. Good enough
may take a lot of it away from Nvidia. The volume is in good enough. Intel
always has an advantage in CPU / chipset integration. They have been
pulling most of the chipset into the CPU with the Core architecture. The
core I5/i3 has almost the entire motherboard chipset on the CPU. What was
left was graphics. Now they have that.
It's important to realize that high-end graphics
chips are mostly multi-core CPU's. Nvidia's has demo'ed high-end GPU's
with more than 100 CPU's on chip. They may have gone to production with
them, I don't know. However, Intel has been pushing the many cores on a
chip approach as a major strategy and one thing Intel knows how to do is
put CPU's on dies. Today 's GPU CPU's are specialized and limited in
function, but Moore's Law continues to work it's magic and Intel can and
will put many on chip.
Another angle on the new press / old press for non
tech news is "they had it coming". Considering how the MSM tried to shape
(read control) public opinion for the last 60 years, it's no wonder people
wised up and looked for something else. It's amazing they are still in
business at all. As Leo mentioned on Twit, broadcast video is very
expensive. TV shows must somehow be funding broadcast news. Ether that or
it's aging boomers that watch it. Look at the adds. No one under 50 would
care.
All true. Now factor in DRM and the movie industry paranoia.
And of course Intel has been worried that the GPU (the graphics
processing unit) would replace the CPU. When Microsoft started off loading
some of the Windows code to the GPU, alarms must have sounded at Intel.
Graphics processing -- Alan Teng, actually -- bailed Microsoft out of a deep
hole in the early days of Windows, when Word took 15 seconds to do a page
down of text, until ATI's Windows graphics board made Word not only usable
but a winner to beat out Word Star and Word Perfect. Here is hardware
catching up, getting it all on the CPU. It's another driving force for Intel
to take Nvidia's market. Good enough is where the money is, not with
niche excellence like La Cie.
=============
I have been discussing the CES journalism imbroglio -- or
perhaps positive restructuring -- with John Dvorak, who says:
According to Shapiro, who heads CES, there
are 5000 credentialed press which means every "mainstream" event like the
Intel event will be over-covered and not worth bothering with...it's for
suckers.
I didn't even bother to go to the Intel event
at all and now I can see I made the right decision. I assume the other
major conferences later today will be the same. I assume Pepcom will be an
event with some possibilities. And it is there I'll try to find some
private functions and hit those. These young so-called hustlers are doing
nothing more than the grunt work we normally avoid. There seems to be an
inordinate amount of "off the books" events which none of the bloggers
will ever get into. And no CEO is going to say much to a kid anyway. Let
them cover this bullcrap.
And don't kid yourself, the CES staff wants a
600 seat room venue jammed with 1200-plus reporters. This is just to
sucker the vendor into coming again next year. The reporters are, in
effect, shilling for CES.
John C. Dvorak
I will be at PepCom tonight. For the moment one assumes that
these smaller peep shows will not be so crowded that you can't talk to the
presenters, as the Press Pre Show was on Tuesday night. What happens when
that becomes known as it surely will, and the egalitarian people's press --
bloggers -- demands equal access may be interesting. I note that the
traditional Press Room in South Hall wasn't crowded today while the one in
the Venetian was filled to the floors and hallways with bloggers; a
situation that won't last long as the new blogger Press discovers it. I look
for interesting times. And yet I can't help thinking that some good may come
of some of this. But will the vendors think that having 5000 credentialed
Press at an event like this is a Good Thing?
I don't want to sound like too much of an elitist. On the
other hand, I did earn my spurs by going to Every Blasted COMDEX...
Stay tuned.
================
And shortly I will be off to Caesar's for Pep Com where Alex
and his crew are providing the connectivity. (They're doing Show Stoppers,
another important peep show, tomorrow, too.)
==============
The New Journalists.
Jerrty,
I feel rather presumptive in writing to you about
journalism but do so as a heavy user of the blogs and bloggers that cover
my specialised interests. I now have a list of about twenty of these that
has grown over the years, mostly by following the recommendations of
people whose opinion I have learnt to respect. Once News 2.0 has settled
down I don't suppose that the entry qualification to important venues will
be any different from what it is now. It will be based on influence and
size of readership. Surely this is precisely why the New York Times gains
entry to White House press conferences and the Journal of Cabbage
Cultivation does not. Another of the great strengths of News 2.0 and one
that you already exploit is to ask questions of a highly educated
specialist readership. It is almost certain that someone in the readership
will know the answer, if answer there is. This is a far better research
tool than Google, as you don't get the daunting number of mostly
irrelevant hits that even the best search engines provide.
So cheer up. You will soon be striding past the hoi
polloi who lack your gold pass that are presently obstructing your entry
to the conference room.
John Edwards
Well, the point is that unless I continue to write stuff
that people want to read, I probably should not have all that advantage over
the young hustlers. I'm pretty good but I am slowing down. I really don't
need all that access, and they do. We will see how all this works out.
I have just come back from Pep Com. A lot of stuff,
some interesting, but nothing I'd have come to Las Vegas to see. I am
beginning to suspect that this show is just not my cup of tea. Like Dvorak I
came hoping to be blown away with wondrous things, but that doesn't so far
seem to be happening. It's good solid advances on the past few years,
but no miracles. Maybe the young guys will ferret out the new good stuff
hidden away in tiny booths. I used to do that at West Coast Computer
Faire...
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