Hunting Penguins in the Desert: The CES Report

This year's CES (Consumer Electronics
Show) ran in Las Vegas from January 8-12, following Macworld
in San Francisco. My report on Macworld was called "New
Economy Hack: Turning Consumers into Producers". This
is my report on CES. Coming up, reports on LinuxWorld
Expo in New York, which ran from January 21-23, and the
O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference, which ran from February 9-12.

--Doc Searls

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 the industry's giants into an "always
on" and "interactive" future built largely on
a co-developed embedded Linux distribution. 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 I expected to see plenty of
braggage about Linux out on the show floor--at least among CELF members.

What I discovered was 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 surely on display at the show.

img src="images/showguides.jpg" alt="figure"

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 4,000 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 of the 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 still would 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 far as convention sites go (as a breed, they're usually
brochures), it didn't provide a way to search through all the show
guides for the word "Linux". Fortunately, the CES people did
provide touchscreen kiosks in the hallways; thankfully, those got
me straight to the information I needed.

So here's a question. Out of 2,300+ 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, which had a
huge booth but nobody to talk to about Linux. 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 a lot 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 also 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. The company mentioned nothing about Linux in its booth or its
literature, but said it could support Linux as a primary system
platform choice made by OEM customers, which include Toshiba and
other major brands. In fact, the company said they had to do so,
because 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.

So, it's clear that Linux is fast becoming a pure infrastructural
commodity – like the air we breathe. Why
promote what's best taken for granted? Thus, take Linux's decreasing
visibility as the inverse of its ubiquity.
Hack Your Tube
Fortunately, Linux still has promotional advantages for some companies;
especially those competing against closed-box makers who value all of
Linux' virtues other than its hackability.

Take TiVo boxes. As we all know,
TiVos run on Linux. But, as with so many other embedded Linux cases,
TiVo as a company defaults to silence on the subject of its operating
system. So it was a welcome relief to find a company at CES (one of the
Eleven) that not only builds TiVo-like boxes on Linux but decorates
its logo with a penguin:

img src="images/head_nav_r2_c2_f2.gif" alt="figure"

The company is Interact-TV and its
"Telly:" boxes are designed to be much more than DVRs
(digital video recorders--the category TiVo created). Interact-TV
boxes are, in the Linux tradition, all-purpose devices. Home
entertainment servers, they call them. Telly boxes feature
TiVo-like PVR functions, but they also provide an interactive storage
and content management system for all your video, audio and photo
archives. Interact-TV CEO (and Linux Journal subscriber) Bob
Fuhrmann explains:

We want to make these things as open as possible, so you can record and
store files any way you please, through any connection you choose. You
can rip audio CDs into any format you want: MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WAV,
uncompressed--whatever. You can burn audio or MP3 CDs. We have USB and
FireWire connections for whatever outside devices you want to plug in. Our
video library supports MPEG2, MPEG4, MPEG1, OGV or OGM files. Again,
whatever you like.

And because it's all in a network-mounted drive, you can do a lot with
it: Internet radio, CDDB database lookup.

There's a built-in Web server, so you can access it from any Web-enabled
device on your home network. It has SAMBA. There's a Wi-Fi option. We
support most CAT-5 and USB wireless adapters.

Again, it's all open. You may want to replace the hard drive or add a
second one. You may want to upgrade from CD-RW to DVD-RW. We let you do
that without breaking the warranty.

A lot of our customers are Linux savvy. So we give them root
access. Please, go hack away. We're already seeing a lot of community
development. In fact, some of the features we're introducing at the show
came from the community.

We have support for two-screen interactive applications, coordinated
with either a live or recorded program, which wouldn't be possible if
the unit wasn't also connected over the Net.

We also have program guides that you can download for satellite, cable
and terrestrial TV reception. But we also support content that isn't
mainstream, communities of artists, for example. Our goal is to allow
any kind of content to be easily downloadable to the box. And to make
it accessible to PCs because it's a network-mounted drive.

We're also open to future developments. HDTV is coming along this
quarter. It'll be a swap-out of parts for registered users.

I asked him if the company might do a DVR for Internet radio, something
I'd love to see. He replied:

We've had some requests for a DVR for radio, NPR listeners, for
example. And we've been talking with RealNetworks about its Helix platform. They've
bent over backwards with reasonable licensing programs for companies
like ours. Their developers have been very helpful and open. So we're
planning on moving forward with that. Our current offering is still a
little bit spotty. Pure MP3 stuff is straightforward, but there's less
and less of that. Some of the sources are switching to Windows Media 9
or Real and dropping MP3. Helix has a good architecture for switching
between codecs in an agnostic way. We'll also probably enable some of
the additional video codecs as well.

"What about DRM?" I asked.

We don't want to get directly involved with DRM, but we do want to give
customers access to protected content. Working with RealNetworks is helping with
that. We also may have to license Windows Media 9 directly. We've been
sort of avoiding that, but the customers may give us no choice about it.

Fuhrmann said the company sells both directly (you can buy on-line) and
through resellers. Because the products still appeal mostly to early
adopters, we can expect them to appear first at boutique retailers and
later at "big box" stores. Meanwhile, they're selling as
value-adds for home entertainment systems. Best Buy, for example, offers
a home networking service at some of its locations, and media servers
are a natural fit for those installations. Interact-TV also has an OEM
strategy in which they sell only the software. EOS is the
"entertainment media development platform".
Stars from the East
Over in one of the international halls, I met with three energetic
Asian companies, Movain,
Unication and MagicEyes, all of which not
only use Linux extensively but are eager to talk about it. They were
three among the Gang of Eleven.

Movain has multimedia content filtration systems, a cool color deficiency
engine that corrects for partially color-blind people, and data management
products for high speed PC backup over networks.

MagicEyes runs Linux on its multimedia SoC
(system on a chip), MMSP (multimedia application
processor) chip and vRender3D graphics application processor
offerings--all targeted to the "convergence" space
where TV, radio, telephony, PDAs and computing intersect. Yong Ho
On, Sales and Marketing Group VP for MagicEyes, told me the company is
looking for Linux experts. In fact, executives at all three companies
told me there currently is a very competitive market for Linux
talent all over the Far East.

Unication was showing
a pile of products: a wireless
set-top box, a wireless
gateway and one item I want bad, a PDA that
transmits at any frequency on the FM band. There's no
shortage of little PDA-attachable FM transmitters that are switchable
between four channels at the bottom end of the band (88.1, .3, .5 and
.7) or that offer "seven selectable channels", but I haven't
seen anything that can go on any FM channel other than
the
unit Belkin showed (the TuneCast
II) at both Macworld and CES. At both shows, Belkin promised to
start delivering the things "next month" (they're still not
here). The Unication PDA is tunable up and down the dial, even among
the even numbers to the right of the decimal point, which often are used
outside the US.
What's Left of Radio
Sometimes I call myself an "old radio engineer", but that's
a stretch. Although it's true that the only code I know is Morse and that
I once tended transmitters and other heavy hardware at radio stations,
my interest in radio technology has been avocational since Linus was
in grade school. Still, I always hold hope that broadcast engineering
and consumer electronics eventually will pull their clues together and
renew the golden age when AM was king and FM was challenging its empire.

Fat chance, right?

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

XM
Satellite radio had the biggest booth, with Sirius close behind. Gear-wise,
the two and only vendors in the space seemed to be pushing their
offerings in the same two directions. One is localized data, for
example, XM's "instant"
traffic and weather offering for 16 major metros. The other
direction is expanding from dashboards to living rooms, kitchens and the
great outdoors. For that, XM and Delphi were showing off the
SkiFi, a $99 receiver that's essentially a plug-in face plate for
a car radio, a home stereo or a boom box. Sirius was showing off
a cool Tivoli
tabletop satellite radio that plays Sirius stations with
all the handy digital readouts, as well as AM and FM. It was
designed by Henry Kloss and resembles the excellent old KLH Model 8
radio.

img src="images/playboygirls.jpg" alt="figure"

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
from 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 its huge booth displays. I didn't
catch her name, but she patiently paused
for photos with ogglers-by. I guess the she (or her agency) answered
this
ad.

Digital radio won't be coming at us only from the sky. Both
the FCC and the consumer electronics industry want to see the
terrestrial radio industry convert to digital as well. Ibiquity is the company
behind the conditionally approved IBOC (in band, on channel) "HD
radio" digital transmission system that eventually will
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
some kind of penguin business was going on there; but nobody at the booth had a
clue about Linux' involvement with the company's tech. They were able, however,
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 manufactured
for decades--but could be, if anybody still is interested.

The people over at Delphi
(formerly GM's Delco division) went much deeper into the
technologies they're developing, showing me the prototype chipsets
and boards
that will go into car radios in 2005-2006.

I really like the car radios Delphi makes and wanted
to thank them for taking the trouble. Many of 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 also 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. (So does RDS, but not as elegantly.)

There's plenty happening on the supply side. Harris and other
transmission equipment suppliers already have HD gear on the market.
Tim Posar,
a Linux and open-source geek of high standing, as well as a veteran
broadcast engineer, recently told me he'd fired up some HD gear at
the transmitter of a public FM station near where I live in Santa
Barbara. But there still are no production receivers out there,
and the future offerings showcased at CES were mighty thin. Kenwood
showed a few "HD ready" car receivers, which they announced
one year earlier. But that was about it, not much mojo there.

When I asked around about how manufacturers might improve the quality of
FM and AM chipsets, it was like I was asking Dell about about improving
the quality of its floppy drives. I was told that chipsets had long
since become ubiquitous standard parts and cost only pennies for the
receiver manufacturers. So it's hard to imagine the Ibiquity chipsets
getting cheap quickly, especially in the absence of awareness--much
less volume demand. Meanwhile, the lo-fi qualities of AM radio chipsets
have forced the whole band to do almost nothing but talk.

At this point in history, most of us who care about music are no longer getting
it from radio anyway. We're getting it from one another or from
on-line sources. The most popular portable entertainment systems today
are MP3 players, as all those iPod billboards are glad to tell you.
One big reason for their popularity is regulation. There's a lot of it
around old-fashioned radio and nearly none of it around computers and
MP3 players.

Here in the US, about 14,000 signals are wedged onto 95 FM
and 116 AM channels, using modulation methods developed early in the
last century. The capital costs of setting up and running stations
are high. Ownership and content are regulated, though not as highly as
elsewhere in the world. And approximately nobody outside the business
thinks it's better than it was in its golden years, now long gone.

When I was a kid, I used to ride my bicycle down to the New Jersey
Meadowlands and hang out with the old guys who ran the transmitters for
New York's big AM radio stations. All but four of New York's AM stations
still radiate from New Jersey, taking advantage of the high ground
conductivity provided by the salty tidewater there. The old guys were
true antenna
gurus who worked where the rubber met the road. The patient ones
taught me interesting stuff about phased array radiation patterns
(produced by two or more towers), with lobes for maximizing coverage and
nulls for protecting other stations. They compared the virtues of guyed
and self-supporting towers, spoke reverentially of the great Blaw-Knox tower
designs (like WOV/WADO's diamond-shaped
landmark, which came down a few years ago) and lamented
technical compromises, such as capacitive "hats", including the
ones worn by
WNEW's old
towers. (From a plane I once got a nice picture of WBT's
three diamond-shaped Blaw-Knox's before a hurricane damaged them a
few years later. Thankfully, the replacements are just
as pretty, if you're into this kind of thing.)

Back in those days, being a broadcast engineer was a worthy calling,
full of black art and deep knowledge. Now it's antique. These days,
the same kinds of kids hack their own computers, not somebody else's
transmitters. Today, all those transmitters I used to visit are solid-state
and run by computers anyway.

Meanwhile, the media environment continues to become increasingly
infertile as Congress salts the land with content regulations. As
I write this, the House of Representatives has passed the Broadcast
Decency Enforcement Act, by a vote of 391-22. One of its
unintended consequences is sure to be an acceleration in the shift of
technology innovation away from broadcasting and over to the relatively
free and unregulated Internet. (Like it hasn't happened already.)
Gems in the Midst
I missed a lot at CES, unavoidably. For example, it was hard
to find Booth 22200 when the banners on the ceiling pointed to
22100-22175 on one side of the hall and 22300-22350 on the other. But
there were fun places to pause between here and there. One was Nisus, which makes a little
camera that shoots 4-megapixel still pictures,
records and stores MP3s, shoots digital movies (even at
VGA resolution) and costs just $199. They were doing brisk business at
the booth when they weren't busy goofing
around. The same went for the folks at NeuTrino Technologies,
who have a complex and useful Windows-based desktop software
product. I tried to convince them to re-deploy their stuff for
Linux but didn't get my hopes up, even though it was clear they take
Linux seriously.

It also was fun to see all the LCD and plasma TV screens, which
generally looked impressive but continue to be priced way too
high for most of the market--but not so high that the haven't made
the market for conventional TVs, even "HDTV-ready" ones, terminal.
That's why prices for old-fashioned picture-tube TVs are falling
toward zero. If you're still into TV, now might be a good time to buy
one. I saw in a recent Consumer Reports that the top-rated TV of any
type, including plasma and LCD, was a Sony WEGA tube model. (The KV-34XBR910,
to be exact.)
Looking Around
As you might guess from the photo galleries I
publish along with articles like this one (see also, Linux Lunacy
Geek Cruises (2001, 2002 and
2003);
OSCon; Apachecon; and
Digital ID
World), photography is one of my preoccupations. In
fact, I began my journalism career 33 years ago as a newspaper photographer
and reporter. Since then my specialty
has become candid photography, although I enjoy a nice sunset a much as
the next lens wrangler.

But I've avoided getting a good digital camera; partly because
they're still too expensive and partly because my practical
needs are outside the scope of just about everything I've
seen from the digital camera makers. For one thing, I shoot a lot of
presentations at trade shows and other events (such as Linus' talk on
the last Geek Cruise), and I need a long zoom lens to get tight
shots of presenters and presentations (an enormous help for
note-taking). I also shoot a lot of candids that take advantage of the
flip-out viewers that are standard on camcorders and increasingly rare
in digital cameras.

My base requirements are simple: 1) long zoom, 8x optical at the minimum;
2) flip & pivot display; 3) small size, so it's easy to carry in a
laptop bag or a large pocket; and 4) ability to shoot good pictures in low
light. High resolution is nice to have, but not it's not a prime necessity.

So far, the only cameras that do all four of those things have
been camcorders that also shoot stills. That's what you see in the
archive links above. Most of those were shot with my Sony DCR-PC120BT
or its stolen predecessor, the DCR-PC110 (nearly identical, except
for the 120BT's BlueTooth, which, in the Sony tradition of hideous UIs,
is unusable). The resolution is only 1.55 megapixels, but most of the
time that's good enough for the Web. Its built-in processing has a lot
of compression artifacts and the color is far from the best. But the
Zeiss optics are excellent, and on the whole it does a good-enough job.

At both Macworld and CES I stopped by the Olympus,
Canon and
Nikon
booths to see what they had this time around. The only
camera that came close to meeting my needs was the Nikon
Coolpix 5700. I loved the way it felt and the size, which is
smaller than it appears--it's almost pocketable. But it's still a lot
of money I don't have, so I think I'll wait.
Opening Closer
It seems like every time I go to Las Vegas, Bill Gates and Carly Fiorina
give keynote addresses. There's still nothing that overlaps in the
Microsoft/Linux Venn diagram, so I saw no point in joining the vast herd
that always turns out for Bill. But Carly runs a company that's one of the
leading lights on the supply side of the Linux product market. The last
time I saw
her speak was at Comdex 2002, when she minimized her mentions
of Linux (just three times in a long talk), most likely because Steve
Ballmer sat in the front row and one of her missions was showing off
HP's new tablet PCs. I hoped she'd give Linux a longer shrift
this time around, but I wasn't holding my breath.

As it happened I missed her talk anyway, for scheduling
reasons. It was just as well. She only mentioned Linux once--and
gave the most pro-DRM speech I've ever heard from a computer
industry CEO. Here's the relevant excerpt from the transcript:

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
canceled 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.

No doubt HP will be running a lot of that DRM on Linux that you won't
see and that the company won't promote.
The Good Stuff
Every technology trade show has its moral geeks, pushing
a cause. I saw the EFF at
Macworld. Maybe they were at CES, too; I don't
know. What I did see, in the press room hallway, was an
ancient top-loading Betamax VCR, with piles of
literature from the Home
Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC). The old
box celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Betamax
case, which gave viewers the right to record TV transmissions,
regardless of content. It was a defeat for the movie industry,
which wanted to outlaw VCRs because they allegedly infringed on
protected copyrights. The Supreme Court called Hollywood's case an
"unprecedented attempt to impose copyright liability upon the
distributors of copying equipment". It also would have prevented
most of the future business for Hollywood that the VCR opened up.

Since then, Hollywood has waged a vicious battle to burn
supply-controlled DRM software and firmware into everything that
might conceivably circumvent their copyright: audio and video
playback, Internet radio stations, MP3 players, DTV receivers
and personal computers. Chief among its successes is the
Digital Millennium Copyright
Act, which serves to legitimize, among other things, strangling
the infant Internet radio business while it was still in the cradle
(and where today its damaged form still gasps for air).

The HRRC supports HR
107, which would counteract the anti-circumvention clauses in
the DMCA,
among other things.

Another group is siding with the computer industry (that's us) against those who
would protect copyright at all other costs. Surprise: it's the Consumer
Electronics Association, which puts on CES. Here's what the
CES says about home recording rights:

First Amendment and fair use rights must be safeguarded to preserve
consumers' freedoms, the creative spirit and advancement in the digital
age. Consumer electronics products are a vital link allowing the world's
citizens access to information, education and entertainment. Increased
access to this technology will shrink the digital divide and produce a
renaissance in arts, science, music, academics and creativity across the
entire world. Copyright owners must resist the temptation to restrict
technology. If successful, restrictions will deprive the public of equal
and fair access to information, entertainment and education.

They also add,

On the regulatory front, SEA sent comments the FCC on broadcast flag
proceeding urging for the protection of home recording rights. In
the 108th Congress, we will actively support the introduction of the
legislation that reaffirms consumers' home recording rights and
actively oppose legislation that threatens such rights and impose
burdensome technology mandates.

This is consistent with the same creative energies that brought Linux
into the world and spread it everywhere. If SEA members are what they
eat, it should be good news that they're eating a lot of Linux.

Even if we can't see it.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal.
His monthly print column is "Linux for Suits" and his bi-weekly
newsletter is SuitWatch.