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Bill Gates Comdex 2000 Keynote
Bill Gates showed the audience a humorous video clip with Bill & Steve riding around Seattle on scooters and talking to smart vegetables at the store. Mr. Gates didn't mention "Linux", "open source" or even lawsuits. He did talk about XML quite a bit, and was quite animated about this "very exciting new technology". You would almost think that Microsoft invented the open source XML software.
During the talk Mr. Gates invited several others to join him on stage. One of the guests was David Lauren, son of Ralph Lauren who talked about the .NET site Polo.com, a new web site that emphasizes "Merchantainment". At Polo.com you can have fun while you shop online. Contrast that with the "Coopetition" that has been happening for a while in the Linux world.
Mr. Gates did show off some interesting new hardware in the form of a tablet computing device. The tablet computer looked like a Palm Pilot on steroids, it was based on a standard hardware design, presumably Intel/IBM PC, and the display/CPU component undocked from the keyboard and disk peripherals for portable use. Undocked, user input was done with a touch screen and stylus. Some interesting pen writing software was demonstrated, word processor functionality was added to handwritten graphics, the graphics could be treated like text and moved around on the page as would be done in a word processing session with typewritten text. This new large-screen PDA looks to be a nice hardware platform, we look forward to more of these showing up from various hardware manufacturers, they should adapt nicely to Linux.