Waterloo - Day 32 - Bill Gates' speech.

The very first object that catches my eye upon entering the room was xbox 360.

No wonder my question about Rev gets picked...

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First of all, it's a miracle that I woke up at 9.

Lined up outside of Hagey Hall for an hour, followed by a short speech of the president of UW, Bill Gates showed up.

Well, I'll start from the conclusion.

In terms of speech, it wasn't that impressive. He spend about an hour talking about things we all already know: how this is the golden era for software and how things like books, tv, physical medium, phone number, language barrier will start disappearing in the next couple decades; how technology will be integrate more into our daily life and be more accessible for all, and how we ought to use this knowledge to maximize our own benefit and so on and so forth.

The usual craps.

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In terms of presentation, I think he did a great job. We get to see some really cool gadgets that'll be available within a couple years.

Xbox 360 and its wireless controllers, not that amazing to me, simply a better version of Xbox and it's coming out next month.

A cell phone that can do all sort of things...

Windows Vista's gallary functions - ok amazing.

The most impressive gizmo turns out to be a table that no one noticed at the beginning. (Err.. at least no one around me had noticed.) An ordinary table with a smart camera and projector on top of it.

Bill throws his cell phone on top of the table, the table recognized that it's Bill's cell, and shows a pop-up window asking him to provide a password. And then he throws a name card on the table. The table recognize the name card, and stores the information into the cell phone. You can manipulate and move things, real or not, around the table.

Err... my words are poor. One has to see it in action in order to find out how cool that thing is. Basically, it's a prototype of the computer you see in Minority Report. And it's not merely a touch screen. It's a 3D input/output device. Very very very neat and astonishing.

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Perhaps it's because he's talking to a bunch of math/cpsc students, the impression that he gave us was that he's a technology geek/nerd. During the Q&A session, he just won't stop talking about technology. Even though some people are more interested about his personal life, he can always easily avert the subject and starts talking about networks, operating systems, data processing ... etc.

He's polite, cute, funny, and again, a geek.

At the end, He did showed some business side of him and gave us some advices in how he gets into this bussiness and becomes successful at it. How to be at the right place at the right time and how the volumn vs price thingy... the usual money and business talk and it was rather boring, I'll probably skip it then... don't think anyone would be intereted in that.

Think I'll spend some more time describing xbox 360.

The shape is concave, everyone already knew that. And it does look like a small personal pc if you stand it up.

The loading time is still there while he starts a racing game. About 5 sec. Long enough.

The graphics is better, but not to the degree of extraordinary. PS3's pre-rendered show did a much better job than that.

Grrrrr... he mentioned Sony and PS3 twice, but never mentioned once about nintendo. That was... not very polite. Nintendo did pawned xbox in the land of rising sun. I guess he just don't consider Nintendo is fighting on the same frontier as Xbox and PS right now... In a way, that's a good thing, coz Nintendo obviously doesn't want to fight on the same battleground as them as well.

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Was it worth the early wake up and 3 hours of time? I'd say yes.

Although the speech part was a bit of disappointment and not that inspiring, it was still a great and free show to attend to.

Hungry now, lunch time~