CES started way back in 1967 and was first held in New York City. In 1978 the showcase was moved to Las Vegas and within a few years it doubled the number of attendees to 50,000. Currently each year nearly 150,000 people are now making the trek to Las Vegas making it the best and maybe the worst place to be at the same time. During the full days of the show, the traffic to and from the LVCC (Las Vegas Convention Center) and the Sands Convention Center is unbelievable. Taxis, buses fill the roads while other walk from the nearby hotels. Even with this if you ever get a chance to attend you must go. For the week that CES is in Vegas it literally takes over the town. Billboards, sides of building, trucks, cars, you name it, all have some sort of advertisement draping from them. Even in your hotel room you can watch the “CE Channel” with 24 hours of news, interviews, and highlights, but it does not stop there. NBC will be broadcasting some sort of CES information for 2 hours everyday. Also G4 has partnered up with CES to give you shows, news, and features about the 2008 CES. Like other large companies or groups The Consumer Electronic Showcase has gone green. They will be doing what ever they can to use recycled materials like drinking cups and other food items will be made from recycled items. Any unused food each day will be sent to homeless centers. The majority of the carpets that cover just about every square foot will also made from recycled materials. One of the biggest concerns is the amount of CO2 that is generated from the large amount of vehicles used. CES is making a large donation to plant trees to offset this issue. You can check out this program at www.carbonfund.org/ces . To find out more about what CES is doing to go green you can look here www.cesweb.org/green My first day at CES began late on Sunday and a good thing it did. You have to go over the convention to register for your press pass and get all the extra stuff you can get. Well as it turns out I had a bit of an issue with my badge. I went to pick my badge, you MUST have some sort of badge to enter the event, it went pretty quickly and I headed over to the Sands to get my press kit and bag. As I was walking into the press area I was stopped and told that I could not enter. “This is the press area” I was told “Yes I know I am here to get my stuff and then go the Keynote.” Sorry but you have the wrong color badge” I look down and see that it is green but most importantly it says Industry Affiliate… SH#$! This sucks I can all this way and now I can’t get in? I was instructed to go over to an On-Site Press Registration and see if they could help me. I explained my issue and got “Well the system shows you as an Industry Affiliate” “I know and it’s wrong. This is the third year that I have coming to CES and each year as Press. Can’t you look at my past registrations and see’? “No sir we can’t”. What I ended up doing was tracking down a manager, telling him what was going on and he said “Do you have any articles online that I can see to make sure?” “Uh, I own a website and have written a lot of articles, even one about last years 2007 CES.” I think he was almost not going approve my pass until I showed him my picture on the site with all my information. Finally I got my correct badge, good thing too as the first keynote was allowing the press into the ballroom in about 30 minutes. The 2008 CES keynote by Bill Gates. Once again getting a press pass is worth any trouble you might encounter along the way. With the keynote not starting until 6:30 PM most attendees where starting to lining up at 2 o’clock. The presse has their own staging area and are allowed in before anyone else plus we have a special area blocked off. I was lucky enough to get a third row seating just to the right if the stage. Bill Gates has given a keynote speech at CES 10 time with one other speech making a total of 11 times. This year Gates said that this will be his last year giving the keynote speech. I believe that his has been said before, like last year, but I think this time it may be true. Sometime in July of 2008 Bill Gates will be stepping down from the day-to-day control over Microsoft and will focusing on the foundation that he and his wife started some years ago. Gates said that there will be some special projects (software for education and medical) that he will still be involved with but the job that he has held since being 17 years will come to an end. Gates is know to have fun about himself, unlike Steve Jobs, and uses it to his advantage by making himself more like the common person and approachable. This year Gates decided to make a tiny video of what his last day at might be like and as normal Bill Gates poked fun at himself. Very one from staff members and employees to countless stars and presidential candidates graced the screen in a very funny video. You can see the video here. Gates stated that the last Digital Decade saw some major breakthrough’s but the next digital decade with brings us more. This new era will be about the connection of our lives thru these new technologies. Three things must happen in order for this to come true as Gates states “So a lot of big advances will underlie this new class of applications. Things that we haven't tackled yet, like the ultimate change to all of TV, or to reading, or to health care and education. Those will be enabled by these elements. The three key elements I'd highlight are first, high definition experiences everywhere. Second, all of these rich devices will be service connected. And so getting the latest software, the browsing applications, and getting your data, you'll just take that for granted. The idea that when you take a photo that it shows up in the place that you'd like it to show up, that would be extremely simple. No longer will users have to bridge between the devices, and they're the ones who have to remember what's where. Finally, the third element, perhaps one that people underestimate the most, I would say, is the power of natural user interface. The first digital decade was largely driven by the keyboard and the mouse. Just in the last two years we've started to see the emergence of other modes of interaction.” You can see the full keynote speech at http://www.microsoft.com/ces/ . Let's get onto the show. There is so much to see that I think there is no way to be able to see everything, heck not even half of everything. What you have to do is layout a plan of attack and try to stick with it. Even with the best laid out plan you always seem to get side tracked like with stuff like this... or like this fellow.... Do you think he is checking out their footwear?11th Annual "Build Your Own PC Race For Charity." Hosted by Tiger Direct The "Build Your Own PC Race" is a fun charity event for the PC editorial community supporting elementary and secondary schools and promoting Systemax PCs based on AMD Phenom™ CPUs. Public Relations opportunities for sponsors' products are created by matching them up with members of the related trade press giving the opportunity for exposure and story pitches.A huge ballroom an the Wynn Hotel is use to host the great event along with all the food and drink you can handle....for free. Before the big race the CEO of Tiger Direct made a huge announcement. Tiger Direct has purchased all the assets of CompUSA. This includes the name, url, stores and all other items about CompUSA. Tiger will continue the CompUSA name, but plans on taking it back to the powerhouse it once was. Thirty PC's are set up ready to be put back together for the race. Each PC will then be donated to a charity or school at the race is over. The motherboard and power supply have already been installed all the racers have to do is install everything else. Every item must be installed correctly and each part must use all the parts needed with every screw tightened. If not a 60 second penalty will be added for every infraction. This comes into play later on. And the races begins! Last year the winning PC was completed in under 7 minutes. This year, well it was not that easy, as the winning time was over 10 minutes. Remember the "Time Penalty" I talked about before? The first person that actually completed the build was under the 10 minute mark, but he forgot to plug in the power to the CD ROM. So that moved him down to third, and second up to first. The guy now in second had to get his machine checked out and low and behold he forgot to plug in his floppy drive power cable! After all of this Will Smith of MaximumPC was finally the winner. $10,000.00 USD was given to his charity of choice. Can you name these three guys? OK so lets get to the floor and see some stuff...SilverStoneThey have a mouse coming out soon. The large "fish eye" knob allows you to fine tune the dpi of the mouse, but I found that I could not grip the mouse with my thumb and little finger. For me it felt out of place. Other than that the mouse felt great and moved with ease. The laser in place directly in the center and the mouse is perfectly centered by weight. Here is the Sugo series with a new less cost version on the left. It is made from steel with a plastic front and should be around $65.00 USD when released. It can hold an over sized video with ease. This a prototype of the newest member of the Sugo series. Two HTPC cases with one housing a 4 inch LCD and the other one has a 7 inch one and both are touch screen. Each one of these comes with a remote and software while you get the option of with or without the LCD on the black one. New case Cool PSU's...well yeah but the cool thing is that each one is 1200 watts, "but the one on the left is smaller"...correct. ThermalTakeLooks like a new water cooled case is one its way.Couple of RAM coolers Zalman Zalman has a new case that uses two ideas; one is water cooling and the other is from their the resonator. The case uses the normal water cooling setup, but it also runs the water through the right side panel to help remove more heat. Here you can see the "resonator" hybrid in action. Oh by the way it won award for the design. Way to go Zalman! Some one at the Zalman booth called it their "Boot Gun" and it turns out to be pretty close to that. It is actually a mouse the gives you the feeling that you are using a gun in a First Person Shooter (FPS) Game. Hey guys, stick with the great cases OK. Star Wars Everyone's little friend was there and well it was a cool but very geekie idea they did with him. As you know R2-D2 was able to project an image of Princess Leia so wouldn't it be great if he could do that in real life. Well he can. R2-D2 is a project that can display TV, movies, games and what ever else. Guess what the remote is...A tiny desktop version is a web cam with a lightsaber as the controller for it. Tritton This little unit will allow you to add a second or third monitor if you want by using a USB Port. One demo they had there was a 4 monitor display and no you can't use it to game with, yet. Tritton also had a new set ouf head phones The earlier version of this model was USB but now you got all the connectors to be able to use your sound cards SennheiserGaming head phones