Embedded Systems West - Global Warming and Motorcycles.

 This week I'm at ESC West in Sunny San Jose, California, manning the Microsoft booth, talking to press and developers - if you are at ESC West drop by the Microsoft booth and say "Hi!" - also bring any questions you have about the .NET Micro Framework, Windows CE, Windows XP Embedded, or Windows Embedded for Point of Service.

I managed to get into the keynote session for the conference, which this year was delivered by Al Gore - Unfortunately I missed the end of the keynote due to a press meeting - Al Gore opened the keynote with a series of amusing stories and set the scene for the rest of the keynote which was based around global warming which he refers to as "The Climate Crisis" and how embedded developers can make a difference by building devices that are either power aware or are able to monitor and control legacy embedded systems. Al Gore is obviously a well practiced speaker, he came over as very 'human', is easy to listen to, but did appear to get somewhat lost at times when trying to link global warming and embedded developers together - hopefully the end of the keynote pulled everything together. The audience was of course made up of hardware and software engineers, I was half expecting the speaker to discuss embedded systems Al-Gore-ithms.

 

The second big presentation of the day was given by Douglas Davis from Intel, this is an "Industry Address" (I didn't make it to this one, I was busy working on the Microsoft booth), I assume that Intel were talking about their 30 years in the embedded space, and some of their roadmap for new technologies - I'm not sure how many people went to the Industry Address to hear about the Intel Roadmap, my guess is that most were interested in seeing Paul Teutul and team from Orange County Choppers who have built a chopper based around an Intel processor. The Intel booth (right next to the Microsoft booth) has a space set aside for the Chopper, which I assume will be on display from tomorrow (Wednesday).

 

Is it's a little odd that the opening keynote talks about how much CO2 we're pushing into the atmosphere through use of carbon based fuels and how we, as embedded developers should be building energy aware devices, and then the Intel keynote rolls out a custom chopper ?

- Mike

Comments

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  April 04, 2007
  Did Al mention again that he helped develop the Internet, or has he conceded that to the old pile of inconvenient things he wished he never said?

• Anonymous
  April 05, 2007
  "Al-Gore-ithms"... this is the funniest thing I've read all day. Mike you are the best.

• Anonymous
  April 06, 2007
  Mike, I was lucky enough to introduce Al and brief him before his talk on the Embedded market and I think he did a great job of challenging engineers to be more aware of the power their designs consume and to think about ways to reduce carbon emissions. He was very knowledgeable about technology in general and he is clearly an intellectual which is probably why he didn't get elected