The world’s largest annual tradeshow for consumer technology, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is now under way at Las Vegas from 7-10 Jan. This year CES is truly phenomenal with many innovative products line up. Some of the highlights I captured from the internet are:

• Bill Gate Farewell - Bill Gate delivered his farewell speech at the CES. During the speech, he showcasted a very funny self-deprecating video of his last few days in Microsoft. Watch the funny video below.
• Blu-ray - Sony announced the release of a blu-ray player for the PC. The BDU-X10S is a sub $200 player that will allow you to play back Blu-ray movies on your PC (Ref). Yesterday, Blu-ray made the headlines by winning the format war against rival format HD-DVD after Warner Bros announced that it would use exclusively Blu-ray starting from June (Ref).
• 45nm chips - Intel unveiled 16 products, including the company’s first 45nm processors for Intel Centrino based notebooks. Among the 16 new products, 12 are designed for new notebook and desktop products and four are for servers. (Ref).
• New laptop graphics - AMD introduced the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, with the series as a whole optimized for the forthcoming AMD notebook platform, code-named “Puma.” The chips also allow notebook users to play the Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies in full-HD 1080p resolution(Ref)
• Digital Freedom - HP expanded its MediaSmart connected entertainment portfolio with the new HP MediaSmart Receiver, which allows consumers to stream movies, music and photos from any networked PC or device in the home to any high-definition HDTV (Ref).

Everyone knows who is Bill Gates. But who is Richard Stallman? I believe not many people know him in the semiconductor industry. From Wikipedia reference, Richard Stallman is the founder of GNU Project (1983) and Free Software Foundation (1985). He is a strong advocate of free software and pioneers the concept of copyleft including the popular GNU GPL (General Public License). In contrast, Bill Gate is the epitome of commercial software supporter. About two weeks ago, when Bill Gate was handing out prizes to award winners of the university’s 2007 Innovation Year Meeting in China, a supporter of free open source software jumped onto the stage holding a sign reading: “Free Software. Open Source.” The humorous scene was captured and aired online.

As mentioned in my previous blog, I am the beneficiary of free open source softwares. I have just consolidated all the RSS feeds used in sikod onto Sikod’s Gregarius. Gregarius is a free open-source web-based RSS news aggregator designed to run on a web server. Using the powerful Gregarius search function, you can search for all the rss news related to a particular keyword or topic. The Gregarius also supports public tagging.

The following two videos trace the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. The videos feature Richard Stallman and why he left the MIT Lab for Artificial Intelligence in order to devote his life to the development of free software, as well as how he started with the GNU project. They also show the founder of Linux - a free open source operating system used by many individuals and enterprises.