Rupert's DiarySlightly sanitised for the squeamish

A programmer was talking in a tech support forum about some GMail problem he had that was linked to YouTube. "I haven't tried it in Chrome", he said. "That's a little too much Google for me."

That comment has a certain force. I was reminded of it when I watched Eric Schmidt give a bravura performance at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

It started well, with some subtle but cutting digs at his Gartner interlocutor: when asked his prediction of non-advertising Google revenue three years time to compare with Gartner's projected nine percent, he said "We don't do that calculation. It's what finance people do, and it's not very interesting." Laughter.

But there wasn't much laughter during the next 45 minutes, as he elucidated a frighteningly coherent view of how the future was going to go Google's way - and not just bits of the future, the whole lot. From enterprise to consumer, from cloud to mobile, everything was included.

We might, if we're good, be left some vertical market stuff - Google only likes dealing with things that a few hundred million people can use - but that's because the big G can't be bothered. Everything was in the mix; Wave, ChromeOS, Chrome, Google Apps, HTML 5, GMail - oh, was GMail high on the list - Android, even YouTube. Cross-enterprise searching, anyone, where you find out what's going on inside your circle of trust? Employee monitoring? Seamless cloud apps on all platforms? Security that works without firewalls?

One of his predictions was that by next year, there will be netbooks running cloud services within the enterprise that will be good enough to replace the run-of-the-mill enterprise PC "but at a fifth the cost", because cheap hardware was that good. It all joined up. It all made sense.

I digested that prediction while reflecting on the fact that I was watching Schmidt in high resolution via YouTube within Chrome under Linux, on a machine that was simultaneously running all my social networking, chat and other clients, all my home entertainment requirements, all my editing and content creation faffery... and the only part of it that was Microsoft was the copy of XP I run under VirtualBox in order to get to my corporate email. That's only because Microsoft chose to cripple Outlook Web Access when it's not running under IE. Guess how that makes me feel.

(Ah yes, Outlook. Exchange. Schmidt talked on stage about the revelation he'd had about calendaring being at the heart of enterprise: when I use Exchange's calendaring, the revelation I get is that I hope to the highest powers in the cosmos that someone fixes it soon.)

I had a Google Doc open for a project I'm sharing with five pals. I had Google Maps open. I had an Android phone snoozing by the side of the keyboard. In short, I had too much Google in my life. And when ChromeOS comes along and makes my netbook work better (and it will), the amount of non-Googleage will shrink still further, because Google works and is nice to use and I am weak in the face of working code that's nice to use. The fact that everything Schmidt was saying was patently coming true in front of my eyes didn't help.

Now, imagine Ballmer trying to put on an equivalent 45 minute performance where he seamlessly merges the Microsoft vision for mobile (can you even tell me what that is?), cloud (ditto), netbooks (ditto), security (ditto). And how much? Those MS calculations that running free services and software cost more than proprietary solutions - well, they're hard to swallow when you're paying for everything yourself.

Just to put the seal on it, Schmidt mentioned how many Google salesmen were going into the enterprise pushing GMail - priced not for free, because they found that enterprise was happy to pay for service, when they got it. And when the sales pitch didn't work because things were missing, they went back to the Googleplex and fixed them, or worked around them, or found reasons why those missing things didn't need to be there at all. Then they went back, and tried again.

So when I read that Los Angeles City Council is moving from Groupwise to GMail and Google Apps - at a cost of $7.25 million, paid for partially by a legal settlement Microsoft had to make for overcharging - and think that this is the sort of deal Microsoft should be winning, I wonder what Ballmer makes of Schmidt's grand plan, and whether I will hear any cogent response this year, or next year when the ChromeOS netbooks are in the fray, or the year after that when the migration from Exchange becomes too big to ignore.

When, in short, will Microsoft get scared enough to do something that might make a difference? Because after 45 minutes of Schmidt's world domination plan, I was plenty scared myself.

And I like Google.

Last night, just 48 hours after I'd installed it, I had my very first Windows 7 Blue Screen Of Death.

It may not have been the complete BSOD package, but the machine was thoroughly dead and the screen was blue: there was what may have been intended to be the traditional mystic hexadecimal runes of disaster on the screen, but they'd been scrambled into a cryptographic stew of white pixels. And it was making a most peculiar noise.

Just before this, I had been watching Carry On Spying on DVD - reaching the point where Kenneth Williams (in a fez) and Charles Hawtrey (as Beau Geste) were about to rush in on Barbara Windsor and Bernard Cribbins (both in belly-dancing outfits, both at imminent risk of violation from Eric Pohlmann, aka The Fat Man) in an Algerian bordello. A classic moment in British film, and Kenneth Williams was giving it his flared-nose hyper-camp all.

The exact point of silicon disaster hit as he was issuing a nasal vowel so elongated and swooping it fell from the sky like a roll of toilet paper thrown from the Kop. The screen blinked and went blue: the sound system locked into a death spasm, repeating 200 milliseconds of the audio ad infinitum. The death knell of Windows 7, I can report, sounds like this:

"OooOooOooOooOooOooOooOooOoo..."

I enjoyed the moment, then reset the computer. The laptop, a by now rather venerable Sony Vaio, recovered at length: I replayed the scene, but all was well.

I think it's safe to blame Windows 7. The laptop had previously been running Vista for a couple of years - I try and use whatever MS' latest OS is daily, even though I hadn't warmed to Vista after all that time - and I'd performed an in-place upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. (That took around four hours, but as I had the luck or foresight to kick that off on a Saturday morning before retiring back to bed for a long lie, I was as refreshed as the computer once it had completed.)

I was using the same application for DVD playback as I had for many DVDs before; there were no hardware changes or configuration fiddling beyond what had come in on the Windows 7 installation. I'd certainly never experienced a failure like that under Vista; although I had had a couple of catastrophic crashes, they happened when I was running beta software or messing around with peculiar hardware.

And so, pace Talbot Rothwell and the Pinewood posse, I fear we have to conclude that the longest running farce on the small screen has got some acts left to go before conclusion.

This is a pure rumour, sourced from random tweets. But it comes from Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome and Mono, so it has a certain investment of radiance.

His first tweet:

"VMware is creating a new Linux distro, according to the recruiting spam they are sending on Linked In."

and a little later:

"Leaky VMware-istas confirm that VMware is creating a Linux distro. Investigative Journalist De Icaza signing off."

Nice work, chap. In subsequent discussions with other hacks, we agreed that it had a lot of sense behind it, although the thought of getting Linux support from VMware did rather unsettle some correspondents. The prevailing opinion, though, was "If they don't do that, where do they go?" - which has a certain logic to it.

More on this as it happens...

The news that Nokia is suing Apple over ten wireless patents marks the start of what may be a fascinating and prolonged canter through the worlds of mobile phone standards and intellectual property. (Alternatively, it could end up, as the Nokia-Qualcomm war did, in silence)

It's not generally realised that a lot of industry standardisation work is legal, rather than technical: a company that owns a useful patent which would work well in an international standard wants paying for it, but the standards body won't want barriers to adoption.

The mechanics of how this works vary from case to case - most commonly, an agency is set up which manages the pools of IP and offers an efficient way to license them. But whatever the details - and GSM is more gruesomely complex than many - there are fairly standard way to get the IP you need to make the goods that follow the rules.

Which means that cases like this, where an IP owner goes after a handset maker, are rare. We don't know the details of the case, but it's a fair assumption that it's going to have a number of unique aspects. Nokia isn't a patent troll, it's been in discussion with Apple for a year, and the manner of the action tends to support the view that whatever the outcome, Nokia genuinely believes it has a case and is proceeding as a responsible litigant would. Around $25 of the cost of a mid-range phone goes on GSM licensing, which means Nokia's claim of between $6 and $12 owed per iPhone is no small percentage of the total amount you'd expect. It all looks and sounds like a case with substantial grounds.

You wouldn't know that from the reaction online, though. Half the world has assumed that Nokia is doing it because it can't make phones as good as the iPhone, because it wants to cripple a competitor, because it's a cheap path to publicity, because its losing money and Apple has loads... well, pick any combination of greed, stupidity, ill-will, jealousy and desperation and you'll find someone confidently proclaiming that this is what's going on. Poor Apple, eh?

All of the above could be true, although I doubt it. Yet neither I nor you nor any of the shouty Apple fanboys know what's actually going on. So from whence comes their great confidence?

It could be that they hate patents in general, although it's hard to despise a framework that's helped create a global mobile phone standard with four billion users. It could be that Apple is always right, a shining example of wholesome propriety and not the aggressive, arrogant, secretive organisation some mistake it for. Or it could be that those darn Finns have no right taking a pop at America - World War III? Is there nothing the iPhone can't do? There's an app for that..

Or it could be prejudice informing an instant and gratifying group opinion.

Whatever the answer, the evidence is out there right now. Have a look and decide for yourself.

It's nearly Wednesday, and the question of what happened to the Sidekick service remains unanswered.

At one level, it's obvious. T-Mobile US's Sidekick service, run by Danger and thus Danger's owners Microsoft, went down and stayed down. As the Sidekick mobile phones rely completely on the service to maintain their data – they're thin clients with only battery-backed local storage – this has left the users with nothing.

At another level, it's remarkably unclear. How can a company with the resources, experience and reputation of Microsoft allow a mission critical system to die beyond resurrection? The reaction of the punditsphere has been rapid, predictable and not unreasonable: this is the failure of the Cloud idea, this is a vindication of keeping it local, this proves Windows is useless, this is absolute proof of Microsoft's incompetence.

Not unreasonable, just not very right. If local backups never failed, then yes, that would be a killer shot against remote services. Cloud means many things, but it doesn't normally mean having a single copy of data running on a single system: Google's downtimes have been bona-fide cloud failures, but data has not been lost. And as for Windows being somehow at fault: please. Danger is an Oracle, Unix and Java outfit: unless the problem happened because the service was being moved to a new Windows-based system, then keep yer trap shut (and even if it was, the old system would have been there for fallback. So, no).

Which leaves Microsoft's incompetence. Of all the diagnoses, this is the most unanswerable. And while Microsoft has many very competent people, the loss of all data goes beyond personal incompetence. This has to be, at a very deep level, a systemic management failure.

And that is a truly dangerous perception for Microsoft. Forget about the loss of consumer confidence in Sidekick – that's gone, and won't come back. It's not as if the customers really knew or cared that Microsoft was behind their service. Management failure speaks most eloquently to enterprises, who know more than they know anything else that bad management is a corporeal disease that will ruin all else that is good and reliable in a company. It makes a partnership unconscionable: it doesn't matter if a business partner is evil, greedy, power-crazed or working to hidden agendas, you can work with all of that if it comes up with the goods. If it is incompetent, though, it is poison and can kill you. Run away.

There is only one course of action that will save the day for Microsoft, and that's a detailed, frank and complete explanation of what happened. That's very difficult for any company to do, let alone one so addicted to public protestations of God-like perfection in the face of what the faithless consider evidence to the contrary. Yet in this case, there is no other path to redemption.

Microsoft even has a template to work to. Earlier this year, the Apache Foundation had a very embarrassing and very public security failure. Hackers gained access to many of its public servers and installed scripts that compromised various Apache developer services. It took some time and a loss of service for Apache to recover from this: not what you want if you're responsible for the code that runs the majority of the Web.

Apache reacted well. After diagnosis and restoration, and having fixed the chain of vulnerabilities that exposed them, the Foundation published a very detailed account of what happened, how they recovered and why it won't be happening again. That account was sufficiently complete to act as a valuable and apt lesson for others who also run web services. Not only did it restore confidence in Apache, it took a bad event and turned it into a public good.

We still don't know what happened with Sidekick. There are plenty of rumours, including sabotage, Machiavellian actions by Microsoft to destroy confidence in the cloud, internal revolt and quite possibly alien action. Best guess? It was probably a failed upgrade that required data restoration from a backup that subsequently proved unusable – this happens. The golden rule, that a backup isn't a backup until it's restored, was ignored.

Microsoft needs to come clean. It needs to publish what it found in the wreckage, it needs to say how that happened and it needs to say what steps its taken to ensure that it doesn't happen again anywhere in the organisation. And it needs to do so in terms that the rest of us can use, to check our own systems and guard against our own tendencies to incompetence.

It needs to do this now. Otherwise, all we know is that the company is incompetent in delivering the core services it's trying to sell us, and it may not be able to cure that.

Enterprise poison.

Welcome back my friends to the magnetic machine story that never ends, courtesy of Dublin-based perpetual motion mongers Steorn.

One of my two favourite miraculous organisations — in the company, however unfairly, of xG and its magic morphing wireless broadband — is making noises again and promising great things. In this case, it's "a public display of various Orbo systems" by the end of 2009, with a video stream so that all of us out here in Webland can watch, wonder and then buy a very reasonably priced licence to use the technology.

Ah yes, the technology. You won't be surprised to hear that there's been no further disclosure about what it is and how it works, except that it now includes a "passive magnetic bearing technology, ZeroF". In an interview in Free Energy Times, Steorn CEO Sean McCarthy said that this was necessary because ordinary bearings act as speed bumps due to the "very strong radial forces that change direction in very small angular displacements". I think that means powerful magnets wobbling around a bit, but we'll have to wait and see.

Apparently, every bit of the Orbo perpetual motion over-unity energy-from-nowhere device is explicable by standard physics "except the net result". So far, though, the 'net result' in terms of the failed demo in 2007 and the disbanding of the independent review panel this year — their conclusion: nothing doing — has been thoroughly explicable by standard physics.

Steon has also filed two patents this year, but don't get too excited. One is for measuring energy transfer from an electromagnet to a permanent magnet, and the other is for measuring the torque of a rotating device. In both cases, they're in the class of patent best described as "stark raving obvious" — the latter incredibly so, as Sean appears to have reinvented the optical encoder.

Which leaves yet another intriguing question: if that's their IP, what on earth would they license?

At last, the Amazon Kindle is to launch in the UK - and around a hundred other countries. This ebook reader has attracted a lot of attention in the US, as much for its business model as for its hardware and software (which are on a par with a rather brain-dead smartphone).

That business model has dictated a lot of limitations. Not all content sources can be accessed over the wireless network of the Kindle, which uses a protocol called Whispernet over the Sprint network in the US to support nominally free mobile access. It's only nominally free - in fact, around thirty percent of the revenue from paid content goes to the network - and so what you can do wirelessly is restricted compared to what you can get it when you plug the Kindle in via USB (there's no wi-fi) to another networked PC.

There's no equivalent to the Sprint wireless network outside the US, so the UK Kindle (actually a Kindle 2, which has to be bought from the US) and other international models will use 3G data.

Now, the commerical side of 3G data is fascinating. Which network are they using, we wonder, and how are they going to duplicate the no-subscription model? "It'll use the AT&T Global Network", the PRs assured journalists. "But AT&T doesn't have a network, global or not, in the UK", the journalists replied. "Ah... we'll get back to you on that", said the PRs. Likewise with Amazon execs, who say "You'll have to ask AT&T about that".

So how come Amazon is ready to talk about the launch of the Kindle, but unable to say which essential partners it'll be working with? Not as weird as it sounds: my bet is that it's a matter of press releases. When you're a big company doing something with another big company, you have to make a joint release - or say nothing. That's not just politeness, that's big company rules.

But all releases from big companies have to be written by marketing and approved by upper management. Upper management tend not to approve things until they've fiddled with them, because they have to prove that they're managing upperly. Then the changes go back down to marketing, who have to turn those changes back into some form of language that the rest of the world will understand, and submit the new version back upstairs for the OK. This can take a few iterations before marketing or management get bored, and you can normally tell who surrended by whether the press release makes any sense or not.

That's bad enough when you're doing it by yourself. When the process has to be synchronised between two big companies, it can turn into a rich carnival of madness. When you've got a hundred countries and goodness knows how many mobile operators (AT&T's Global Network, whatever that may be, notwithstanding), you've got a better chance of organising a bank holiday on Mars with Prince Philip and Skippy, the Bush Kangaroo.

Unless you hold a gun to everyone's head, in the nature of a unilaterally declared public deadline. Which, I think, Amazon has just done - quite possibly taking lessons from Apple in the process.

So, we'll have answers to our questions about how you can have a subscriptionless connection to 3G soon enough. And at that point, we can ask the next question. Given that Amazon has promised no roaming charges if you take your Kindle abroad, when will us paying stiffs get the same kindness?

There is one outcome that seems particularly exciting. What if all Kindles worldwide are on American AT&T sims, and the 'no roaming charges' are because all of them are roaming, all the time? There's absolutely no technical reason for that - once you get the other networks to agree to it. If that's the case, then what happens if you extract the sim from the Kindle and shove it in your own phone? A global, free, 3G data sim?

If that's the case, then there's going to be a very lively market indeed in Kindles. Or, as we will get to see them, a rather useful sim in an elaborate, disposable package.

The first international Kindles are due to ship by October 19. Can't wait.

So, there I was in San Francisco, listening to Intel tell me all about the bright, spangley future of mobile. The keynotes were full of standard issue happy videos of happy young people doing happy young things with mobile devices, socially networking with video and the great taste of Internet.

Wouldn't disbelieve a word of it, guv, except for one thing. I was sitting at the very epicentre of networked wireless technology, and I couldn't even send an instant message from my phone.

Technically, there was no problem. My phone, the constantly pleasing Android-based G1, has no difficulty in speaking American airwaves, and it is stuffed to the gills with software that tweets, chatters, displays moving pictures, geolocates and so on and so forth. The problem was me: for some reason, I dislike being held to ransom and having my money extorted. And with T-Mobile wanting to charge me £7.50 a megabyte for data, there is no other way to describe data roaming charges.

Seven pounds fifty. A megabyte. My iGoogle home page? 300Kbytes? That'll be two pounds fifty. Just to see my own home page. A fiver to check ZDNet UK's home page (naughty of us to have pictures, I know).

It gets worse, of course, when you consider what the extra costs to T-Mobile are for data roaming. Using the Internet, of course, the local operator just has to hook me up to its local connection point, which it can economically do for its own customers for the usual amounts. In my case, that local operator was T-Mobile – who will also sell me hotspot access via Wi-Fi in San Francisco for eight dollars a day, no particular data limit mentioned.

Extortion isn't too strong a word, especially when you consider how competition has been so carefully excluded from the equation. I tried to do the smart thing and buy an American pay-as-you-go data-only SIM, but my handset is locked to TMob and the local TMob shop assured me that such a thing was "impossible".

I know that many, if not most, companies now forbid data roaming for their employees, because the charges can easily run into thousands of pounds for even moderate use. I know that none of the UK people I talked to at IDF were using data roaming – although some had unlocked handsets that allowed the "impossible" task of using local SIMs for data. And these are the people who are directly involved in creating the exciting new world of mobile which, we are assured, will push technology for the people into ever greater heights of electrowonder.

It doesn't matter how good and cheap the technology is, if you can't afford to use it because of extortion. And it is doubly painful when you're abroad, which is exactly when you most need all those wonderful online information tools.

I have been at parties with mobile phone executives who openly laugh about the rip-off of data roaming charges. That left a very bad taste. What baffles me is whether they've ever made the calculation of how much money they don't make – or are there so many thousand-pound bills floating around that they don't want to bother to collect a hundred ten-pound bills instead?

But the current state of affairs is wrong – criminally, caustically, catastrophically wrong. It is poisoning the hopes of the mobile Internet, it is showing up the lack of international regulation (three cheers here for the EU, which is slowly enforcing sanity on the robber cartels), it is massively stupid in a way only telcos can be massively stupid. It is an enormous insult to customers, developers and manufacturers. It spits in the face of the future. If anyone can suggest a way to break this conspiracy down, I'm more than ready to hear it.

And if anyone from T-Mobile would like to explain to me why it is right to charge me five pounds to look at a single web page, I would love to hear that too. Bring it on.

I said it was going to be one of those IDFs. It was, more than I could have guessed.

To begin at the beginning... but when was that? The 9am first keynote of the day, a little Otellini in the morning? But there'd been a 7:30 breakfast briefing before then. The breakfast briefing, then – but there'd been a 6:30am phone call set up. And that was just four hours after I'd sent the last copy back to the UK from Day Zero. Which was itself out of time, as my planned evening writing was disrupted by the discovery of high level Intellites at the hotel bar, an unusual event which deserved investigation.

In the name of journalism, you understand. That and jetlag.

The 2:30am copy, you'll have read. The 6:30am phone call: timezones, bosses, meetings. You know.

Which leaves us with the 7:30am breakfast briefing. This was called by HP, who promised to (here I quote exactly) "unveil a new product that taps the power of Intel multi-core processors to enable a new generation of communication and collaboration, to achieve unheard of levels of ROI and environmental impact".

Apart from "unheard of levels of environmental impact" being the sort of thing we're trying to avoid, that seems a pretty straightforward promise. What we got was HP's version of Skype (you can tell this because it's called Skyroom and does HD video conferencing from PCs). Which had previously been "unveiled" in March, where HP gave exactly the same demo they did this time. Admittedly, that demo wasn't in the basement of a hotel overpacked with grumpy hacks trying to digest an American breakfast which clearly didn't want to be there either.

Tscha, HP, you've always had a reputation for overselling events, but this is beginning to assume the settled shape of accepted fact.

Then keynotes. The newly promoted Sean Maloney gave a rapid canter intro to the show, and then it was Otellini Time.

But before I mention Paul Otellini's keynote — Moblin, Atom, embedded chips, graphs go up and down (rarely with numbers), smiling people juggle exciting technology — I think we should take a moment to examine that new force in semiconductor physics, Maloney's accent.

A Sarf Londoner by birth and mildly Irish by nature, Maloney's adventures in the ultraworld of Intel management have had their effect on his voice. In one sentence — indeed, in one word — it can fly from Brockley to the Bay Area via stopovers in Boston and Brooklyn, only to make the return trip in the final syllable.

This is an interesting poser. If Maloney's accent can move 10,000 kilometers in the space of a syllable, around 300ms, then his words must be able to travel at around a tenth of the speed of light.

That's fast enough to cause detectable relativistic effects on their weight – and, if my schoolboy physics is correct (It's San Francisco, you can get schoolboys on room service), then a word travelling at 0.1 times c has around 0.5 percent more mass than at rest. Half M vee squared over cee squared, and all that.

That may not seem much. But if every word Maloney utters is even slightly weightier than those said by others, he's got a built-in advantage that will add up over time to an unstoppable force. And indeed, this is what we observe.

Back with Otellini, whose accent is immutable, his opening keynote was masterfully presented and with a few interesting nuggets to sieve out of the stream of marketing. For example: Intel is copying ARM's business model almost exactly, by selling its Atom chip as a virtual component for inclusion in other people's chips and encouraging a huge community of developers. It's also copying Apple — no crime in that — by going down the app store route. In five years, Otellini said, he could see Intel selling more processors like this than in the mainstream of Nehalem, Xeons et al.

There's a lot to chew over there: all I'll say for now is that anyone following this battle should be very, very careful to check everyone's claims against reality. Powerpoint predictions have a habit of turning into 'real' data, because it's so tricky to measure what's being claimed — let alone in comparable form.

The Q&A at the end — well, Europe came up and the insistence that Intel had indeed been naughty in shutting out the opposition by exerting commercial pressure on its customers. Had that happened, asked one hack. "We do not do that", answered Otellini – a curious use of the present tense to answer a question about the past, as another hack noted later.

Intel continues to present itself as being unfairly treated by an evil European judiciary, unable to answer its accusers while they're free to misrepresent whatever evidence they like. Well, perhaps.

About the European accusations, I know nothing more than you do. But in the days when I was involved in a small chip-buying start-up, it was standard practice for large chip companies to use every weapon they could to shut out the competition. (And one that backfired: we needed one part, was told we could only have it if we bought another part with it instead of from the competition, so we went out and found a much better alternative for both. That's harder if you're facing a monopoly and a single-sourced part).

Then it was Maloney's keynote, which veered between rich farce — him trying to order a drink from a giant iPhone-like gaming console that towered over him — and thundering technology, like the experimental PCI Express SSDs that were delivering over a million random IO operations a second, or around 4Gbps throughput. That's the next game-changer, right there: memory mapped mass storage. Bearing in mind that some Intel products can now map a terabyte of memory, there's a revolution (if solid state storage can be said to revolve) waiting to happen.

I'm not sure whether Larrabee, Intel's mysterious manycore graphics chip, is rich farce or gamechanger. Maloney's demonstration of it doing so-so graphics, and his refusal point blank to give any technical information whatsoever about the chip itself, is rather suggestive of the former. I'm not sure when Intel last had a chip out with software developers and absolutely no technical info available to anyone else, but it ain't normal, Martha.

I wish I had time to cover the rest of the day's events. The whiteboards which dot the show floor, on which people are encouraged to write down their ideas — and which have more on them than perhaps Intel realises. The "BUMMM! Bum bum bum BUMMMM!" T-shirts which are supposed to echo the Intel Inside sting, but instead make Brit journos giggle like schoolgirls (This being San Francisco, you can order... oh, but never mind). We even hatched a plot to buy a bunch of these — the T-shirts, not the schoolgirls — and give them to the tramps and panhandlers which surround the conference centre, but that could be construed as bad taste. And rightly.

There was an Intel-sponsored Maroon 5 concert. Nothing more need or should be said.

But now, I must go off for more keynotes. There are many untold stories from yesterday, and I'll get around to them later. Any day when you get high praise from one Intel exec and a severe dressing-down from another needs to compost a bit, I think.

At least until one's safely home.

The result of the 2009 IDF Keynote Moore's Law sweepstake are in. Paul Otellini mentioned Moore's Law at 9:08:14 local time, some 3:50 minutes after beginning the first keynote of the conference. THe winner is thought to have been won by Nick the Brief, but a stewards' enquiry is under way.

More - and Moore - as it happens.