Sham-wow

I was a guest of my dad's at a luncheon in DC with a bunch of other ex-military types cum consultants ("Beltway Bandits"). They didn't all exactly fit this mold, but close enough to give you the flavor of the group. A lot of the casual conversation centered around how easy it used to be to get money for the military. These guys spent a lot of time in the Pentagon working up their pitches to Congress and then becoming chum buddies with Proxmire and Stennet and a lot of other appropriations guys. One of the guys was telling an amusing story of how a bill got "disappeared" via some simple string-pulling, and the humorous reaction that it got from the befuddled writer of the legislation who could no longer locate his baby.

I wouldn't want to give the impression that these are bad guys. Quite the opposite. Very engaging, articulate, and accomplished the most of them, and good pals with my dad. There was a truly hot recently retired Air Force colonel(ette) that I will continue to fantasize about for some time.

This group gets together regularly and eats well, sips wine, and listens to a featured speaker. They all slap each other on the back and rattle off their pedigrees (really, some are impressive – I was unable to fix the exotic scientist's present position, but it was something like Director of Department of Applied Science – and he was all wild-haired and accented and truly Einstein-esque in every way).

The speaker this time was a tech guru from an American company in China (honestly, I am purposely leaving out so many details in deference to my dad's trust), and he goes to CES every year and then wows this older crowd with the gee-gaws and advances that he gleans from that trip. He has 5 or 6 PhD's, and I have to say that he knows his stuff. This presentation is a lot of everyday stuff for most of us Gizmodo/PersonalTech/PCWorld followers, but it really wows this particular crowd, and it was fun to watch him evoke the oohs and aahs from them.

The main thrust of his lecture is the convergence of computing platforms toward the sweet spot of computing. The old guys don't know a lot of this stuff, but they all carry around their smartphones, because they can afford to, and they tap into about 2% of the capabilities of the devices. It's only a short time before that smartphone is their entire computer. Input, display, and battery life are the rapidly advancing technologies that are breaking down the barriers to effortless portability of our comprehensive computer needs (and desires).

A couple of the gadgets seemed kind of yesterday to me (GigaPan for one, and a golf caddy that follows the golfer around the course, for another – although the new ones have enhanced obstacle avoidance), but when he talked about this new Canon EOS 180 mm lens (I looked it up – it's the EF 180mm f/3.5L Macro USM – used for taking macro shots from a distance), he included a discussion about the mathematical improbability of aligning 14 different mirrors and lenses into such perfect harmony, and it opened me up to a concept that I had never heard. The upshot in this particular case was that it had to be a serendipitous accident at some level to have achieved this level of perfection in a lens. He said that this lens costs about 1,300 dollars, but that to exceed its quality by the slightest margin, you would have to spend 35 thousand.

When I asked the speaker about the prospects for white band (this is where I discovered him to be truly on top of developments), he talked about how all of the investors in the WiMax and analogous technologies were writing down their investments because of the quickly advancing 4G technology, which is nearly as good and doesn't require the same (new) investment in infrastructure. Up to this point, I had considered holding out on a netbook purchase while I waited for WiMax, but it has me rethinking that whole equation.

At the end of the lecture, the general hubbub was something like "I got about a third of that!"

For me, it was more like "Hmm – I'd like to tap into that market niche where I get to go to CES and then wow a bunch of old guys for a lunch and a speaker's fee and be able to write the whole thing off.."