Robert Dow

Aye, Jon, I’m afraid we’ve got a wee bit of a problem. It’s Jontober here in Tiburon, when people from all over the world come to celebrate my birthday and bring me gifts. Each year they ask me or secretly ask Kathleen or Robert, What would Jon like? Is there anything Jon needs? As a result my wine cabinet is … Read more

I was pleased to see that a major three-letter market research firm has caught up with us and now agrees that the PC industry will probably have a nice 12% to 14% year-to-year growth in 2004. Pretty good, right? Yes, but only if the GPU and VPU suppliers don’t screw it up. Right now those xPU guys are doing just … Read more

THE CROWDS WERE THIN at ECTS in London. How many game exhibits and conferences does one city need in one week? Well, it's London it's the first week of September, and the answer is six. Six!? You gotta be kidding, right? Wrong—six. Out in the West End in the understated but always charming Earl's Court sandwiched conveniently between the Brompton … Read more

People ask from time to time, “What do you do?” People who don’t know me ask that question, assuming I actually do something—it’s because I’m such a snappy dresser and drive such a nice car, they figure to have that I must do something. I tell them I chase pixels. That usually scares away the causal inquiries and allows me … Read more

What is it? Well, obviously it’s something you can hold in your hand. So under that broad definition we might have to include the nozzle of a gas pump as a handheld device. OK, then maybe we should add the word portable to it; what is a portable handheld device? A can opener is a portable handheld device. OK, add … Read more

When I think about what it was like to use a computer in the sixties compared to using a computer today it makes all those little problems we deal with every day seem kind of small. For instance, in ’64 we had stroke writer displays, and computers that were built with magnetic core memory and integrated circuits that had only … Read more

Ever heard me say that? Ever been near me for more than 20 minutes? And no, I’m not talking about supersizing or the world’s growing problem with obesity; I’m talking about technology. In computer graphics it’s always been true, and probably always will be. But it applies to other things as well. Take standards, for example. Ever hear the comment, … Read more

Unless you’ve been in deep freeze waiting for millennium meltdown or Longhorn, most countries are either in the process of, or have a schedule for, the introduction of and then the cut-over to all digital (free) terrestrial transmission of TV. The justification, of course, is that DTV will save bandwidth and thereby give us more utilization of the limited spectrum … Read more

We see huge growth in the handheld game market. It’s a market that has three or four segments: dedicated game-only handhelds such as Nintendo’s Game-boy, mobile phone game machines like Nokia’s N-Gage, PDA game machines like Tapwave’s, and a new category: x86 machines like VIA’s reference design, Eve. Each of these segments has different platform opportunities and challenges for the … Read more

Philo Farnsworth, inventor of television, died in 1971, disappointed with how the medium had turned out. “He foresaw something a little more useful to the public,” said his biographer Donald Godfrey.   You got video, we got video, all ah God’s children got video—ain’t life grand? It occurred to me the other day that there are the X- and Y-gen, … Read more