Say goodbye to the Beastmaster.

Every January, there are two big events to look forward to. There's CES and there's Macworld. Tonight marks Bill Gates' last CES keynote before he steps down from his position as CEO of Microsoft. It's quite sad actually. I've decided to quote one of my favorite moments of last year's keynote and to dedicate this post to the wonderful innovations Mac OS X Leop--- I mean, Windows Vista brought to the computing world in the past year.

Demo Guy: I saved the wrong document. This is an invitation to something special we're planning tomorrow night at CES, and making a mistake like this before Windows Vista would be a problem. But thanks to a new feature called Shadow Copy in Windows Vista, I can restore previous versions of this document with just a couple clicks. So when I click Restore, you're gonna see this document on the right revert back to the original.

Demo Guy restores document.

Demo Guy: Just like that. Vista reverted back to the original and it got me out of a jam. It's *better* than going back in time.

Cue audience laughter.

While I'd love to tune in to the keynote tonight, I can't. Microsoft insists on users installing their Silverlight plugin to access any portion of the CES mini-site. While I'd love to do that, Silverlight doesn't run on PowerPC Macs. :/

I guess I'll be waiting for the MP3 of the keynote to go up later tonight.

edit: I GUESS I WON'T. Someone linked me to the direct URL, so I'll be able to watch live like all the cool Windows people. *coughcough*

edit2: I figure that while I'm waiting, I can echo what a few people seem to be saying. Apparently the Silverlight requirement is only needed for the wrapper that goes around the stream, the stream itself is Windows Media Video, which I can view through VLC if I want to see it (which is how I'm watching the minute-long "tune in at 6:30" video right now). People who are using it seem to be having performance issues, which is odd, but then again they might not be running Vista. Since Silverlight/WPF/E appears to be built into Vista, maybe those have better performance, I don't know. Haven't heard anything from Mac users watching it. Oh well.

I still think this Silverlight requirement is to boost download numbers and then go on about its tremendous success onstage during the keynote. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft.