Wednesday was pretty boring from a high-level, consumer prospective. There weren't too many “cool” things being shown off, but I'll do my best.

The morning started off with some Windows Vista statistics from Mike Nash, showing that Windows Vista is good, even from a device driver prospective. Vista, according to Microsoft, had the largest in-box device driver ship at launch than any other operating system release. It seems they must be counting half-assed drivers (cue Creative, Lexmark, Hauppauge) too.

Nash handed off the clicker to Bill Laing, who gave us a run-through of more skeptical statistics, showing us that Windows dominates the server market and that they had the greatest marketshare by far. Specious stats aside, we continued on with Mark Russinovitch, defector general now working as a technical fellow in the Platform and Services division. who sounded really excited about changes in the NT 6.x kernels.

From there, I checked out the dance floor again, hitting up the Expo Hall booths that I missed yesterday. VMWare has shipped VMWare Workstation 6.0, IEEE 1394 (now in version b of the spec) is alive and kicking, and the Windows Vista Partner Odyssey is your ticket to adventure.

I didn't have time to talk to the VMWare guys for very long, but I got an interesting demo at the IEEE 1394 booth. I thought the spec had long since died, but now (intriguing enough), the spec has been applied to multiple connection methods, everything from CAT 5e to coaxial to powerline to glass and plastic. The specification boasts greater reliability and extensibility than Ethernet, with demo computers displaying streaming HD audio and video at low price points.

Passing by the Microsoft booth, I learned about the Windows Vista Partner Odyssey, where partners can win backpacking supplies or even a custom trip. I suggest checking that out, and I suggest that Microsoft has the program manager return for PDC 2007, which I'm planning on attending as well.

Seagate had some stuff up, demoing some hybrid hard drives and on-drive encryption technology, which they promised me had no impact on drive performance. That's definitely something to look into, especially since I don't have a TPM chip on my laptop and therefore cannot run BitLocker.

I'll put up pictures as I find them (my camera wasn't working), but the only one I have so far is from Larry Richman of Pro-Networks fame.