Kenny Dirt Jeans

OK, here's what I wanted to write about last night:

I've never seen such a black-white contrast in the way we business reporters are treated by big tech companies than I have in the last two days. On Tuesday, I went to Nvidia's launch event for its new GeForce 4 processors, where we press got the royal treatment. We got a big show at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, were well fed and liquored up, and even got a goodie bag that included a pretty nice sport jacket.

The next day, I went to PalmSource, where I and other journalists were told that we could have only Expo passes because "there are limited press resources." When I explained that I didn't need access to the press room, only the keynote talks, the registration officials wouldn't budge. And judging from the nonexistent lines, there was no way those keynotes were anywhere close to full. Needless to say, the event didn't get any coverage from the Business Journal. Actually, neither the the Nvidia event. So I suppose it doesn't matter.

Anyway, here's my first impression of the GeForce 4 graphics chips: they're good, but I wouldn't recommend buying them just yet. They're not completely DirectX 8 compliant, most games won't even begin to use their most advance features for a year, and there should be some pretty nice bargains on the GeForce 3 cards now. Also, the low-end GF4s don't perform much better than the bargain-basement GF2s).