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The past few days I've been out of town at a developers seminar which discussed this new fangled piece of entertainment hardware that will be coming down the pike in about a year. The presentations were cool; being surrounded by 300 other programmers was not.

The worst thing about my kind is how on the one hand we(as a demographic) assume we're so goldarned smart, but when we open our mouths it's clear we're total idiots who do not deserve the salaries we are paid and the respect we receive. For example, the Q&A session following the seminar took it's usual pattern for these events. The questions fell into one of three categories. First, there's "the answer to your question is totally obvious if you've been paying attention". Then there's "your question makes absolutely no sense and you'd know that if you were paying attention". Finally there's the "hey! I'm here at this seminar talkin'! Look at me!" Watching the faces of the presenters - all of them engineers who spent a great deal of time and effort to clearly disseminate this important information - fall in disappointment and consternation made me embarassed for my industry. If this is truly the best we have to offer it's no wonder the Japanese are kicking our asses.

On the upside, if photo-realism(and the unfortunate attendant hyper-violence) are your thing, this new hardware will rock your world. It's also a programmers dream if you like to program the sorts of things I like to program.