Hot gossip from the ECTS show

WE ROLLED UP at the ECTS show yesterday, held at the Earls Court exhibition centre in West London.

Is there much life left in this show? While the usual suspects such as Nvidia, ATI, AMD, Microsoft and others were there, the visitors seemed a tad thin on the ground.

Wil "News of the Screws" Harris from Bit-Tech had been to a rival show being held in Docklands at the Excel conference centre. He said, just after Paul "Missing with Hexus in Shanghai" Dutton had tweaked his harris, that the games show over at Docklands was throbbing. We think that means "busy".

Dutton and Harris were engaged in some street-fighting tactics. Both had built machines for the Via stand with the latter muttering dark things about suspected sabotage.

Dutton was having a little glass of lager at the Prince of Wales pub just outside the conference centre. He was wearing a t-shirt with a huge black Nvidia roundel on the back when he was approached from the rear, so to speak, by two ATI boys. He appeared to believe Fudo's story that one of the guys was a championship archer when he was a student and it's just as well he didn't have his bow with him because an ATI arrow would have easily hit its mark slap bang in the middle of the Nvidia target.

Thronging? Throbbing? We think not

Some rather distinguished looking gentleman wondered over to the table and asked how the show was. We said the show looked a little dead. Just a few minutes later, Jon Peddie, for it was he, came back from the show. We asked him how the show was. He said the show looked a little dead.

We found Nadim from S3 and Marco from Club3D munching club sandwiches in a little room at the back, while Ben "Heart Throb" Boyden from Via watched on.

A man takes a picture of
one of the many robot visitors to the show

The thronging AMD sponsored
Developers Lounge. There is a distinguished looking
gentleman with silvery hair sitting at a table. Could this be Jerry Sanders III? Nah. It's Dave Everitt

A SWAT squad from Gainward scooped up Fudo, Harris and Dutton and regaled the company with a lengthy philosophical disquisition about the Ethos of Water Cooling.

This is the moment when Harris'
harris got tweaked by Dutton. Harris almost chokes
on his club sandwich as he chats to Nvidia spinmeister Andrew Humber Adam. The little chap behind him is
the Sage of the Ethos of Watercooling

You probably didn't realise that water cooling had an ethos, but sure enough it does. The problem, said Gainward, was that quite a few hardware sites didn't understand the Ethos.

We're not sure, even after a lengthy discussion with the Sage of Water Cooling whether we understand it either.

The throng at the Irish Development Agency's booth

The show runs today and tomorrow. Now we must run. µ