Kirk to Enterprise: "None of this sh*t works for me!"

William Shatner, the Hollywood star best known for playing Star Trek's Captain Kirk and hard man cop TJ Hooker, had attendees at this week's big Intel conference laughing out loud when he admitted he and technology aren't the best of friends.

Despite being instructed in voice recognition software by Ray Kurzweil, an expert in that field, and having a home entertainment system installed to answer his every oral command with a "Yes, master", the actor admitted: "None of this shit works for me."

Shatner was in town promoting a new book entitled I'm Working on That, about technological advances, most of which he said he is still far from understanding.

His appearance - alongside Intel CTO Pat Gelsinger - capped this week's big Intel jamboree in San Jose.

silicon.com's Tony Hallett was covering the IDF event and in case you missed the news, here are the some of the highlights:

Itanium II
Intel showed off mega-powerful server systems from the likes of NEC and Unisys but denied it is disappointed with the uptake of the 64-bit architecture since its July debut.

silicon.com verdict: One of the down sides in an otherwise upbeat week - but just who's going to buy such systems in the current climate?

Xeon
Intel introduced 2.8GHz and 2.6GHz Xeon processors for 2-way workstations and servers featuring 512KB of L2 cache and actually hitting the market three months early. And Mike Fister, senior VP and GM Intel Enterprise Platforms Group, promised: "There's lots more headroom in the architecture."

silicon.com verdict: Xeon is now well bedded down and doing better than its higher-profile big brother Itanium.

Banias - the next-generation mobile architecture
Perhaps the story of the week, Intel is truly seeding the market for this ambitious, mobile-only architecture. To be released in the first half of next year, when more details will emerge. Banias quote (from Intel's Mike Trainor): "Banias is a turning point in the way computing happens."

silicon.com verdict: Still early days but we're optimistic. Improved power efficiency, wireless networking and device types - including tablet PCs - are all on the cards.

XScale
The great white hope for the PDA and small gadget markets, there still needs to be more development done to the platform but devices such as the XScale-based upcoming SONICblue ReplayTV digital portable video player (PVP) are encouraging.

silicon.com verdict: There are plenty of handset companies out there who will say they know more about mobile terminals than Intel, and rightly so, while taking video P2P and mobile could provoke the interest of Hollywood lawyers at some stage. A tricky market for the chips giant.

Green Intel
The company spoke openly about lead-free manufacturing, waste management, safety and power consumption.

silicon.com verdict: Good to see but there needs to be more done to educate users and partners about product lifecycle management. And a 'green semiconductor company' tag will never be accepted in some quarters.

The rest
There was plenty more at IDF Fall - noise around the widely adopted USB 2.0, AGP graphics advances and more on the technology front. There was also the sight of Teamster union members protesting at the convention centre upset about conference contracts going to workers from out of town, and a popular man showing off a Segway Human Transporter. Yes, Ginger was in town.

But in a week when one of outer space's most enduring characters showed his face, Intel will say their focus remains very much on the inner workings of computers. The vision thing was all about nanotechnology and while Intel spoke about a billion-transistor chip around the corner, it just had to talk about a 10 billion transistor chip by 2010.