Where have the light netbooks gone?

Recently I had a look for a light netbook, and got a nasty surprise: there are almost no netbooks under 1 kg anymore. If you want to travel light your options are severely limited. You can either purchase the uber-expensive Sony VAIO Lifestyle 8-Inch Netbook that weights less than 700 grams, or the more reasonably priced but still expensive ASUS Eee PC Touch T91 at 960 grams. After that all the recent netbooks now weight more than 1 kg.

Where have all the light nebooks gone?

The original EEEPC 701 was well under the 1 kg mark, what happened? Where have all the light nebooks gone? A better question would probably be "where have the actual netbooks gone?" In my opinion the hallmarks of a netbook are ultramobility, the presence of a real keyboard and a 5 to 9 inch screen able to display most web pages without side scrolling.

Nowadays however most of the machines that are sold as "netbooks" have large 10 to 11 inch screens and a weight above the 1.1 kg mark, these are not ultramobile anymore. These are machines that a lot of people would use as their primary computing device rather than something light that can easily be transported everywhere for a quick surf session. There is light at the end of the tunnel however:

The new Ultraportable netbooks: the smartbooks

Several manufacturers have presented prototypes of new ARM based machines that are much closer to the original light netbook concept of 2 years ago. We have the Mobinnova Elan that offers a battery life of 10 hours in a very light package: only 900 grams. If you plan a trip to Japan this autumn you may also be interested in the new sharp netwalker and its 5 inch 1024 x 600 touchscreen display.

For me the conclusion is clear: there are no reasonably priced light netbooks based on the x86 architecture anymore. If you want real ultramobility you will have to get an ARM based machine or invest a large amount of money in a Sony Vaio.

Does an upgrade to Windows 7 kill a netbook battery life?

One of the most touted advantage of Windows 7 over Windows XP and Linux is improved battery life. This may be true for future netbooks that would be optimized for Microsoft new operating system, but don't expect any gains from installing Microsoft's latest release on your current netbook! Many people have actually reported reduced battery life on their netbooks after an upgrade to Windows 7.

I suspect that the so-called improved battery life of Windows 7 has much to do with better communication between the OS and the hardware, especially the BIOS and graphic chip. This would allow the OS to take better advantage of the hardware's energy saving features. The problem is that you would only get these advantages if the BIOS and the hardware drivers were optimized for Windows 7. When this is not the case (such as with current netbooks designed for Windows XP and Linux) Windows 7 actually has a reduced battery life.

We should keep in mind that even if Windows 7 is more optimized than Vista, it still uses much more resources than Windows XP or even Linux. That it consumes more power than these operating systems should not be a surprise. Some netbook manufacturers have well understood this and intend to stick with Windows XP until the release of the next generation of netbook processors from Intel.

To conclude I would say that installing Windows 7 on current netbooks is a risky proposition: on some machines the newer OS will run fine, on some it will run but with a reduced battery life, and on some it will slow to a crawl once you open a few applications. In my opinion it is not worth the trouble.

Not too soon: Moonlight 2 finally reaches beta

The team of Miguel De Icaza has released the first feature complete beta release of Moonlight 2.0.

I must say: it is about time! Silverlight 3.0 for Windows has been released last month. Although I really admire the work of Miguel and his team, Linux is still the poor child when it comes to Silverlight support.

My opinion is the following: if Microsoft wants to compete with Adobe Flash they need to offer at least the same level of service as Adobe. Since Adobe releases Flash runtimes simultaneously on Windows, Mac and Linux, the minimum that Microsoft needs to offer to be credible is the same simultaneous release schedule. This is obviously still not the case!

The only silver lining that I see here is that contrary to Flash, Moonlight is open source. This may allow the runtime to be easily ported to other computing platforms such as ARM. Also it is possible to replace the video decoders provided by Microsoft by your own if you compile Moonlight yourself. This means that someone could create a version of Moonlight that takes advantage of video decoding acceleration protocols, like Nvidia VDPAU.

That said, the delay between Windows and Linux version releases is still too much of an issue for me to accept Moonlight / Silverlight as a credible alternative to Flash. If Microsoft was serious about competing with Adobe these delays would not exists. As it is now Silverlight looks more like a attempt by Microsoft to draw the developers attention away from Flash than to create a true multi-platform runtime.

I do think that if Microsoft really wanted they could make a success out of Silverlight, but that would require them to stop favoring their own platforms and become really agnostic: support all desktop and most mobile operating system, as well as most consoles! Granted, they support the Mac, but Macs only compete with Windows in the high end consumer computing segment. Where is Silverlight for the Wii browser? What about the PS3s? What about Symbian and Android smartphones? What about the iPhone, are they even working on it? As long as Microsoft does not solve these issues Silverlight will stay an also-ran.

Reader question: buying a computer for online video

Kevin Asks:

I read your article on tech-no-media about streaming video from the internet.

I am in the market for a new computer. Streaming video from sites like NBC.com, ABC.com, and Fox.com will be done a lot.

Would there be a noticeable difference between these two systems?

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 with a X4500 HD video card

Intel Core 2 Duo E7400 with a NVidia GeForce 9300M GS video card.

What would the percentage difference be in video quality?

Answer:

From a processor point of view the difference should be minimal, as both should be able to decode 720p flash video correctly as long as you don't run many CPU intensive programs at the same time you are watching the online video. Activities that don't use the CPU a lot like web browsing or typing should be OK as these would happen on the second CPU core and thus not interfere with video decoding.

The computer with the Nvidia card could have an advantage in the future, as the next version of flash should be able to use video acceleration on Nvidia cards. When that happen you should be able to watch even 1080p online video smoothly no matter how much your CPU is loaded.

From a quality perspective the limit will probably be the high compression of the online video and your network bandwidth rather than your computer's ability to decode the video. Again the Nvidia card may (nothing is sure) better compensate for artifacts in the future, but even if this is implemented the difference should be minimal.

So if you don't intend to multitask a lot when watching online video the cheaper computer should be OK. If you do intend to heavily multitask when watching video pick one with Nvidia graphics and better processor.

Does CPU power matter anymore?

A few year back the when you wanted to buy a new computer the first thing you looked at was the CPU. This was because the CPU was the component that had the most impact on your computing experience. In recent years however this has changed to the point that on some computing platforms (like the netbook market) the CPU has become a standardized, comoditized unimportant item. Let's look at how this did happen.

Why the CPU does not matter anymore

The main reason why consumer wanted more and more powerful CPUs was simple: it allowed them to do more things faster. The problem is that in most cases the current bottleneck on computing productivity is not the processor anymore. The most CPU power consuming activities a typical user is likely to do are playing video and games. In both of these case the largest part of the computations are not handled by the CPU anymore but by the GPU. The other thing that these activity require is a constant flow of data: this is handled by the chipset and the storage devices. Most other computing activities actually require nominal CPU power.

A powerful CPU can be a disadvantage

Another issue is that a powerful CPU comes with a lot of disadvantages. There is of course the price, but also power consumption. This is especially true for mobile computers that are supposed to run on batteries. The recent rise of the netbook is a clear indication that consumer now favor portability and long battery life over processing power. The only progress that can be made by the CPU here is by reducing power consumption, and if you look at ARM processors we are already pretty low here.

No help from the OS

In the past new operating systems required more and more powerful CPUs, but as of 2009 this is not the case anymore. Most modern Linux distributions will run perfectly on a 7 year old 1 GHz CPU. Even windows 7 does not require a very powerful CPU to run well, what it does requires is a huge amount of RAM and fast storage! This means that the next generation of Windows 7 based computer won't benefit much from an improved processor.

What to look for in a new computer in 2009 - 2010?

When shopping for a new computer the average consumer is now looking for many things beyond the CPU. In the portable market battery life, size and weight are important factors. If you wish to run Windows Vista or Windows 7 you should also look hard at the amount of memory: 2 GBs is really a bare minimum. If you intend to play games and video the GPU should be of special interest. Finally if you intent to handle large media files you should probably wait until next year and purchase a computer equipped with a super fast USB 3.0 bus to connect external hard disks. Another point to take into account is the prices: most consumers are more price sensitive these days, and decent computers can be had for well under $500, especially if Linux is enough for your computing needs. The CPU is not high (if at all) on the list.

Read more in the Hardware category

Image cc by pasukaru76

Net Applications Changes Methodology: Windows & Linux Market Share Rises

I have always claimed that the widely used Operating System market share statistics from Net applications were not really accurate when it came to MacOS and Linux market share. In my opinion there were two factors that prevented an accurate worldwide market share to be produced: Linux browsers potentially ignoring the counter and improper geographical distribution. The second problem has been fixed and it does impact the market share numbers significantly.

The problem was that a large portion of the website visitors that are counted come from the USA and other English speaking countries. This means that worldwide data was more representative of the USA than of the rest of the world. The problem is that the OS market share is currently very different in the USA than the rest of the world: the Mac OSX market share is much higher, but the Windows and Linux market share are lower. Now that the data has been adjusted MacOSX market share has fallen from 10% to around 5%, and Linux market share has increased slightly to 1.05% (with a peak at 1.17% in may). This is much more consistent with the data provided by other firms such as XiTi Monitor which recently placed the Linux market share at 1.2% and MacOSX at 4.6%

Astute readers will notice that the Linux market share numbers are still much lower than the ones provided by W3Counter which place Linux around the 2% mark. The explanation advanced by some would be that it is in fact Firefox's market share that is not correct. It is feared that some Firefox plug-ins like adblock and noscript would prevent a visitor from being counted. Since these are widely used by Firefox and Linux users their market share would be underestimated, and this would account for the difference. Personally I would trust the numbers from W3counter the most, but if you don't know what to do you can always try to count the Linux market share by Twibbons.

Read more in the Linux category

Open Source: many advantages beyond price

When people think about adopting an Open Source solution, the first factor that comes to mind is the price: it is usually cheaper than proprietary alternatives. What a lot of people fail to consider is that there are a lot of other advantages to Open Source that can be much more important than the price factor. Let's have a look at a few of them:

No forced end of life

One of the most overlooked advantage of Open Source is that there is no real end of life for any project. If a driver is released as Open Source and part of the Linux kernel your hardware will probably work out of the box for as long as you care to use that piece of equipment. In the proprietary world it is common for hardware manufacturers not to release a decent driver to run older hardware on newer operating systems to drive sales of newer models. When Windows Vista was released Creative Labs released a Vista driver that did not support all the features present in the XP driver for its older hardware, thus consumer were forced to buy the newer models just to have on Vista the same features as their old hardware on XP. This could not have happened if the drivers were Open Source, as any developer would have been able to port the XP driver to Vista or to modify the Vista driver to support all of the old hardware features. The same is true for software: even if the company that built your software does not support it anymore as long as a developer is willing to maintain it you are good, and if you really need that software nothing prevents you to hire that developer.

True competition rather than lock in

One of the easiest way for any software company to make long term money is software 'lock in'. The idea is to sell you a piece of software without telling you its inner workings or how to convert the files it produces to other formats. This means that the original vendor is the only one that can sell you upgrades or maintenance on that piece of software since he is the only one that know how it was built. That exclusivity often comes at a premium price since the software vendor has virtually no competition for your custom. In the case of Open Source the inner working of your software and the files it produces are known, meaning that several companies can offer support and maintenance for it, as well as develop and sell compatible alternatives. This creates real competition, encourages innovation and brings prices down for the consumer.

Security transparency

Do you know if Windows is secure? Do you know if it has any back-doors? No you don't, only Microsoft knows that. With closed source software you have no way to know if the software was properly tested for security holes or if unwanted code has been added to the software. With Open Source everything is transparent: you know exactly what you are running and anybody can easily look for security vulnerabilities.

The right to fork

What do you have to say about the direction that Windows has taken in the recent years? Not , much! If you do not like what Microsoft did with Vista and Windows 7 too bad, it's that or nothing. With Open Source software you can Fork. This means that if you do not like the direction that a piece of software is taking you can always create your own version and push it in the direction you like. Of course this comes with some problems: it causes fragmentation and reduces the resources that can be invested in each fork, but often forking is actually not necessary. When the developers or maintainers of an Open Source software project realize that a significant part of their users are unhappy with what they are doing and are ready to fork they sometimes change their plans to make everyone happy. Sometimes forks also merge after some time, or sometimes the less popular fork dies. This means that users actually have much more control on the direction in which the Open Source software they use evolves than with closed source software.

These are only some of the advantages of Open Source. This is why I would always prefer to purchase hardware for which there is an Open Source driver, or application that are Open Source. It is not only a question of price!

Tech-no-media most popular articles: July 2009

It is again the end of the month, the time for me to recap the 5 posts that were the most successful on Tech-no-media in July.

1) Glassbuntu: design a dark crystal Gnome theme for Ubuntu or Linux Mint

2) Microsoft reminds us that Windows is f*cking expensive

3) Linux is not an Operating System

4) The Free Netbooks are Coming

5) Linux Netbooks: 3 paths to a bright future

I must say that I am impressed by the result of the Glassbuntu article. This is the first post on a series on theming and in light of this success I would consider that the series has some big potential.

Other articles are mainly opinion pieces (which is normal for an opinion blog). Linux, operating systems and netbooks seems to still be popular topics so expect some more article on these. My article on ChromeOS just missed the top five, which surprised me somewhat given all the media noise that surrounded Google's OS and the number of positive votes this received on reddit.

In August expect the next part of the series on theming Ubuntu and Mint and more of the same opinion articles. I also plan to continue the trend to publish less "long articles" but to improve their quality.

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