The Netbook is Dead: Long Live the Netbook!

The Netbook is Dead: Long Live the Netbook!

The “netbook” has only been with us for a couple of years, and yet in that time, it has managed to completely shake up the laptop market, driving prices down,

down, down. But I'm here to tell you that the reign of the netbook is over!

The reason for their untimely demise is that netbooks have traditionally been shipped with Windows XP, as netbooks weren't powerful enough for Windows Vista. Since nobody really wanted Vista anyway, everybody was happy with this. But now Windows 7 is hot, hot, hot, and who wants to be left in the dust with crufty ol' XP? It is getting pretty long in the tooth, after all.

But what to do? Windows 7 won't run well on a tiny little netbook, with its miserly 1gb of ram, its miniscule display, its subpar resolution, its slow-to-the-bone CPU, and its crappy video card, will it?

Probably not. This fact has apparently not been lost on laptop manufacturers, and so a few of them have just started shipping perfectly good ultralight notebook computers at netbook prices. For instance, I just purchased an Acer Aspire 1410-2801. It has a dual-core low-voltage 64-bit Celeron CPU and 2gb of ram. It's expandable to at least to 4gb (without taking the whole thing apart you'd have to do for many netbooks!), comes standard with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium, and a 6-cell LI battery good for about 5 hours of use. It weighs only a tad over 3lbs, has a decently-sized 11.6" 1366x768 LED-backed display, and can play HD YouTube videos with nary a frame dropped. What more could you want for $400 shipped door-to-door?

“Isn't this just the new breed of netbook?” you ask? Well, of course it is! But the manufacturers don't call them that anymore because they don't want you to think these machines are crippled. And now netbooks aren't. Long live the netbook!

Cloud Computing & Amazon Web Services

Today I attended a talk on cloud computing by Chris Dagdigian of BioTeam, Inc. The executive summary is this:

• Most of what is sold as "cloud computing" these days is hype -- just warmed-over stuff that they used to market as "grid computing", which was also mostly hype (unless you're a large government organization with zillions of dollars to spend).
• Amazon Web Services is cloud computing. Even Google and M$ are years behind Amazon, and if they don't catch up in the next six months, it will be too late.
• "Private Clouds" = Absolute Rubbish.
• Tipping Point: In 2008 many people started independently successfully using AWS to solve their customer's problems.
• Why AWS works:
• Smart Pricing:
• 8.5 cents per CPU hour.
• Traffic to and from the S3 service is free.
• If you personally spend a week playing around with AWS, it will probably end up costing you about $8.
• With EC2, you can burst up to any number of servers. To keep that many servers of your own spinning idle, just so that they're there when you need them, would cost you a fortune.
• AWS comes with a MapReduce implementation (with Hadoop integrated into it).
• People estimate that it costs Amazon 80 cents per GB per year to keep all data online, spun-up, and replicated three times in a geographically distributed manner. This is probably much cheaper than you could do it for.

A Very Brief Mercurial Tutorial

Distributed Version Control Systems are where it's at. Give up this lame Subversion crap and move to something worth using.

Here is a little tutorial on Mercurial I wrote. Mercurial is one of the few version control systems in the world worth using.