I’m enjoying my iPhone. A smart phone is one of those things you can put off buying, but once you have it, it becomes impossible to give up. Any question you have, you can pull your phone out of your pocket and look it up.
I’m also comfortable enough with Apple’s technology and AT&T’s service. It’s more expensive than a “phone” ever was, but a phone couldn’t hit Wikipedia, IMDB, and stock quotes in quick succession.
All that said, I’m thinking that my 2-year contract is about right for iPhone dominance. I expect Android phones to come in and win the market. It’s “Mac vs PC”‘ all over again. Many voices and many innovators will win the market over from a sole source.
I’m still running an old Pentium IV 2.4 GHz as my main Linux box. It has more than enough horsepower for what I do, allowing Apache / JBoss / MySql development when I turn my hand to it. Still, at around 70W average power, it is a little bit much for a greenie to run 7×24.
And so I’ve got my eye on some new things on the horizon:
In an interview at the Linux.conf.au conference today, Torvalds admitted that Linux was lagging behind on power management and energy diagnosis tools.
“It is an area we were pretty weak a few years ago and just building up the infrastructure took a long time but now we are at a point where we have most of it done.
“That doesn’t mean we are done. Now we have an infrastructure in place … we have the tools to measure power and notice when the power is higher and why that is — which is pretty important. Before, it used to be a black box,” said Torvalds.
I would have preferred to see this earlier. I would like to run a home Linux box 7×24.
Perhaps with next year’s Linux and next year’s processors that will be reasonable.
The upcoming Shuttle KPC looks like fun. The projected price is $99 bare bones and $199 minimally configured. It should be a green PC in the base configuration, or with other low power choices. I could even stock it with a “green” hard drive.
I might wait until we hear more, but I’m leaning toward it.
The fall-back is to do it myself, Paul Stamatiou has an excellent article up on that, with his DIY: 200 Dollar PC
I’ve been happy with my Eee PC, but this morning I did a routine software update … whoops a bunch of desktop icons are missing.
Checking the Eee PC forum, this has happened to other people, starting in mid-December.
This is really unacceptable. A bad update should have been pulled back within an hour, and a fix certainly should have been up withing a day or two. A month?
I like the promise of small and inexpensive Linux devices, but it won’t work if vendors don’t take the process seriously.
(The Firefox icon is still there, and I can get to the rest one way or another. This is more an inconvenience than a failure … but still, a month?)
There are several models available. I have the black 4G Surf model. It has 512M of memory, 4G of flash storage, a 7″ 800×480 screen, and in contrast to the non “surf” models, no webcam.
Apparently we pronounce Asus like ah-ha, and Eee as if it was one e.
I like it as a surf-pc, and for some light work (like this post). It includes the Firefox web browser. I use it as if I were reading the newspaper (and I am wondering if I should take up crosswords in my middle age). The included ebook reader is ok, and I used it to make my way through PT Barnum’s “The Art of Money Getting”
The following video from NotebookReview.com gives a good overview of the machine:
The power consumption on this thing is tiny. I pulled just 0.82 kWh in the first ten days and stopped counting (measured via Kill-A-Watt monitor).
Some people do replace the bundled Xandros Linux OS with another Linux variant (or Windows, but we won’t think about that).
If you are a deep UNIX hacker and you understand why you are switching to Ubuntu or whatever, more power to you. I think though that some folks don’t quite get the similarity and commonality between UNIX (and especially Linux) flavors. We are really talking about software “stacks” that are perhaps 90% the same and only 10% different. Is it worth reloading the OS to change that 10%? Maybe, but be aware that you can probably tweak the stock distribution to do everything you want, if perhaps in a slightly different way. The EEE User Forum should be your first stop if you are thinking about such things.
Advanced, and possibly dangerious, questions and answers:
For what it’s worth, I’ll mention how I feel the vibe. There have been stories of late about Microsoft meeting with open source folks, or Microsoft working with Linux companies, or Microsoft buying Linux companies.
I think the answer is that Microsoft has become comfortable in a world partially run on Linux. They’ve figured out that they still own, and will continue to own, the desktop in rich and developed countries. It doesn’t hurt them to have Linux as the OS of choice for small-to-medium servers in the same markets. They will still continue to make tons of money – even if they have to price their OS-bundle a little cheaper.
At the same time, Linux boosters are moving their desktop focus to the developing world, where they can gain a foothold before Microsoft. A few oddballs (like me) will run it (Ubuntu) on the desktop, but we’ll be the propeller-heads and not the bulk of the market.
A real-time signal processing consultant has posted a how-to on building a combination home router/server that draws just 3.1 watts, including AC adapter. PAMurray says the set-up, based on a Peplink Manga running Debian, saves power compared to a separate router and laptop-based server.
The authors of the how-to conclude that the device will save about 17.8 kWh/month, when compared to using a separate LinkSys router and a power-efficient x86 laptop.
I switched to a Canon printer after buying a couple rounds of HP print cartridges and feeling totally misused. Printer makers have always been into the razor/blade thing, but HP takes it to the extreme.
Surfing, I found that Epson and Canon have pretty good refill prices (I think both have ‘clone’ cartridges). So I watched Techbargains via its rss feed until a good deal popped up. I got a Canon PIXMA IP3000 at NewEgg a while back (for something like $50), and kept it until the old HP ran low on ink (or until tax time, whichever came first). NewEgg is a great site, with good forums and real-world user experiences. The interesting thing about the forums for this printer, was that it seemed that a lot of tech-savy people were abandoning HP over the cartridge cost issue. Really, my new Canon IP3000 (with the packaged set of print cartridges) cost less than a replacement set of cartridges for my HP!
(HP is toast!)
Now, I did sweat a bit this morning, until I discovered that I had a bad USB cable and not a bad printer, but now I’ve got the thing running nicely with either the Windows XP machine, or my every-day computer … running Ubuntu Linux. The trick I picked up on a web search was to tell Ubuntu that I was installing a Canon BJC-7004. That driver seems to work fine.
(The Ubuntu site is slow today, because they’ve just had a release, but I like it! There is a great Unofficial Ubuntu Starter Guide that I used to tune the last release for multimedia, etc. Brilliant!)
