The ChromeOS Netbook

Matt Mastracci's impressions of the ChromeOS netbook after 1 week.

A week with a ChromeOS netbook:

The first thing you notice when starting the netbook up is that it’s fast. Pushing the power button to the firstboot or login screen is a matter of seconds. It’s the same while signing out or powering down. Oh, and the power button functions as a signout key as well. Hold it for a few seconds and it signs you out. Keep it held down a few more seconds and it powers down.

There aren’t a lot of surprises on this box. It’s basically a giant battery strapped to the Chrome browser. The battery is pretty amazing. Popping the power cord out yielded a runtime of just under eight hours when I first got the machine. A few discharge/charge cycles later and it’s sitting at more than eight hours.

Overall, the hardware is pretty decent. It’s an Atom N445 processor with 2GB RAM. It has 16GB of onboard solid-state storage. For comparison, the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 I just bought had a similar processor, but half the memory and way more storage (albeit spinning bits instead). The screen is really great and the keyboard is very comfortable to use.

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The Chrome browser runs fairly well on this hardware given the size of its CPU. It’s definitely not as slick as Chrome on my Macbook. It can start to feel a bit sluggish when you end up with a number of tabs open. Sites that use position:fixed or background-attachment:fixed are terribly slow to scroll as well. I imagine that future versions of the OS will bring hardware-accelerated compositing to scrolling.

The netbook supports multiple users, but it can’t support more than one user logged in at a time. That’s likely to avoid having more than one user hogging the limited resources of the box. I’d really love to see something along the lines of tab hibernation used, instead of forcing one user to log out to let another log in. Once a user signs out, the state of their session should be persisted to disk locally and restored after they log in again.

I’ve been trying to get used to a world without any apps beyond the browser. It’s tough. I set up Guacamole to get access to a Linux desktop where I could run a bunch of applications that I need access to. As a developer, I can’t really live without a few desktop apps. If there were a way for me to get access to the applications on my desktop remotely, I’d be bringing this netbook everywhere instead of lugging around the much heavier Macbook Pro.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the ChromeOS netbook. It feels designed, not just made. I’m confident that a lot of the issues I’ve seen can be fixed in software updates. There are probably a lot of people that could make a switch full-time to this netbook. I’m not one of those right now, but I’d love to use something small like this for more of my computing needs.

Dealing with Pricey Textbooks and the Digital Divide

A couple of interesting approaches to dealing with expensive textbooks from the Sate of Washington. The first endeavors to develop online materials for the community college system's 81 highest-enrolled courses. Realizing that many students do not have a computer or Internet access, other initiative aims to allow low-income students to rent netbooks for $35 a quarter. The students can download e-textbooks and online materials developed in the first initiative.

With the price of a typical netbook, the students might be better served by a rent-to-own model or by making a computer mandatory, so that financial aid can pay for it. One issue not addressed by these two initiatives is the scarcity of high-speed Internet access in some under-served areas. I'd love to see a more holistic approach that combines low-cost course materials, devices, and, high-speed Internet access.

State of Washington to Offer Online Materials, Instead of Textbooks, for 2-Year Colleges:

It's a question that students, and a growing number of their professors, are asking: Why require students to buy expensive textbooks every year, when the Internet is awash in information, much of it free? After all, the words of Plato have not changed in the past 2,000 years, nor has basic algebra.

Washington State's financially strapped Legislature, which foots much of the textbook bill for community-college students on state financial aid, has wondered the same thing. With nearly half a million students taking classes at the state's 34 two-year colleges, why not assemble very inexpensive resources for the most popular classes and allow access to those materials online? And why not cap the cost of those course materials at $30?

Calculating the savings, when students are paying up to $1,000 for books each year, was an exercise in simple math, says Cable Green, director of e-learning and open education at the Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges. "We believe we can change the cost of attending higher education in this country and in the world," he says. "If we are all teaching the same 81 courses, why not?"

So with a $750,000 matching grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the board has started an ambitious program to develop low-cost, online instructional materials for its community and technical colleges. For the Open Course Library, as the materials are known, teams of community-college instructors, librarians, and Web designers from around the state are creating ready-to-use digital course modules for the 81 highest-enrolled courses. The first 43 courses, which are as varied as "General Biology" and "Introduction to Literature 1," will be tested in classrooms beginning this month.

The basic design requirements of the Open Course Library are simple enough. The material must be available online and accessible to anyone, says Mr. Green. Faculty designers, hired for their teaching experience and expertise in the subject, can use material from anywhere and anyone, as long as they abide by licensing agreements. Instructors can then use and revise the material as they see fit, dropping and adding components to customize the course for their own students. And now they have peer-vetted syllabi, lecture notes, and teaching materials, available with a few clicks of the mouse.

Textbooks? So Last Century. Rent a Netbook Instead:

For many students, heading to class without a laptop is a bit like leaving the house without wearing pants. And whether it's registering for classes, meeting with professors, or doing homework, chances are those aspects of college now involve a computer and the Internet.

Yet according to a 2010 survey by the Census Bureau, while Internet use is creeping up, 30 percent of Americans are not online —not at home, not at work. And it's not always by choice.
Low-income students are not just on an uneven playing field, says Kristen Connely, manager of the bookstore at Bellevue College, the largest community college in Washington State. Without technology, they can't even get into the stadium.

In November, with help from a U.S. Department of Education grant, Bellevue bought 500 netbooks—inexpensive laptops used to download and read Internet material—to rent out for $35 per quarter. Negotiations are still continuing with publishers, but the cost of the e-textbooks used on the devices can be half that of traditional books. Students will also be able to download low-cost digital course materials being developed by the state's Open Course Library project.

A Low-Power Computing Cloud

A very cool cloud computing infrastructure built using netbook processors. Great potential to reduce power consumption of data centers.

Technology Review: Netbook Chips Create a Low-Power Cloud

Using a cluster of the same processors that normally show up in netbooks and similar mobile devices, researchers have created a powerful server architecture that draws less power than a lightbulb.

The architecture, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, offers a way to decrease by an order of magnitude the amount of power used by the computational infrastructure of Internet giants like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, and others. If the predictions of its inventors are borne out, it could have a significant impact on both the bottom line and the environmental impact of cloud computing.

Power now accounts for up to 50 percent of the cost of operating data centers, and in the United States, its cost per kilowatt-hour is increasing. Even relative newcomers like Facebook use up to $1 million a month in electricity, and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projects that by 2011, data centers in the United States could use up to 100 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, for a total annual cost of $7.4 billion, with an estimated emissions impact of 59 million metric tons of CO².

FAWN, which is described in an as-yet-unpublished paper by David Andersen and his team at Carnegie Mellon University, tackles this problem with a combination of relatively slow processors (the kind used in netbooks and other mobile devices) and flash memory (the kind that stores data in digital cameras and USB drives). The somewhat counterintuitive result is an architecture whose performance per watt of energy is a hundred times better than that of traditional servers, which use faster (but much more energy-hungry) processors and disk-based storage.

The exceptional performance of FAWN is limited to certain kinds of problems--random access of small bits of information--but this kind of input/output-intensive task is exactly what strains the existing infrastructure of Web companies like Facebook.
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FAWN is composed of many individual nodes, each with a single 500-megahertz AMD Geode processor (the same chip used in the first One Laptop Per Child $100 laptop) with 256 megabytes of RAM and a single four-gigabyte compact flash card. The largest FAWN cluster built to date, consisting of 21 nodes, draws a maximum of 85 watts under real-world conditions.

Each FAWN node performs 364 queries per second per watt, which is a hundred times better than can be accomplished by a traditional disk-based system working on an input/output-intensive task, such as gathering all the disparate bits of information required to display a Facebook or FriendFeed page or a Google search result.
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Will Richardson on Netbooks and Cloud Computing

Weblogg-ed » The Netbook Effect

Great article by Clive Thompson in the new issue of Wired (the paper version, so no link to the text right now) about the ways in which netbooks are changing the laptop landscape. And, at the same time, cementing the idea of cloud computing in our lives. Estimates are that netbooks will hold 12 percent of the world’s entire laptop market next year, which is amazing when you think that the Eee PC is less than two years old. And their adoption says a lot about how we think about our computers these days.

As Thompson points out, 95 percent of what we do on computers can now be accomplished through the browser. I don’t need a huge hard drive or speedy fast processors as long as I have a solid, broadband connection to the Internet. (And even then I don’t need much; I’m writing this in a Google Doc while offline on a plane to Seattle.)

Netbooks are evidence that we now know what personal computers are for. Which is to say, a pretty small list of things that are conducted almost entirely online…Netbooks prove that the “cloud” is no longer just hype. It is now reasonable to design computers that oursource the difficult work to someone else. The cloud tail is wagging the hardware dog.

Nice.

I’m looking at my almost two-year-old, dropped a dozen times, bent up MacBook Pro, thinking I’m going to need to replace it in the next few months and wondering should I go with a netbook. Better yet, should I go with like seven of them (or more) which is about many I could buy for the same cost as my Mac. Don’t get me wrong, I love my Mac. And I really want to do more video work using iMovie this year. But it would be really nice not to lug this thing around everywhere in my travels.

Convergence of the Cell Phone and the Laptop

This quote is from a story speculating on the possibility of Apple releasing a netbook or tablet computer - a product somewhere between an iPhone and a MacBook. There's been and I'm sure will continue to be lots of chatter about this unannounced and as yet unconfirmed device, but I'm interested in the implications of this quote. So what we're seeing is processors for cell phones getting increasingly more powerful - to the point that they can run a full blown OS on a tablet/laptop/netbook form factor. At the same time, the power consumption of traditional tablet/laptop/netbook processors (Intel, AMD, etc) is dropping - to the point that these chips could find their way into cell phones. I see three possible results. First, we could see an entire new class of devices - powerful, low power ultraportables with fullscale OSs. Second, we start to see cell phones with greater capabilities and feature sets - to some degree we are already seeing this. And finally, we'll start to ultraportable notebook-class devices - again already happening with netbooks. All three trends seem to be gaining traction at the same time. Sort of a convergence to the center. The problem with the second and third approach is that in each case it's one device (a cell phone or a laptop) trying to masquerade as something entirely different. If Apple is indeed working on an entirely new class of device - it could have the advantage of defining this new center. Time will tell. Apple's netbook/tablet to be based on ARM Cortex architecture?

ARM and Intel are doing battle because they are encroaching on each other's turf in much the same way that Verizon and Time Warner are in the Cable/Phone/Internet space. ARM is getting fast enough to build a netbook while Intel is getting miserly enough in power to be put into a phone. 2009 will be a huge face-off between the two in this field.