Are Netbooks Worth It?

Since my European backpacking adventures is almost upon me, I’ve been thinking of taking along a netbook as my primary computer. That got me thinking about the popularity of netbooks in general and whether they are sufficient as one’s only computer. In my last post, I speculated that the performance is good enough to perform office tasks and web surfing. Streaming video and games are not there yet. This time around, I was sorely tempted by the Asus Eee PC 1000HE, which offers 9.5 hours of battery life, 3lb lightweight design, and 92% full-size keyboard. Sadly though, I could not justify spending more on extraneous luxury products given the economy (a paradox, since my spending would help drive growth).

During my research, I found that Intel is trying to downplay the desirability of netbooks as a mass market device by casting them as toys for kids and cheap gimmicks. Still, consumers aren’t buying that argument. There is clearly pent-up market demand for small, mobile, cheap, and light computers that can all of what most people expect and desire. If Intel avoids leading the market, VIA and AMD need to pick up the slack in offering alternatives to the Atom. VIA’s Nano is a good start, but the company lacks the ability to get OEM penetration (a marketing skill), so sadly there are very few models available using that CPU.

Update (09/19/09): Funny comments from Nvidia’s CEO shamelessly promoting the Ion platform

The Externalities of Moore’s Law

Green is good. With the advent of Energy Star 4.0, there is the real hope that power usage and waste can be reduced. One way to do this is to reduce one’s consumption, especially in electronics. I forgot the link, but a new computer requires a hundred litres of water, various halogens and heavy metals. The energy required to produce the machine is quite a drain. That’s why I am disgusted by comments on hardware forums of people switching in new CPUs and graphics cards every three months. For one, there are far more deserving people in need of a basic computer (those living in developing countries, students living in poverty in developed nations, many open-source developers) to do things like learn, create, and discover. In fact, the lab I worked at this summer had pretty outdated machines and were straining their budgets trying to upgrade to run analysis of genes and 3D modeling of protein folds. Explain why a drunken teenager upgrading to get a few more FPS for some game is more deserving of power than these researchers.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that most of our current machines are already pretty good and more than suffice for what we do. I’ve been saying that ever since we passed the 1 GHz mark in CPU speed that there is no need to upgrade apart from hardware failure. Mail, office tasks, the internet, and videos (H.264 can be made to run well on a 1 GHz P3 if the encoder is competent) won’t noticeably improve. If most people had a clue of what’s going on, they’d recognize that the slowdown that occurs in the lifetime of using the computer is due to software bloat and accumulated spyware. Arch Linux with kdemod on one of those machines blows away Vista on a new computer in terms of pure responsiveness and usability. In reality, the software industry has been driving hardware upgrades and purchases by making their products more and more bloated. Adobe’s latest suites, MS Office, Crysis, Visual Studio, Matlab, and especially Windows don’t have any reason to have such drastic increases in minimal requirements. Compare those with more efficient and better programmed GIMP or Krita, Koffice/Abiword/Gnumeric, UT2004 or Half Life 2, Netbeans or Eclipse which have been improving every release, err… Matlab I guess doesn’t have any comparison, and the BSD or Linux kernels, which have only modestly grown in memory consumption but have actually improved in operating efficiency. Most software doesn’t have to consume as much resources as it actually does; the proprietary hardware and software companies are in bed with each other to inflate requirements and create bloated code just to justify the next round of upgrades.

We only have to look back a few decades and wonder how we managed when hardware resources were so limited. For anyone who’s getting nostalgic, try running a CLI desktop on an old 486 with mutt/pine, emacs, mpd, and links.

Inspired by http://lowendmac.com/myturn/05/0516.html and http://muse.tau.ac.il/maslool/boidem/94mycomputers.html

Oh, and what did I do this semester in response to all of this? Get a new computer (or two -_-).

Computers

I find it interesting how at this point, so many of my friends are complaining about how they need to upgrade their machines or at least buy a new one. Even when they already have 2 ghz or faster computers, they just seem to throw them away or complain about slowdowns in performance.

The thing happened with my roommate’s computer; it wasn’t running as quickly as its processor (2.8) seemed to indicate. Windows took forever to load up. This was actually the result of memory being incorrectly inserted and also too much crap being built up over the years. Most people in those times just seem to think about throwing their computers away and getting another one.

Okay, I’m here living with (or rather administrating 5 machines). My dorm desktop is an Athlon 1800+ with nForce2, and it runs perfectly fast now, just as it did four years ago. I did tweak it for performance and regularly maintain it. Then, my home computers (in San Jose) include a Duron 1.06 (overclocked from mobile 850) on a nForce board. This one runs just as quickly as my dorm desktop does and loads abiword, gnumeric, gnome, and all essential applications without problems. It also emulates Soul Calibur on Dreamcast. My home server is a 500 mhz Pentium III and it runs my server. It does web, mp3 streaming, ftp, and this blog. No one can tell the difference =). When I started my interest in computers 4 years ago, I learned all the maintenance and caretaking that has served me well all this time. I probably won’t upgrade or get another machine for 10 years at the current rate. Old machines simply run fine.

Oh, did I mention that the server is running off hardware 90% of which was orignally thrown away by someone else? Gah. People don’t appreciate these things. If I had my hands on someone else’s PC and had free reign, I could improve performance by 50-100%. Okay, maybe not, but I’m still irked about the trend towards more power. It’s really not needed.

I guess that’s another reason why I’m irked at Microsoft’s Vista. The beta requirements were something like 1.8 ghz processor, 64 mb shader model compliant video card, 1 gb ram. I mean, who needs that much to run a frickin operating system?! DSL is a fully featured operating system in just 50 mb. Beaver has full icons, highlighting, syntax editing, line numbering, and colours in just 100 kb or so. Notepad on the other hand has no features, requires 4 mb, and needs the TCP/IP stack to run! Microsoft’s codebase is just too bloated. They’re packing more and more features. I mean, Windows XP installs to a 1.5 gb base with just the operating system and no software. Ubuntu is one cd and has a fully-featured office suite, image manipulator, email, web software, all for free too!

Oh well, end of rant.