Category Archives: Technology

Linux sub-notebooks finally arrive

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This is the ASUS Eee 701 PC. Acting on the suggestion of a colleague, just before Christmas I slipped into a Toys ‘R Us store, handed over £219 (£186.38 ex VAT) and came home with a smartest little machine I’ve seen in ages. It’s a Linux box configured for the school-kid market (hence the retailer — Research Machines are also selling it to educational institutions), and it’s been a revelation. First of all, it’s really small and portable (0.89kg and not much bigger than a paperback book), but has a usable keyboard, good on-board applications and built-in wireless networking. It’s also an object lesson in how to package Linux for non-techies. Here are the apps, for example:

It comes with FireFox and OpenOffice pre-configured. And the webmail option comes with Google, Yahoo and Hotmail icons all ready to go. Likewise icons for Skype, a Messenger client, Google Docs and Wikipedia. It’s powered by an Intel M 900 MHz processor, has 512 MB of RAM plus 4GB of flash disk, and takes USB drives and an SD card. It also has an 0.3 megapixel onboard camera (plus some apps for using it), a VGA port (for an external monitor) and an Ethernet port as well as microphone and headphone sockets. And all for £186 + VAT.

Having a genuinely small and unobtrusive networking device around is interesting. When I’m home, I tend to have my Mac laptop tethered to a big screen and audio set-up in the study, so find myself carrying the ASUS round the house, using it to read mail or browse BBC News when cooking, or for cheating when we’re doing crosswords at the dining-room table! The 7″ screen is a bit small for some purposes, but in the main it’s perfectly readable.

The only downsides I’ve discovered so far are:

  • poor battery life (the makers claim three hours, but it’s definitely less with Wi-Fi switched on);
  • it doesn’t remember Wi-Fi passwords after shut-down (though it does retain them while in sleep mode);
  • the trackpad button is unaceptably stiff and the pad itself is pretty small: the user experience is much improved using a small Targus optical mouse.

    There’s also a model running a version of Windows XP — though in that case you’re paying more (£299) for a crash-prone system. There’s one masochist born every second. Or is it every minute?

    Update: Most of the reviews I’ve found are pretty perfunctory, but this CNET one is informative. There are also some informative videos — notably this IDG News Service preview.

    And this:

    As you’d expect, lots of people are hacking this neat little machine. Here’s how to turn it into a touchscreen device. Here are some useful tips if you want to poke around in the innards. Some people have replaced the Xandros Linux distribution with Ubuntu. And there are even claims that people have installed Mac OS X on the ASUS.

    • Social networking in education

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    The third of the Economist’s online debates is on the proposition that “social networking technologies will bring large [positive] changes to educational methods, in and out of the classroom”. Martin posted this comment:

    In some ways the argument is irrelevant – it’s like asking ‘is alcohol beneficial to study?’ You could argue either way, but regardless of what we think students are going to use it anyway.
    But, that aside, let’s look at what SNS offer – a sense of community, peer support, enthusiastic users, engagement with technology, resource sharing, democratic participation – hmm, these are all things we’ve been desperate to have in higher education for years. We’ve largely failed in many of these (as anyone who uses a VLE can attest), so why wouldn’t we look at what happens in SNs? It would be remiss of us not to do so.
    However, there are some _big_ cultural issues that higher ed will need to get over – in particular HE is based on a very hierarchical model, and is often obsessed with controlling the student experience. In a social network you have to let go. In short you have to accept bottom up over top down – and that will be tough, as it goes against 3000 years of educational instinct.
    So, my conclusion – of course higher education should try and adopt principles of social networks and 2.0, but the question is whether it _can_.

    My two-pennyworth was:

    Technology is not the key factor in any of this. Many years ago Seymour Papert believed that putting computers into primary schools would revolutionise learning and education. It didn’t — mainly because giving pupils the capacity to engage in computer-mediated exploratory learning would have undermined the authority of teachers and made schools more ‘difficult’ to manage. So the school system asserted control over the technology and placed it in roped-off spaces called ‘ICT Rooms’ or the like, and Papert’s hoped-for revolution didn’t happen.

    There’s an analogy here for social networking. It’s intrinsically non-hierarchical and largely uncontrollable. It’s therefore a poor fit with our hierarchical and tightly-controlled educational institutions — at every level from kindergarten to university. Social networking could conceivably have beneficial effects in education — but only if the social structures implicit in our educational system adapt to accept it.

    Jobs on Kindle

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    From a conversation with John Markoff…

    Today he had a wide range of observations on the industry, including the Amazon Kindle book reader, which he said would go nowhere largely because Americans have stopped reading.

    “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

    Forward to the past…

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    … or is it back to the future? Lovely column by Stephen Fry on walled gardens and social networking…

    I am old enough to remember Prestel and the original bulletin boards and “commercial online services” Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online. These were closed communities. You paid a subscription, dialled in and connected. You made new friends and you chatted in “rooms” designated for the purpose according to special interests, hobbies and propensities. CompuServe and AOL were shockingly late to add what was called an “internet ramp” in the 90s. This allowed those who dialled up to go beyond the confines of the provider’s area and explore the strange new world of the internet unsupervised. AOL offered its members a hopeless browser and various front ends that it hoped would keep people loyal to its squeaky-clean, closed world. This lasted through the 90s as it covered the planet in CDs in an attempt to recruit subscribers. A lost cause, naturally, and the company ended up as little more than an ordinary ISP. Made millions for Steve Case on the way as AOL merged with Time Warner, but that’s another story.

    Opening and closing like a flower

    My point is this: what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern…

    Thanks to Pete for the link.

    Money for jam?

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    No — this is not a story about a hedge fund manager, but about a guy who founded an online dating site.

    MARKUS FRIND, a 29-year-old Web entrepreneur, has not read the best seller “The 4-Hour Workweek” — in fact, he had not heard of it when asked last week — but his face could go on the book’s cover. He developed software for his online dating site, Plenty of Fish, that operates almost completely on autopilot, leaving Mr. Frind plenty of free time. On average, he puts in about a 10-hour workweek.

    For anyone inclined to daydream about a Web business that would all but run itself, two other details may be of interest: Mr. Frind operates the business out of his apartment in Vancouver, British Columbia, and he says he has net profits of about $10 million a year. Given his site’s profitable advertising mix and independently verified traffic volume, the figure sounds about right…

    Bully for him!

    Posted in Web

    The green machine that made Intel see red

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    This morning’s Observer column…

    An interesting package arrived in my household the other day: a small bright green-and-white laptop with a built-in carrying handle. It looks as if it has been designed by Fisher-Price, an impression reinforced by two little ‘ears’ which, when unclipped, double as wi-fi antennae. The 7.5in screen rotates and folds back on itself to form a kind of tablet, rather like those pricey Toshiba laptops only Microsoft salespeople can afford…

    Farewell, my lovely

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    Paul Steiger, the retiring Editor of the Wall Street Journal, has written an interesting valedictory piece — a retrospective view of what’s happened to print journalism during his distinguished career.

    On Thursday I’ll pack my last box and take leave of a place where I’ve spent 26 of my 41 years in journalism, including 16 as managing editor of the Journal. (The other 15 years, 1968 to 1983, I was a reporter and then business editor at the Los Angeles Times.) Today, all around me is an industry in upheaval, with slumping revenues and stocks, layoffs, and takeovers of publishers that a decade ago seemed impregnable. Just this month, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones & Co., the Journal’s publisher, and real-estate magnate Sam Zell gained effective control of Tribune Co…