Here Comes the Asus 'Freee PC'

Still saving your pennies to buy a computer? Forget about it -- they're about to be free. It's a wonderful time to be a nerdy cheapskate.

Asus shook up the industry with its $300 -- $600 mini notebook last year. Asus continues to dominate the market for super small, super cheap mini-notebooks. It may sell as many as 5 million Eee PCs by the end of the year – far more than all other competitors combined.

It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Microsoft and OEM partners Fujitsu, General Dynamics Itronix, HTC, OQO, Samsung and even Asus have been planning, designing and building Ultra Mobile PCs that were supposed to be so good people would pay $600 to $2,000 for them.

Many of these devices attempted to re-invent the sub-notebook wheel with funky form factors, goofy keyboards and exotic feature combinations.

Worse, some took Microsoft's advice and made the gadgets dependent on Vista, which is a lousy OS for a full-size, full-powered desktop PC and a disaster for an ultra-portable.

It turns out that people just wanted a regular laptop, but much smaller and cheaper. When Asus came out with its mostly solid state, plain vanilla PC running Linux (and now XP), the masses flocked. And now, Acer, Dell, HP and possibly Sony, as well as a smattering of smaller companies, are rushing their own cheap-and-tiny offerings.

Soon, the market will be overwhelmed by what I like to call "mini me too" laptops -- commodity Asus clones that will drive margins for all players toward zero. There will be no real money to be made in direct sales of cheap mini-notebooks to consumers.

I'm predicting that the successful pricing model for "mini me too" laptops will look nothing like the notebook pricing model (where you always pay full price for the hardware), and a lot like the cell phone pricing model where you buy a service, and the hardware is heavily subsidized or given away free.

This will happen because improvements in solid-state design, economies of scale through mass production, aggressive competition and other factors will drive the cost of producing tiny laptops down even further.

Manufacturers will make their money by selling large quantities to companies who have more profitable products and services to sell. They'll use the lure of free PCs to steal customers from competitors and upgrade existing customers.

Don't believe me? It's already happening in Britain and Canada.

In the UK, PowerupMobile.com will give you a free Asus Eee PC if you sign up for a two-year contract for a specific T-Mobile mobile broadband service called Web 'n' Walk Max, which costs about $68 per month.

Years ago, banks used to give away toasters (and other things) to encourage people to sign up for new checking accounts. Fast forward to 2008, and the Royal Bank of Canada is giving people Asus Eee PCs if they open one of two accounts.

My prediction is that by the middle of next year, "mini me too" laptops will be given away in the United States, and by so many companies that they'll become hard to sell at any price. Here's what you'll have to buy in order to get your free mini laptop:

• Mobile broadband services. Phone carriers will use "mini me too" laptops to lure existing customers into faster and more expensive pricing plans. They'll give you a good reason to upgrade to 3G, for example, by giving you a free 3G Eee PC if you upgrade. They'll also use them to attract new customers.

This makes a lot of sense because a two-year contract at, say, $30 per month (or $30 extra on top of your existing wireless cell phone plan), means $720 for the carrier. But with dropping prices and buying in bulk, they might pay less than $100 for the laptop.

• Online storage and synchronization services. Asus announced recently that customers in Taiwan would get free online storage for one year with the purchase of an Eee PC. After the year is up, presumably, they can stop using the service or pay a monthly fee. I think this is bass-ackwards.

A new breed of online storage and synchronization services, including SugarSync, Syncplicity, DropBox, FolderShare, Carbonite, Mozy, Upline and others are all trying to make money in their own over-crowded niche. The two were made for each other, because mini-notebooks are almost always secondary systems.

Almost anyone with a mini-notebook needs to synchronize files with their PC, or at least needs online storage. One of these companies is going to figure out that giving away a laptop along with a two-year commitment is a compelling way to beat the competition.

• Software. Hundreds of companies make vertical applications or applications suites for specific types of professions, and sell these software titles for hundreds or thousands of dollars. It's only a matter of time before they start selling their software already installed on a mini-notebook. Imagine, for example, a suite of Real Estate applications pre-installed on an Asus Eee PC, where agents could check listings and do all their work from anywhere. Or insurance. Or sales.

• Non-technology related products and services. Vacation packages, new cars, bank accounts (like in Canada) -- you name it. Mini-notebooks will become the new toaster, and will become popular giveaways for raffles, radio programs, universities trying to lure freshmen, and others.

I'm not saying all "mini me too" laptops will be free. I'm saying they'll be priced like cell phones. That means the low end of the market will be free, the mid-range will be heavily subsidized ($50 to $100, plus you have to agree to buy some service or product) and the yet-unannounced Apple product will be over-priced and totally unsubsidized.

It's a wonderful time to be a nerdy cheapskate.

Build your own Google

In an earlier post I talked a bit about a start-up called Kickfire who are releasing an accelerated database appliance for MySQL applications in the 1TB-3TB range that gives comparable performance to an equivalent Oracle RDBMS setup for around a quarter of the price.

Kickfire sounds compelling for utility LAMP computing applications that need to be fast and cheap, but it doesn’t address ultra-scalable and cheap, at least not yet. If you want to build some big Web 2.0-type application, such as a Facebook, a Yahoo or a Google, or even something very storage and database intensive like a bioinformatics application or geophysical data modeling, you are going to need to store very, very large amounts of data, in the hundreds of terabytes.

Credit: Dreamworks Animation LLC

Another new company, Aster Data, which was formed by a group of Computer Science PhD’s from Stanford University, is attempting to go with a similar Open Source technology-enabled appliance approach to Kickfire’s, but are applying it to horizontal database scalability for roll-your-own data warehousing applications.

Aster uses the same philosophy to scaling databases the same way “Beowulf” clusters are used for compute-intensive applications, such as with CGI render-farms and DNA-sequencing, high-energy physics and weather simulation. But instead of just distributing application memory and CPU cycles over a large number of nodes using a shared memory and parallelism API like MPI-2, where slave nodes boot off a high-speed network (such as Myrinet, multiple bonded gigabit interfaces or 10GigE) on a master node that issues instructions and use shared storage, Aster uses a massively parallel “Beehive” approach for database storage, where “Worker” nodes, each with their own storage, CPU and memory are provisioned and controlled by “Queen” and “Loader” nodes.

The “Queen” is a Linux appliance with all the software needed to give birth to new Workers, which are tweaked out PostgresSQL drones that share a distributed copy of your database, much like the way striped and parity data is stored on RAID drive arrays. All your IT staff has to do is add a bunch of totally virgin, new commodity servers to your network, boot via PXE from the Queen, and she does all the work of installing a new OSes on your Workers and building out your database schema. The result is a highly distributed and highly available database that can scale easily into the hundreds of terabytes.

Google and other large Web 2.0 operations have had to design totally proprietary, specialized systems in order to scale their databases that large – but with Aster, all that scalability is completely transparent because your front-end apps and your middleware business logic is the same as it always was on monolithic systems – applications communicate with the Queen via standard ODBC and JDBC interfaces, so you don’t have to do a ton of re-coding to stand up your own Hive. The “Loader” nodes are responsible for partitioning and loading datasets onto the workers and communicate with data federation services.

Aster Beehives are such a compelling technology that it has already been noticed by the big guys. MySpace already uses it for storing large amounts of data and issuing huge numbers of transactions – and one of the original financial backers of Google, Sequoia Capital, has financed the company through it’s A-round of venture capital financing.

Now, if only Kickfire and Aster could join forces. Then you’d really have something.

The 10 Best Linus Torvalds Quotes

Torvalds: not one to mince his words...

1. “Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.”

2. “Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”

3. “My name is Linus, and I am your God.”

4. “See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.”

5. “The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.”

6. “Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100 mph.”

7. “Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

8. “When you say, ‘I wrote a program that crashed Windows,’ people just stare at you blankly and say, ‘Hey, I got those with the system, for free.’”

9. “I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.”

10. “Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here's the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there's really nothing better to do in between meals.”

Surprise ARP Attack Draws Attention

It isn't often that old hacking methods make significant news, but an ARP attack received widespread attention earlier this week, more so for the perceived target than for the actual attack itself.

In the seven layer OSI networking model, the second layer includes support for protocols like Address Resolution Protocol (ARP), which is what helps networking devices work out which specific piece of hardware should receive network traffic being sent to a particular network address.

Known attacks against this protocol include ARP spoofing, which allows an attacker who carries out a successful attack to completely intercept or otherwise manipulate traffic to a target system and completely remove it from a network.

In the recently reported attack, H D Moore's Metasploit Project had all Internet traffic redirected to a defaced page, announcing that a group called sunwear had hacked the site for fun. When H D Moore initially received reports of the defacement, he was able to verify that the site itself was completely functional, which hinted at a network-based attack at some point upstream of his server.

Given that it was affecting all network traffic headed for Metasploit, it had to be a close network node, and it turned out that another system in the same VLAN that held the Metasploit systems had been compromised and then used to carry out an ARP spoofing attack against Metasploit and the 200-plus other sites on the same VLAN.

H D Moore was able to address the issue by hardcoding his service provider's router MAC address into his ARP cache, but it didn't solve the problem for the other sites affected (who would have to carry out similar steps to overcome the issue or rely upon the service provider to do so).

According to a posting from Moore to the Full Disclosure mailing list, the ARP spoofing attack coincided with a broad denial of service attack (syn floods) against various services associated with the site.

The group claiming responsibility for the attack are a well-known Chinese group, but there doesn't appear to be much more to the attack than an effort to make a public statement of capability.

Some observers have pointed out that older style attacks and probes have largely been forgotten in the rush to focus on application-level attacks and threats, so this case should be a good wakeup call for most security service providers. It also highlights the risks that can be associated with outsourcing data and hosting services to external providers

Wait! Don't Buy Microsoft Windows Vista

Over the next few weeks, NBA star LeBron James will try to convince you to move to Windows Vista as part of Microsoft's massive ad campaign.

This is not a review of the Windows Vista operating system. I'm not here to tell you about Vista or what's wrong with it. For an opposing viewpoint, read Windows Vista: 15 Reasons to Switch.



This article is key reading for those of you who are about to download or purchase Windows Vista and install it on a PC. I'm here to talk you out of it. Just say no to LeBron James and Windows Vista--for now. Here's why.
1. Vista Is Incomplete

Microsoft is already planning its first service pack and seeking input from users on what to include. Vista probably won't be truly ready for prime time until that first service pack version, possibly later this year.

The hardware and software companies that make compatible products for Vista aren't all ready for the new OS. Many of those companies are scrambling to complete Vista drivers and updates. Most important, not all video and sound card companies are ready.

Audio and peripheral maker Creative publishes a list detailing the status of drivers for each of its many products. Most of their Sound Blaster Internal products already have Vista drivers available. Two of them have only a "beta 2" version of the drivers. Three of their older products say "No Development Planned." Most of their cameras and other peripherals have no Vista-specific drivers available.

On the Advanced Micro Devices site, you can find information about Vista readiness of ATI graphics cards (AMD and ATI merged last year). Most are supported by a Catalyst Vista Software Driver, which is in beta, and are plagued by a long list of published "known issues." It also comes with the following warning: "ATI does NOT recommend installing these drivers in systems used for mission critical operations or where productivity of any kind is a concern."

These two companies are on the leading edge of supporting Vista. Their partial readiness for Vista is symptomatic of the larger companies. Many smaller peripheral makers simply have no Vista support at all.

Some PC vendors, such as Alienware and Polywell, are aggressively pushing XP over Vista, because both say graphics and other drivers for Vista aren't quite ready for prime time.

Software, such as the security suites you may have already paid for, may not run on Vista, and some require updates that aren't ready yet.

Trend Micro, Panda, Computer Associates, and Symantec have all announced that they'll ship updated suites on Tuesday--just in time for the consumer availability of Vista.

Microsoft claims McAfee will support Vista, but hasn't said when. The company itself has not announced Vista support. And some, but not all, ZoneAlarm products will support Vista by next week. The smaller the company, the longer it will generally take for them to support Vista.

Gaming on Vista--and Vista's DirectX 10 graphics support--is awesome for gamers. But that's something you'll be able to fully take advantage of only later. The full gaming potential of DirectX 10 requires three elements: an operating system, supporting graphics hardware, and supporting games. The operating system is ready, the graphics hardware is partly ready, and the games are nowhere. Eventually, Vista will be the ultimate PC gaming platform. But there's simply no reason for gamers to rush out and buy Vista next week.
2. Vista Is Expensive

Microsoft offers three versions of Vista to home users in the United States: Home Basic, Home Premium, and Ultimate. You can buy any of these in the upgrade version with a discount, or the stand-alone version without the discount.

The cheapest way for current Windows XP users to get a legal copy of Vista is to buy the upgrade version of Home Basic, which is $99. But you don't want the cheapest version.

First, the upgrade version will require you to keep your Windows XP CD for years. You do have a Windows XP CD handy, don't you? Second, Home Basic just won't cut it for most people. It lacks the Aero UI and Media Center capabilities. Plus, you can't connect Xbox peripherals to Home Basic. For many, including yours truly, those are the three best reasons to upgrade to Vista in the first place.

Home Premium ($239 for the full and $159 for the upgrade version) is roughly equivalent to Windows XP Home. It's for nontechnical, nonpower users who employ their system for lightweight, personal purposes only. But if you're the kind of user who runs Windows XP Pro at home, you'll be happiest with Windows Vista Ultimate. It's got all the fun and goodies of Home Premium, plus the power-user features in the business version of Vista.

Are you sitting down? The full version of Windows Vista Ultimate costs $399. If you have an XP CD, and don't mind the hassle, the upgrade version of Vista Ultimate costs $259. Ouch!

(If you buy the Ultimate Edition, you'll be able to buy additional copies of Vista Home Premium at a cost of $49.99. For technical users, the ideal scenario for many will be Ultimate for you and Home Premium for the spouse and kids.)

The cheapest Vista is the copy that comes with a new PC because you get in on the reseller's steep discount.

3. Vista Wants a New PC

To get full value from Vista, you're probably going to want to buy a new, Vista-optimized PC. Many of the benefits of Vista require hardware your current PC doesn't have. ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive, for example, require special hybrid or flash drives. Windows Aero looks awesome, but only if your graphics card supports Pixel Shader 2.0. You can record high-definition cable TV, but only with a tuner card designed to take advantage of that Vista feature. You can enjoy DirectX 10 games, but only with a compatible video card.

Vista's new indexed searching is great, but you'll need extra hard disk space for the index--and extra storage for the operating system itself. Don't even think about running Vista on a system with less than 1GB of RAM; 2GB is reasonable, and 4GB is the sweet spot. And if you want to really enjoy the Aero eye candy, you'll want a 20-inch or larger flat-panel LCD display.

Sure, you can buy Vista and install it on an old PC. But that's like subscribing to HD cable, but not buying an HD TV. You're paying for the HD experience but not actually experiencing it.

4. Vista Is Time-Consuming

Installing any new operating system is time-consuming. You have to configure everything, load your data, install your applications, and get your peripherals working. Then, in the case of Vista, you have to figure out where Microsoft buried all the options, menus, and features, and get used to the ubiquitous Search boxes. Anytime you want to do anything in Vista, it seems, the software asks, "Are you sure?" You'll want to figure out how to turn that off and customize Vista to get rid of all its annoying "user-friendly" hand-holding features.

But buying Vista now, and installing it on old hardware, means doing additional, time-consuming tasks--possibly an additional day or two. Why? Chances are, you'll have to hunt down, install, and troubleshoot new drivers for your old peripherals and system components.

You may have heard about Windows Easy Transfer, which moves files and settings from XP to Vista. But don't get too excited about this. It works only after you've reinstalled all your applications; it doesn't actually move installed applications, just settings and data.

By waiting, and getting Vista on your next PC, you'll save yourself the pain and hassle of trying to retrofit your old PC with the new operating system.

5. Windows XP Isn't Obsolete

Vista adds new benefits and, in the long run, will make computing easier, faster, and a lot more fun. But it doesn't really solve any existing problem. Windows XP--after years of service patches and strong, industrywide support--is a solid, well-understood, and highly functional operating system. And it will continue to be well supported. Microsoft itself has committed to at least seven more years of XP support, and even plans a Service Pack 3 next year.

Gartner says that by the end of this year, XP will be installed on 77.1 percent of all PCs worldwide, and Vista on just 12.3 percent. That means the industry will make sure their new products still work great on XP.

6. Vista May be the Best Reason Yet to Buy a Mac

That's right. I said it.

Years ago, switching from Windows to a Mac was nearly impossible for most people. We relied entirely on desktop applications, many of which had no equivalents on the Mac platform. Today, so much of what we do is online--and Apple has done such a good job of making the transition easier--that leaving Windows and moving to a Mac is perfectly doable for most people. It's a real choice now, and mostly a matter of preference.

With Windows Vista as the default operating system on any new PC you buy, it makes sense to consider moving to a Mac. After all, Vista will force you to learn a new operating system anyway, and--in the short term--one less supported than XP. In either case, you'll be using a 3D interface, widgets, and other goodies.

Apple will start selling the next version of OS X, code-named Leopard, this spring. The details of this operating system are secret, but it's likely that it will be spectacular. All may be revealed as soon as next month. If you're going to buy a new PC this spring, you might as well check out Leopard before making your choice.

Under what circumstances should you switch to a Mac? Apple fans will tell you that the answer is obvious: If you want your system to crash less and run with fewer hassles and fewer security breaches, then buy a Mac. But that's the Mac user's world view.

If you're looking to make that decision from a PC user's world view, here's a more practical checklist.

Consider switching to a Mac if:

• You're not into PC gaming.
• You don't have any Windows-only applications you'd still like to run without emulation.
• You don't have a major PC hardware investment--such as expensive flat-screen LCD displays--to take advantage of.
• You don't have non-Mac applications that are required by your employer for working at home.

Most Windows users won't make that choice, however. For most of us, resistance is futile--and unnecessary and undesirable. Windows Vista is a truly great version of Windows with enormous benefits and will be a lot of fun to use.

LeBron James will tell you that upgrading to Windows Vista is a slam dunk. But before you upgrade the hard way--and on the wrong hardware and before the industry is fully ready to support it--take a moment and consider: What's the rush?