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 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); and it doesn’t remember Wi-Fi passwords after shut-down (though it does retain them while in sleep mode). [It does remember passwords: you just have to change a setting in the Properties dialog — apologies for mistake.]
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 minute.

Peter Sayer, of IDG News Service reports on BECTA’s considered opinion of Microsoft Vista:

British schools should not upgrade to Microsoft’s Vista operating system and Office 2007 productivity suite, the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) said in a report on the software. It also supported use of the international standard ODF (Open Document Format) for storing files.
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Schools might consider using Vista if rolling out all-new infrastructure, but should not introduce it piecemeal alongside other versions of Windows, or upgrade older machines, said the agency, which is responsible for advising British schools and colleges on their IT use.

“We have not had sight of any evidence to support the argument that the costs of upgrading to Vista in educational establishments would be offset by appropriate benefit,” it said.

The cost of upgrading Britain’s schools to Vista would be £175 million ($350 million), around a third of which would go to Microsoft, the agency said. The rest would go on deployment costs, testing and hardware upgrades, it said.

Even that sum would not be enough to purchase graphics cards capable of displaying Windows Aero Graphics, although that’s no great loss because “there was no significant benefit to schools and colleges in running Aero,” it said.

As for Office 2007, “there remains no compelling case for deployment,” the agency said in its full report, published this week.

The report (pdf) is available from here.

The relevant bit of the Executive Summary reads:

The key recommendations emanating from this final report (all of which we cover in further detail in the report) are as follows.

We advise that upgrading existing ICT systems to Vista is not recommended and that mixed Windows-based operating-system environments should  be avoided.

We believe that Vista can be considered where new institution-wide ICT provision is being planned

Recognising the limitations regarding Microsoft’s implementation of the ODF standard and the limited uptake of Microsoft’s new Office 2007 file format, we recommend that in the short term users should continue to use the older Microsoft binary formats (such as .doc)

Schools and colleges should make students, teachers and parents aware of the range of ‘free-to-use’ products (such as office productivity suites) that are available, and how to access and use them.

The ICT industry should be pro-active in facilitating easier access to ‘free-to- use’ office productivity software.

Note: BECTA is the government-funded organisation which advises the UK educational sector on ICT.

There have been lots of interesting complaints recently from users of Microsoft and Apple operating systems about the latest releases of these systems. The nicest take on the Vista problem is this satirical review which treats Windows XP as an ‘upgrade’ to Vista. “I have finally decided to take the plunge”, it begins. “Last night I upgraded my Vista desktop machine to Windows XP, and this afternoon I will be doing the same to my laptop.”

The results, needless to say, are positive. On ’system performance’, for example,

Well, here there appears to be no contest. Windows XP is both faster and far more responsive. I no longer have the obligatory 1-minute system lock that happens whenever I log onto Vista, instead I can run applications as soon as I can click their icons. Not only that, but the applications start snappily too, rather than all waiting in some “I’m still starting up the OS” queue for 30 seconds or so before all starting at once. In addition, I have noticed that when performing complex tasks such as viewing large images, or updating large spreadsheets, instead of the whole operating system locking down for several seconds, it now just locks down the application I am working on, allowing me to Alt-Tab to another application and work on that. I am thrilled that Microsoft decided to add preemptive multitasking to their operating system, and for this reason alone I would strongly urge you to upgrade to XP. With the amount of multi-core processors around today using a multitasking operating system like XP makes a world of difference.

In addition, numerous tasks that take a long time on Vista have been greatly speeded up. File copies are snappy and responsive, and pressing the Cancel button halfway through actually cancels the copy almost immediately, as opposed to having it lock up, and sometimes lock up the PC. In addition, a lot of work has gone into making deletes far more efficient, it appears that no more does the operating system scan every file to be deleted prior to wiping it, and instead just wipes out the NTFS trees involved, a far quicker operation. On my Vista machine I would often see a dialog box from some of my video codec’s pop up when deleting, moving or copying videos. No more, now all that is involved is a byte transfer or NTFS operation.

Automatic Updates has also gone through a performance facelift in that it no longer hogs your bandwidth when you’re surfing, a nice touch.

Disappointment with Vista has echoes over in the Apple world too. The latest release of OS X (codenamed Leopard) has not been an unalloyed success. For example, Charles Arthur, the Technology Editor of the Guardian, wrote an interesting piece on his experiences with the new system. In a nutshell, they have made him consider ‘upgrading’ to the older version of OS X.

Now, Leopard has some nice cosmetic improvements. But my system sometimes freezes inexplicably after I’ve disconnected it from a network or after it wakes up. It’s unpredictably slower. Sure, my computer is three years old, but Leopard should run fast enough on it without occasionally pausing for what seems like geological epochs. And whereas five years ago I could go weeks between reboots, now I’m lucky if it’s days. These weren’t problems I had with the previous incarnation, Tiger; hence my consideration of a downgrade, like so many users. Other people have found all sorts of problems, not just the security flaws or frustrating behaviour of the Spaces virtual desktops program…

Interestingly, I haven’t seen comparable cases of Ubuntu users being cheesed off by the latest version of the software. Now why could that be, I wonder?

Techcrunch covers the latest beta release of Office Live, called Workspace, which is Microsoft’s attempt at an online collaborative environment. Think Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Anyway, they weren’t impressed:

The big surprise is that Office Live Workspace includes a decent online word processor called Web Notes that is comparable in most ways to other Web-based alternatives. It is fast, supports a handful of different fonts, font sizes, and formatting. Nothing too fancy, but enough to write a memo, take notes, or even write a draft of an article. There is no spellcheck, though. And—its Achilles’ Heel—you cannot export a document from Web Notes to your desktop. Anything you write in Web Notes is trapped inside Office Live.

If Web Notes feels like an afterthought, that is because it is. The way you are supposed to write documents in Office Live is with Microsoft Word. Once you upload a Word document to Office Live, it automatically syncs every time you make a change on your desktop. So you edit in Word, and all the changes are reflected in the version on Office Live. (Goodbye, Live Documents). Office Live is a hosted version of Sharepoint. Unfortunately, this works only if you have a Windows machine running XP or Vista, with Office XP or a later version. The syncing does not work on a Mac at all.

Microsoft are still light years behind the pack when it comes to Office 2.0. When you consider just how good the offering from Zoho is, it becomes pretty embarrassing…

BBC NEWS report…

The first official order for the so-called “$100 laptop” has been placed by the government of Uruguay.

The South American country has bought 100,000 of the machines for schoolchildren aged six to 12.

A further 300,000 may be purchased to provide a machine for every child in the country by 2009.

The order will be a boost for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) organisation behind the project which has admitted difficulties getting concrete orders.

“I have to some degree underestimated the difference between shaking the hand of a head of state and having a cheque written,” Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the organisation, recently told the New York Times.

This is interesting:

The UK computer agency Becta is advising schools not to sign licensing agreements with Microsoft because of alleged anti-competitive practices.

The government agency has complained to the Office of Fair Trading.

It says talks with Microsoft have not resolved “fundamental concerns” about academic licensing and about Office 2007 and the Vista operating system…

It’s no so long ago since many of us in the Open Source community regarded BECTA as a captive of Microsoft.   I hope this isn’t just a temporary aberration.

Nicholas Carr, a well known commentator on IT and business, has written an  interesting blog post.  The future, he argues, can be expressed in a simple equation: Google plus Apple.

The future of personal computing was divulged by Mr. Eric Schmidt, the chief executive officer of Google, on March 23 of this year during an interview with Wired’s Fred Vogelstein. Vogelstein asked Schmidt why he had recently joined Apple’s board of directors, and Schmidt responded:

“Google’s architectural model around broadband and services and so forth plays very well to the powerful devices and services Apple is doing. We’re a perfect back end to the problems that they’re trying to solve. And they have very good judgment on user interface and people. They don’t have this supercomputer I’m talking about, which is the data centers.”

At this very moment, in a building somewhere in Silicon Valley, I guarantee you that a team of engineers from Google and Apple are designing a set of devices that, hooked up as terminals to Google’s “supercomputer,” will define how we use computers in the future. You can see various threads of this system today - in Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, its dot-mac service, its iLife and iWork applications as well as in Google’s Apps suite and advertising system, not to mention its vast data-center network. What this team is doing right now is weaving all those threads together into what will be, for most of us, the fabric of cloud computing. (This is so big, you need at least two metaphors to describe it.)

Telegraph report:

Since the ruling [by the European Court of First Instance], Microsoft’s chief executive Steve Ballmer has been in almost daily contact with Neelie Kroes, the European commissioner for competition policy.

Following these intensive discussions, Microsoft has agreed to change the way it provides rivals with information that allows them to write programmes that mesh with Windows.

Microsoft will now make information available to open source developers, with licensing terms that allow every recipient of the resulting software to copy, modify and redistribute it in accordance with the open source business model.

In a statement today Ms Kroes said: “The Commission’s 2004 decision set a clear precedent against which Microsoft’s anti-competitive behaviour could be judged.

“Now that Microsoft has agreed to comply with the 2004 decision, the company can no longer use the market power derived from its 95pc share of the PC operating system market and 80pc profit margin to harm consumers by killing competition on any market it wishes.”

Microsoft has agreed to slash its requested royalties for a worldwide licence, including patents from 5.95pc to 0.4pc - less than 7pc of the royalty originally claimed.

The software group has also abandoned its demand for a royalty of 2.98pc of revenues from software developed using licensed information…

We’re sorry that LWM disappeared from the Net for a few days. It would be nice to be able to blame technical difficulties, but the real explanation is administrative incompetence on the part of the management! Sincere apologies for downtime.

Dell sells PCs pre-loaded with Ubuntu, but you have to dig deep into its website to find them.

The Register adds this observation:

Dell, it seems, is reluctant to big up its Linux offerings. At every opportunity it reminds potential customers that open source is NOT Microsoft. About Ubuntu it says: “The main thing to note is that when you choose open source you don’t get a Windows operating system.”

It also goes on about the benefits and disadvantages of open source. According to Dell, it’s good for the community spirit created among all those friendly chaps out there holding hands and sharing code, but bad because it’s not compatible with lots of other software.

You might be forgiven for expecting the same even-handed approach from Dell to its Vista-based machines. But no such luck, instead it simply loudly bangs the Microsoft drum.

All very well, you might say. After all, Microsoft is the leading global provider of operating systems and does have an all-important Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) agreement with Dell.

But Dell appears to be missing one significant point; it claimed to have listened to its customers who strongly voted in favour of Linux via the computer giant’s IdeaStorm user forum.

A phonecall to the firm’s customer support helpdesk, however, seemed to underline Dell’s commitment to all things Microsoft.

A Dell support person, let’s call her Pat, told us that it was very unusual for anyone to request a machine that doesn’t come loaded with Vista or XP. She reckoned that “out of 500 customers only one person wants Linux.”

Pat was very keen to push Microsoft as the recommended operating system of choice for all Dell systems, even after we pointed out our desire for a Linux-based PC.

In fact, the request appeared rare enough to warrant her having to check the system before confirming with confidence what Linux operating system was on offer: in this case it would have been an Insprion 530 loaded with Red Hat available for just £20 more than the same machine with Vista inside.

And, during the entire conversation, Pat failed to once mention Dell’s Ubuntu offerings.