Ever the enterprising niche player, Amazon is now in the textbook selling and BUYING game. They will sell you the budding college student that new textbook at a discount for better than the school store AND they will buy your last semester stuff too boot. —

New Textbooks: Save up to 30% off the price of over 100,000 new textbooks. Shop for the latest test prep, reference, and study guides.

Used Textbooks: Save up to 90% off millions of used listings. All used textbook purchases are backed by our A-to-z Guarantee.

FREE Two-Day Shipping: Get FREE Two-Day Shipping for three months with a free trial of Amazon Prime™. Just add any eligible textbook to your cart to qualify. Sign up at checkout.

Amazon has been doing this for a couple of months but it just now caught my eye. What I love about this is that the textbook publishers really can’t complain. –

[Amazon] We want 50% off all your physics titles.
[Schuster] Gasp! Sputter? That’s outrageous. No way.
[Amazon] {taps on the keyboard ensuing} No problem. Now NONE of your titles appear in our website. {rep looking at watch…}
[Schuster] Well on second thought….

It warps the market. Personal story. Last year my daughter took a college computer course. The ‘textbook’ was a spiral bound customized product that included a USB thumb drive as a package. Total price $160. If you break it down the 512mb thumb was worth $20. Even at Best Buy prices. So in essence the book was going for $140 for a soft cover non-bound title. What a rip.

I hope Amazon is successful. The student needs a break. Quite honestly, college ePubs ought to be going for $9.99. A group of designated distinguished professors publish it. They split the proceeds as they see fit. The ePub is on Lulu for download. Updates are a $1. They sell a million a year. What’s not to like?

Linky.

Not wanting to rain on Microsoft’s parade, I’ll do it anyway. First let’s lead off with a positive note. I hope W7 is successful. The user base has been pretty much stuck on XP which will be reaching the decade mark here in 2 years or so. Especially after Vista proved such a disaster. But does W7 warrant the hype? –

Yet, by being designed to show only the performance differences of various hardware, typical benchmarks do not represent the total performance experience of end users. A game certainly appears smoother at 40 frames per second (FPS) than at 30 FPS, but the benchmark doesn’t indicate how long it takes to load a map. Rendering a 3D animation frame in 24 seconds certainly saves time over rendering it in 25 seconds, but again it doesn’t indicate how much time the user wastes starting the program or changing between menus.

To better gauge the user’s performance experience or how fast the system feels, load times must be captured. While we could certainly have used a stopwatch, an electronic timer is far more accurate, and benchmarks such as PCMark and SYSmark use them. These programs indicate that Windows 7 feels 7% to 10% faster than Windows Vista, and that’s enough to make us give the new OS the nod in spite of its lack of differentiation in most of our other test.

Editor’s Note: For even more data demonstrating Windows 7’s responsiveness versus Vista, check out our recent look into the Core i7 Mobile’s power consumption. In that piece, you’ll find complete runs of PCMark Vantage in Win7 and Vista with power sampled every two seconds. Clearly, Windows 7 is finishing the test faster, though it’s using more power in the process, too.

So Tom’s is indicated a slight speed improvement but at the expense of optimizing power management it appears. (Course Linux will do the same if you tweak it that way.) But the user still has to do the UAC mamba. The saving grace is at least the user can dial the UAC down. Remnants of DRM still exist as well. To tell you the truth I don’t know what Windows users are getting.

The more one looks at it, W7 looks somewhat like yesterday’s prime rib. Well built, but still has the bones of Vista sticking out. Easier to digest but still a little too pink for medium. Still as resource demanding as its predecessor but at least this time no surprises which is gravy. But to be honest the cook should not shout its praises too loud, after all it is still leftovers.

Linky.

Mosaic began investigating client virtualization and desktop Linux in 2004 as a possible cost-cutting exercise, and slowly began repurposing its old PCs as thin clients running remote instances of Novell SUSE Linux.

The Omaha-based organization switched from SUSE to Ubuntu last year and ramped up its project. Now, almost all of Mosaic’s 1,500 PCs in more than a dozen locations run Ubuntu 9.04 delivered over its network with desktop virtualization from NoMachine. Those PCs also run OpenOffice as a productivity suite, Firefox as the Web browser, open source GIMP for photo editing, Scribus for desktop publishing, GLabels for printing labels, and e-mail from Google. On the server side, most of its Web applications run on Apache, and it uses OpenLDAP for directory services and access management.

In all, Mosaic CIO Keith Courier estimates the company is saving $400,000 annually, on a total IT budget of about $2 million, by getting rid of most other proprietary software. The IT team also is three full-time employees smaller as a direct result of the move, partially because it no longer needs staff to manage Exchange servers.

Not a bad return for the change out to FOSS. No mention of conversion costs, which should be added to the cost benefit analysis. But regardless a nice result. I find it particularly interesting that they ditched the Exchange servers and staff. That is typically the last bastion of the ‘cold dead fingers’ of Microsoft. As an enabler Exchange has a lot going for it which is a reason that many moves to FOSS are not 100% at the enterprise level. Usually a move to Thunderbird as the IMAP client using a connector and Exchange stays in place on the back end.

More here.

Back in March, I wrote about a sick-joke of a limitation in Windows 7 Starter edition preventing users from changing the wallpaper. The limitation was imposed by the use of a technical licensing policy named ChangeDesktopBackground-Enabled and re-enforced by a SHA-256 hash of the static image, to prevent img0.jpg hot-swapping.

Given Windows 7 Starter’s applicability to the rising netbook market, it was presumed that Starter would branded by OEMs and/or mobile carriers (like Verizon) like any other Windows SKU. This is no longer a valid presumption.

Here’s the official scoop, from Microsoft:

In Windows Starter Edition, OEMs must not modify or replace the Windows-provided background for Windows Welcome, the logon screen, or the desktop.

Yikes.

How much sense does this make? From a technical perspective none. A wallpaper is wallpaper. Its almost like complaining about the color of the shell of the laptop. So what cents is Microsoft’s motivation? Might I suggest that it has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with marketing.

MS is attempting to make the Starter edition functional but just limited enough in certain ways to encourge upgrades. I figure what, about the 4th to 6th month after the official launch of W7 they will offer a discount coupon for an upgrade to W7 Professional or some such. It has to do with money pure and simple.

An the poor schmucks that buy a netbook that can only run Starter Ed are stuck.

Linky.
HT: The Register.

We have more than once suggested that Microsoft is between a rock and a hard place. They cannot year after year spend the billions for OS development while at the same time offer these OS’s with $13 margins for Netbooks. Any run through a product mix problem will show the fallacy of that effort –

Revenue for its third-fiscal quarter fell six per cent to $13.65bn the company said Thursday while net income plummeted 32 per cent to $2.98 bn. Earnings per share dropped 30 per cent to $0.33.

Microsoft’s client business took its biggest hit of all the groups - server and tools saw the only growth - with revenue dropping 16 per cent to $3.4bn and operating income dropping 19 per cent to $2.5bn. Revenue from OEMs fell 14 per cent as companies steered away from pricier versions of Windows Vista and shipped the growing netbook category of PCs with cheap versions of Windows XP. Netbooks remained at 10 per cent of total PC shipments for the quarter while sales of non-netbook PCs fell between 15 and 17 per cent.

And while Microsoft was not predicting a recovery this calendar year, it insisted that a planned wave of software updates would help Microsoft “out perform” once the economy does rebound. Microsoft doesn’t see business improving until at least the start of 2010, which covers the end of its fiscal 2009 and the start of fiscal 2010.

The key of course is that sentence in bold above. Microsoft is fiscally unsustainable in the low end of the PC product market. Regardless of whether that is Desktop or Netbook. Fact the only area where their price model is holding up is in the Laptop area. The bad news is that where 2 years ago 90% of laptops were above $400. That has dropped to 65% of the market this year. As the hardware price points drop the demand for the OS to be cheaper has to impinge on MS’s long term profitability.

Does that mean Linux gains. Well yes. But I also believe that OSX will gain even faster. But here is the really odd outlier — would it be possible that MS would abandon the desktop? If the numbers continue to be negative in that market I don’t see how they would continue to pour money into that side of the business. Likely scenario? Not in the next 5 years. The controlling factor would be if the desktop stayed unprofitable for them.

More here.

Its a rather longish piece from NYT. But there are several good note in there worth pointing out. –

The premium that consumers have paid for the privilege of having a portable computer has shrunk greatly or, in some cases, disappeared — thanks to advances in semiconductor technology, increased competition and other factors. This month, AT&T introduced into two test markets, Atlanta and Philadelphia, a $99.99 mini-laptop for customers who commit to a two-year data plan. Other carriers may experiment with offering free mini-laptops to subscribers.

In 2004, only 2 percent of notebook computers sold in the United States cost less than $800. In 2008, some 35 percent did, according to data collected by the NPD Group, another research firm.

Prices for desktops, which averaged about half the price of notebooks five years ago, had less room to fall, but indeed they have. At Fry’s, an eMachines system, made by a unit of Acer and having 3 gigabytes of memory and a 320-gigabyte hard drive, sells for $379.99. It isn’t even the least expensive one on the shelf. Hewlett-Packard, under its Compaq brand, offers a slower model with less memory for only $269.99.

If I had to quibble, most of the IT research firms had indicated that portables reached volume parity with desktops the latter half of 2007. It will be interesting to see how AT&T makes out with their test marketing of a subsidized netbook plan. As prices keep dropping it could portend a shift in how computing is purchased. (with our usual caveats its a stupid idea….)

More here.

At CES it appears that an all in one PC is the cats meow. Lenovo (pictured below), HP and several others are attempting to sell these suckers.

Permit me to point out why these units will be lukewarm –

• Its the component stereo problem. If you have a service problem then the whole unit has to go in for repair. That vs say if its a monitor that goes you just put in a new monitor and reboot.
• Upgrade is locked out.
• You are paying a premium for bling.
• If you need expansion better hope you can do so via USB.

If one already has the display why pay the extra to replace it? In a US market where 90% of the homes already have PC’s this will be a replacement or hand-me-down play. But to be fair there are two niches where this may make sense. In high density call centers it saves horizontal real estate that is at a premium. The college bound dorm rat where again space will be at a premium. Personally I’ll keep buying beige boxes and assembling them myself.

Linky.

Tom’s Hardware is a site I make a regular part of my reading cycle. Every once in a while they come up with some startling analysis. Like this piece. –

et’s get back to the key issue: does Atom make any sense for desktop-like PCs? It does, but only if you have to be very conservative on cost, and only if your requirements are clearly defined. Atom-based nettops or budget PC solutions are very affordable, but they don’t perform really well and you hardly have any upgrade possibilities. If you can afford spending $100 more for the motherboard and a decent processor
, you’ll get a solution that offers similar idle power, but much better performance and efficiency, along with upgrade options.

The core point being that the differece between the Atom and the low end of the Core Duo line at the quiet state is 20w. That’s equivalent to a night light. Unless you intend to use the setup as a server that is on 24×7 you won’t even notice it on your power bill.

Tom’s Article.

I am somewhat skeptical myself. Even being a Linux fanboy. But if you believe ChannelWeb That’s what they are pitching. Click the image to see the presentation –

Distros like Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 9 are catching up with Vista but I don’t think they have surpassed it yet. Areas where Linux is starting to show fruit? Ubuntu 8.10 has a much better interface for WiFi network management. Ubuntu and Fedora are DRM free. Installs of both distros are easier than Vista from bare metal. With the inclusion of upstart, even recognition of new devices and events have improved in Linux. Though it is no where as through as Vista for obvious reasons.

Could Linux surpass Windows? Its possible. We have to see what Win7 really brings to the table. If it ends up being Vista-lite Microsoft is in trouble.

HT: ChannelWeb

Yes we have covered this topic before. But it goes without saying that right now in the market building is probably one of the better values than buying a prebuilt system. You can apply some customization and upgrades as you wish and not be hampered by whatever Dell just swung a deal on from a suppler.

Linky.