Plugging into the cloud

History of netbooks Cheap, light-weight netbooks didn't exist long ago. In fact, amongst the first ever cheap, light-weight laptops were built by the non-profit organization One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). OLPC called their laptop the XO and OLPC realised that they needed to build a laptop that would be child-friendly, simple in design, rugged and cheap to be able to distribute them to school children in developing countries.

One Laptop Per Child have used components from Red Hat's Fedora Core 6 version of the Linux operating system and they've built the XO's user interface using the Python programming language.

The XO's applications include a web browser built on Xulrunner, the run-time environment used by the Firefox browser; a simple document viewer based upon Evince; the AbiWord word processor, an RSS reader, an email client, chat client, VOIP client; a journal; a multimedia authoring and playback environment; a music composition toolkit, graphics toolkits, games, a shell and a debugger. Libraries and plugins used by OLPC include Xul, GTK+, Matchbox, Sugar, Pango, ATK, Cairo, X Window System, Avahi and gstreamer.

Intel followed OLPC by developing the US $200 Classmate PC, which is now in its second generation. They look like toys but pack all the same features of a laptop and they were coined as sub-par laptops, or "subnotebooks". Although subnotebooks were fully intended to be marketed in developing countries, they heralded the way for the netbooks in today's retail markets. And this is very noticeable when one looks at the specifications of the Classmate PC.

The Clamshell Classmate PC has a memory of 512MB or 1GB, storage space of 8GB, a Windows XP or Linux operating system and it's under 2kg in weight.

Considering that netbbooks' lower specs make cost-effective computing units, it makes sense then for users and businesses on a budget to plug into the cloud with netbooks. But what are the pros and cons with this combo? Netbook pros and cons:

Size

Netbooks are lightweight and extremely portable. But this could also be the Achilles heel of the netbook. Netbook touch pads can be annoyingly small to use, and you can end up feeling like a giant when using your computer. Working on a netbook for eight hours could be a test of endurance owing to the netbook's small size.

Price

Netbooks are generally affordable, and you can get good value for money. As Window's tech guru Jason Saundalkar wrote about in a recent netbook group test, you can get the MSI Wind U 100, which has a 80 GB hard drive and 1 GB RAM, for $490.

SSD

Most netbooks use solid state drives (SSD) as opposed to traditional hard disks. SSDs are faster than hard drives, use less power and weigh less than the traditional hard disk. The problem is that, at the moment, SSD is not great when it comes to storage space, which means that accessing big server space in the cloud with your netbook becomes ever more important if you want true value out of your netbook.

Operating system

Most users prefer having Windows XP on a netbook because of its familiarity. Netbooks loaded with Linux are much cheaper, but for most people, it takes a bit of time to learn how to use Linux. A process as simple as installing a new program, while not difficult, is completely different than it is on a Windows XP machine and it would require the use of the command line in Linux. External device support under Linux is not the best either, even for basic tasks such as playing back a DVD (many netbooks also lack built-in optical drives).

Cloud computing pitfalls:

Ok, so you've got yourself a netbook and now you want to use the internet to good use by accessing "the cloud". Before you scurry along, there are a number of security concerns to bear in mind. User Access

With cloud computing, your confidential data will be available on a server that you or your business will have very little if no control over. An unauthorised user can access your information and potentially cause havoc. Many cloud computing services have security measures in place, but there is always that risk factor.

Downtime

If you become reliant upon the cloud for your day-to-day tasks, it's almost inevitable that the cloud will burst at some point, and you will experience server downtime. Many cloud computing hosts will tell you that they have 99.9% uptime, but the 0.1% downtime could occur at a critical period and many servers experience more than just a point one percent downtime during any given year.

Data location

You won't know where in the world your data is stored. Because the internet is really just a group of servers connected to each other, your data could be stored anywhere in the world from Saudi Arabia to South Africa.

Availability

Your data on a server could ‘magically disappear'. In theory it is said you don't have to worry about your data disappearing when using a cloud provider. It should be easy for these providers to mirror your data in various locations. But is this guarantee enough to provide peace of mind against a system crash?