Are We Doubtful to the Lilliputians?
But given its form factor, which is too much similar to a traditional laptop: flip-top clamshell look, LCD or LED screens, small keyboard, touchpad as a mouse (with one or two exceptions), running on batteries - it is meant to be a computer on the go. Given that netbooks run operating systems also found in desktops and traditional laptops, it is also meant for those usual computing tasks: word processing, spreadsheets, maybe a little casual gaming. But Intel says the netbook is not powerful enough to run applications such as photo editors, video editors, audio mixers, HD media players, and even programming environments.
The question now is that: why do customers still opt for these little laptops?
It has been long a time that the most powerful desktop computers that existed 10 years ago have the same power as these netbooks. If you would run those PCs today, would you think that these computers are downright unusable?
Netbookation.com says this on the netbooks of 2010 in comparison of desktops of 1999:
Is the real problem that software is getting too big, bloated and inefficient? Do we really need animated characters to search our hard drives for data? Do we need graphics of paper flying across the screen every time we do a copy? Once those "features" are built into the operating system they take up disk space even if they are turned off. What can grade school kids do with 160 gigabytes of disk space besides fill it with videos? But is that why people bought desktops in 1999?Have you used those usual benchmarking software such as PCMark05 or 3DMark06, or the like, on netbooks and concluded that these small things aren't powerful enough?
The same website gave a page which states that netbooks are still powerful enough. They used a benchmarking software that BYTE Magazine used in 1983. It's not even software actually, in today's view. It's just a C code for the Sieve of Eratosthenes, a method of finding primes from an array of integers of size n.
/***********************************************************
* *
* Sieve.c - Functional portion of sieve program from *
* Jan 1983 Byte magazine that finds prime numbers *
* using the Sieve of Eratosthenese. *
* *
***********************************************************/
#include
#define true 1
#define false 0
#define size 8190
char flags[size + 1];
int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
int i,prime,k,count,iter;
for(iter = 1; iter <= 100000; iter++)/* loop 100,000 times */
{
count=0; /* prime counter */
for(i = 0; i <= size; i++) /* set all flags true */
flags[i] = true;
for(i = 0; i <= size; i++)
{
if(flags[i]) /* found a prime */
{ /* twice index + 3 */
prime = i + i + 3;
/* print primes to test but comment out to run benchmark */
/* printf("\n%d",prime); */
for(k=i+prime; k<=size; k+=prime)
flags[k] = false; /* kill all multiples */
count++; /* primes found */
}
}
}
}
If you are to compile this 20+ line of C code on a netbook and run it - you will find out that it is THREE TIMES FASTER than the most powerful computer way back in 1983.
Why do experts - IT experts, business experts - discourage netbooks?
Processing power? Possibly, because Intel discourages its customers to use their Atom-based PCs in using resource-heavy applications. But until what time, when software will be now based in the cloud?
Screen and keyboard size? Quite. Small sizes mean some difficulties, productivity wise. Yet the small form is a plus for the netbook's portability.
Price? Never. Due to the recent global financial crisis, netbooks have become an alternative to traditional laptops due to its lower price. As productions for bigger laptops have dwindled, and while customers wanted something that will fit their meager budget, netbooks came to their rescue for their computing needs. I highly encourage netbooks, and if you are willing to get the most out of it, go on.
I'm dedicating a research for my ENG 10 (Writing Scientific and Technical Papers) class, as I will study about what are the factors that arise when customer opt for a netbook in my city.
In the upcoming post, I will share more on how I wanted a netbook rather than a laptop.
KENNETH
