At the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week, Dell announced an effort they’re calling Project Sputnik. The basic idea was Dell’s latest and greatest XPS hardware pre-provisioned with developer infrastructure: a developer laptop, in other words. As Barton George discussed, this was in part – full disclosure – an idea of mine. One of the questions we’re fielding from the media following this announcement is why? What’s the point of a developer laptop? I cannot speak for Dell on their motivations or the project logistics, but there are two primary reasons I believe a developer laptop program broadly makes sense.

Most obviously, there’s the success of Apple. It’s easy to forget now with the iPad generating Fortune 500 revenue by itself, but developers played a not unimportant role in Apple’s ascent. To be sure, most of the credit belongs to Apple’s relentless execution, in the areas of aesthetics, industrial design, usability and even supply chain management. But developers had their part to play in Jobs’ comeback story.

Developer populations proved no more immune to Apple hardware’s charms than the average consumer. Even hard core open source developers couldn’t resist the siren song of ‘It Just Works’ married to a Unix kernel, and the result was more Macs at OSCON every year. Developers were more than just another market for Apple, however, because as a population they were disproportionately valuable: alone among customer segments, they had the unique ability to make Apple’s platform more compelling. Developers, after all, build for themselves as much as any external audience, and the result was a rich ecosystem of developer oriented tooling and applications – tooling and applications that were by and large more compelling than Linux and Windows alternatives. For Apple, it was the equivalent of renting out an apartment at a premium and having the occupants leave behind a home theater, new kitchens and bathrooms and a kegorator.

Given the importance of developers, then, it seemed logical that hardware vendors would attempt to specifically court them. But none did. As far as I’m aware, Dell is the only major hardware vendor delivering a machine – even in this experimental fashion – that is optimized for developers. Which seems as odd as it is unfortunate.

The second reason developer laptops make sense is the challenge of building developer environments. I’m not an active developer anymore – my work in R is about as close as I get these days – but I am regularly required to spin up environments for various languages from JavaScript to Ruby. Whether it’s to execute provided scripts, test new tooling or simply play with a new language, it happens frequently. In general, this is much more difficult than it needs to be. Part of it is basic questions. For a given programming language, am I better off finding packages, or leveraging runtime package management systems like CRAN, npm or rubygems? What is a reasonably current version of the libraries? And so on.

There is endless documentation for this on the web, of course. But where do I find it for each new community? How much of it is current and maintained? And who is behind the individual configurations? If I wanted to replicate Flip Kromer’s Ruby setup for example, or Ryan Dahl’s JavaScript environment, or Tim Bray’s Android configuration, could I do that? For the most part, the answer to that question is no. Or at least, not easily. Which is unfortunate, because as an industry, we’ve gotten very, very good at machine configuration. Tools like Chef and Puppet or Ubuntu’s Juju are excellent at scripting typical configuration tasks in an eminently repeatable fashion. Why aren’t these tools more commonly applied to desktop environments, then? And why aren’t there canonical – note the small C – images available for individual development environments?

One of our most important roles at RedMonk is to serve as an advocate for developers, who we believe are the most important single constituency in technology. For me, then, the question isn’t “why a developer laptop?” but “why not a developer laptop?” If we can help vendors understand how important developers are and that it’s worth making it easier for developers to set up their environments and share these configurations with each other, that seems like a win here. It will be interesting to see whether the market agrees.

Disclosure: Canonical and Dell are both RedMonk customers, while Apple is not.

It is true that predictions for the new year are best made before it begins. And predictions regarding consumer technology trends specifically should certainly be made prior to CES. All fair complaints.

Which I will now ignore.

The following are my predictions for the upcoming calendar year. They are informed by historical context and built off my research, quantitative data that’s available to me externally or via RedMonk Analytics, and the conversations I’ve had over the past twelve months, both digital and otherwise. They cover a wide range of subjects because we at RedMonk do.

With respect to their accuracy, as with all predictions these are best considered for what they are: educated guesses. For context, last year’s predictions graded out as approximately 66% correct.

On to the predictions.

Browsers

Firefox Will Cede First Place to Chrome, But Not Without a Fight

From Screenshots

We built RedMonk Analytics to track developer behaviors, and what it is telling us at present is that Firefox and IE both are losing share amongst developer populations to Chrome. Chrome is highly performant, but also benefiting from significant marketing investment (e.g. billboards, site sponsorships) and related product development (e.g. Chrome Web Store). The conclusion from this data is that Chrome will eclipse Firefox from a marketshare standpoint (speaking specifically of developers, not the wider market where Firefox is sustainably ahead), likely within a quarter.

But having tested the 4.0 version of Firefox for several weeks, it’s clear that Mozilla’s browser is responding to the evolutionary threat. Firefox 4.0 is faster and less stale from a user interface perspective, but more importantly differentiated via features like Panorama.

The 4.0 release is unlikely to be sufficient in preventing Chrome from assuming the top spot among developer browser usage, but it is likely to arrest the free fall. Expect Chrome and Firefox to be heavily competitive in 2011.

Cloud

PaaS Adoption Will Begin to Show Traction, With Little Impact on IaaS Traction

The conventional wisdom asserts that, at present, the majority of cloud revenue derives from IaaS offerings over PaaS alternatives. The conventional wisdom is correct. Infrastructure-as-a-Service has benefited from its relative simplicity and by virtue of its familiarity: IaaS offerings more closely resemble traditional infrastructure than PaaS. Platform-as-a-Service adoption, for its part, has been slowed by a variety of factors from legitimate concerns regarding platform lock-in to vendor design decisions. The result has been a marketplace that heavily advantages IaaS.

This will not invert in 2011, but the wide disparity in relative adoption will narrow as PaaS adoption climbs. With a multiple year track record of of anemic adoption, PaaS vendors will adapt to customer demand or they will lose ground. Specifically, expect PaaS vendors to borrow from Heroku’s model [coverage], offering platforms assembled from standard or near standard componentry.

Assuming that PaaS will never be successful because it has yet to be successful is illogical. Historical precedent demonstrates adequately that some markets take longer to establish than others (e.g. SaaS). Watch PaaS in 2011.

Interestingly, the rise in PaaS adoption will have little impact on Amazon. Most obviously because its traction has become, to some extent, self-fulfilling, but also because the vendor has anticipated demand and added platform-like features to its infrastructure offerings. With cloud being far from a zero sum market, it’s reasonable to expect Amazon and select PaaS vendors to both be successful.

Developers

Talent Shortages Will Continue

It is counterintuitive to speak of talent shortages when the overall labor market hovers near 10% unemployment, but the data supports no other conclusion. Employers that we speak with, large and small, are desperate for people. RedMonk Analytics query histories regularly feature searches on named individuals, a frequent precursor to recruiting efforts. Our @monkjobs account, for its part, has more positions that we can reasonably post.

It is unclear where this demand will lead. Fred Wilson is correct when he argues that the fundamentals of this hiring war are unsustainable in the longer term. But even should the hypercompetitive Silicon Valley market experience a major correction, it is probable that wider industry trends will remain biased towards talent, assuming the economy does not substantially recede in the next twelve months.

What this means, then, is that employers will be forced to be creative about talent acquisition. Besides traditional benefits such as high end workstations and stock options, employers may be forced to consider allowing employees to release their work as open source, granting them access to data not available elsewhere or giving them the right to work relatively autonomously within the larger organization. In many cases, it may involve leaving positions unfilled in favor of consumption of externally produced software. Other counterintuitive approaches to easing hiring pains include publishing guidelines on your proprietary engineering approaches (e.g. Hadoop), which affords some of the benefits of open source software – namely academic familiarity – without the attendant risks to competitive advantage.

Expect hiring to be a challenge in 2011. If identifying and employing qualified resources proved challenging during the worst recession since 1930, it is unlikely to become less so as global economies gradually recover.

Frameworks

Node.js Will Continue its Growth Trajectory

Of all of the technologies we tracked in 2010, none generated the same interest that node.js did. Using RedMonk Analytics to rank the incoming developer queries from January 1st, 2010 to December 31st, 2010, node took the top two spots on our list. Nor is our experience unique: Google Trends reflects the same spike in traffic.

We expect this to continue. Node.js is not just another framework; it’s a fundamentally different way of approaching challenges like concurrency that limit even moderately sized properties today. Couple this with the ascendancy of Javascript and the aggressive evolution of the V8 stack and we see no reason to expect Node.js to plateau.

Data

Much of what I would predict in this space has already been said, better. O’Reilly’s Edd Dumbill, for example, expects data marketplaces to come of age in 2011. Given that we expected data to emerge as a revenue generating asset in 2010, we concur. And both Edd and Hilary Mason predict substantial data related job volume expansion, and thus a tight labor market. Again, we are in agreement. But here are two predictions for what we expect to see in data.

Firms Will Increasingly Seek to Leverage the Data They Generate

With the cost of storage falling in response to declining memory prices as well as the introduction of commodity hardware and software, organizations have greater capacity for telemetry capture. They also have an increased ability, via open source software, to leverage this data in new ways. Better and more accessible big data technology is enabling entirely new lines of inquiry. As a result data which was once considered a byproduct becomes an asset, economically speaking.

Predictably, this is causing friction between business and IT. Business is more cognizant of the value of their data by the day, but traditional IT departments which are less familiar with the emerging class of big data tools are hitting the brakes on putting it to work. Patience with this tactic is exhaustible, however. Lines of business will have their results, whether they have to go outside the organization or not.

We will undoubtedly see more public data made available, as Hilary predicts, and more private data sold, as Edd anticipates. But we will also see organizations become introspective in search of internal, high value data.

Hadoop Will Become the MySQL of Big Data

This is already arguably true, but by the end of 2011 there will be no argument. Much as MySQL emerged as the dominant player among many candidates for the lightweight backend to websites large and small, Hadoop is becoming the de facto standard platform for Big Data. While Hadoop’s MapReduce and distributed filesystem implementations are already effectively the standard outside of proprietary alternatives, its extensibility is what will prolong its longevity. Hive and Pig bring SQL-like interaction to the store, while projects like Hbase bring to Hadoop GFS-like key-value store capabilities.

There are undoubtedly shinier proprietary technologies (e.g. Dremel, Percolate), but Hadoop’s market presence will be cemented in 2011.

Hardware

• Desktop:
  Workstations Will Make a Comeback:
  For all the talk of machine availability driven by the cloud, most of the developers I know – particularly those who play in big data spaces – are rotating away from MacBook Pro-style portable hardware to workstation-class hardware. When you’re operating on large datasets or virtualizing multiple operating systems, the combination of outsized display, fast processor and large memory footprint makes life easier. Laptops will not die out, in spite of the coming tablet wave, but they will be less primary in their role moving forward.
• Servers:
  ARM Will Emerge as a Server Player:
  It may seem obvious in light of the news that Windows will run on ARM and Nvidia’s Project Denver, but the growing importance of ARM has been apparent for months now. Speak with hardware suppliers, and they will all privately admit that they’re experimenting with ARM based server designs. Software development trends, meanwhile, reflect this. Observe the spike in ARM discussions on the primary Linux development mailing list in 2010.

  From Screenshots

  Doubtless a majority of the conversations center around mobile architecture and design, as Android and other projects have driven Linux on ARM into consumer markets in volume. But the attraction of the platform, most particularly in power consumption, don’t end in mobile.

  It’s not clear to me that Nvidia’s ambitions of realizing ARM markets in consumer desktops will meet with success, but the evidence for a significant server presence is there.

• Tablets:
  Tablets are a Real Market:
  There’s speculation in some quarters that tablets are a passing phenomenon. I do not subscribe to this view. Tablets are, at present, seriously limited by input mechanisms. But they excel in other areas. The Motorola Xoom tablet, as an example, is claiming 10 hours of battery life displaying video. More important is the anecdotal evidence that machine usage patterns seem to be changing. If workstations become more common and use of laptops as workstations declines, there’s a natural market for lightweight, portable machines. Particularly for those who need to demo things.

Mobile

Challenges of Native Development Will Drive Interest in HTML5 and Hybrid Approaches

The inevitable product of multiple successful mobile development platforms is a fragmented development landscape. Further complicating the development process is the challenge of navigating competing marketplace options. Enterprises privately express frustration with the status quo, and even developers are questioning the efficiencies of reimplementing the same application for multiple platforms. As a result, expect cross platform approaches such as HTML5 and hybrid-compilation solutions such as PhoneGap to attract more interest as the challenges of supporting the Android tablets that will begin arriving in Q1, Windows Mobile, and so on become more acute.

NoSQL

There are many relevant trends in the NoSQL space worth discussing, but two predictions that can be made with a reasonable degree of confidence are:

• The NoSQL Marketplace Will Experience Consolidation:
  We’re in the beginning stages of a cycle which is likely to output a handful of successful projects. Much as the relational database market cannot support an infinite number of comparable projects, the NoSQL space will begin to contract from its 2010 height as technically credible but not popularly adopted projects are supplanted by competitors.
• NoSQL Will Look More Like Pro-SQL:
  One of my original objections to the NoSQL term was its implicit rejection of a widespread, well understood technology in SQL. The limitations imposed by this designation have been clear to a variety of projects, which in turn have led to the reintegration of features common to traditional RDBMS systems but typically omitted from first generation NoSQL stores. These include indexing and, ironically, SQL access. NoSQL stores will remain differentiated from relational alternatives moving forward, but less so than they were in years past. We’ve seen this trend play out, before, remember, with MySQL. The enterprise tension requires projects to walk a fine line [coverage].

Open Source

1. Open Source of Non-Strategic Infrastructure Assets Will Increase
   Historically, businesses that developed software have considered it a differentiating asset, one worth protecting. Over time, many of these in house development efforts have given way to packaged applications. An insurance company, for example, is unlikely to develop Customer Relationship Management software that’s superior to what an open market can provide. While this is widely understood and accepted, open source software is not yet viewed in the same context.

   This is changing. Intelligent enterprises are increasingly aware of the lack of differentiation that infrastructure software provides, and are therefore rethinking the economic model for software development. If software is non-differentiating, the benefits to making it publicly available may easily offset the cost of maintaining it internally [coverage]. Such is the logic that has led to the release of projects like Cassandra, Hadoop, and Hbase.

   Expect to see more of this moving forward, as the benefits to open development become more obvious and the anticipated downside proves to be less than substantial.

2. Forking: How Development Gets Done
   Development, historically, has been a serial activity. A developer passes changes to another developer who adds to the codebase and so on. The advent of version control systems such as Subversion made this process more efficient, but didn’t really alter the dynamics. Distributed source code management technologies such as Git or Mercurial, however, enable a concurrent, parallel development that has more in common with bacterial replication than centralized version control.

   Networked implementation of these toolsets such as Github have fundamentally and permanently altered the nature of development [coverage]. This approach has become so common, in fact, that where once open source projects would do everything in their power to discourage forking, today their websites actively incite it (see below).
   
   

   In 2011, then, forking won’t be a curiosity: it’s how development will get done. Most frequently on network-backed implementations on Github.

3. Ubuntu is the New SuSE
   It was six years ago last November that we first speculated on the possibility of IBM supporting its applications on a Debian based distribution. Last year, this became reality for two reasons. First, because Canonical was more aggressive in embracing greenfield opportunities on the cloud than its competitors, who were myopically focused on their customers; customers who were collectively well behind the curve. But just as important has been the end of Novell [coverage]. For all of Attachmate’s promises to give SuSE the support it needs to continue servicing its install base, the market has already largely reacted away from the acquired entity in favor of, primarily, Canonical’s Ubuntu.

   Red Hat will maintain a firm grip on the commercial Linux distribution lead as a result of its consistent performance and excellent account control, but Ubuntu will emerge as the de facto alternative at the expense of SuSE.

Programming Languages

James stated this perfectly: at one point, learning Javascript meant you were not a serious programmer. At this point, not learning the language makes the same statement. Javascript is resurgent, and buoyed by the V8 runtime and adjacent frameworks like Node.js will expand its footprint on the server.

Bonus

The mistake often made with Dropbox is its categorization as merely another synchronization application. All of the quantitative data available points to a larger opportunity. Alexa, for example, shows Dropbox’s growth trajectory.

From Screenshots

Google Trends, meanwhile, shows a more pronounced 2010 spike in interest:

From Screenshots

This growth is driven by a variety of needs. The most basic is simple backup or cross-platform file availability. But underlying most of these behaviors is a more subtle realization: Dropbox is a virtual, cross-platform filesystem for a substantial and influential population. Whether you use a MacBook and an iPad, Windows and a Blackberry, or Ubuntu and Android, as I do, your filesystem is available. This is particularly important for device types – smartphones and tablets, primarily – that don’t natively expose their own filesystem. Dropbox doesn’t message this, but features like the shareable links for music are an indication of the possibilities to an abstraction of the filesystem that not only spans devices but that can be exposed via a browser.

The net of this growth and its drivers is that Dropbox will become an attractive acquisition target. Expect Apple, Google and Microsoft to be among the interested parties. Acquisition scenarios are likely to be challenging, however, not just because of the potential competition for the asset, but because Dropbox is relatively successful in monetizing usage. The data available does not support prognostications of a specific exit, then, but it does indicate that those discussions will accelerate in the coming year.

I didn’t want a tablet. No, seriously, look it up. It has never been at all clear that the form factor will work for me. And yet here I am, in the market for a tablet. What happened?

A number of things. It didn’t help that Lenovo killed off the device that I actually wanted, the Skylight, which was essentially a tablet-like piece of hardware in a netbook form factor. Not that I can blame them, not when its chip manufacturer Qualcomm is running around admitting that Apple’s iPad obsoleted smartbooks before they even arrived. Probably because I wanted one, the smartbook category died a quiet, unacknowledged death. The reason I wanted one, however, remained.

The simple fact is that a modern laptop is more machine than I need while traveling. Even my underpowered Thinkpad X301 and its ultra-low-voltage chip represents a surplus of computing capacity. What do I really need while I’m on the road, after all? A browser, a text editor, a terminal application and some form of MLB At Bat, be it native or Flash. For that I just don’t need much machine. I wouldn’t mind the excess so much if the costs weren’t so high. But for the power that a laptop affords, you trade weight, battery life and size. I’m aware that the new Macs, for one, can get better than five hours to a charge. But I’m also aware that five hours does not a full day make, and that even the MacBook Air tips the scales at three pounds.

What I want is a machine I can carry sans briefcase on a day trip to New York or Boston. More specifically, this:

• Battery Life:
  I don’t want to have to walk into a room at a conference and look for a charger. Actually, I don’t even want to bring a charger on a day trip. Which means I need seven or eight hours to a charge, at a minimum.
• Connectivity:
  Wifi, obviously. Ideally, I’d like 3G (EV-DO/HSPA) or 4G (LTE) connectivity on a non-AT&T network, simply because I can already turn the Nexus One into an AT&T hotspot so an alternate carrier would give me more options.
• Cost:
  Anything more than the iPad is too much, given the quality of that device. Less is better, obviously.
• Display:
  Basically, it needs to be at least twice the size of my Nexus One (3.7″). There are just some things it’s easier to do on a full sized – or nearly so – display.
• Size:
  This one I’m unsure about. Would the Galaxy Tab’s 7″ display be sufficient? Or would 10″ be better? Probably I’ll have to use them to find out; I hope the carriers make their tablets available under the same 30 day return policies as their handsets.
• Weight:
  Can’t weigh much more than a pound. The Galaxy Tab’s .84 lbs is just about right.

What about the software, you ask? Funny thing: it’s juts not the priority for me – I’m far more concerned with the hardware. Any of Android, Chrome OS or webOS would probably be acceptable as a tablet operating system. For me, anyway. Google’s Director of Mobile Products, Hugo Barra, was unequivocal in his belief that Android isn’t ready for that device type, which while technically true probably isn’t going to help Samsung’s marketing efforts.

Even the iPad’s iOS would be workable were it not for the fact that it’s tethered to iTunes, and thus to a Mac or Windows desktop. I’m excluding primarily desktop oriented operating systems such as Windows or Ubuntu because they’re not quite there for these form factors, in my opinion.

Add it up, and I’m probably getting a tablet, in spite of their unfortunate lack of a keyboard. The question is which one? The answer to that is as much timing as anything else.

For reasons that I cannot fathom, we are nine months post-the iPad announcement without a credible alternative on the market. This, in spite of the availability of obviously workable alternative operating environments in Android and webOS, and possibly Chrome OS. Whether the massive latency is due to difficulties in design, market factors and uncertainties, or something else, the fact is that the would-be challengers to the iPad are massively late to market. To the point that many have not only missed the Back to School rush, but might not make the holiday shopping season either. In theory, we’ll see Samsung shipping its 7″ Galaxy Tab on a variety of carriers in the near future, but most of the rumored arrival dates for tablets are a quarter to two quarters away.

It’s baffling.

The choice before me then is to wait, or do what I did with the iPhone: tread water using the Apple product until such time as its competitors are sufficiently compelling. The majority of the private feedback I’ve received about tablets encourages me to wait: those who’ve seen or held the forthcoming iPad competitors consistently say nice things about them. But that means putting up with a laptop during one of the two busiest portions of the year for me in terms of travel. Suboptimal.

What do you think? Do you have interest in a tablet?

It’s true. I really did encourage Cote to think about getting an iPad. Not because I’m a fan of the machine; I haven’t seen fit to purchase one myself. But I do think that the iPad, and the inevitable wave of devices that will follow it, herald a real change in the computers we travel with.

Look around the room at an analyst conference and you’ll see this at work, already. Desks will be littered with machines, and you’ll see a few netbooks sprinkled in with the laptops. Ever so often, the former will actually outnumber the latter.

Why? Because analysts don’t really need much computing power on the road. And the more you travel, the more you come to resent the extra pound or two that even ultralight laptops represent, not to mention the comparatively terrible battery life.

My primary laptop at this point is a Thinkpad X301, which while underpowered with an ultra-low voltage chip that runs at 1.6 Ghz, will still run Ubuntu and a separate instance of Windows. More and more, though, I’m asking myself why – and whether – even this minimal computing power is necessary.

I’m fairly confident that I could get away with nothing more than a tablet while I’m on the road. Between the T7500 workstation that Dell sent me for the office and outboard storage and compute from Amazon, it’s not clear to me what the benefits are to traveling with a real computer rather than a jumped up phone.

There are doubtless drawbacks to traveling light. One that Cote and I discussed was our tendency to work on slides up to the last minute, which is probably more of a challenge on a tablet style device. As are, I’m sure, other tasks yet to be identified. The question is whether or not these are sufficient to justify a full laptop.

I suspect that, at least for me, the answer is no: that I no longer require a full machine. That the X301 is, for better and for worse, my last laptop for a while.

Considering the following:

• The overwhelming majority of my day to day applications – document editing, email, IM – are cloud native (coverage), meaning that they are operating system independent. The work that isn’t – like the testing that we do in virtualized images – doesn’t need to be done while I’m on the road.
• The battery life on my X301 is average, at best. With a substantially dimmed screen, I can make the two batteries (I swapped out the DVD drive for a second) last around four hours. Contrast this with the 10+ hours you can expect from an ARM driven tablet/smartbook.
• The weight difference is quite substantial. My X301 weighs in at around 3.5 pounds with the second battery. A Skylight, Lenovo’s forthcoming smartbook entry, would shave better than a pound and a half off of that at 1.95 pounds. An iPad would better even that, with the 3G model tipping the scales at 1.6 pounds. If you don’t travel, a pound and a half doesn’t sound like much. But if you travel, you know that’s a big difference, and a big advantage.
• Most of the sub-netbook class of devices are going to have dramatically revamped interfaces, and within a year or two all will probably be touch enabled. I’m unconvinced this is an advantage relative to a physical keyboard, but in all other areas of usability it’s likely to be an improvement. If I’m doing simple things like using a browser, touchscreens can offer a much better experience.

I’m having a hard time building the case for anything but a tablet or smartbook for a travel machine.

But which device would I pick, if I do indeed go that route? Apple’s iPad is the obvious choice for many at the moment, but I’m not much of an Apple fanboy and that device is going to have quite a bit of competition soon. Google and Verizon have their own Android-based response coming, Dell’s reportedly got a spate of machines on the way, and HP may actually have some plans for the billion plus dollars they spent on Palm (coverage). There’s also the oft-forgotten Chrome OS (coverage) lurking just over the horizon. It’s very interesting to me, as an aside, how dominant ARM has become in this space, virtually overnight.

Anyway, the market’s clearly not going to lack for choice. What I will actually choose is open to question right now, but if you’re looking for my business, I suggest you talk to MLB about getting a version of At Bat for your platform. Nothing is more likely to increase your chances than letting me watch or listen to the Red Sox while I’m on the road.

Whatever I end up doing, however, change is coming. Mobile is the new desktop, and the stakes are high.

The more time I spend crunching numbers on even moderately sized datasets, the more frustrating my current hardware setup becomes. Things are desperate enough that my Thinkpad X301, which maxes out at a mere 4 GB of RAM, is becoming a better performing alternative to my aging, dying Sun Ultra 20 workstation. How sad is that? But at least I have a schedule to address that situation: a crazy tricked out workstation is – at least in theory – on the way.

With my workstation needs in all likelihood addressed, the big remaining question for me is what’s at the opposite end of the spectrum. Back in December, I discussed the fact that I was transitioning from a general purpose laptop only model to one characterized by more specialized hardware. Big, monstrous workstation for analytics, virtualization, testing and the like, complemented with something much smaller and lighter for all the travel. Something netbook or smartbook-like, in other words.

Something that probably won’t run most or all of the applications I’m used to relying on, with the notable exception of a browser.

When I first began looking at Moblin a while back, people told me that it was nice, but that I’d miss the standard application set of my operating system of choice, Ubuntu. Interestingly, the trend in the space is actually towards even fewer applications than Moblin allows; the Lenovo Skylight, one intriguing option, is preloaded not with a standard application set, but with widgets running on top of a thin Linux film. Chrome OS, of course, goes even further, dispensing with the idea of applications entirely and pushing a browser only experience.

True, there’s the iPad, but that’s more or less a non-starter because I require a physical keyboard to be even remotely useful. The touchscreen keyboard works on my iPhone because that’s a device I use for reading, not writing: whatever I end up taking on the road will need to be equally comfortable with both.

The good news is that my application needs are actually relatively few. I have no intention to ask a netbook to handle a general purpose laptop’s workload. Things like a media player (Banshee) or virtualization platform (VirtualBox) that I use now are certainly not must haves in a mobile device. I’m more reluctant, however, to give up Emacs. Mark Pilgrim is aggressively agnostic when it come to the choice of text editors (not to mention frustrated with the recent crops of new writing tools), saying:

Picking the right text editor will not make you a better writer. Writing will make you a better writer.

Which is true. But I’m not looking for a text editor to make me a better writer. I’m looking for a text editor to make the task of writing more enjoyable. Easier. Simpler. Less complicated. And so on. Emacs does that for me, mostly, though I need to spend some time looking up how to make writing HTML natively simpler. Google Docs, on the other hand, does match the Emacs authoring experience.

Could be I’ll find a browser based text editor I like as much or more than Emacs: stranger things have certainly happened. But I’m not counting on it, and I’m not looking forward to it. Ymacs is interesting, but not the same. Bespin doesn’t have Etherpad‘s zero latency. And Etherpad is just plain going away, unless you want to host your own Scala codebase.

The other missing piece for me will be a terminal (no, I don’t use Emacs for this, generally). True, on something like Chrome OS that abstracts the underlying operating system away, it’s kind of pointless for local work. But I’ll still need to spend a fair amount of time adminstering remote servers. And do I really want to SSH into my servers from a third party, browser based SaaS terminal service. No I do not.

None of this means that I’ll miss the applications enough to forgo the hardware form factor. The chances are excellent that by the end of the second quarter at the latest, you’ll spot me at a conference touting some kind of new, lightweight device. But the transition is going to be interesting. While I don’t use all that many applications in general, the ones I use, I use a lot.

So get to work recreating Emacs and a terminal in the browser, will you? You’ve got until the end of Q2.

The last time a laptop wasn’t my primary computer was 1999. Or maybe 2000, I can’t really remember. Either way, it’s been a while. At the time the machines were bricklike, had appalling 800×600 displays and measured battery life by tens of minutes.

And I loved them. Would ask what laptops were issued to employees in interviews, even.

Apart from a few Dell bricks along the way, and the occasional flirtation with alternatives, I’ve been all Thinkpad, all the time. The X23 screen cracked and gave way to an X40, which was temporarily replaced by loaned X60s and X300s because compiles took me six hours, and in September 2008 a shiny new X301 arrived. Which, while the processor is a bit anemic and the battery underwhelming, has been a really excellent machine. The best I’ve owned, easily.

It could also be the last laptop I buy.

Like a lot of people these days, a subset of my computing needs are now serviced by a smartphone. An iPhone, more specifically. Checking email, getting directions, Twitter, listening to Red Sox games: all of this, the iPhone – or an Android, if I was to go that route – can handle. Which leaves writing, browsing the non-mobile websites, watching video, downloading music and a million other jobs better suited to a full size machine. But what kind of full size machine?

The appeal of a laptop, for me, has always been the single experience. Everything’s in one place, and I only have to get used to one keyboard and mouse setup. I’ve had desktops, usually: some even had nice large and multi-monitor setups. But moving from laptop to workstation and back was frustrating, because I have no interest in having files, applications, and configurations asymmetrically distributed across machines. So while the workstations were useful for certain heavy compute or visually intensive tasks, I still worked mostly off my Thinkpads.

The gradual transition from desktop applications to web based alternatives, loosened the grip the laptop had on me, but then I’d hop on the workstation and my bash completions wouldn’t be there. Or my emacs theme. And so on: the friction in moving from machine to machine was still substantial.

Enter Dropbox. Synchronization’s not a new invention, even on the desktop: I’ve been using rsync based tools for years. But Dropbox makes synchronization absolutely painless, and throws copies up into the cloud as a bonus. All of a sudden, then, my client side files and settings are pushed around to my various machines, seamlessly. With no effort or intervention required. Seriously, it’s magic.

Hence the question I’ve been asking myself: with my settings and files available, then, and most of my applications browser based, what’s the point of a laptop, again? Sure, I need a mobile keyboard for travel, but wouldn’t a netbook suffice? Or actually, be a superior option? What if I, for the sake of argument, went from a laptop configuration to a netbook/workstation combination? Lighter machine on the road, more horsepower while I’m in the office? Both of which can be acquired for less than the cost of a single high end notebook? Sign me up.

The transition to using strictly the workstation at the office, begun a month or so ago, has been uneventful. I’ll need to replace it sometime in the next year – the 4 GB max on the RAM is tough and the Opteron inside barely outruns my laptop – but the 30/24 dual monitor setup has not been difficult to adjust to. Nor has, for obvious reasons, the keyboard. What’s less clear is what I do about a netbook? I’ve gotten a variety of recommendations, from the Dell Mini to a few Acer machines. But the Chromium machines are yet to arrive, as is the fabled Thinkpad netbook. I’m going to try out a bunch of them in the months head, but honestly, I’m waiting for the holy grail of mobile computing: sunlight readable screens. Pixel Qi says they’ll be going into mass production in Q1, which means that we would see their screens on netbooks sometime in Q2. Just in time for boat season, in other words.

Have I really bought my last laptop? I’m not sure. But that, by itself, says a lot. It says it’s the end of an era.

Assuming that people actually use it for piracy at all, which I personally haven’t seen. But hey, there are better than two million of us using the software these days, so statistically it’s probable that there are some bad apples.

For the rest of us, Dropbox is a drop dead simple, cross-platform application synchronization client. One that Just Works. Now, before you start, I know what you’re going to say. You’re about to say this:

For any advanced techie, the three main reasons (Backup, sync, sharing) for using DropBox are irrelevant. For ordinary users: sure! It sounds like a great solution.

Let me explain.

I don’t think anyone with valuable data would trust their only backup with an external “in-the-cloud” source. On top of that, most people’s upload capacity is severely limited.

Syncing is accomplished with rsync or a network share on your home network. Most geeks will SSH into their home computers, etc. Sharing via drop box cannot be any better than a personally managed web server. GIT/SVN on your server offers much more than drop box can. On the other hand, maybe I just like to hack and get my hands dirty creating my own solutions.

To which I would reply just as JesseAldridge did:

Have you tried DropBox? The app is so damn easy to use it’s ridiculous. Sure there are other ways to do it, but the absolute lack of headaches makes Dropbox way better than those other techniques you suggested.

No hyperbole involved. Seriously. Dropbox is stupid easy. I still employ rsync and related tools for odd jobs here and there, but Dropbox is so low effort that I honestly have to justify not using it. You can replicate the functionality, but you’re not going to match the user experience, let alone the speed, on your own. Watching the changes you make on one machine instantly reflected on another with zero intervention on your part is magical, I assure you.

Of the three core services, I don’t really use sharing, so I can’t comment on that. I’m sure it’s useful. Dropbox’s backup and synchronization, on the other hand, are fundamental enablers of my day to day technology usage. First, the simple stuff.

Backup

Backup is probably the most straightforward use case for Dropbox. You can take files or directories and either drop them into your Dropbox folder, or create symlinks out to them from there. Here’s how to do that. Items that I back up – using the term loosely, as there’s no versioning, etc applied: my Ubuntu repositories list (etc/apt/sources.list), a list of the packages I have installed locally, the directory containing my writing, a subset of my music, my Tomboy notes, and more.

But to be honest, backup just isn’t that interesting. Lots of services can do that. What’s compelling about Dropbox, really, is the synchronization element.

Synchronization

This is where things get cool. If you’re wicked geeky, that is. It’s nice, of course, to have web based backups of your files: it was a godsend the last time I fatally damaged my .emacs file. But it’s nicer to have the various configuration files that make your desktop your desktop seamlessly pushed to every machine you use. Which, in my case, include a Windows 7 laptop, an Ubuntu laptop and workstation, a Mac Mini and an iPhone.

To explain what I mean, here’s how you create and share a .bash_aliases file with all of your bash equipped machines. The following, please note, assumes that you have a primary workstation and secondary machines, as I do.

• If you have a .bash_aliases file already, great, keep going. If not, create one now on your primary workstation with something like nano ~/.bash_aliases (note: you have to activate this by uncommenting the three lines beginning if [ -f ~/.bash_aliases ]; then in the ~/.bashrc file).
• Change to your Dropbox directory: cd Dropbox.
• Create a symlink to the .bash_aliases file: ln -s ~/.bash_aliases .bash_aliases.
• Assuming that your Dropbox instance is active and that your network connections are good, it should only take a few seconds to populate that file on all secondary machines.
• Moving to your secondary machine, change to the home directory: cd.
• Create a symlink to the .bash_aliases file in the Dropbox directory on the secondary machine: ln -s ~/Dropbox/.bash_aliases .bash_aliases.

Congrats, you’re done. What you did was create a single real .bash_aliases file that gets symlinked first into Dropbox and then into the ~/ directory on the target machine. In practical terms, it means that any aliases you create on the master will henceforth execute perfectly on the secondary machines.

I use this for my .emacs and the requisite *.els, my .fonts directory, my Tomboy notes, and with the failure of Weave I’m even contemplating doing it to my .mozilla directory. And when it comes time to purchase a new machine, Dropbox will be the grease that gets me moved in and up and running quickly.

Security

Am I concerned, as some are, with security? Marginally. I don’t use it to store anything particularly sensitive, although I think that’s just common sense. The Dropbox folks have done a better job of late, I think, articulating just how they go about protecting your data.

What Would I Like to See?

Frankly, less of Dropbox. And I mean that in a good way. I’d love to see Dropbox baked directly into applications. Media players and photo managers would be logical first candidates, but how many applications would not benefit from fast, real-time file system awareness and synchronization?

Until then, however, I’m a very happy, paying customer of the service. It’s certainly come a long way from its days as a candidate for Y Combinator, and I wish it well in future.

With the twin caveats that I’m an Ubuntu user and the admission that I have yet to actually hold a device of any type actually running Google’s Android software, I have to be honest: all this talk of Android netbooks baffles me.

Not the part of getting it to run on the platforms, of course: the appeal of the challenge is obvious, even to me. No, what I can’t quite grasp is this: what need would Android fulfill in the netbook market that couldn’t be better and more efficiently served by alternate platforms. Why anyone would want one, in other words, and favor it over either Linux or Windows? And I suppose I should throw OS X in there as well, as I’m told that it will run on the MSI hardware.

No question, Android is an interesting project from virtually any angle. The Linux base layer gives it an appeal to certain audiences, the cleanroom JVM reimplementation is fascinating for any number of reasons, and its market significance cannot be overstated…as long as we’re talking about handsets. But I must be missing something that makes it suitable for the Netbook market, because from here it just looks like a poor idea.

Why?

It’s all about the applications. As usual.

Look, I’m no big fan of rich clients, but to paraphrase Jason Priestley’s character from Tombstone: “I’m sorry, we got to have some apps.” Android’s got a browser, true. But it’s not Firefox. And while handset users are used to not having any choice in the matter (if I could use something besides mobile Safari, which crashes like that’s its job, I would), desktop users are. If I’m going to be using a desktop – and especially if I’m going to rely heavily on the browser as an application platform – I’d like it to be one that I choose.

Why doesn’t Android – and why won’t it – have Firefox? Because Android applications have to run on top of Dalvik, Android’s JVM implementation. So until you reimplement Firefox on top of a JVM or find a way to bypass it to access the underlying operating system, no Firefox. Which means you can count out OpenOffice, too. And Pidgin. Probably Skype as well. And so on. Virtually every staple application Linux or Windows users are used to using on their desktops will be unavailable.

To be sure, there will be Android alternatives available. Just as many of the Linux applications are alternatives to their Windows cousins (think OpenOffice). But who’s going to be building for Android on netbooks, at least initially? My guess is that the bulk of Android development will be focused on the handset market, not netbooks. And while I admire some of the iPhone application implementations, I certainly wouldn’t use them over a version designed for my Mac Mini.

Application volume would seem to be a massive issue for Android based netbooks. There are tens of thousands of applications available for anyone running, say, Ubuntu Netbook Remix. How many are there for Android? Dozens? Hundreds? And that’s just looking at the Linux apps: imagine what the Windows crowd might think. Who’ve become accustomed to using one of the myriad of applications available for that platform.

Ultimately, the question I can’t answer is this: if you had to choose between:

a.) Linux and the C, C++, Java, Python, etc applications of your choice and
b.) Linux and the Dalvik applications of your choice

Why would you pick b? Or put more simply, what precisely does the reimplemented JVM buy you on the client side? What about Android will make Java desktops succeed where they’ve failed so often before? And no, user experience doesn’t count: you don’t need a JVM to have a good UX.

Anyway, if you’ve got an answer to that question, I’d love to hear it, because as I said, I’m kind of at a loss.

For the first time in nearly four years, I have a new laptop. It’s the one with the stickers on it. Feel free to send more of those, incidentally.

After being patient and not purchasing an X61s last summer to replace my aging and beat up X40 (only a 40 GB hard drive, if you can believe that), as was originally planned, I’ve got a brand new machine with everything I could want. 128 GB SSD, 13.3″ 1440×900 LED backlit screen, dual batteries and so on in a package that weighs slightly more than three pounds (with the extra battery, otherwise ~3).

To be honest, it’s probably not in my self-interest to review this machine. The folks from Lenovo have historically been very generous with loaner machines in return for detailed reviews and feedback; what if they were to discover that I’d do these reviews anyway? But several of you have asked about the machine, and I live but to serve. So this one’s for you; let’s just keep it on the down low.

The Hardware

• Battery Life:
  There are two problems with me estimating this for you: 1.) I’ve only had the laptop for 24 hours or so, and 2.) I actually have two batteries, complicating the assessment.

  Windows Vista, which did a better job of handling the two batteries seamlessly (Linux sees both, but will not calculate aggregated life expectation), guessed anywhere between 5 and 8 hours on two fully charged batteries. Other reviews I’ve seen indicate it’s closer to the former than the latter, but we’ll see.

• DisplayPort:
  It’s got one, in addition to the standard VGA. I’m told I’ll care more about that in a year or two; for now, it doesn’t mean much to me.
• DVD Player/Burner:
  Didn’t get one this time around. As mentioned on Twitter, I only used the DVD player on the X300 two or three times in five plus months, so replacing it with a second battery that I could use daily was an easy call.
• Finish/Frame/Etc:
  It’s nearly identical to the X300. On the plus side, the frame is exceptionally stiff, while on the minus the matte finish is like glue for skin oils. Overall, the fit and finish is just what you’d expect from a Thinkpad; exceptional. They may not be aren’t sexy, but they are well made.
• GPS:
  Haven’t tested this on Linux; on Windows, it failed to track because I was inside and had no line of sight to the satellites that power it.
• Memory:
  I’ve got 3 GB on board, and I believe there’s room for one more – though that was the maximum available at order time. Could be wrong on that, though.
• Processor:
  The machine is, frankly, a bit underpowered thanks to the Ultra Low Voltage processor they’ve crammed into the narrow casing. Its two cores run at a clock speed of 1.4 Ghz, which is almost a full stop down from even the X200. But the performance hasn’t been impacted in my brief usage; compiles took what they should, applications run with no perceptible impact, and so on. I’ll be interested to see what happens when I set up VMWare, but for now the processor is adequate.
• Slots:
  What I miss most relative to other Thinkpads I’ve owned is a card reader. If you own a digital camera, as I do, the ability to pull a card and insert it directly in the machine is big. Also, the machine has no PCMCIA slot, so what’s on board is what you’ve got.
• Screen:
  Maybe the laptop’s best feature. Although the same size as the MacBook Air’s, the X301′s LCD owns the higher resolution. The result is more screen real estate in the same footprint, one that in no way shape or form is an eyechart. The resolution provides enough space to run Firefox and have a third of the screen left for Twhirl, Pidgin, or whatever.
• Speakers:
  They’re tremendous. Maybe not compared to a desktop replacement, but against any other ultralight or borderline ultralight, they’re exceptional. Which, given my music habits, is a good thing.
• Trackpoint/Touchpad:
  I hate touchpads with the white hot intensity of a thousand suns, which is why Michael Dolan’s reminder that it can be toggled off in the BIOS is worth a beer the next time I see him. Alex and some of the other Mac people I know might be right that I could adjust to the touchpad given time and better software, but it’s academic for now.
• Weight/Size:
  The machine, as mentioned, weighs in between 3 and 4 pounds with the second battery (near as I can determine, anyway), and the dimensions are likely nearer the 14″ T series models than its 12″ X brethren, thanks to the sizable bezel. Which I’m fine with, personally, but if you’re used to a 12 inch model it’s an adjustment. And if you’re looking for a netbook, I recommend buying a netbook, not this.
• WWAN:
  Lenovo offers both AT&T and Verizon cards for the machine; I chose the former because AT&T gets five bars of reception here in Maine, while Verizon gets one – if you walk up on the hill behind the house. Also, because I have one AT&T data account and zero Verizon data accounts. Under Vista, the signup process was painful because a.) it has to be done over the phone, and b.) I wanted to connect the on board card with an existing account, rather than create a new one. Making that happen took two calls to AT&T and another two to Lenovo. All of the support people were friendly, if ill equipped to handle my request.

  If you’re trying to convert from an existing card rather than sign up fresh, here’s what you need to do: get the IMEI and SIM numbers for the new card from the Lenovo Broadband Connectivity application, then call AT&T at 866.246.4852. Tell them the phone # associated with your data card to look up the account, then request they add the new hardware to the account using that data.

  That done, reboot the machine and fire up the Broadband Connectivity application or whatever Lenovo calls it, and see if it says the card is “Activated.” If yes, ignore the fact that it will tell you that you still have to sign up (don’t ask me, I don’t know). Instead go to “Access Connections,” and use that (seriously convoluted) UI to attempt a connection using HSPA. It worked here, and no, before you ask, I am not a fan of the ThinkVantage applications.

  As for the card on Linux, well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

Windows

I don’t have much feedback on Windows as I ran it for less than 24 hours all told, but Vista seemed to run without much effort. At no point, did it drag or hang, except when coming back from suspend. Boot time, however, was slow, even with the SSD.

Linux

Ok, this is what a high percentage of you people probably came here for. Herewith, then, the Linux on X301 report. One very important note before I get there, however.

For my distribution, I chose Ubuntu Hardy. Many of you will be doubtless be tempted to run Intrepid, or OpenSuSE 11.1, or something similarly new and cutting edge. I highly recommend that you not do this. Should you ignore that advice, you may risk damaging your ethernet card permanently, which – seeing as it’s integrated into the motherboard – is suboptimal. This bug describes the problem; basically, a rogue driver may overwrite the firmware of the device, rendering it inoperable. Worse, the tools that Intel provides to repair it (IABUTIL.EXE), will only worsen the problem by making the device invisible to the PCI bus. In case it’s not obvious, the fix for this is sending your laptop to Lenovo for a motherboard replacement. Seriously.

If you decide to proceed with Intrepid knowing this, I would follow the advice Chris Jones gave me, which is to hide your LAN chip from the OS by deactivating it in the BIOS.

But until that bug is fixed, I recommend you do what I did and stick with Hardy. Everything will work, with three exceptions – two important and one trivial – which I’ll get to.

On to the breakdown:

What Works

Pretty much everything. Unlike the X300, sound works out of the box (if you experience any problems, go to System:Preferences:Sound and turn off autodetect, picking ALSA instead). The display is picked up correctly, ethernet works, suspend works, as does Bluetooth and the Thinkpad keys (volume up/down/mute and the keyboard light).

What Mostly Works

As mentioned above, GNOME Power sees both batteries, and drains them serially with no issues (like a loss of power) whatsoever. It cannot, however, provide an estimated runtime based on the capacity of both batteries as could (if very imperfectly) Vista. As nearly as I can determine, it will estimate the runtime for each battery individually. This may be less of an issue once I’ve had the laptop longer and know better what to expect, but for now this is less than ideal.

What Doesn’t Work

• Camera:
  This may be a transient issue, as I experienced no issues whatsoever with the camera on the X300, but attempting to take a picture using the on board camera using Cheese locked up the entire UI. Haven’t looked at fixing this at all; mostly because I don’t really care that much about the camera.
• Wifi:
  As of kernel 2.6.27 – the standard kernel issued for Intrepid (which again, I recommend you AVOID for now) – the Intel 5100 drivers are in mainline. Hardy, however, is still on 2.6.24 and the 5100 drivers are not available out of the box. As a result, the wireless will not work on install. The good news is that there’s an easy fix.

  I followed theburningor’s simple, excellent instructions here and had wifi up and running first try. For the link averse, the build process is as follows:
  

  1. sudo apt-get install build-essential
  2. wget http://intellinuxwireless.org/iwlwifi/downloads/iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11.tar.gz
  3. tar -xzvf iwlwifi*
  4. sudo cp iwlwifi-5000-ucode-5.4.A.11/iwlwifi-5000-1.ucode /lib/firmware
  5. wget http://wireless.kernel.org/download/compat-wireless-2.6/compat-wireless-old.tar.bz2
  6. bunzip2 compat-wireless-old.tar.bz2
  7. tar xf compat-wireless-old.tar
  8. cd compat-wireless-2.6-old/

  
  You need to make sure at that point that the CONFIG_IWL5000 switch in config.mk is marked y – mine was. Once that’s done, just do the following:
  

  1. make
  2. sudo make install
  3. sudo make unload
  4. sudo make load

  Reboot, and you're good to go. Wireless works.

• WWAN:
  Update: This one’s been solved: see the instructions here.

  This one, unfortunately, may be a significant problem. Because I'm stupid and didn't check, I assumed that Lenovo would be continuing to use the Sierra based WWAN cards that were present in the X300. These are popular amongst open source types because they are relatively easy to get running under Ubuntu (I've done it a few times) and the drivers are already in kernel.

  As you might have deduced, Lenovo's made a change. I wish Lenovo had stuck with Sierra, and I wish they published the Linux compatibility of the various hardware components, but ultimately it's my fault for not checking. In my defense, I have been waiting for a new machine for nearly four years; you can understand if I got a bit carried away at order time.

  The card in the X301 is an Ericsson F3507g, which appears to not only have no in kernel driver - but to have never been successfully activated under Linux (please correct if I'm wrong. seriously.). This datasheet (PDF warning) says there is a Linux driver, but I'll be damned if I can find it. Lenovo's support site lists nothing but the Windows bits.

  This leaves me with two potential options longer term; 1.) attempt to run the Windows driver under something like ndiswrapper, 2.) reinstall a Windows partition just for the purposes of running the WWAN card. I'm fired up about neither option, to be honest.

  But maybe someone who runs across this has a solution for me. That's the hope, anyway.

Also not working under either Linux or Windows is the BIOS setting to power USB devices while the machine is in low power states; a minor trifle, perhaps, but it would be nice to be able to charge my iPhone while the machine was suspended.

One other item of interest: while I don't recall it being mentioned at purchase time, the BIOS mentions a WIMAX radio. Whether or not it's on board is undetermined as yet, but it's something to watch for.

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