If there has been any optimism about the hardware business of late, it has mostly focused on tablets, which IDC has forecast will outsell portable PCs for the first time this year.But if tablets are all that consumers want, the news hasn't made it to Google's Chromebook division, which continues to market what are essentially ordinary low-cost notebooks, albeit ones running an unusual OS.We're seeing tremendous growth, without a doubt – massive, massive growth, Chromebook product development manager Caesar Sengupta told Bloomberg.Part of that growth is doubtless due to Google's recent retail push. Chromebooks are now available in Best Buy, Fry's, Office Depot, OfficeMax, and Walmart stores in the US, as well as from online retailers Amazon and TigerDirect. In all, the devices are now on sale in nearly 7,000 retail outlets.
The Chromebook line is expanding, as well. Acer, HP, Lenovo, and Samsung all manufacture Chromebooks today, with Asus expected to follow suit in the second half of the year. Google even markets its own branded model, the upmarket Chromebook Pixel, with a 2560-by-1700 touchscreen that puts even Apple's vaunted Retina Displays to shame.The Pixel retails for $1,300, but it's the exception. Each of the other Chromebook models sells for less than $500 in the US, with the cheapest, the Acer C7, going for just $199.Those low prices have helped keep the devices at the front of Amazon's laptop best-seller list, where the Samsung Chromebook has remained in the top 100 for the last 259 days (and counting).Google has also marketed Chromebooks aggressively to the education market, with special discount programs and management tools designed for school administrators. Lenovo's Chromebook product is targeted specifically at education.
NPD's Baker said all this points to a bright future for the Chocolate Factory's boot-to-browser devices, with the market for low-cost laptops projected to grow by more than 10 per cent in 2013.The entire computing ecosystem is undergoing some radical change, and I think Google has its part in that change, Baker said. Canonical top man Mark Shuttleworth says that Mir, the company's ground-up replacement for the X Window System graphics stack, is almost complete, and that the technology will ship with the next version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution in October.Canonical announced the Mir project in March to much controversy, particularly from backers of Wayland, an alternative X-replacement project that has gained the support of several other Linux distros.But in a blog post on Monday, Shuttleworth defended Canonical's decision to pass on Wayland and forge its own path, saying Mir has delivered on expectations.
We take a lot of flack for every decision we make in Ubuntu, because so many people are affected, Shuttleworth wrote. But I remind the team – failure to act when action is needed is as much a failure as taking the wrong kind of action might be.In the case of Mir, Shuttleworth said Canonical was motivated by a desire to develop a display system that ran consistently and efficiently across a wide range of hardware, in keeping with the company's goal of developing Ubuntu as an OS for everything from PCs and notebooks to smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs.I believe Mir will be able to evolve faster than the competition, in part because of the key differences and choices made now, the multimillionaire and erstwhile astronaut wrote. For example, rather than a rigid protocol that can only be extended, Mir provides an API. The implementation of that API can evolve over time for better performance, while it's difficult to do the same if you are speaking a fixed protocol.Mir operates at a layer below X, Shuttleworth said, and that while applications can talk directly to Mir, existing X applications can also run via an X implementation that runs on top of the Mir server. In fact, he said, the patches required to allow today's X servers to run on Mir amount to fewer than 500 lines of code.
Shuttleworth said he has been running Mir on his own laptop, an all-Intel Dell XPS, for two weeks, and that barring a few minor glitches, the system feels smoother than it did before.As such, he said, Mir will be integrated into Ubuntu 13.10 Saucy Salamander – the next version of the OS, due to arrive in October – just as soon as our QA and release teams are happy that it's ready for very widespread testing. Review There’s no doubt that smartphones are getting more robust. Both the Sony Xperia Z and the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S4 Active boast IP57-rated resistance to dust and water intrusion which is handy if you take your phone to the beach or the pool and come over all clumsy.Drop either of them out of a third-floor window on a building site, or drive over them in a Range Rover, though, and it will all end in tears. The Caterpillar Cat B15, however, is designed to survive just such abuse, as you’d expect from a handset designed by the folks who make big yellow construction equipment. Or by a company licensing the big yellow brand, as Bullitt Mobile has here.
The B15 is currently the only viable hard-as-nails smartphone on the market. JCB’s discontinued Pro-Smart can still be picked up here and there, but it boasts a hopelessly out-of-date spec: Android 2.3 and an 800MHz processor, anyone? Sonim’s handsets may be as tough as old boots but they are also as dumb as a bag of hammers.The B15’s specification on the other hand isn’t too shabby. You get stock Android 4.1.2 running on a 1GHz dual-core MediaTek MT6577 Cortex A-9 SoC; a 4-inch, 480 x 800 screen; 5MP and 0.3MP cameras; and a 2000mAh battery. Granted, that spec isn’t going to tempt anyone away from an HTC One, but it’s a solid enough offering for a tough phone with a £285 SIM-free sticker price.Besides being as ‘ard as a cockney gangster in a Guy Ritchie flick, the B15 has another unusual feature: two SIM slots, complete with a usefully comprehensive menu with which to manage them. Changing which SIM does what, or switching one off completely, is the work of seconds, which should help keep some clear blue bathroom sealant between your work and private life.
While the B15 certainly looks like a device designed for life on a building site, Caterpillar hasn’t gone overboard with the phone’s styling. Sure it’s quite a square and chunky old lump but it’s still small. At 170g, it’s only a smidge heavier than a Nokia Lumia 820. And it’s smart enough to pass muster down the boozer after knocking-off time.It’s obvious from the get-go that some serious thought has gone into the design. The Caterpillar-yellow volume keys are well separated to aid gloved-hand usage, while the camera button between them requires a three-second push to activate, the better to avoid accidental launches.The power button at the top is similarly designed to be easy to activate deliberately but difficult to do so accidentally.Another clever touch is the micro USB port cover. If the rubber plug ever breaks you can just unscrew the bit that’s still attached to your phone and replace the entire thing. You can’t do the same with the 3.5mm audio jack cover on the top of the phone but it’s so robust I can’t imagine how you’d ever rip it off.
Of more importance in everyday use are the 15mm-thick square sides, which make it a very easy device to hold firmly with cold and wet hands, or while wearing gloves. That said, the touchscreen isn’t one of the magic works-with-gloves types.Officially, the B15 is certified to IP67 standard which means it’s dustproof and waterproof when dunked in up to one metre of water for 30 minutes. But that’s only part of the story.Thanks to thick silicon rubber bumpers at the top and bottom, and aluminium side panels, the B15 can survive a 1.8m drop onto concrete. I know: I dropped one from a second-storey window at closer to 3m onto a stone patio, and no harm done.I also drove over it in a Range Rover Sport on a gravel drive, left it overnight at the bottom of a nearby stream - so much for the 30-minute dunking maximum - and then stuck it (after a wash) in a pint of Banks’s Mild until I got thirsty. It survived all those experiences none the worse for wear.Analysis When Red Hat launched its commercialized version of the OpenStack cloud control freak in June, along with an update to its supported version of the KVM hypervisor, the one thing it did not do was provide pricing for the support contracts for this code. But when the software was made generally available for production use on Wednesday, Shadowman also announced pricing for various bundles of its Linux, KVM, OpenStack, and CloudForms software.
Red Hat's cloudy software stack is the result of more than two years of work and more than a few acquisitions by the company. And with the addition of OpenStack is competitive with what VMware and Microsoft have cooked up in their respective vCloud and Windows Server stacks.During the Red Hat Summit in June, when Paul Cormier, president of products and technologies, announced the new software, he tossed up this comparative chart that hinted at the kind of pricing that Red Hat was thinking of for its server virtualization and infrastructure cloud software:Cormier was pretty vague about who the competitor in the chart above was, but it is very likely VMware, which unlike both Red Hat and Microsoft, does not control its own operating system.In a blog posting, Red Hat tweaked the packaging and pricing on its commercial-grade implementation of the KVM hypervisor for servers and desktops. As expected, it has merged the server and desktop versions into a single package that is now called Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, or RHEV.
Before, RHEV was sold in either a server or desktop variant, and the server edition cost $499 per socket per year for a standard support contract, and $749 per socket with premium support. With RHEV 3.2, the RHEV desktop connection broker, the SPICE protocol, and Remote Desktop Protocol support as well as support for desktop operating systems have been merged into the single RHEV. It is licensed in two-socket pairs, for $998 per year for a standard support contract and $1,498 for a premium support contract.It's not clear what happens if you want to use RHEV on a single-socket PC or workstation. Presumably this is Shadowman's way of pointing out that only companies using two-socket workstations want to virtualize their machines anyway. Presumably you can work a deal if you really want RHEV on your laptop or desktop and only have one socket. Or, you can use VMware Workstation or Oracle VirtualBox, we suppose.
There are two different stacks from Red Hat that have the Grizzly implementation of OpenStack embedded in them, as the company announced in June.Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which is comprised of Red Hat Enterprise Linux with OpenStack rolled up on top of it and KVM underneath it as the virtualization layer for the server slices that make up a basic infrastructure cloud.As it turns out, there are two variants of this OpenStack variant, and they have two different prices based on the jobs they do in an OpenStack cloud. If you are getting a support license for a controller node and therefore does not need an unlimited license for RHEL guests, then it is cheaper – bBut still not cheap. And like KVM above, the licenses are sold in socket pairs.