Laptopmag :P
Damn, Laptopmag needs to lay off a little bit. Who is this guy Avram Piltch writing these blog articles anyways? I don’t think I’ve seen anything but negativity come out of this self-proclaimed Web Editor / Guru that hasn’t updated his own blog in over a year. Are you kidding me? He didn’t know about hitting F11 to get full-screen Firefox?? *Newsflash* Mr. Editorial Guru…it works in Internet Explorer too! Surprise! You can have the same fun on your Windows boxes.
I suppose I should tell him about the PageZoom and ImageZoom plugins available from Mozilla.org for Firefox that allows you to change the size of the text and images to fit better in Firefox (which by the way is built into Firefox 3.0). But that’s probably too much to handle, right. I mean this Cloudbook stuff should just “work” right out of the box? No customizations necessary, right? I mean my Windows boxes don’t need to be setup either…they just turn on and work too, right?
Since I don’t believe most of what they’re posting in their little blog updates about the Cloudbook, I’m going to take every one of their blog entries/complaints and try it out for myself to see what the real deal is. I have no big corporation behind me tossing me a paycheck. I’m a consumer that bought a Cloudbook on my own free will. Not because my employer told me to.
On top of that, how about some articles that point out what’s good about the Cloudbook. Better yet, even if these things are truly bad or not working as they’re supposed to as Mr. Piltch claims, how about something constructive and beneficial to the public…helpful fixes/hits/tips/workarounds for some of the early issues with the Cloudbook. Surely there’s more value to that than Laptopmag’s bashing. Stay tuned, I’ll see what I can do.
Oh, and one more thing Avram. Update your Wordpress installation. It’s outdated.
Posted in News, Rants, Technology | 
February 19th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
You’re being too harsh on them. They’re looking at from the point of view of end users like me (who, btw, keeps *forgetting* about F11 in Fox because I rarely use it!).
I’ve been reading their reports — linked to them — linked to you too! — and have been taking everything with some grains of salt because I don’t believe they have the final software (at the very least, maybe they are a build or two behind?).
I’m waiting for you to get your CB in. Especially now that you intend to re-enact their tests!
February 19th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
[...] Meanwhile, someone waiting for his has issued a challenge to Laptop Magazine. [...]
February 19th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Well, I posted a remark on laptopmag.com about the zoom-function of Firefox 3, but they chose not to publish it.
I also wrote a lot at the gOS forum about why I think their claims of 3 minutes boot-up-time and the 90 seconds needed for add/remove to start up must mean their system is -broken-! The hardware in the CloudBook is very comparable with the WalMart gPC, and nobody is complaining about these issues. Also gOS 1 on my older P4 boots up in under a minute, and starts add/remove in less than a second.
I know that Everex when deciding to “go gnome” had to almost rewrite the windows manager in less than a month or so (maybe even in 3 weeks), so they are probably under enormous time constraints, but there issues (if they are not a fluke) can and will be fixed!
also realise that the new gOS is almost identical to a normal Ubuntu, and that Ubuntu has none of these issues, even on the lowest powered machine.
Read more at the gOS forum at http://cafelinux.org/gosforum/
February 19th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Thanks for the links both to laptopmag and to my personal site.
FYI, I’m well aware of the F11 key, but at first was testing the machine out as a typical user would. The CloudBook is targeted at a broad audience of people, most of whom have very little computer expertise.
As I stated in some of my blog posts, we’re not sure about whether the version of gOS on our CloudBook is the one that consumers are receiving or whether we were somehow stuck with an early version.
Not my intention to diss the CloudBook and we’re hoping that, in fact, we did get the wrong version of the OS. We’re still waiting to get a call back from Everex.
We will start posting tips when we know what consumers are receiving. We need to either:
A. Get confirmation that our CloudBook has the correct OS on it, the same exact version of gOS that consumers are receiving.
or
B. Get the correct build of the gOS that consumers are now receiving on their CloudBooks.
Oh, and there are some very positive things about the CloudBook, namely that the touchpad is quite good, despite its strange placement.
February 19th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
>>>so they are probably under enormous time constraints, but there issues (if they are not a fluke) can and will be fixed!
I have no doubt of that. I hope shipping units won’t have those issues.
Everex must come through with updates, of course, as the CLoudBook sells. I hope they’ll do a better job of it than both Palm and Nokia have! (Apple’s iPhone is a great model; bug fixes *and* new stuff!)
February 20th, 2008 at 7:33 am
Meanwhile, it seems someone found out what the real reason might be why the CloudBook is so extremely sluggisch. (normal boot times should be around 1 minute, and starting add/remove -should- take less than 1 second). It seems that a last minute change in the kernal version has caused Everex to run into a hardware problem with the VIA chipset, for which a software work around is needed. It seems the harddisk driver of the new kernal has a lot of problems with lost data during heavy disk access. See -this- bug traq:
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/641355/match=cloudbook
No doubt Everex (or Good OS) will issue fixes for this (and any other issues) very soon. gOS has an automated update mechanism, so no doubt many issues will be fixed automatically in the next couple of weeks.
By the way, if you are having trouble with the Launcer on the bottom (AKA as the iBar or “dock”) there should be several configuration options to help with that, such as auto hide, “always behind every window” and options to place it on the top or side.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
Oh, and according to the link below the but up process can use a lot of tweaking, to boot faster for example, the CPU is throttled to -just half speed- (600 MHz) during booting! And many other thing are also sub-optimal. There are also some issues found that might explain some of the WiFi issues we heard of.
http://forum.cloudbooker.com/viewtopic.php?pid=1775#p1775
So it seems there is room for a -lot- of improvement!
It all really seems caused by the fact that this version of gOs seems to be slapped together in record time.
Less than a few weeks ago nobody had heard that this new version would be a completely rewritten version that used GNOME instead of the Enlightenment 17 desktop manager.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
oops , please edit to read boot up, not but up…
February 20th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
If you didn’t know, he’s the background on the Everex OS:
http://mikecane2008.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/everex-cloudbook-the-guy-behind-the-os/
February 23rd, 2008 at 11:34 am
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