Or, more succinctly, 9.57 zettabytes. That’s the amount of data the world’s computers blitz through every year. Most of that, I’m sad to report, involves kittens doing something adorable. Blech. I’m a dog person. [Techland] More »

Gizmodo

The Three Broadcasteers
KCSBeat presents the music-loving trio behind Kittens vs. Godzilla .

Read more on Santa Barbara Independent

If you’re in the market for a netbook—the gimpy kittens of the laptop jungle—know this first: on the inside, they’re all basically the same. Making the little differences all the more important! And yes, they do add up.

For our Battlemodo, we decided to look only at netbooks powered by Intel’s Pine Trail (Atom N450) processor. Netbooks sporting older processors are a bit cheaper, but they’re also a little slower and don’t achieve the same impressive battery life as Pine Trail. And they’ve been reviewed to death elsewhere.

Netbooks with an Ion GPU are also available, but they’ve got their own baggage. First: they’re around $50 more expensive than non-Ion models. Second: they’re not available yet on Pine Trail. So you can either settle for an older processor with Ion and take a battery life and performance hit, or wait until the first Pine Trail-compatible netbook—the Acer Aspire One 532G—comes out later this year and pay the premium. Once you’re spending $500+ on a netbook, though, you may as well step up to a full-function ultraportable.

So: Pine Trail netbooks it is. Usually we put the benchmarks off until the end, but in this case it’s worth highlighting up front just how comparable these machines are inside:
Peas in an underwhelming pod. Which is why when you’re even considering a netbook, it’s vital to pay outsized attention to design, display, keyboard, and all the extras that’ll ultimately inform your experience.

The Results

I’ll say this as many times as I have to: netbooks are a sea of sameness. And it’s a shame that even the ones that stand out come with some significant caveats.

The Winner (If You Need Affordable HD Now)

Dell Inspiron Mini 10


Price: $425

The Dell Mini 10 is a little bulkier than the other contenders, but I’m happy to trade a little weight for the sturdier build. The glossy red top was a welcome splash of color without looking cheap. And where most netbook batteries stick out the back end or bottom like oblong tumors, the Mini’s is safely tucked away in the bottom deck. The result? A small form laptop with a big boy design. The Mini 10 was also the easiest to type on, with flush and raised keys leaving me pleasantly hand-cramp-free compared to the island-style netbook keyboards.

Most importantly, Dell (along with HP) has managed to mitigate the netbook HD problem by throwing Broadcom’s Crystal HD accelerator into the mix. It won’t offer the full 3D graphic support of Ion, and you’ll have to download Adobe’s Flash 10.1 beta 3 for the full effect, but once I did I was able to reliably stream 1080p video off of YouTube, as well as full-screen HD content from Hulu. it’s your best bet until Pine Trail Ion 2 netbooks start popping up later this year.

Here’s the catch: the trackpad is bad. Really, truly, frustratingly bad. Not so bad as to be unusable, but it’s too small and the integrated buttons respond clumsily.

Runner Up: HP Mini 210 HD Edition
Price: $465

Admittedly, this was a close call. The HP Mini 210 has a similarly solid feel to it, and handles HD video almost as well as the Dell. But in the two areas that are arguably most critical to a netbook experience—battery life and price—the Mini came up way short. Unlike other manufacturers who include a 6-cell battery as standard, HP offers theirs as an $80 add-on, driving up the price of a usable configuration. Not that it did much good: the Mini 210 fared worst of all in our battery test, lasting only 4:09.

The Winner (If You Don’t Care About HD)

Acer Aspire One 532h


Price: $350

If you don’t consider watching HD clips on your netbook an integral part of the experience, congratulations! You’re going to be able to save yourself a good chunk of cash and walk away with an otherwise comparable user experience. The Acer Aspire One 532h has a sleek design and performs at least on par with the Dell and HP in almost every other respect. It had the best battery life of the bunch, it’s wafer-thin and extremely light, and has a raised trackpad that’s actually enjoyable to use.

The main drawback to the Acer is its keyboard. Although I like the larger buttons, there’s a certain amount of give in the middle that makes an otherwise crisp design feel cheap. The glossy top is also prone to smudging in a way that the other models manage to avoid. Otherwise, though, it performs as well as the extremely capable Toshiba NB305—for $50 less.

Runner Up: Toshiba NB305
Price: $400

The Toshiba stands out as being good at everything, but not great at anything. And if it were a bit cheaper, it’d be my pick here. But paying $400 for a computer with an Atom processor that doesn’t play HD seems like a tough sell, especially when for just a few more bucks you can step up to the Dell.

Feature Comparison

Battery life was tested by running each laptop on moderate performance settings, three-quarters screen brightness, and refreshing a page in Firefox every thirty seconds to simulate active browsing.

Verdict: Buy What’s Cheap

I wish there were a clear-cut winner. I wish Pine Trail had more to offer. I wish Sony weren’t charging $480 for their incredibly subpar Vaio W Eco edition. But hey, that’s just netbooks.

It’s an interesting dilemma. There’s clearly value in an affordable computer you can carry around for basic tasks, but is this really the best we can do? And the more triage we do on netbook guts to increase usability—be it Ion graphics or Broadcom HD accelerators—the more expensive they get, and the less apparent that value proposition becomes. And who knows? Maybe netbooks themselves have never been more than a patch. Maybe what we’ve really wanted all along are tablets and smartbooks.

For now, though: find the cheapest netbook you can that does what you need. If that means HD, go for the Dell. If not, the Acer’s your pick, or even an older, discounted model, if you don’t see yourself needing maxed-out battery life. It’s purely a commodity purchase: treat it like one, and you’ll be fine.

Natali joins the dark side and immediately offends Justin and Wilson; Google introduces a new social network and gets pissed at Chinese copycat site Gojje; and GoldenEye makes its triumphant comeback–all this on today’s episode of CNET’s The 404 Podcast, now featuring co-host Natali Del Conte!

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Best sticker picture submission yet!

(Credit:
Christopher Bletzinger/The 404)

Today marks a special milestone on the show as we welcome the newest co-host of the show, Ms. Natali Del Conte! She’ll join in the fun every Thursday (with the exception of today), offering a fresh perspective on our usual collection of stories. Right off the bat, Natali sparks a little controversy and reveals her one true weakness, so tune in to hear it all unfold!

The 404 is also the perfect outlet for Natali to speak freely on topics like Google’s newest social-publishing tool, Google Buzz. Announced yesterday, the service lets you explore status updates and automatically adds your contacts via Gmail, which we’re still trying to figure out. Interestingly enough, messages can be made public or private, but Natali is justifiably hesitant to give out her e-mail address to everyone in her network. The service also has a recommendation engine that allows Google to “learn” your tastes and recommend incoming items–sounds suspiciously intrusive, we’ll keep you updated on this story as we play around with it.

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(Credit:

TechRadar)

Speaking of Google, the site is adding another log to its flame war with China over a copycat site subtlety dubbed “Goojje.” We’re not sure what’s up with the cease-and-desist letter since its logo looks nothing like Google’s, but Goojje already pulled down the original site, so no harm no foul, right guys?

Finally, big thanks to everyone who’s sent in a sticker picture submissions, we’re trying our best to stuff and send all the SASEs back in a timely fashion, so please be patient! If you already got your sticker pictures, it’s your turn to do work for us! Take a picture of where you stuck it, hopefully in a public setting, and send it to the404(at)cnet[dot]com. We’ll show it on a future episode of The 404!

EPISODE 516

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…

Originally posted at The 404 Podcast

By David Ponce

Our old pal James Grahame from Retro Thing recently released three T-shirt designs. This is what he has to say about them:

After months of top secret R&D, we’re proud to unveil three limited edition Retro Thing shirt designs. They were created pixel-by-pixel on a curmudgeonly old Atari 130XE, ensuring maximum authenticity and the most convoluted workflow since the Apollo missions.

Each pixel tee is screen printed on a heavyweight 6.1oz Gildan Ultra Cotton shirt in Madison, Wisconsin by a genuine American named Rick. There’s no digitally printed tomfoolery here, nor are our shirts made by 3-week-old kittens slaving at gunpoint in North Korean sweatshops.

We’re big fans, so head over there before December 8th to order yours, for all of $14.

[ Product Page ]

Come back with me to the turn of the century, circa 1996. Your humble narrator was working for campus police at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, creating FileMaker databases for their police reports. It wasn’t uncommon then to see DOS machines sitting beside Windows 95 machines and the web was a primitive and strange thing. There were only two browsers of note, Netscape and Internet Explorer, and firing either up was neither particularly comfortable or interesting. But, hidden deep behind Netscape’s bland carapace, was Mozilla. When you typed “about:mozilla” in the Netscape address bar, for example, you got:

Pretty badass stuff, especially when most websites were dedicated to kittens and burgeoning corporate identity. I was hooked instantly. This was the browser for me and it slowly became the browser for everyone with self-respect and a brain.

Fast forward to 2004: Mozilla and Netscape were on the rocks and it looked like the browser wars had been won. IE was the victor. In order to combat bloat and “feature creep,” however, a ragtag team of coders led by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross built something they called “Phoenix,” then “Firebird,” then, on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 was born. This turned into the Mozilla suite – Firefox and Thunderbird – were born.

On this, the fifth anniversary of that momentous occasion, let’s all tip out a little Jolt for Netscape and toast to the future of Firefox, the best browser in the world. Best of all, the book of Mozilla is still being written and any time you type ‘about:mozilla’ into Firefox you get a red screen and a potent reminder of the early days of the Internet.

Happy birthday, Firefox.