HP Mini 5102

As the sequel to one of our favorite all-around Netbooks, the HP Mini 5102 has some pretty big shoes to fill. It wasn't HP's choice in components that we liked about its business line 10-inch system--after all, most 2009 Netbooks shared a very uniform set of parts--it was the overall design and build quality of the Netbook we liked

With a body made of aluminum and magnesium alloy, the 5101 felt significantly more rugged than many of the plastic Netbooks it was competing with, and its excellent keyboard layout made typing a breeze. The new version, the 5102, offers only minor cosmetic tweaks, but also more configuration options, including a touch screen.

That means you can create a fairly compelling Netbook using HP's online configurator, but it'll also be an expensive one, as anything above the baseline adds significant cost. At a time when HD displays are becoming the norm, our $424 review unit has only a standard 1,024x600-pixel resolution 10-inch display, along with a single-core Intel Atom N450 processor, Windows 7 Starter Edition, and 1GB of RAM.

With the competition (including HP's own Mini 311 line) regularly offering HD displays and Nvidia Ion graphics for very reasonable prices, we would have liked to see the Mini 5102 make some bolder steps with its new version. As it is, this sequel to our favorite 2009 Netbook feels like just that--a 2009 Netbook.

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Amazon eases cloud control

When Amazon's Elastic Cloud was in its infancy, the only management tools available were a set of Java-based command-line applications. The set was comprehensive: You had complete control over and access to Amazon Machine Images (AMIs). Moreover, you could create and manipulate the ancillary components of the cloud: key-pairs, elastic IP addresses, and so on. As capable as the tools were, however, they were out of pace with the very Web-based world that they served.

Graphical alternatives have since appeared. Elastic Fox (available from Amazon's Web Services developer site), a free plug-in for the Firefox browser, is a popular tool for creating and supervising AMIs. It provides virtually all the capabilities of the command-line tools, but in an easy-to-navigate browser interface.

[Learn more about Amazon Web Services in the InfoWorld Test Center analysis: "Diving deep into Amazon Web Services."]

Commercial GUI-based cloud-management systems are available as well. Examples are RightScale and Elastra, which add features that enhance the creation and deployment of AMIs beyond what is available with the freeware tools.

Into this arena, Amazon has trotted out the AWS (Amazon Web Services) Management Console. Currently in beta, the AWS Management Console is a browser-based dashboard for Elastic Cloud that -- unlike Elastic Fox -- is not restricted to Firefox. The Console currently supports Firefox 2.0 or later, Internet Explorer 7.0 or later (though I have run it in 6.0), and Safari 3.0 or later. Like Elastic Fox, however, the AWS Console is free; all you need is an AWS account with access to Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3) services to get started.

In the clouds

The AWS Console is arranged in IDE fashion, with a navigation pane on the left and workspace panes on the right. The navigation pane holds links pointing to the services provided by the console. The workspace panes comprise the dashboard itself, where you actually interact with the cloud and track the status of in- progress operations.

The AWS Console is primarily a control panel for launching and monitoring AMIs. Before you start an AMI, however, you'll need to create an RSA key-pair. For Linux images, a key-pair is needed so that SSH can provide you with a secure log-in to the running instance. For Windows images, the Elastic Cloud infrastructure uses the key-pair to generate an image's administrator's password. (The key-pair consists of a public and a private key. AWS encrypts the password with the public key. You have to have the private key to decrypt that password; otherwise you'll be unable to log in to your Windows instance.)

Amazon.com wederom uren uit de lucht

Opnieuw kon het winkelend webpubliek maandag moeilijk terecht bij Amazon, net als vrijdag het geval was. Op beide dagen was de winkel urenlang slecht bereikbaar.
Voor Nederland waren het de avondsurfers die last kunnen hebben gehad van de technische problemen. Maandagavond tussen 19.03 en 19.23 uur lukte het maar dertig procent van de bezoekers om toegang te krijgen tot de site. Dat zegt het bedrijf Keynote Systems, dat de prestaties van verschillende websites bijhoudt.

Nadat de verbindingen na de eerste storing zich stabiliseerden, was het een half uur later opnieuw raak. Tussen 19.56 en 20.09 lukte het 68% om op de site te komen. Ook de Britse versie van de online winkel kampte met problemen. Na 20.09 deed de site het weer naar behoren.

Reactie
Amazon liet weten aan PCWorld: "Er zijn klanten die problemen hebben gemeld aan ons. Het lukte sommigen niet om op de site te komen. We proberen er alles aan te doen om de problemen op te lossen."

Amazon's site voor ontwikkelaars, getiteld Amazon Web Services, had geen last van de storingen op vrijdag en maandag.

Onderhoud
Op vrijdag duurden de problemen langer dan maandag. Voor het weekend was de site bijna drie uur moeilijk bereikbaar. De website meldde slechts "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable."

Voor de gemiddelde klant betekent deze cryptische melding niks. Maar de baas van Keynote Systems, Shawn White, vermoedt dat er ergens een server niet goed geconfigureerd was: "Hoe complexer het system, hoe moeilijker het is om te onderhouden. Daardoor kan een configuratieverandering op de ene plek, zorgen voor problemen in een ander gebied."

Voor elk uur onbereikbaarheid loopt webwinkelreus Amazon duizenden koopgrage klanten mis en daarmee behoorlijke omzet.