Gates: Hardware, Not Software, Will Be Free

orthogonal writes "That's small-'f', not capital-'F' free: according to Bill Gates, "Ten years out, in terms of actual hardware costs you can almost think of hardware as being free -- I'm not saying it will be absolutely free --...." Gates expects this almost free hardware to support two of the longest awaited breakthroughs in computing: real speech and handwriting recognition. He further predicts -- ugh! -- that software will not be written but visually designed."

Comments

Re:Visual design

[1781]

Ah, yes. Jest about it, but the UML-people has been working on visual programming for years. Perhaps there is a mutual interest... UMSL?

Re:Another Quote

[e6003]

To be fair, it seems the (in)famous Gates 640K quote is an urban legend.

Too Cheap To Meter

[handy_vandal]

Is this kind of like in the 50s when some expert said that nuclear power was going to make electricity free?

Not "free": the exact phrase, from Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was:

"Our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter."

... which turned out to be overly optimistic.

-kgj

Re:Hrmmmm....

[gkuz]

At current list prices, the software is already more expensive than the hardware in the server space. Microsoft Windows 2003 Enterprise Server lists for $4k with 25 Client Access Licenses (CALs). Each additional 20 CALS costs $799. So an approximately 100-user server will run you over $7k (at list) for MS software licensing. Dell or HP will sell you quite a nice server for less than $7k.

Spare me the obligatory replies about how much cheaper you can do all this with white-box hardware and Linux -- I'm not talking about that, I'm trying to add context to BillG's pronunciamento.

Re:Yeah, right

[MacJedi]

Actually the Soviet Union did use nukes for mining and creating canals... Check out this link (scroll down to the bottom.)

Re:I hope not

[AntonyBartlett]

Take the hint from the majority of good Universities who teach computer science, where you are simply expected to pick up a language in your spare time, because that aspect is secondary to the theory, and the easier of the two.

The difference between theory and practice is very small in theory, but rather large in practice.

Where laptop power goes ...

[willtsmith]

Right now, the display is the big power consumer in portable devices. The processors have been tuned to use minimal power.

The Scion 5Mx has a B/W LCD screen. How long do the batteries last when the backlight is on????

When OLED comes to laptops, that will significantly increase battery time.

Re:Another Quote

[mbourgon]

Bull. Apple conference in 1981. I love how it's been debunked by Bill saying he didn't know. Kinda like how Bob Eubanks claimed for years the "in the butt" urban legend was false... until they found a video of it happening.

There are plenty of valid uses for a tablet PC

[blorg]

If you need to use a computer while standing up and walking around for example - I can completely understand why your building inspectors would want one. It's also a lot easier (read more respectful and less distracting to everyone) to use a flat computer in a meeting. It's better for reading the Web while sitting on a sofa. You don't want one to code on however, (in tablet mode at least) or use it for writing a novel. That doesn't mean that they aren't very useful for certain tasks.

LabVIEW

[ojQj]

I would add National Instrument's LabVIEW to your list of visual languages.

If you are trying to do detailed logic rather than just bring already written libraries together, a visual language may not be worse than something like Java. It may also not be better. I do think it makes a nice programming model for bringing together existing modules of code though. (as in LabVIEW Express)

Of course, as in any other kind of choice between programming languages, it all depends on the specific problem domain.