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Moore's Law Is Microsoft's Latest Enemy
Glyn Moody writes "Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated. One of the achievements of the popular new Asus Eee PC is that it has come up with a tab-based front end that hides the complexity. But maybe its real significance is that it has pushed down the price to the point where the extra cost of using Microsoft Windows over free software is so significant that ordinary users notice. As Moore's Law drives flash memory prices even lower, can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?"
Familiarity is worth $200 to a lot of people. Besides, if this becomes the case, I'd have to imagine we won't be seeing vista or whatever windows system there is being sold for the same price.
That was fairly crash proof, and it has hardware requirements that my engineering calculator can muster,
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
Only on Slashdot would an article ask if Windows can compete with Linux.
*Shakes head*
Get out of mom's basement once in a while, guys.
Lies about crimes
Namely, that with a closed source OS, vendors are being paid by software companies to install reams and reams of crapware on your system. When (eg) Dell installs Linux, they lose that revenue, which on a $200 unit, is a significant portion.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
you're being too pedantic, the styling of Moore's law can be applied to progress of most anything, (from the Ford model A to the Ford Mustang for example, not just transisters)...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It's such a well-known thing that anyone who makes the inference that Moore's law has anything to do with price is an idiot. Moore's Law is strongly correlated with price. For about the same price, you can double the number of transistors every 18-24 months, *or* you can keep the same amount of transistors for less cost, or some combination thereof.
In fact, the relation between Moore's Law and price is so well known, that I'd say anyone who thinks it has *nothing* to do with price is the idiot...
You're right... as transistors get smaller, and flash drives get larger capacity, it stands to reason that the price per KB stays completely static. That's how the economy works!
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
One of the formulations says "Twice the computing power for the same price every 18 months".
You fail it.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Asus is already has an XP model overseas, and it is coming to the US. They have created a smaller footprint for the OS, so I dont see any barriers...
Yes, they can compete. Well, if then can turn a profit on $20 Windows licenses.
For something as useful as a computer, a $20 price difference isn't a significant motivator, especially for someone facing some unknown amount of transition cost.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
If you have $3000 to blow on a laptop then you're not the target market for the Eee in the first place making your comment irrelevant.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
an excerpt....
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=2
"WASTE AND WASTE AGAIN
Forty years ago, Caltech professor Carver Mead identified the corollary to Moore's law of ever-increasing computing power. Every 18 months, Mead observed, the price of a transistor would halve. And so it did, going from tens of dollars in the 1960s to approximately 0.000001 cent today for each of the transistors in Intel's latest quad-core. This, Mead realized, meant that we should start to "waste" transistors."
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
It's not price that cripples Microsoft in the mobile market, it's flexibility. As anyone who's used a Pocket PC or Windows CE device knows, it's the chained to the desktop mentality that's killing them.
The inability (well, ok, extreme difficulty in) to skin/specialize the user interface is going to hurt them. Microsoft appears to be mentally permanently stuck in one-size-fits-all land. And to be fair, it would be really hard to let people customize as deeply as they need to without letting them muck with the deep details of your OS.
Moore's law does pertain to transistor density, but anyone who doesn't see the relationship between the two is just as silly. Increasing transistor densities invariably mean price drops for the previous generation of chips, and since the power/capacity of chips is growing more rapidly than the needs of devices, especially in the ultraportable segment, it is not at all surprising that the chip prices for those devices see a corresponding drop.
Moore's law may pertain to transistor density, but increasing transistor density indirectly affects the price of chips at lower transistor densities.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
The "eee-running-aero-yeh-right department" line says it all.
If computer usage were truly based on activities average people needed to get done on a daily basis - reading email, surfing, basic word processing, etc. - then I might be inclined to agree with the article.
However, software producers have an incentive to keep tacking on new features, some useful, some just bells and whistles. The new features mean that consumers will always have to keep upgrading their computer just to do basic things.
You never know, though. From TFA:
"The first effects may already be being felt. Notably, last week Microsoft cut the cost of retail copies of Vista, apparently because people don't see it as a necessary upgrade at the prices charged."
Maybe people will smarten the fuck up a bit, to the point where they realize they don't have to get bloated "upgrades" requiring the latest and greatest hardware.
Skype is too convoluted... Now I'm reverse-engineering the Kyoto Protocol.
Intel has this new low power low cost x86 processor. This family of processors is not powerful enough to push through the Microsoft bloat ware. It must be intended for Linux systems!
Religion is the main cause of atheism.
I don't think ordinary users notice. When I talk to my non-tech-savvy friends, they usually ask me if this or that price is right for a given computer, mostly without taking into cosideration its characteristics (Once a girl I know asked me if a 300 price tag for a laptop could be right, and when I asked for specs, she only replied "Acer"). Besides, we've got big PC stores here (like PC City) whose prices can be 50% more expensive than those you find in smaller, franchised, specialized shops, and they still sell the most.
So no, ordinary users will judge the price based on how awesome the salesman tells them it is (and, of course, if it doesn't come with Windows, don't bother calling it a PC, please, it just confuses them).
My 0.02 cents
MS had a $3 XP license in the 3rd world for awhile. If they did that worldwide and cooperated with these low-end PC vendors it would short-circuit the Linux retail-price advantage.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The point has already been made that these linux-based minicomps may not be as accessible as you might like - having never used one, I'll just give the benefit of the doubt that they successfully fill the needs cheaply. If they don't play mp3s now, they'll do so sooner or later.
Microsoft can make money on windows without charging for it; they can charge $15/copy for the minicomputer version. Microsoft has an endless number of strategies, which they will employ to keep market dominance for as long as they can.
There will be a whole *series* of retrenchments. Microsoft is in a very powerful, very profitable place, so they will fight each retrenchment as hard as they can - but they're not stupid, they've got contingency plans to stay in the market and, frankly, to stay extremely profitable whatever happens. Put another way: they can compete with free, maybe not on a level playing field, but on the playing field that exists, and they intend to do so.
Forcing them to compete, even on a biased field, is good for the rest of us, so I'm all for it. But driving MS out of any market segment is going to be extremely difficult.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
For a portable email, quick document, travel internet browser this $400 "piece of crap" is the perfect solution in a hostile environment. I won't let my 11 year old touch the Vaio with my business on it, but when traveling in the car and checking hotels, he can do this easily with this little gadget. When dropped (it is actually more durable than the Vaio) and broken, I am only out a few hundrend and am not stuck with a multi thousand dollar pile of junk. I have no problem sending this "piece of crap" with my kid to school for a project. Would you send a $3000 Vaio with your 11 year old son?
Everex has now come out with the Cloudbook (Linux) at WalMart so, now it is being exposed to the masses. The revolution is starting!
Athiesm is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
MS is using all its weight in anticipation of the problem. The new and upcoming Eee 900 for example, has been announced by Asus France as a Windows only version.
http://www.blogeee.net/2008/03/06/le-eeepc-900-uniquement-avec-windows-xp-dapres-asus-france/
The good news is that the French customer is very well protected and forcing a software with a PC down their throat is illegal. So essentially, what will happen is thousands of geeks demanding reimbursement of the XP licenses. That oughta hit Asus really hard, and teach them a good lesson.
I read that Asus Germany announced a similar "forced sale", but can't seem to find the article.
Res publica non dominetur
can ultraportables running Microsoft Windows compete?
Sure they can! Sure, Linux is free, but Windows can be also made free. After all, it's not like it's not already amortized, or something. They can even _pay_ the PC makers to put Windows inside, if it's just in some models. Linux cannot really compete with that, can it?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
You forget there's still this - http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/WinXPStarterFS.mspx
If low-cost Linux machines become more & more popular, I'd expect to see Microsoft broaden the market for the cheapest Windows editions.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Once CPU speeds cease to double every few years, competition becomes too complex to sustain a monopoly. Further increases in software performance and features will be done in many different ways - robust multithreading for multi-core CPUs, instruction sets more efficient than x86, use of GPU and CPU's vector unit for general computations, programable hardware with each application supplying Verilog-like code, distributed computing and of course plain old good code. It's impossible for one operating system or one application of a given category to be optimum in all these areas. Programming languages very different from C++, Java or .Net will be needed for good auto-parallelization, auto-vectorization and use of programable hardware. A market for a bare-bone, hand coded in C and assembler OS may once again develop if it allows a movie frame rendering app to run 30% faster when hardware performance is not anticipated to rise wildly in a couple of years.
Microsoft can not possibly maintain 10 operating systems with radically different code bases and programming interfaces. In fact it's likely that some use scenarios will be too specialized for a commercial company and will instead be realized by open-source coding by the prospective users. Eee-PC and OLPC are already more about failure of Moore's law that it's continuation. People want to have a cheap, light and silent notebook with extraordinary battery life, but the technology to run Vista+Aero on such a machine is not anywhere on the horizon. So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants.
If a P3 500Mhz system was coded with the efficiency and elegance that prevailed on the Commodore 64, your OS and every application running would be so blazingly fast as to seem instantaneous, and with 1GB RAM you would not require a harddrive for anything except storing large image/music/video files. Instead, my early-generation P4 2ghz machine at work with 2GB of RAM chugs and sputters and stutters along and I can't wait to get home and use my 'powerful' personal machine that operates much faster. It's absolutely ridiculous.
A-Bomb
Unusable piece of crap has less than 1024 px horizontal res == not suitable for web surfing.
Sites with fixed layouts that cannot accommodate browsers with screen widths under 1 kilopixel == not suitable to be web surfed.
Utter nonsense. The last paragraph illustrates perfectly why. 99% of the market does't want to customize their OS, they want apps. I can't believe 30 years later some people still don't get that.
they will be forced to slash prizes. This already started. It could even so far to give a basic version away for free to get people hooked.
You're impugning the credibility of Wikipedia as a way of dismissing anything that contradicts your argument, rather than dealing with the matter head on. That's intellectually dishonest, and a lazy, stupid way to argue.
Also, if you'd bothered to look at the article, you'd find that the quote provides a citation, and that citation points to a PDF file of the article in which Moore made the statement in question:
ftp://download.intel.com/museum/Moores_Law/Articles-Press_Releases/Gordon_Moore_1965_Article.pdf
In short, you lose on both style and substance.
Until now, the received wisdom has been that GNU/Linux will never take off with general users because it's too complicated
I think you meant "perceived" wisdom. But in fact, I've installed Linux on several friend's PCs who had never used a computer before (Mandriva 8 IIRC). None of them have had any trouble whatever using it. In fact, I get fewer "how do I" phone calls from them with Linux/KDE than I did when their new machines were running Windows.
Gnu/Linux/KDE (and most likely Gnome as well, although since I haven't used it I can't say) is easier to use than Windows for a variety of reasons, the first being that stuff is put in logical places (at least with Suse and Mandriva) as opposed to Microsoft's way of putting stuff any old place. At least that's what it seems like; I can't see the logic of where Windows' stuff goes at all.
So please stop spreading this this FUD. It's simply not true. Windows is NOT easier to use than Linux.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
the Windows flavor of treos is fairly new and you definatly feel the price pressure... to the point I am not sure anyone than Exchange Server "push" Lock-ins are the only thing selling these things.
Treo 755p (palm) - 320x320 screen, 312mhz processor
Treo 750 (windows)- 240x240 screen (looks like crap compared to Palm), 300mhz processor
The windows version does have a persistant file system and the palm does not, which is nice if your battery and backup battery both die, but this has never happened in my 4 years of owning a treo.
The price difference? The windows one costs $100 more, for (imo vastly) inferior hardware.
No, it can't.
Here, on this laptop:
# du -sx
4677115
# du -sx
2026303
# echo "4677115 - 2026303" | bc
2650812
(This is Gentoo so you need to subtract about 300M for the metadata caches,etc. Also,
2 1/2 Gig. That's it. Sure I could slim it down more if needed (I don't really use timidi much at all, etc.).
That's for a FULL, USABLE Operating System. OOo, Full install of KDE, several other User things that make this machine (a near 9 year old laptop) a User's PC and not a "workstation".
Given that same space, Windows will get your machine to boot to a Desktop and that's about it. Linux will soar on flash drives, especially with them getting larger and cheaper. Windows (unless you run CE...
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
I'm sure it's been said many times here, but I think that it is really this simple:
+ Simplify the interface and make it usable
- As much as I love KDE, there are just too many options.
- GNOME needs to be more usable. Sometimes I think that it was made for 5 year olds.
- Once you get over the fact that Office 2007 is not Office 2003, Office 2007 is a good example of how to make things simple AND usable.
+ Get support from big companies that sell to schools
+ Increase interoperability with Windows applications
Linux is on its way and I think that Windows XP highlights just how far Linux has come. As much as it many not seem like it, Windows may have moved more towards Linux than vice versa. Linux developers need to understand what Apple has done. Linux is great, but I think that the people who develop it don't understand the people who actually use the products!
If it wasn't for Moore's law, Linux would have long since caught up with them. Imagine if hardware hit a wall, and technology couldn't advance beyond say what existed in 2000 or 2005. Then MS couldn't sell a more complex OS or office suite, and customers would be "stuck" with Win 2000 XP. There would be security patches or hard tuned optimizations to make it a bit faster, but that would be it. They couldn't justify the release an expensive major update for existing customers. Users would dead end at office 2000 or office 2003, since there would be no incentive to update. Office 2007 and/or Vista would not run at all, or would run impossibly slow on such machines.
Eventually, Open Office and Linux would catch and match them feature for feature, so new customers would have no incentive to go with the proprietary solution, since their protocols would eventually be reverse engineered bug for bug, feature for feature, driver for driver. The only way MS keeps Linux at bay is by releasing new feature laden stuff that takes advantage of new, updated hardware.
My prediction: The end of Moore's law will herald the end of Microsoft.
My rights don't need management.
A lot less people all the time. Every single electronic gizmo nowadays has its own menu system, along with half the websites and such. People are used to learning slightly different interfaces all the time these days, 'familiarity' is much less of a barrier. And then there's the fact that Vista's Aero interface isn't all that familiar to XP-users compared to the latest Linux systems, anyway.
There are still plenty of dealbreakers - niche Windows-only software - but those niches are shrinking, and 'familiarity' alone isn't enough to save Windows forever.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Mod parent down for not knowing what the hell he is talking about and being, in general, a giant douche, if you please. Thank you, that is all.
Double click on your mp3 file, click on 'ok' a few times if it decides to install codecs (this will only happen on the first mp3 you try to play), hear your mp3.
Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.
It implicitly refers to transistor density at a given price. You've been to get $200 computers for many years, and Moore's law means that you can now get $200 laptops capable of running Linux and a GUI.
As long as Microsoft Office runs on Windows and doesn't run on Linux, Microsoft will be able to compete.
Maybe in ten years that won't be true. After all, I didn't really expect Word to overtake WordPerfect and other alternatives in the market the way it did back in the 90's... but even in that case, it's because something has happened to Office, not because of Moore's Law.
What could Microsoft do to defeat such enemy? Just use the old, proven tactics to win, including:
- Put their own lawyers on the case. To extra effect, make Ballmer shout "Lawyers, Lawyers, Lawyers"
- Buy another law, rename to MS Law, include it with new versions of Vista for free, and put the Moore Law out of the market
- Patent something related to some of the words of the moore law, and sue anyone trying to use it
- Finance a dying company to sue Moore for prior art.
- Add some undocumented code in Windows, to make it stop working if the Moore law tries to come into effect (they already are doing a good work in this direction)
Moores law can also be applied to the correlation between the increase in ones Unix knowledge, and the corresponding decrease in ones attractiveness to the opposite sex.
Dammit.
The tabbed interface of the Eee PC is simpler, but that does not mean it's more usable. That's one of the big mistakes people make about the Mac. Mac OS X is more usable than Windows (as a general rule, YMMV), but it's not simpler. In many ways, OS X is much more complex than Windows, but that complexity is *managed*, not merely limited.
The main problem Linux faces is not that it's too complex, but that it's designed with a philosophy that tends to value "technologically correct" above all else. There are times when being less precise, less technically oriented, less detailed or less optioned is better for the human user, even if it is not as "true" to the computer itself. Apple seems to explicitly understand this, Microsoft seems to sort of intuit this without understanding it (so they don't make the right choices, but they realize such choices need to be made, which is better than nothing), while on Linux, this seems to be poorly understand, and often seen as a negative.
With most cases of usability efforts on Linux, it's often just trying to copy (and improve upon) some existing system (GIMP vs Photoshop, KDE vs Windows, GNOME vs Mac OS (classic), etc.), it's an attempt to be more usable for admin-types (dselect, aptitude, etc.), or--and this is where Linux truly falls flat on its face--when someone attempts to make a truly usable Linux, they don't think, "let's make a Linux that works the way people work," they think, "let's make an interface that is so simple, even an idiot can use it." Instead of respecting the humanity of their target audience, they insult them.
That is a problem Moore's Law can't do anything about.
Linux won't truly take off until they stop insulting the normal person, and start respecting them. Ubuntu is close, but it's still too technically-oriented. The thing is, though, I'm not sure this is a bad thing. It might be, as it does keep Linux from being a mainstream OS, but on the other hand, it *is* an excellent OS for the people who are more technically-minded, and prefer absolute control, who value technology over aesthetics and the humanity of the interface. If Linux truly evolved to become a user-oriented OS, it would leave a void for the technical user. I suppose there'd still be the DIY Linux distros, plus there's always BSD or Plan 9, or some new OS yet to be created. Still, I'm not sure that if a User-Oriented Linux became a major OS player, that the more bare-bones technically-oriented Linuxes wouldn't find themselves losing significant attention by both users and developers alike.
For those of you just now getting out from under your rock; both the consumer and professional versions of Windows have been fully self-reliant operating systems (not a DOS-based "operating environment") since 2001 (XP release), and the professional line since the first WinNT release.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
When half of the WinTel duopoly puts out a new processor two years after the introduction of the other half's latest operating system, that won't even run it, that is significant.
Microsoft should not have started OEM'ing AMD PCs in India with Zenith.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Moore's law did not reduce the cost of power supplies, monitors, DVD drives, keyboards, plastic cases or mice. And guess what, almost every one of those items I mentioned costs (significantly, as in twice) more than an OEM Windows license. If anyone should worry, it's Intel.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
You're comparing the move from one version of Windows to another to the move from Windows to Linux?
Can you score me some of what you're smoking?
he wins in jackassory!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I seriously thought you meant the line about goats. I was trying to search that PDF for "zionist" and "goat" and wondering why I couldn't find it!
http://www.skullsecurity.org/blog/
link.
"With unit cost falling as the number of components per
circuit rises, by 1975 economics may dictate squeezing as
many as 65,000 components on a single silicon chip
Certainly over the short term this rate
can be expected to continue, if not to increase."
oh know, not 65,000! heh, I love how times have changed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We use a system that requires MS SQL on the laptops (yes its a bad system, I didn't write the program.) Anyhow needed to add a new machine and I phoned up our supplier and we were quoted £4,500 for a single licence. So ok, multiply this by 10 and you could be saving £45,000 per year.
This is just one example of where MySQL can kick the ass of MS SQL.
Ok so I don't write the programs, but my god thats a saving and a half, even if you need to rework a percentage of the code, the cost saving is still massive.
http://www.writeitfor.us - Writing IT for the IT generation.
Just because the Eee OS is tabbed and simpler than normal Linux doesn't mean it's suddenly better than Windows. It lacks probably 90% of functionality that Windows and a full distro has.
Gordon Moore worked at black Mesa,
and Steve Moore was rebuilt faster and stronger.
Wait...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I disagree, from personal experience. The only thing I do on my regular laptop that I wouldn't do on the Eee is use photoshop/gimp. Word processing, web browsing, email, coding/programming, etc can all be done just as easily. More importantly, it'll fit in my purse and I don't worry about losing it or having it stolen. I also have it to thank for introducing me to Linux, which I would probably never have come around to if I hadn't tried it out on the Eee.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
a movement. Revolution implies you end up where you started.
I am running a 289 dollar "piece of crap" desktop. I have been 4 four years. It plays WoW and does general work just fine... stupid computer, I promised i wouldn't by another one until it broke. I gave it a year.grrr.
Maybe I should install Vista, that would break it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Whether or not who gets what chunk of the pie isn't as significant as the change that flash memory and the ultra portables such as the EEE PC have brought about: Not since the 1990s has the size and hardware requirements of a "full featured" operating system been an issue. Terms like bloat, needless redundancy, inefficient, memory-hog, slow, have not had as much meaning as they have lately. Solid State hard drive capacities will increase, but what a refreshing look at the reality and wastefulness of so many operating systems and programs. Taking note: Even as SSD capacities increase, the requirement to not endlessly grind on them will not in the near future decrease.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
I would argue that you're utterly wrong on this. Some of my DRMd music wouldn't play on Linux until I sorted it out, but that's a problem with iTunes and not with Linux. MP3s were never a problem.
More than that, I installed Ubuntu from scratch myself, knowing nothing about Linux beyond what I could find on Google and had picked up from using the Eee for a week or so. The only thing that gave me significant trouble was the wireless card, but that's working fine after a bit of tweaking. I'm now using egrep, shell scripts and a bit of perl to do some great stuff which has advanced my PhD research (into medieval literature) astronomically.
The problem is not that Linux is in any way "unusable", but that many people are scared of learning to use new tools. I have genuinely come across a lot of people who think they will "break" their computer if they do anything beyond what Windows easily allows. Downloading codecs for MP3s or using the command line to move or rename a file would be terrifying for them because they fear the kind of hissy fits that Windows tends to throw if you tinker with it. We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
"Once CPU speeds cease to double every few years.."
Speed is a by product of Moore's Law. High speeds are hitting certain problems.
More accurately:
"Once CPU power cease to double every few years.."
Because it is finally moving into multi cores and 64 bit, CPU power will continue to increase.
I don't think Vista is optimized for dual core. It works, yes but think wide spreed dual core came along too late in Vistas development cycle for it to be optimized. Another on coming train MS missed.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Your same logic could also be used to support the argument that closed source software would gain traction in that environment. If it becomes the case that cleverly designed software is the only way to improve performance once hardware advances slow, then companies will be much more likely to jealously guard their code!
Microsoft has always been the king of marketing in the software world ... Gates and company could even be credited for creating the proprietary software industry as we know it today. Their bundling practices, evidenced by Internet Explorer and Media Player (et al), have proven their capability. They will take advantage of bundling again. The only question is how. Perhaps they will do it with the next generation of Xbox; a "free" operating system with their gaming platform just like the "free" Blu-ray player in the PS3. Perhaps they will buy an Asus competitor and bundle the OS with their ultra-portable. Perhaps it will come in the guise of donations in the form of Classmate PC.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
You have to use your brain. Best of luck.
I'm pretty sure it can be done, because I'm doing it right now. And I don't possess the encyclopedic inventory of Linux skills assumed necessary to get any basic functionality from a Linux system.
You do need to learn for to use Google. I guess you need to be able to read too. And then you have to be able to reason a little. And type a bit too.
But back to the point of the article, I think it's a great point they're making. I'm only using Linux now because I got sick paying for Windows. I don't think Linux (Fedora in my case) is the greatest OS ever, but then neither is Windows. It has more potential to improve over short periods of time. I've seen this in the year and a half I've been using it. Since I'm using a massively improved version compared to the one I started on (which worked well BTW) and I'm still using XP on my other system. I do have the luxury of two desktop computers, so I can keep one aside for games and the other for everything else. The functionality of the gaming system improves enormously because of this, and the other system improves by virtue of using a "better" OS.
And it's free.
Microsoft's stock has become a widows and orphans fund since 2002. It is no longer a growth stock. It has flattened out. The market obviously has intuitive sense that yes, Moore's law is pricing Microsoft stock out, in the face of the growth of Free Open Source Software. I am not an investment adviser, but I would not hold onto Microsoft stock right now. The borg's best days are behind it.
Never mind Moore, how about Microsoft's law: "The size of our operating system goes up 50% every five years"
Since Moore is obstensively moving faster than Microsoft, MS's 'footprint' on a given machine, as a total percentage of available disk and memory resources, will decrease with each successive OS release. Their price should decrease accordingly, although (at least today), it's being held artificially high by, well, shareholders demanding profit.
The balloon has gotta pop, and Linux is the likely pin.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
However the flip side is that x million transistors gets cheaper and cheaper. If you're frugal with computer resources then the solution can run on lower and lower cost hardware.
This is particularly important in embedded space where 32-bit micros with small amounts of memory can now be bought for under a buck per part. Just don't expect to run any fat-ass code on these.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
and collectively these alternatives have won less than a 1% share of the desktop. Operating System Market Share for February, 2008
Three things the Geek will never understand:
No one else has the slightest desire to muck around "under the hood."
Users like a consistent "look and feel" across applications. You develop for Windows or the Mac you know what your clients want to see. Go your own way and you are hobbled like the GIMP.
The UI is the "public face" of the operating system. That one billion users world-wide have settled on the Windows GUI with minimal customization ought to tell him something.
Im sorry sir but as your name is Moore, and we have been advised that you are ineligible for personal injury insurance and anything to do with chairs. Have a nice day.
I do not believe there is anything malicious that has caused this inefficiency to rise. The cost of developing software means that slow and bloaty is what we end up producing as software engineers. It just makes more sense economically.
I hope that in the future, with capped per-core CPU speeds, we will see a renaissance in tight programming. Perhaps new languages will spring up that offer the efficiency of C++, but with the coding efficiency of ECMAScript4 or even C#. D is one such language, and there may be many more to come.
We may also see much smarter compilers built on ideas like LLVM that will offer statically compiled languages some of the benefits of dynamically compiled VM code, just as taking advantage of specific architectures, and extensive inter-process analysis of code.
With many software problems becoming better understood, we could see much more extensive system libraries that offer the same features as say the .net environment. Cocoa and QT4 are already heading in this direction, with a really feature rich set of libraries, but also with the eye on cutting down memory usage and CPU cycles. In the future, we may see much more optimized shared library usage for system-level applications. This will lead to a snappier user experience. We won't need to have 100s of megs of shared libraries duplicating so much across so many apps.
I think massive parallelism in user applications will never happen without a complete rethink from the OS up, or a new application development paradigm. Furthermore, most developers simply aren't up to writing thread-safe code - it's very hard to get right, and often you don't gain that much for standard applications. That's because of the types of problems being solved in typical applications. We're having a hard enough time writing single threaded apps regardless.
I admire the managed code empire that M$ has built into vista, but ultimately we may want better performance than this heavy-weight approach can offer. Both OS X and KDE are staying away from the managed code "heaven" for the time being. I believe that apple will find a way to make future versions of Objective-C have most of the benefits that managed code can offer, but also with extremely tight machine code.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Not invariably. Every so often there's a technology barrier which means that going smaller costs a new factory. That can raise the initial cost of the chips quite a lot. The manufacturer generally eats the cost, but makes it back over the life of the factory. But there used to be a lot more manufacturers. Costs of more expensive factories has caused the market to dwindle, and dwindle again. Now it's almost a world wide monopoly. Intel, AMD, and IBM. Anybody else major? There used to be dozens. (I'm talking computer chips here. Watches can still be made with the old, cheaper factories...or possibly even ink-jet printers, if what I've been reading recently is accurate.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
This is somewhat akin to asking in 1920 "100 years from now, do you think Ford's cheap cars have a chance?".
At the rate we are going, it's entirely possible that the Ford Motor Company will go Chapter 11 (or more likely be bought by some other company) and for all intents and purposes cease to exist. In both cases, there is broad mass appeal in the first wave of a technology adaption, and a cash horde and corporate infrastructure with "legs".
In 1920, electric and steam were still competitive engine technologies. In the 1920s it was probably apparent to most that gasoline engines would dominate. This happened, and the engine in mass-market autombiles was fundamentally the same (emission, computer, and many other refinements aside, still the same fundamental technology) until hybrids were mass-marketed in the late-90s. Now it looks like hybrids might dominate some day; but gasoline-only had quite a run, didn't it?
100 years from now, who knows what the trend in computing will be? Maybe most people won't even have general-purpose computers. Maybe they'll just have boxes with a dozen killer apps built into hardware for better reliability, because the "do it in software first" stage of development will be considered "done".
Or, maybe the introduction of inexpensive multiprocessing technology, smart non-volatile memory, or some other combination of these will reveal deficiencies in OS design that require re-writing the OS from scratch, and maybe that OS will dominate for 30 years. 100 years from now is enough time to fit about 3 lifetimes of MS and *NIX. In other words, 100 years is a long time even in a conservative technology like automobiles, nevermind tech where 10 years is an "eternity".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
which will forever be known by the moniker "Rucs' Corollary" in honor of the man credited with both discovering it, and proving it; simultaneously no less.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Microsoft can still make money by charging far less if that is what it takes to beat Linux on the ultraportable devices. It is likely that we will see a Vista ultramobile edition or something in the next couple of years and it will cost an OEM like under $30.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well you're just like Hitler
Please stop stalking me, bro.
Via
It's excellent for a business environment too- which is how I use mine. It has entirely replaced a "conventional" laptop. It handles doing briefings and the usual business crap with ease and aplomb. There's nothing better for working on tight airline seats or airline terminal couches and tables. It's ultra-quick boot time is fantastic for taking quick notes in meetings or showing documents to others. It's so small it can be easily passed around a table in one hand or alternately it easily hooks up to projectors so lots of people can view at the same time. As a daily user of an eeepc I really don't think this distinction of the eeepc not being "real" is just a red herring created by other laptop makers.
Not that I'm a MS fan.
Yes, this is correct. Moore's law has nothing to do with price. In other words, if price doubled each time transistor density did, nothing would be different today.
Wellllll...except that the average laptop would cost several trillion dollars. Minor detail.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
Somebody please explain to me how a fictional law is driving down flash prices as stated by the article. A 'law' must have some external controlling factor to ensure compliance. Moore's 'Law' is simply an observation of, and in no way contributes to, the on-going increase in processing power and reduction in price. Unless possibly, Moore has hired a bunch of goons to visit Intel if they don't comply.
Please, please, stop calling it Moore's Law...
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
With open source, though, all it takes is one person finding a good solution for everybody to have it. And open source has a hell of a lot of developers.
No tyrant thrives when every subject says no.
Check out the Web stats for the iPhone.
It gained a larger market share in 6 months than Windows mobile has in years.
Your sig - out of state/ld calls are federally regulated at a lower rate. Local calls are regulated by the state PUC, usually at a higher rate.
Cheers
Right, I hear those Eee PCs are just flying off the shelves at Best Buy.
I heard an interesting story on npr this morning. The study was the effect of perceived value based on price using a placebo. They gave a placebo pain reliever to a group of subjects, gave them time for the 'drug' to take effect, and shocked them to test their tolerance. They found that the subjects that were told the pill cost $25 each had a much stronger placebo effect then those that were told the pill cost 5 cents each. Morale: without any reasonable means for comparison people use price to assign value.
Why is this relevant?
Most consumers do not have any reliable mechanism to put value on Windows versus a *nix OS. So the only metric they have is the price, thus a higher priced OS would be perceived as even higher value. I think your thesis is incorrect.
While Microsoft can duck for a while by lowering OEM prices the same thing will happen to the campanies computers down the road. If something starts eating away at the prices of Windows and Office it will hurt Microsoft, badly. This is because even with countless of millions spent they cant seem to make money on anything but the desktop and the office suite. Whatever they touch becomes a sinkhole how ever they go by.
The answer to the eeePC is pretty funny to me, they want to deliver it with XP since Vista is such a resource hog. That does indicate big troubles down the road since a Linux box now does everything a vista box does but faster, including running Windows apps.
HTTP/1.1 400
If I had any mod points left you would have a couple headed in your direction right now, for ou have touched upon one of the biggest roadblocks in the adaptation of linux and other alternative OS's. Before we went to 100% FOSS in our office I had to convince our president that linux wasn't some sort of "virus" or "hacker's tool". Not that I could blame her though; between the copious amounts of FUD coming out of Redmond, and the natural human aversion toward anything not in our "comfort zone", it's no wonder that people have been hesitant to even so much as give another OS a fair shot.
On the other hand, another problem I've run into in trying to convince even my more computer-literate associates to switch is that most of these guys have cut their collective teeth on Windows OS's. They know every nut, bolt, registry and DLL hack of that system, and they kind of like their view from the top. They'll never admit it but their perception is that trying on an unfamiliar OS would force them to swallow some pride and put them back at the bottom of the learning curve. I guess some people's egos just can't bear to take that kind of hit.
This space for rent!
Standard Operating Procedure for Microsoft is to have a little chat with Asus about their 'nice little business'.
It could go something like this:
Microsoft, "You have a nice business here; you sell a lot of motherboards."
Asus, "We sure do. The motherboard business has been very very good to us."
Microsoft, "And we at Microsoft have always been good to you, right?"
Asus, "Well... there was the tablet fiasco. Remember how you convinced many of us...
Microsoft, "Nevermind that. I am talking about all the help and access you get in order to write all your drivers for Windows. We have always been there for you, right?
Asus, "Well... Vista didn't...
Microsoft, "Forget about Vista for now! Just how far would you get without confidential access to all our operating systems?
Asus, "We couldn't sell any motherboards to Windows users, just Linux, BSD, Solaris...
Microsoft, "In other words, You Would Be SCREWED!"
Asus, *hangs head* "What do you want?"
Microsoft, "We are not happy about your $200 little laptop running Linux."
Asus, "But we can't stop it now - we have taken orders..."
Microsoft, "We want you to offer it with Windows!"
Asus, "But Windows is too big and too expensive and...
Microsoft, "Let me tell you what you are going to do. (1) You are going to raise the price to $400 instead of $200. (2) Then you are going to offer a Windows XP version for $395. (3) Then you are going to make a larger version that will actually work with XP.
Asus, "But our original version is underpowered and doeesn't have enough storage for XP and Office..."
Microsoft, "Too bad. Our customers have to become used to much less performance - haven't you tried Vista yet? And you leave the storage problem to us - once we trim out all the useless crap XP will fit - so will Office. It will still be slow but who cares."
Asus, "But our customers..."
Microsoft, *screaming* "They aren't YOUR customers!!! They are OUR customers!!! The only reason they buy your motherboards and computers is to run OUR operating system. And if you don't cooperate with us, you just may have all kinds of problems getting the information you need to create the drivers for your new products. UNDERSTAND?"
*CRASH*
Asus, "Yeah, sure. We understand Mr. Ballmer... Could I get you another chair?"
Microsoft, "Maybe later. Where are the girls?"
And so it goes, Microsoft Standard Operating Procedure for the last 25 years.
Ed (UnDead)
As a long time Microsoft hater... hey I am an old Amiga user :) I have recently started to wonder how long it is going to fair for Apple to continue to get to tie themselves to expsensive hardware that they control and only they can sell. Or to say another way, I think they may have the potential to be the main competitor to Windows, but they limit their potential market share buy sticking to their hardware. Is fair then to blame MS for being a Monopoly when Apple could likely have half the market if they opened their OS to hardware as MS has? MS then is only a monopoly because Apple chooses not to play fair. I mean if MS said we are going to force you OUR $1500 computers with every copy of Vista people would freak out. But Apply gets away with it.
Now MS does plenty of other nasty stuff. But just looking at markshare these days Apple is holding themselves back to make more money off their hardware. We'd be giving MS tons of crap for doing the same. Apple is cheating and using anti-trust tactics.
When you buy a Dell or what ever, you aren't paying $200 for XP, you are paying a lot less. With the E P C its an add-on. Just like adding XP to a Macintosh. If the E P C makers licenced Windows, you might see a $30-50 price jump.
The reality is that the E P C is not a consumer computer at this stage.
Microsoft isn't stupid and they seem to be realizing this trend is coming. Have you looked at their product roadmap and how it all has to work together?
It goes something like this:
I hate Microsoft, but the apps I mentioned above are actually pretty decent and they drive all of our business decisions from there (server OS, client OS, etc).
----- obSig
It is the intractable "Geekness" of Linux that drives users away.
Open the Linspire CNR library.
Take a look - a long, hard look - at the 25,000 or so applications in the repository.
How many of these apps would be of the slightest interest to the shopper at Best Buy or Wal-Mart?
Now open Download.com and ask yourself the same question.
The Windows platform demands no religious ideological commitment to anything. You are not shunned because you installed the Blu Ray drive with the licensed and closed source Windows driver.
The holy wars fought out on Slashdot are out of sight and out of mind.
You want subscription radio, you can have subscription radio. You want Photoshop, you can have Photoshop. If you want Paint.NET, you can have Paint.NET.
Microsoft positions product for every market segment.
If Moore's law has any meaning in the discussion, it implies that it won't be long before the $200 PC will be perfectly capable of running Vista with the Aero GUI enabled.
The $500 PC with DX10 becomes a viable entry-level gaming platform.
Vista Home Basic dies and is reincarnated as Vista SE for the OLPC market abroad.
The OEM Windows install remains a one-time purchase for the life of the system. The Premium or Ultimate install continues to dominate at higher - and more profitable - price points.
The poor will not be buying computers even at a discount.
The $200 Windows PC becomes simply the second, third or fourth PC in the middle class home or office. Look at the reviews of the gPC posted at Walmart.com and it becomes perfectly clear who actually buys these things.
Oh, I am sure fragmenting of OS and application market will be good for many closed source companies. It's just that Microsoft will not be one of them, because they can not meaningfully market 10 radically different operating systems. Open source will be still the only way to go for specialized usage scenarios that are too rare for commercial companies to address, have requirements understood only by potential customers or require large teams of C.Sci PHDs to develop successfully.
maybe instead of just bitching to be in the "cool crowd" you could actually *gasp* do some research and see HOW that memory is used and HOW it is released as necessary....
Every time i see someone bitching about how they wouldn't want to have all of their RAM in use, my mind automatically tells me to ignore this person because they fail to understand even the most basic of computer fundamentals.
Unused RAM is wasted resources.
Period.
I understand the concept of having a good memory scheduler that releases and allocates RAM quickly and efficiently as the needs of OS and applications change, however, to me, crowing that you have 2gb or RAM installed and only ever see 500MB of it used in your computer (regardless of OS) simply tells me you have too much RAM or improperly set up your system.
It's not Rocket Science to understand that anything stored in the RAM is exponentially faster access than something stored on disk of any kind, yet all I see are people bitching that "Vista uses up all of my RAM", yet they do not mention that it is doing so on purpose (whether it works optimally or not is again, another discussion) by preloading the RAM with what is most necessary for the most commonly run apps.
Is the Vista memory scheduler good enough to do this?
That is another debate.
But don't bitch about something using memory to make the use of the computer (arguably) better.
Oh, and you can get Dell core2 Duo laptops for $500 all day long, with at LEAST 1GB of RAM. So don't tell me that they are too expensive.
(And you do know that you can turn of the "eye candy", the superfetch, the indexing, etc.....right?)
How do you play mp3s on one of these Linux "computers"?
I use Ubuntu. I opened Banshee, pressed a button, waited for it to rip then double-clicked. What, you expectd more?
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
It happened to the Amiga, and to a lesser extent the Mac...
When the existing line of CPUs stopped getting faster (Motorola stopped 68k development, and the G4 PPC stagnated for a while), people were forced to improve the performance of their software on existing hardware.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I would just like to comment that I am very much in that boat - I have toyed with linux, configured a few UNIX servers here and there (mostly using guides), and yet I've never put Linux on my desktop (in favor of XP). I'm certainly not a windows nut, but frankly the pure number of linux distros coupled with my concern over getting drivers (I built my own box, picking parts with XP drivers available) has scared me away. Not to mention the number of programs which I use regularly that require Direct X and other (I presume) windows hooks. Taking for instance a few Valve games, I'm not really willing to spend hours configuring my system to play when I could just load up and play immediately on a Windows machine. I could be wrong in my assumptions - in fact, I regularly am - but if I am I think the underlying reasons of *why* I am wrong rather than the fact I am wrong is far more interesting. Microsoft's advertising machine truly is something to be impressed by (or fearful of). And I, like many others, simply do not have the time to educate myself otherwise (except, of course, the occasional slashdot comment offering insight! I may even build a mythTV soon...)
There are still some things that I do exclusively on Windows - Photoshop being an obvious one. You should consider dual-booting. You can get to know Linux at your own pace, and not lose the convenience of your favourite Windows programs. Although of course, if you don't have much spare time on your hands, it's understandable that you'd stick with what works for you.
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
I remember rfeading something written by another "Moore" (Chuck Moore, creator of the Forth programming language,) concerning the compiling Forth programs directly into silicon via a silicon foundry which would take the patterns and traces directly from the compiler output.
Now that always appealed to me.
Making purpose specific devices from more generalized instructions by eliminating the generalized instruction processing.
You would end up having something that might very well be unhackable because all it knows how to do is what its supposed to do and nothing else. (The instructions just aren't there.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Microsoft can of course alter it's prices for any of these devices if it loses enough market share...
There is also the issue of people who have licenced windows in the past and thrown away those machines. I expect to see consumer issues if consumers can't transfer those lic. Esp., in Europe with the regulators having MSFT in their sights.
With only 1 Billion PCS in a world of nearly 6 Billion, I still feel the world needs a $25 computer.
http://www.hawknest.com/
I disagree. If you have money to burn on mobile toys, you're right in the target market.
Very few people are going to buy this as their only computer. It's supplemental. I even bet a lot of eeepc owners have another larger and more capable laptop.
It's different, which makes it neat, its small enough to use places you wouldn't use a full size laptop, and its cheap enough so your buyers remorse (which impulsive buyers know well) is bound to be limited.
The only thing about the beastie is that this kind of thing really, really needs great battery life, which it doesn't have. But as I said, it's cheap so you don't feel cheated. Still, battery is the only reason this beastie hasn't taken the world by storm.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
A key COMPONENT of Moore's law is that progress/speed DOUBLES every 18 months.
If cars followed Moores law they'd cost $500, go for 300 miles per gallon, and have 100,000HP.
but I don't mean regional, I mean ACROSS THE STREET local..
we have trunk lines.. (PBX) with ground start-ancient tech for pots.
they won't offer any but message rate service- for local use... there is no flat rate...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The widows and orphans are still banking dividend checks as the American economy goes south.
60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S.
Microsoft is seeing 20%-30% growth in these markets each quarter. The EU bureaucracy can fine Microsoft $1 billion dollars without having the slightest impact on these numbers whatever.
Microsoft is debt free with $20 billion in liquid reserves.
Happy days are here again, the skies are bright and clear again.
This subject came up here on Slashdot around the time Dell starting selling computers with Ubuntu on them. Often the Dells with Linux installed were not a whole lot cheaper than ones with Windows which led to the question, why were there no big savings with a free OS?
I can't find the postings in question right now, but the estimates were that Dell gets something in the neighborhood of $50 per machine from trialware manufacturers, or just about the same amount as it pays for an OEM Windows license.
If someone else has better data, or can find this discussion, please let us know.
Where'd you get THAT word? And does Stephen Colbert know about it? It's a fairly brilliant word.
timing.
The difference between geniuses who made a bundle in the dot com bubble and the fools who were left holding the bag?
Timing.
It's been clear for a long time that sooner or later Microsoft's license based business model is going to be seriously undermined, especially at the low end. It goes without saying that somebody is going to be making money off this development (possibly including Microsoft itself, if it is smart). The problem is nobody knows for certain which it is: sooner or later? There's really only one way to find out: to give it a try.
The Asus approach is quite interesting; they've tried to define a new niche. This makes is much more likely that they'll have a modest success even if the time is not ripe for the Microsoft model to crumble, while getting a toe over the line if it turns out that the land rush is about to start.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, but remember that there is more involved than just the purchase price of a Windows licence. You also need to take into account the added hardware overhead required to run it - GNU/Linux will generally be a lot happier on a low-specced machine than Windows will, especially Vista. Admittedly the Vista system requirements aren't as high as some people are making them out to be, but they're by no means trivial.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
more on the lines of the parent but slight disagreement
not really, speed, price and all that jazz are all just inferences and interpretations of what makes the law significant or meaningful to you. The law itself is just about the "number of transistors doubling" etc... in essence its just about COMPLEXITY. You probably don't care how many transistors are on the chip, you just care about the result that provides. Because they use a relatively fixed size for the chips, its through increased transistor count (thus density) that they accomplish the performance / speed enhancements. Sure once in a while they come up with a new trick / idea on how to make better use of the transistors they have.. but in general its much more of a statement about chip manufacturing processes than anything else. Plus last I heard the law pretty much reached a death point as we haven't really made any sort of doubling as of late. Gets worse if you look at performance / speed. a fairly decent laptop in 2002 had like a 2ghz processor... a good laptop now has 2.4 core2duo, i dont know the transistor difference, and its hard to count the parallel speed benefit because thats somewhat of an algorithm change providing superscalar results. whatever back to the car thing
the car may not be more powerful, or cost less, but you have to ask yourself if that was ever the goal? people need faster computers in order to run the OS's and applications that are being developed and released.
Seeing as the speed limit has yet to go up there is no need for joe consumer to have a car with significantly more horsepower.. Additionally there are other reasons that they wouldnt want that. More ponies = less efficiency = more wasted gas. gas costs have been growing in case you havent noticed. What do you honestly plan on doing with that HP anyways? I'm not going to pretend to know much about cars and that stuff, but I'm pretty sure that unless you are racing, or towing (although there I think torque is much more important), I dont see why joe consumer ever has any USE for more than 200 horses... unless his car/truck is so heavy that they still cant get 0-60 in under 8 seconds.
Instead of focusing on that car innovation has in many ways been focused on gas efficiency and various compu/electronic components in engines, and luxuries. In the 1980's did you car have dual zone climate control, heated seats, heated mirrors, cruise control, digital stereo, nav, sleek ergonomic interrior, ultra-low emissions/exhaust, air bags, anti-lock, power steering, "assisted steering" (that seems to have a different name from every company), laser etched ignition keys with circuits in them or the rfid keys, useful keyfobs, variable intermittent wipers, etc etc..
cars have gotten lighter, stronger, more fuel efficient, and more functional, and generally better visibility (although thats been in a slight decline in the past several years compared to early-mid 90's
cars definately also become cheaper, look at the price gap between the blue book for buying a 'brand new' 3 year old car thats been on the lot for 3 years compared to the brand new model. not to the extent that various parts have gotten a lot cheaper, but i would imagine because the bulk of the parts dont really change. the chagnes in chip design make it easier and cheaper to produce the old variety and enable mass production of a higher density. That combined with demand and need to create demand contribute to pricing changes. The introduction of a new car seat to a car for example doesnt make it any more or less expensive to produce the old one because they dont have the same relationship as to what makes the new one 'better' than the old.
"Jazz isn't dead, it just smells funny" ~Frank Zappa
EdelFactor
I have an EEE. Not much I do, apart from games, that I can't do on the EEE. Email and wed, word processing, some programming/web development.
I even get a decent res when the EEE is plugged into a monitor
I wonder if Microsoft's traditional strategies will work in this instance if Moore is their enemy? 1) Buy Gordon Moore out for $100 million dollars or so 2) ??? 3) Profit!!! Or perhaps 1) Create a rival "Microsoft's Law" which is more appealing and use subversive tactics to get it recognised 2) ??? 3) Profit!!!
On /. I am constantly shouted down by Game Boys who insist that octo-core liquid cooled machines are absolutely necessary. Be that as it may, your monitor already costs more than a low end commodity PC so I expect that to 'justify' that purchase the graphics engine side of the equation will get ever bigger and more complex.
The Asus Eee PC alone has higher sales volume than Apple.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
You've used two laws of physics as examples, which, at least when I was at school, are generally provable under lab conditions; Moore's Law is not. It's a prediction based on an observation of past behaviour. Physical laws are in turn governed by higher physical laws, otherwise, the universe would be a pretty random place to live.
I'd also like to point out that Avagodro's law is more correctly referred to as Avagadro's Theory or Avagadro's Hypothesis.
A One that isn't cold, is scarcely a One at all.
all I see are people bitching that "Vista uses up all of my RAM", yet they do not mention that it is doing so on purpose (whether it works optimally or not is again, another discussion) by preloading the RAM with what is most necessary for the most commonly run apps.
Linux does this too. Have you ever run 'free -m' at the command line after a linux system has been up for a few hours? Filled with buffers and cached data. I guess this boils down to your 'optimally or not' question, but I've yet to find a system running linux (specifically ubuntu) with less than 1GB of RAM that had to have default settings tuned down in order to improve performance to the point where it became usable... if anything there's been room to crank up the eye-candy. The opposite is true of Vista machines I've come accross (i.e. every vista system with 1GB or less needed to have default settings reigned in to achieve an acceptable level of responsivness).
I know, anecdotal evidence. The question still remains: what value does vista provide over a default installation of ubuntu that requires so much more RAM? Not a damn thing that I can see...
5468652047616D65
You are definitely not paying $200 for Windows. Visit Dell.com and see the $400 entry level workstation (which, despite popular Slashdot opinion, will run Windows generally well - far better than the three year old laptop that I'm typing on now).
Microsoft gets a fraction of that price, IIRC, around $30. No one pays $200 for a retail copy of XP or Vista.
Yes, my current laptop runs Windows, and my next laptop will too. Though, I'll probably opt to spend a bit more to get encrypting file system (EFS) support next time... familiarity is worth it. Plus, now it's trivial to have a free VMWare Server install with Ubuntu, if I'm really stuck for something from Linux.
"So it suddenly makes more sense to run Linux in order to have the hardware that the user wants."
Or XP.
M$ office 2007 is soooo familiar to earlier Office versions.
No, thanks.
I would rather use OO, not because it is cheaper, but because it is more familiar.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
Yes, the original paper by Moore makes the explicit connection between transistor density and prices and consumer marketing.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
"We need to encourage people to understand that customising your OS, playing with it, trying things out, should be the norm - and that you really have to be quite clever to "break" a computer!" How right you are. If you don't have a second computer, or at least a second hard drive, you can't take the risks necessary to learn how things work. The ironic thing is that very, very rarely do you ever mess anything up to the point where you can't get it working again.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
also stuff like playing DVDs, MP3s, running 3D acceleration on Nvidia/ATI cards and youtube(flash) while not installed by default on ubuntu for copyright/patent/dmca reasons, the first time you attempt to do any of those things it just pops up a prompt asking you if you're allowed to do those things, you click "yes", then it just installs the necessary components and off you go.
when i installed ubuntu in 2005 (it was less slick back then, but still relatively good) i left win2k installed so that i could play games, but to be frank i havent booted into windows since...
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
There's a couple slight problems with this.
1) ASUS has released a version of the EeePC with a reduced version of Windows XP on it.
2) The article doesn't mention any poll regarding how many EeePC users have installed Windows XP over the linux install on their EeePC.
3) I RTFA'd and I still don't see how they're correlating falling SSD prices becoming Microsoft's enemy. Linux was installed on the EeePC to keep the prices down, but ASUS realized some users would want XP and even included a driver CD with XP drivers on it! The only issue I think Microsoft had with the EeePC is that they didn't have a good "official" version of XP that works well with SSD as SSDs have limited writes, so some users prefer turning off virtual memory and removing other features that tend to write in the background. Using RAM drives is fairly popular too as they serve as a place to store browser cache, etc.
I have a EeePC 4G Surf and I installed Windows XP on mine. The Linux distro was alright, but out of the box it didn't interface well with my network (streaming files and network shares were a bit of a pain), which XP had no problem with.
I own an Eee PC and the tab interface really is both simpler and more usable at the same time. Relatives, coworkers, and non-technical friends were able to pick it up for the first time and immediately start using it for their typical internet use. It really is that easy, and the design of the system is much more usable and intuitive than a traditional desktop metaphor for the form-factor of the device.
It seems like your criticism of Linux as 'too technically-oriented' may be true in some cases, but is off-target for the EeePC.
The main complaints were with hardware, not the Linux OS or applications: The keyboard is unusually small and not everyone likes using a trackpad.
I think it's a real tragedy that despite a great demand, utility, and business case for a very low cost laptop like the EeePC 701, there seems to be forces at work to reduce the amount of products like this on the market. Even the newer EeePC models are priced significantly higher.
There is nothing that prevents Microsoft to adapt to the new reality. They can simply make a new O/S on an advanced programming language like Erlang which is easily parallelizable and provide an emulation layer to run its old O/Ses. The reason that they don't do it is because they don't need to, yet.
Some people stay because of Office. Some stay because of some oddball Visual Basic app they can't live without. I stay because of Quicken. All it takes is ONE must-have feature to keep one on Windows.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
somebody who has the borg OS installed on his computer is:
- an ignorant, he does not know that he surrendered his digital freedom.
- somebody forced to keep that awful thing on his hardware because he does not have the skills to get rid of it, but he's perfectly aware of what is at stake. This person suffers more and more every new day.
- A niche market user with a software locked out of GNU/Linux by the borg collective money.
- An a** ho**.
I forgot to add that it will be a commercial enterprise that will advance the state of the art on operating systems, not an open source initiative. I have never seen open source beeing pioneers. Open source usually reimplements what other open source/commercial enterprises have.
How do you play mp3s on one of these Linux "computers"? You don't. Umm, don't talk without references. My eee I got yesterday played them just fine out-of-the box when I popped in an SD card full of mp3's.
In general I agree with your theory that the price of software in an inexpensive device will eventually become a purchase choice factor, all other things being relatively equal.
The Moore's Law thing about more for less, probably does apply to both size and price, but not with the same ratio.
Ridiculous...
There's so many easier and more obvious ways to handle your issue. I would list them but you're probably just trolling.
As for programming, how is the keyboard? I mean I know its super tiny, but are all the symbolic keys represented without using shift/Fn or whatever?
The bottom line is Windows is ubiquitous and remains as such because it's "good enough". The lack of interest arises when people are forced into learning a new OS, only to discover that they are performing the same everyday computing tasks as they were with Windows. In the best case scenario, people may seamlessly switch to Linux and use most of their Windows applications with the help of Wine, Mono, Seamless Terminal Services, and/or Virtualization. For others folks, switching might present a hassle, especially if the problems pertains to hardware. The result: The switch to Linux encompasses access to the same Windows or native FOSS applications, which more likely than not have Windows ports. For typical users who care not of FOSS principles and ideology, theres just too little advantage to justify a migration. The cost advantage doesn't really come into play when 95% of the computers sold at retail outlets come pre-installed with Windows; there is really no choice but to pay for Windows in the first place. As the old expression goes...you cannot fight fire with fire. People aren't impressed by merely being "almost" as capable to the leader. Linux and FOSS need to depart from the endless game of matching/rivaling Windows solutions to surpassing them with software innovation.
Regards, Vincent