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?"

Comments

Pertains to density at a given price

[tepples]

Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price. The quotation in the Wikipedia article implies that Moore's law pertains to density at a given price: "The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year" (my emphasis).

Re:Pertains to density at a given price

[peragrin]

It's too bad we are talking about Gordon Moore, and not steve Moore.

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[Corwn of Amber]

One of the formulations says "Twice the computing power for the same price every 18 months".

You fail it.

it's called a corollary

[way2trivial]

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."

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[caerwyn]

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.

Re:And advertising/capitalism is Linux's enemy

[MightyYar]

You will see reams and reams of crapware installed on linux PCs too if it ever takes off. Even Apple can't resist pushing their .Mac at you and putting some trial applications on the machine.

Re:Moore's law has nothing to do with price

[nguy]

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.

Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs

[psychodelicacy]

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.

Re:I would love to have a gig of ram

[initdeep]

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?)

Re:Problem with price argument

[erayd]

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.