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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?"
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Only because of how MS made its OS. Some OS's *cough*Linux*cough*BSD*cough* let you choose among dozens of different UI's without messing with the kernel.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
100 years from now. Do you thing proprietary software has a chance in hell? It just is not sustainable to have every business, school, and government paying 1 provider of software for an operating system.
The school district I grew up at pays MS $400,000 every year for the software assurance program (and then $75,000 to Symantec to secure it). The total budget is about 150 Million. This can not be sustained.
Windows can not compete with Linux. That's why they use lock-in, FUD, etc.
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!
The text you describe appears nowhere in the article for Moore's Law. This should come as no surprise, since Moore's Law is named after Gordon Moore, not Steven Moore.
I figured that would have at least gone to the trouble to vandalize the article yourself and add in such garbage. However, a quick look at the page's history shows that you did not even go to the trouble to do that. (not that it matters; vandalism on Wikipedia is typically reverted in under a minute.)
Congratulations, you are not only a liar, but you are also lazy. Please take your poorly made strawman arguments elsewhere.
I keep hearing this mantra, but I think a lot of it is a case of people looking at the past through rose-coloured glasses. Do people really think that software was more efficient in the days of the Commodore 64?
I remember in the late 1980s, a fair number of games for the PC would take at least 3 minutes to start up, just to initialize look-up tables and pre-render sprites! In the early 1990s, Netscape would literally take more than 45 minutes to start up on his PC. In the mid 1990s, I remember seeing, for the first time in my life, a game rendered at more than 30fps.
My point is, people are a lot less patient these days with computers. No one in their right mind is going to wait a minute for an application to start up, and certainly not 45 minutes for a browser!
If you want to know how bad software was in the 1980s, try to run some software from the 1980s. I used to think like you do, that software was incredibly efficient and incredibly well written in the 1980s. Then I tried to run some software from the 1980s. A game from the 1980s often runs slower on today's hardware than today's games do. There are all sorts of ill-conceived hard coded limits in old games. Take software from the 1980s and try to run it on data sets measuring in the gigabytes: no dice.
Again, people expect more from their software today than they did from yesteryear. I'm extremely suspicious of people who say that old software is more efficient/better written than today's software. I've used software from the C64 age. Guess what: IT SUCKED.
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.
In the past, MS has effectively given away software -- in the form of licenses that could be used on two computers: so that a license bought for a work machine could be taken home and used on the home machine.
Microsoft has two advantages over Linux: familiarity and applications. Recent Linux distributions are as easy, if not easier to use than Windows, but many applications (such as iTunes) are simply not available on Linux. Both of these advantages can be swept away if Linux gains a significant foothold in the desktop market.
I just wish that Apple would see that helping Linux would also help Apple. Breaking MS's dominance is the most important goal and Linux can help that to happen.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
You shouldn't need 2GB to do those things though. That was the entire point of my post. You can do most things on Linux with 1/4 of the resources that Vista takes. If the next windows takes the same approach, and requires that you have 6 GB of RAM for a 3D desktop while playing mp3s, then Linux will just seem that much more attractive. My Linux laptop has 512 MB of RAM, and i've never felt like I needed more memory. Granted, I don't do video editing or editing of 80 MegaPixel images, but most people don't do that kind of thing anyway.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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"?
Like what? Have you ever even used one? Your comment is pure FUD. For instance, does your out of the box MS Windows machine have skype installed? What about word processor and other business applications? What about disk encryption and mobile sync software? Can it sync up your calendar and contacts with google or other calendars and your PDA? My eeepc does all that and more, out of the box. So quick your FUD or name specific examples of USEFUL tasks that aren't just made up to justify your point.