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

Re:Eee PC vs. REAL UMPCs

[InsaneProcessor]

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!

Clear for a long time

[Bombula]

It's been clear for many years that part of M$'s strategy has been to maintain a high overall cost of personal computing, and thereby ensure that they are getting a slice of a big pie. If the total cost of a computer falls - if the pie shrinks - their slice will shrink with it. Their strategy has therefore been to write software that requires more and more demanding hardware, not to offer enriched user experiences (as claimed) but rather as a rationalization for keeping costs up.

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.

Why don't you actually read the Wikipedia article?

[Reality Master 201]

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.

Re:Yes? Is this a question?

[CastrTroy]

But it's starting to become more than $200. With the hardware requirements of Vista, you have to buy a much more expensive computer, just to get the same usability. I bought a laptop that runs Linux. It cost me $500. To get a machine that runs Vista just as well, I'm looking at spending $1000, at least.