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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.
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...
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...
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
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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/
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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?)
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 $25 computer.
http://www.hawknest.com/
timing.
The difference between geniuses who made a bundle in the dot com bubble and the fools who were left holding the bag?
Timing.
It's been clear for a long time that sooner or later Microsoft's license based business model is going to be seriously undermined, especially at the low end. It goes without saying that somebody is going to be making money off this development (possibly including Microsoft itself, if it is smart). The problem is nobody knows for certain which it is: sooner or later? There's really only one way to find out: to give it a try.
The Asus approach is quite interesting; they've tried to define a new niche. This makes is much more likely that they'll have a modest success even if the time is not ripe for the Microsoft model to crumble, while getting a toe over the line if it turns out that the land rush is about to start.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Yes, but remember that there is more involved than just the purchase price of a Windows licence. You also need to take into account the added hardware overhead required to run it - GNU/Linux will generally be a lot happier on a low-specced machine than Windows will, especially Vista. Admittedly the Vista system requirements aren't as high as some people are making them out to be, but they're by no means trivial.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
M$ 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