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

[sm62704]

But Wikipedia is not accurate! Uncyclopedia says

Moore's Law
Moore's Law was enacted by the Florida legislature in 1999. This law makes it a felony to posess or sell any film or documentary produced by Michael Moore. Moore's Law had its beginnings when a Florida Legislator heard some old Geezer complain about the damned kids on his lawn saying "there ought to be a law" and told his fellow congressthings that the old guy had said "we need more laws." As all the legislators are hearing aid wearing geezers themselves, they took this to mean that Michael Moore should be outlawed. Florida Governor Jeb Clampett, President George Clampett's brother, signed the law so quickly that the friction of the pen caught the paper on fire and the law had to be passed again.

Many slashdot nerds believe that Moore's law has something to do with computers, but this is patently false.

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."

I think they don't

[alx5000]

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).

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:Flexibility Not Price

[Cro Magnon]

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.

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.

Re:Slashdot

[gQuigs]

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.

Familiarity isn't worth that much

[Dr. Manhattan]

Familiarity is worth $200 to a lot of people.

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.

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.

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

[rucs_hack]

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.