I am not saying that Microsoft doesn't care about Linux on netbooks. Microsoft absolutely cares. It's last quarter total sales were up but revenues were down 8% because a significant portion of Microsoft's sales are for the heavily discounted Windows XP netbook SKU.
Dell's numbers basically confirm the trend. People are looking for less expensive options. Even with a heavily discounted XP a third of Dell's mini sales are not putting any money at all in Microsoft's pocket because Linux is cheaper. If the economy gets worse then this trend is only going to accelerate.
If enough people find out that they can get their work done with Free Software then Microsoft is done. Almost no matter what happens the Free Software genie is out of the bottle now. Microsoft's hardware partners know that people will buy Linux-based gizmos, and they know that Microsoft will cave on price if the alternative is to let Linux take over a niche. Things are bad enough that Microsoft is apparently going to be selling Windows 7 Starter edition in the first world.
My point was that no one (not even Dell or Microsoft) care about the folks that have installed OS X on these machines. The only company that cares about OS X on Dell Minis is Apple, and you can bet that they are looking into ways to shut these people down. The Apple fanbois can think that Hackintosh sales matter if they want, but all Hackintosh sales do is strengthen Linux on these devices.
To my friends in the Apple Fanboi community I would like to offer a warm welcome to the install-it-yourself operating system slums.
No one cares what operating system your computer actually runs. They only care about the operating system you PAID for. This fact has worked against desktop Linux for years. When you install OS X on your Dell Mini all you are doing is making it less likely that Dell will have to offer support. Dell loves folks that install their own operating system on its hardware.
Not that I expect that there is a whole lot of raining going on. I would bet that there might be as many as 1,000 hackintoshes. There's probably twice that many Macbooks running Ubuntu. No one cares.
Disrupting a class is a crime. You do not have a right to disrupt the class any more than you have a right to drive the wrong down a one way street. If you don't like those rules you are perfectly free to get your parents to excuse you from school.
The student was formally arrested for a crime, and her parents were notified before any search took place. The student's actions left the school administration and law enforcement authorities with little choice but to do precisely what they did.
The only reason that we are even discussing this, is that we all know that if the girl had turned over the phone voluntarily at any time before she was formally arrested that she would have got off with little more than a warning (and a confiscated phone). She called the school administration's bluff and she lost.
The link contains the entire police report (redacted). It contains everything that the school authorities and police officers did. The fact that she was lying about the phone was corroborated by the teacher and two of the girl's friends before she was searched by a female officer. The police also tried to contact the girl's father (she gave police several false phone numbers, presumably because the cell phone was actually her father's phone). The police finally succeeded in contacting the girl's mother. The mother was alerted before the girl was searched that she would be searched. The mother eventually came to the school to talk with the teacher and the authorities.
Unlike the headline, what actually happened was completely reasonable and it was clearly the girl that was out of line.
At any time the girl could have avoided problems by simply turning over the phone.
The arrest report is actually a pretty interesting read. Unfortunately, once you've read the report it is pretty hard to feel that the young lady was abused by the system.
Awesome. Microsoft has invented an $80,000 replacement for the board game. I wonder if they are going to license Monopoly (tm) from Parker Brothers (tm)?
Speaking of assumptions, you are assuming that Microsoft hasn't just thrown out a huge pile of R&D money on a gizmo whose sole redeeming quality is that it would make playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle (R) a lot easier. It's impossible to guess why Microsoft paid money to develop Surface, but you are right about one thing. Surface is neither a PC nor a television. It's too bad, too. People have shown a willingness to pay money for computers and televisions.
I think that's a very succinct summary of the situation. The part that you are leaving out, of course, is that Wine, Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Ubuntu all are developed on a budget that is an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft's R&D budget.
Microsoft spends a lot more money than its competitors on R&D without a great deal more to show for its efforts. What's more, in recent years Microsoft has made expensive bets in areas like console gaming, online marketing, and embedded systems, that have all been major losers. I would never say that R&D isn't a good thing, but I certainly would hesitate to give *my* money to the R&D department at Microsoft, and Microsoft's stock price shows that I am clearly not alone.
Seriously, take a look at the Microsoft "innovations" that people in this discussion are talking about in this thread. Songsmith and Kodu are probably not going to make back their investment. Surface is ridiculously overpriced for what it does. Microsoft's.NET framework is pretty cool, but Novell has a functional clone of the framework for a fraction of the R&D costs. As you point out Wine, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, etc. are all close to being functionally equivalent to Microsoft's bread and butter projects. Apple is taking big chunks out of the high end PC market, and is dominating the most lucrative niches in the handheld and embedded spaces.
If I were a Microsoft investor I would be very concerned about how Microsoft was spending my money. Microsoft's R&D machine is clearly broken.
It's more than one investor, as evidenced by Microsoft's decreasing stock price despite a huge stock buyback program. Lots of investors have taken their cash elsewhere.
Think what you want, but don't be surprised if Microsoft starts to rethink its R&D spending. Microsoft's stock has been flat or down even during the previous good years, and now that the economy is in the toilet its investors are going to start to wonder why they are financing so much R&D with so little to show for their investment.
Microsoft's investors have different priorities than you do. They want Microsoft's R&D to produce products that make money, not bad music.
Microsoft's investors are simply starting to wonder why they should pay for billions of dollars a year in research when they can keep Windows, MS Office, and the profitable server software divisions running with a much smaller investment.
Actually, you are wrong. At least according to Microsoft. With Windows 7 it is Home Basic that will only be available in developing countries. Windows 7 Starter edition will be available worldwide.
We know emerging markets have unique needs and we will offer Windows 7 Home Basic, only in emerging markets, for customers looking for an entry-point Windows experience on a full-size value PC.
We'll also continue to offer Windows Starter edition, which will only be offered pre-installed by an OEM. Windows Starter edition will now be available worldwide. This edition is available only in the OEM channel on new PCs limited to specific types of hardware.
Windows 7 Starter edition will be the low-priced version of Windows that will be available on netbooks worldwide. It will replace the highly discounted version of Windows XP that is available now.
The difference is that starting with Windows 7 Starter edition is going to be available in the first world, and Home Basic will only be available in developing countries. The Starter edition is essentially going to replace the netbook version of Windows XP.
Here's the full text of what Microsoft has to say. And here's a quote from that article that sums up the change:
We know emerging markets have unique needs and we will offer Windows 7 Home Basic, only in emerging markets, for customers looking for an entry-point Windows experience on a full-size value PC.
We'll also continue to offer Windows Starter edition, which will only be offered pre-installed by an OEM. Windows Starter edition will now be available worldwide. This edition is available only in the OEM channel on new PCs limited to specific types of hardware.
I agree completely that previous versions of Starter Edition were basically so that people in developing countries could be induced to pay something for their cracked copy of Windows Ultimate. However, the netbook market, and the discounts that Microsoft had to give on Windows XP to keep itself alive in that market, have really changed the playing field in first world markets. Microsoft is apparently going to combat this trend by offering Starter edition in the first world so that netbook manufacturers can continue to advertise Windows computers with low prices, and then upsell these customers to a version of Windows that actually works.
It will be interesting to see if this tactic actually works.
Microsoft is currently planning to sell Windows 7 Starter in the first world on netbooks and other "low end" devices. Currently Microsoft sells Windows XP at a steep discount for these uses, but that will change with the release of Windows 7.
I agree that when Starter was just for third world countries that it was basically a way to get something from users that were going to use a bootleg copy of Windows, but thanks to Netbooks folks in the first world are going to be offered the Starter edition.
Right now most netbooks come loaded with a heavily discounted version of Windows XP Home. When Windows 7 ships Microsoft is going to try and replace Windows XP with the "Starter" version of Windows 7 that they will sell at the same price point. You'll be able to get fancier versions of Windows 7 loaded on these devices, it will just cost significantly more.
It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this tactic. Microsoft is hoping that folks in the first world will pay extra for the version of Windows that they actually want. I personally think that this tactic is likely to backfire badly. Netbooks running Linux are actually pretty useful.
Yes, there are several different editions of Ubuntu. Of course, they all cost the same, and they all run precisely the same software. Kubuntu, for example, is nothing more than a shortcut for Ubuntu users that like the KDE desktop. You can still install all of the Gnome software you want, and you can even use Gnome as your Window manager.
The problem with Microsoft's pricing scheme for Windows isn't that there are different versions. The ability to customize the software that gets installed is a good thing. The problem is that it is quite likely that the version of "Windows" that the end user actually ends up with won't have all of the features that Microsoft promised would be in "Windows." That means that developers can't count on certain Windows features being available, and it also means that consumers are far more likely to be frustrated with their flavor of Windows.
Most consumers get confused with the difference between how much ram a computer has and how much disk space it has. Adding 7 different versions of Windows just makes an already complicated purchase more complicated. People are going to be pissed when their new Windows 7 netbook doesn't have features that they have come to expect from netbooks running Windows XP Home or Linux. OEMs are going to be upset that they can't continue to offer loss-leader PCs running Home Basic at lower prices. Small businesses are going to be upset that they need to purchase Ultimate if they want encryption.
Comparing Microsoft's pricing schemes with Ubuntu's various pre-configurations is disingenuous at best.
Re:a lot is being pushed to the client
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 1
The question becomes whether it is easier to add processor power to the servers housing the data or bandwidth to every point on the planet where you might want to access the data.
Right now, if your data set fits in Excel you don't really have to worry that much about bandwidth. Honestly, I don't see that changing any time soon. R is a much better example. You can crunch datasets with R that are big enough that you definitely want R to be running somewhere "close" to your datastore.
I happen to think that useful AI is going to be a lot more like the Google model where the bottleneck is the aggregation and access of ridiculously large amounts of information than the Excel example where the bottleneck is client side processing power. Even for problems where Excel fits you are far more likely to run into problems getting your dataset into Excel from whatever server it happens to reside on than run into a situation where you don't have enough processing power to actually compute your spreadsheet.
Don't get me wrong. Excel is a handy tool, but only if the data set you want to analyze is relatively small, and it is really the interface that makes it nifty. There is nothing that says that the interface *has* to run on the same machine that is doing the calculations and data handling.
Besides, as fancy as your Excel spreadsheet example happens to sound, I doubt it would take much more processing power than searching the entire internet for documents with a certain set of keywords and then sorting the documents by relevance by calculating the value of incoming links from other pages. This task would be especially difficult if the process it took into account spam, linkfarms, malware sites, and a whole host of other ways of gaming the system. Google does precisely that, generally in less than a second. Nothing that runs on my PC comes even close to doing something as difficult.
Google has a *lot* of processing power to throw at problems.
So instead you simply buy the bottom of the barrel offering from Dell (or the vendor of your choice) and hang onto it until it dies. Not only will you avoid paying a premium for your hardware, but you will probably find that by staying away from the cutting edge that your hardware actually lasts longer. I suppose that's why the call it "cutting" edge.
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
on
Less Is Moore
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Still, will that processing have to be on the client? Probably not. Heck, I don't pretend to be a computer science Einstein, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that the limiting factor in functional AI is access to piles and piles of centralized data ("piles" is a technical CS term that means "a lot"). I don't need a fancy computer to access Google, and when Google is finally self-aware I don't suppose I'll need more than a web browser to talk to it either.
It's pretty certain that computers are going to get faster, but, at least for now, what I really want are for my computers to become less expensive to purchase and to run. Google can buy faster computers if it wants. I'll settle for one that uses less electricity or that comes as a prize in a Cracker Jacks (tm) box.
Then again, I spend most of my day in either a web browser or Emacs, and neither of those applications is in dire need of a fast processor.
Unfortunately, if companies start buying computers in 5 or 6 year cycles instead of 2 or 3 year cycles then HP definitely won't be giddy. They'll be even less giddy if the average price of a desktop PC drops to $200 and the average price of a laptop sinks to $500.
If I hadn't already posted I would mod you up. That's precisely right. The bit about Global Warming being a "Convenient Myth" is especially good.
There are plenty of good reasons to cut down on our use of fossil fuels, to cut down on emissions, to pollute less, and to be better stewards of our planet. "Global Warming" is more about scare tactic politics than science.
A huge part of the problem is that the folks going on about "global warming" have ridiculously simple models that they are using to try and predict a very complex system. We are just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the systems that regulate global temperatures.
Dr. Solomon has a computer model that she believes tells the future. Well, I have a neighbor that is convinced that the position of the stars in the skies predicts the future as well.
I am not saying that Dr. Solomon isn't right, but I will say that I am skeptical until there is some evidence that her computer model is actually useful. The earth is definitely not a pot of water.
Yes, weather is not the same thing as climate, but that doesn't mean that these people have a better grasp on climate than they do with weather. If anything understanding climate is more difficult than the weather. We have a pretty good grasp of weather patterns. Good enough, anyway, that I can make a pretty good daily forecast with nothing more than a barometer and a thermometer (and maybe a quick peek out the window).
We know far less about the climate other than it has always been in constant flux.
Honestly, it's not about whether grandma can use Linux. I can use Linux. That makes me happy.
More importantly, at least to Microsoft, it's about whether Linux's existence is causing Microsoft to charge less for Windows. In the case of netbooks it is hard to argue that this isn't the case.
For the most part Microsoft has kept Linux off of netbooks and out of consumers hands, but it has done so by charging considerably less per copy of Windows. If you are Microsoft investor that's a troubling turn of events.
It will be interesting to see, with the release of Windows 7, if Microsoft tries to charge full Windows prices for copies of Windows destined to be run on netbooks. My guess is that Microsoft will not charge full price, but will instead continue to have special pricing for these devices. This won't be because the next generation of netbooks won't be capable of running Windows 7 (or even Windows Vista) but because Windows simply doesn't add that much value Linux on these devices.
I would never argue that Linux is for everyone, but Linux is becoming an increasingly attractive option for a wide array of uses. Netbooks wouldn't even exist if Linux wasn't available, and it is quite likely that the next computerish gizmo that catches fire will *also* be running Linux.
What's clear, is that netbooks are cutting into Microsoft's bottom line. As I pointed out earlier Microsoft's unit sales were actually up 1% but gross revenue from those sales was down 8%. Granted, that's mostly due to the fact that Microsoft is selling XP at a discount, but if Microsoft wasn't selling XP at a discount then Linux would be on a lot more netbooks.
To Linux vendors netbooks represent a great opportunity, to Microsoft netbooks are a lose/lose situation.
So both MSI Wind and Elonex appear to have trouble rolling out Linux netbooks. Imagine that. It takes more to make a good netbook than slapping some random Linux desktop distribution on it and calling it good.
Once again, the folks that are doing a good job with their Linux netbooks not only don't have the problem, but they also sell far more units.
It's possible that "Carphone Warehouse" is an important computer retailer where you live, but I doubt it. People come out with products that don't sell well every day. Linux isn't some sort of magic panacea.
I've tried the HP netbook with Vista, although I believe it uses a Via chip instead of Atom. I just didn't buy it. My father did, but that's just because his past experience with WordPerfect convinced him that it is foolish to buy anything but Microsoft's latest software. The new HP netbook can be purchased with Vista, and while I haven't tried it, reviews say that it works better than the older model.
When you say that it is unacceptable, what exactly do you mean? Can Word not keep up with your ultra-fast typing?
Quite frankly, I am skeptical. My own personal experience shows that how much memory you have is far more important than what sort of processor you have.
Please. The folks at the FSF will also happily send you a complete GNU mirror for $4000. That doesn't mean that most Linux developers actually fork out $4K.
You don't honestly believe that the wide assortment of quality Free development tools hasn't lowered what Microsoft charges the average developer for tools. Microsoft used to charge hundreds of dollars for packages that it now gives away for free. Sure, it still has expensive packages, but these packages come with software licenses for essentially all of Microsoft's software.
What, I'm serious. While my netbook has a smaller hard drive than the desktop I bought with Vista when Vista first came out, it has more memory a nicer video card, and the hard drive is solid state. The processor is more than fast enough to meet Microsoft specs.
My netbook could easily run Vista. It just doesn't. That's more a function of the discounted price Microsoft is offering on XP than anything else. Well, that and the fact that I bought a netbook running Linux. Heck, HP will even sell you a netbook with Vista preloaded.
It's easy to make jokes about Windows Vista sucking, but if Microsoft didn't create a loophole for Windows XP that's what you would see on all of the Windows netbooks.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not saying that Microsoft doesn't care about Linux on netbooks. Microsoft absolutely cares. It's last quarter total sales were up but revenues were down 8% because a significant portion of Microsoft's sales are for the heavily discounted Windows XP netbook SKU.
Dell's numbers basically confirm the trend. People are looking for less expensive options. Even with a heavily discounted XP a third of Dell's mini sales are not putting any money at all in Microsoft's pocket because Linux is cheaper. If the economy gets worse then this trend is only going to accelerate.
If enough people find out that they can get their work done with Free Software then Microsoft is done. Almost no matter what happens the Free Software genie is out of the bottle now. Microsoft's hardware partners know that people will buy Linux-based gizmos, and they know that Microsoft will cave on price if the alternative is to let Linux take over a niche. Things are bad enough that Microsoft is apparently going to be selling Windows 7 Starter edition in the first world.
My point was that no one (not even Dell or Microsoft) care about the folks that have installed OS X on these machines. The only company that cares about OS X on Dell Minis is Apple, and you can bet that they are looking into ways to shut these people down. The Apple fanbois can think that Hackintosh sales matter if they want, but all Hackintosh sales do is strengthen Linux on these devices.
To my friends in the Apple Fanboi community I would like to offer a warm welcome to the install-it-yourself operating system slums.
No one cares what operating system your computer actually runs. They only care about the operating system you PAID for. This fact has worked against desktop Linux for years. When you install OS X on your Dell Mini all you are doing is making it less likely that Dell will have to offer support. Dell loves folks that install their own operating system on its hardware.
Not that I expect that there is a whole lot of raining going on. I would bet that there might be as many as 1,000 hackintoshes. There's probably twice that many Macbooks running Ubuntu. No one cares.
Disrupting a class is a crime. You do not have a right to disrupt the class any more than you have a right to drive the wrong down a one way street. If you don't like those rules you are perfectly free to get your parents to excuse you from school.
The student was formally arrested for a crime, and her parents were notified before any search took place. The student's actions left the school administration and law enforcement authorities with little choice but to do precisely what they did.
The only reason that we are even discussing this, is that we all know that if the girl had turned over the phone voluntarily at any time before she was formally arrested that she would have got off with little more than a warning (and a confiscated phone). She called the school administration's bluff and she lost.
The link contains the entire police report (redacted). It contains everything that the school authorities and police officers did. The fact that she was lying about the phone was corroborated by the teacher and two of the girl's friends before she was searched by a female officer. The police also tried to contact the girl's father (she gave police several false phone numbers, presumably because the cell phone was actually her father's phone). The police finally succeeded in contacting the girl's mother. The mother was alerted before the girl was searched that she would be searched. The mother eventually came to the school to talk with the teacher and the authorities.
Unlike the headline, what actually happened was completely reasonable and it was clearly the girl that was out of line.
At any time the girl could have avoided problems by simply turning over the phone.
The arrest report is actually a pretty interesting read. Unfortunately, once you've read the report it is pretty hard to feel that the young lady was abused by the system.
Awesome. Microsoft has invented an $80,000 replacement for the board game. I wonder if they are going to license Monopoly (tm) from Parker Brothers (tm)?
Speaking of assumptions, you are assuming that Microsoft hasn't just thrown out a huge pile of R&D money on a gizmo whose sole redeeming quality is that it would make playing Warhammer Fantasy Battle (R) a lot easier. It's impossible to guess why Microsoft paid money to develop Surface, but you are right about one thing. Surface is neither a PC nor a television. It's too bad, too. People have shown a willingness to pay money for computers and televisions.
Surface, not so much.
I think that's a very succinct summary of the situation. The part that you are leaving out, of course, is that Wine, Linux, OpenOffice.org, and Ubuntu all are developed on a budget that is an order of magnitude smaller than Microsoft's R&D budget.
Microsoft spends a lot more money than its competitors on R&D without a great deal more to show for its efforts. What's more, in recent years Microsoft has made expensive bets in areas like console gaming, online marketing, and embedded systems, that have all been major losers. I would never say that R&D isn't a good thing, but I certainly would hesitate to give *my* money to the R&D department at Microsoft, and Microsoft's stock price shows that I am clearly not alone.
Seriously, take a look at the Microsoft "innovations" that people in this discussion are talking about in this thread. Songsmith and Kodu are probably not going to make back their investment. Surface is ridiculously overpriced for what it does. Microsoft's .NET framework is pretty cool, but Novell has a functional clone of the framework for a fraction of the R&D costs. As you point out Wine, Ubuntu, OpenOffice.org, etc. are all close to being functionally equivalent to Microsoft's bread and butter projects. Apple is taking big chunks out of the high end PC market, and is dominating the most lucrative niches in the handheld and embedded spaces.
If I were a Microsoft investor I would be very concerned about how Microsoft was spending my money. Microsoft's R&D machine is clearly broken.
It's more than one investor, as evidenced by Microsoft's decreasing stock price despite a huge stock buyback program. Lots of investors have taken their cash elsewhere.
Think what you want, but don't be surprised if Microsoft starts to rethink its R&D spending. Microsoft's stock has been flat or down even during the previous good years, and now that the economy is in the toilet its investors are going to start to wonder why they are financing so much R&D with so little to show for their investment.
Microsoft's investors have different priorities than you do. They want Microsoft's R&D to produce products that make money, not bad music.
Microsoft's investors are simply starting to wonder why they should pay for billions of dollars a year in research when they can keep Windows, MS Office, and the profitable server software divisions running with a much smaller investment.
Actually, you are wrong. At least according to Microsoft. With Windows 7 it is Home Basic that will only be available in developing countries. Windows 7 Starter edition will be available worldwide.
Windows 7 Starter edition will be the low-priced version of Windows that will be available on netbooks worldwide. It will replace the highly discounted version of Windows XP that is available now.
The difference is that starting with Windows 7 Starter edition is going to be available in the first world, and Home Basic will only be available in developing countries. The Starter edition is essentially going to replace the netbook version of Windows XP.
Here's the full text of what Microsoft has to say. And here's a quote from that article that sums up the change:
I agree completely that previous versions of Starter Edition were basically so that people in developing countries could be induced to pay something for their cracked copy of Windows Ultimate. However, the netbook market, and the discounts that Microsoft had to give on Windows XP to keep itself alive in that market, have really changed the playing field in first world markets. Microsoft is apparently going to combat this trend by offering Starter edition in the first world so that netbook manufacturers can continue to advertise Windows computers with low prices, and then upsell these customers to a version of Windows that actually works.
It will be interesting to see if this tactic actually works.
Microsoft is currently planning to sell Windows 7 Starter in the first world on netbooks and other "low end" devices. Currently Microsoft sells Windows XP at a steep discount for these uses, but that will change with the release of Windows 7.
I agree that when Starter was just for third world countries that it was basically a way to get something from users that were going to use a bootleg copy of Windows, but thanks to Netbooks folks in the first world are going to be offered the Starter edition.
Right now most netbooks come loaded with a heavily discounted version of Windows XP Home. When Windows 7 ships Microsoft is going to try and replace Windows XP with the "Starter" version of Windows 7 that they will sell at the same price point. You'll be able to get fancier versions of Windows 7 loaded on these devices, it will just cost significantly more.
It will be interesting to see how the market reacts to this tactic. Microsoft is hoping that folks in the first world will pay extra for the version of Windows that they actually want. I personally think that this tactic is likely to backfire badly. Netbooks running Linux are actually pretty useful.
Yes, there are several different editions of Ubuntu. Of course, they all cost the same, and they all run precisely the same software. Kubuntu, for example, is nothing more than a shortcut for Ubuntu users that like the KDE desktop. You can still install all of the Gnome software you want, and you can even use Gnome as your Window manager.
The problem with Microsoft's pricing scheme for Windows isn't that there are different versions. The ability to customize the software that gets installed is a good thing. The problem is that it is quite likely that the version of "Windows" that the end user actually ends up with won't have all of the features that Microsoft promised would be in "Windows." That means that developers can't count on certain Windows features being available, and it also means that consumers are far more likely to be frustrated with their flavor of Windows.
Most consumers get confused with the difference between how much ram a computer has and how much disk space it has. Adding 7 different versions of Windows just makes an already complicated purchase more complicated. People are going to be pissed when their new Windows 7 netbook doesn't have features that they have come to expect from netbooks running Windows XP Home or Linux. OEMs are going to be upset that they can't continue to offer loss-leader PCs running Home Basic at lower prices. Small businesses are going to be upset that they need to purchase Ultimate if they want encryption.
Comparing Microsoft's pricing schemes with Ubuntu's various pre-configurations is disingenuous at best.
The question becomes whether it is easier to add processor power to the servers housing the data or bandwidth to every point on the planet where you might want to access the data.
Right now, if your data set fits in Excel you don't really have to worry that much about bandwidth. Honestly, I don't see that changing any time soon. R is a much better example. You can crunch datasets with R that are big enough that you definitely want R to be running somewhere "close" to your datastore.
I happen to think that useful AI is going to be a lot more like the Google model where the bottleneck is the aggregation and access of ridiculously large amounts of information than the Excel example where the bottleneck is client side processing power. Even for problems where Excel fits you are far more likely to run into problems getting your dataset into Excel from whatever server it happens to reside on than run into a situation where you don't have enough processing power to actually compute your spreadsheet.
Don't get me wrong. Excel is a handy tool, but only if the data set you want to analyze is relatively small, and it is really the interface that makes it nifty. There is nothing that says that the interface *has* to run on the same machine that is doing the calculations and data handling.
Besides, as fancy as your Excel spreadsheet example happens to sound, I doubt it would take much more processing power than searching the entire internet for documents with a certain set of keywords and then sorting the documents by relevance by calculating the value of incoming links from other pages. This task would be especially difficult if the process it took into account spam, linkfarms, malware sites, and a whole host of other ways of gaming the system. Google does precisely that, generally in less than a second. Nothing that runs on my PC comes even close to doing something as difficult.
Google has a *lot* of processing power to throw at problems.
So instead you simply buy the bottom of the barrel offering from Dell (or the vendor of your choice) and hang onto it until it dies. Not only will you avoid paying a premium for your hardware, but you will probably find that by staying away from the cutting edge that your hardware actually lasts longer. I suppose that's why the call it "cutting" edge.
Still, will that processing have to be on the client? Probably not. Heck, I don't pretend to be a computer science Einstein, but I wouldn't be at all surprised that the limiting factor in functional AI is access to piles and piles of centralized data ("piles" is a technical CS term that means "a lot"). I don't need a fancy computer to access Google, and when Google is finally self-aware I don't suppose I'll need more than a web browser to talk to it either.
It's pretty certain that computers are going to get faster, but, at least for now, what I really want are for my computers to become less expensive to purchase and to run. Google can buy faster computers if it wants. I'll settle for one that uses less electricity or that comes as a prize in a Cracker Jacks (tm) box.
Then again, I spend most of my day in either a web browser or Emacs, and neither of those applications is in dire need of a fast processor.
Unfortunately, if companies start buying computers in 5 or 6 year cycles instead of 2 or 3 year cycles then HP definitely won't be giddy. They'll be even less giddy if the average price of a desktop PC drops to $200 and the average price of a laptop sinks to $500.
If I hadn't already posted I would mod you up. That's precisely right. The bit about Global Warming being a "Convenient Myth" is especially good.
There are plenty of good reasons to cut down on our use of fossil fuels, to cut down on emissions, to pollute less, and to be better stewards of our planet. "Global Warming" is more about scare tactic politics than science.
A huge part of the problem is that the folks going on about "global warming" have ridiculously simple models that they are using to try and predict a very complex system. We are just scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the systems that regulate global temperatures.
Dr. Solomon has a computer model that she believes tells the future. Well, I have a neighbor that is convinced that the position of the stars in the skies predicts the future as well.
I am not saying that Dr. Solomon isn't right, but I will say that I am skeptical until there is some evidence that her computer model is actually useful. The earth is definitely not a pot of water.
Yes, weather is not the same thing as climate, but that doesn't mean that these people have a better grasp on climate than they do with weather. If anything understanding climate is more difficult than the weather. We have a pretty good grasp of weather patterns. Good enough, anyway, that I can make a pretty good daily forecast with nothing more than a barometer and a thermometer (and maybe a quick peek out the window).
We know far less about the climate other than it has always been in constant flux.
Honestly, it's not about whether grandma can use Linux. I can use Linux. That makes me happy.
More importantly, at least to Microsoft, it's about whether Linux's existence is causing Microsoft to charge less for Windows. In the case of netbooks it is hard to argue that this isn't the case.
For the most part Microsoft has kept Linux off of netbooks and out of consumers hands, but it has done so by charging considerably less per copy of Windows. If you are Microsoft investor that's a troubling turn of events.
It will be interesting to see, with the release of Windows 7, if Microsoft tries to charge full Windows prices for copies of Windows destined to be run on netbooks. My guess is that Microsoft will not charge full price, but will instead continue to have special pricing for these devices. This won't be because the next generation of netbooks won't be capable of running Windows 7 (or even Windows Vista) but because Windows simply doesn't add that much value Linux on these devices.
I would never argue that Linux is for everyone, but Linux is becoming an increasingly attractive option for a wide array of uses. Netbooks wouldn't even exist if Linux wasn't available, and it is quite likely that the next computerish gizmo that catches fire will *also* be running Linux.
What's clear, is that netbooks are cutting into Microsoft's bottom line. As I pointed out earlier Microsoft's unit sales were actually up 1% but gross revenue from those sales was down 8%. Granted, that's mostly due to the fact that Microsoft is selling XP at a discount, but if Microsoft wasn't selling XP at a discount then Linux would be on a lot more netbooks.
To Linux vendors netbooks represent a great opportunity, to Microsoft netbooks are a lose/lose situation.
Elonex? Who in the world is that?
So both MSI Wind and Elonex appear to have trouble rolling out Linux netbooks. Imagine that. It takes more to make a good netbook than slapping some random Linux desktop distribution on it and calling it good.
Once again, the folks that are doing a good job with their Linux netbooks not only don't have the problem, but they also sell far more units.
It's possible that "Carphone Warehouse" is an important computer retailer where you live, but I doubt it. People come out with products that don't sell well every day. Linux isn't some sort of magic panacea.
I've tried the HP netbook with Vista, although I believe it uses a Via chip instead of Atom. I just didn't buy it. My father did, but that's just because his past experience with WordPerfect convinced him that it is foolish to buy anything but Microsoft's latest software. The new HP netbook can be purchased with Vista, and while I haven't tried it, reviews say that it works better than the older model.
When you say that it is unacceptable, what exactly do you mean? Can Word not keep up with your ultra-fast typing?
Quite frankly, I am skeptical. My own personal experience shows that how much memory you have is far more important than what sort of processor you have.
Please. The folks at the FSF will also happily send you a complete GNU mirror for $4000. That doesn't mean that most Linux developers actually fork out $4K.
You don't honestly believe that the wide assortment of quality Free development tools hasn't lowered what Microsoft charges the average developer for tools. Microsoft used to charge hundreds of dollars for packages that it now gives away for free. Sure, it still has expensive packages, but these packages come with software licenses for essentially all of Microsoft's software.
Nice troll though.
What, I'm serious. While my netbook has a smaller hard drive than the desktop I bought with Vista when Vista first came out, it has more memory a nicer video card, and the hard drive is solid state. The processor is more than fast enough to meet Microsoft specs.
My netbook could easily run Vista. It just doesn't. That's more a function of the discounted price Microsoft is offering on XP than anything else. Well, that and the fact that I bought a netbook running Linux. Heck, HP will even sell you a netbook with Vista preloaded.
It's easy to make jokes about Windows Vista sucking, but if Microsoft didn't create a loophole for Windows XP that's what you would see on all of the Windows netbooks.