davePremium,MVM
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio
kudos:8 | reply to FF4m3
Re: Open Source's Secret Ally: Moore's Law It might have been important say 20 years ago - the point at which computer power got 'sufficiently cheap' in my opinion was when I could afford to buy a computer to run NT at home, which was a 90MHz Pentium, 16 MB RAM, two 1GB SCSI disks. But it is not really relevant nowadays, when we have affordable computer power coming out of our ears, and computers are pretty much disposable appliances.
($500 today gets you some vast multiple of what I paid nearly $5000 for)
So, yes, I agree that "Linus can afford a 386" was a milestone in amateur OS development, but don't see it has meaning any more. |
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KearnstdElf WizardPremium
join:2002-01-22
Mullica Hill, NJ | And if I remember old SCSI correctly, half of that 5k could have been in the drives alone.
And today you can secure a 2TB SATA drive that will likely blow any parallel SCSI clean from the water in burst and seek time for under 120 bucks.
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[65 Arcanist]Filan(High Elf) Zone: Broadband Reports |
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 markofmayhemWhy not now?Premium
join:2004-04-08
Pittsburgh, PA
kudos:5
 ·Comcast
| reply to dave
said by dave:So, yes, I agree that "Linus can afford a 386" was a milestone in amateur OS development, but don't see it has meaning any more.
But, if you do agree that "'Linus can afford a 386' was a milestone"; then you should also agree that the 1-3 billion people expected to enter the computer age between 2012 and 2015 due to further cost reductions in Asia and Africa will result in more "Linus" milestones at an accelerated pace.
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davePremium,MVM
join:2000-05-04
not in ohio
kudos:8 | I'm not so sure. I mean, OS OS development has been available (because affordable) to anyone since the 1990s, so there's no further milestone of the exact nature posited by the article. I don't see that a few billion more users necessarily favors open source.
I'd say the next Moore's Law paradigm shift is when we have truly disposable computers (say $1/unit), but it's not yet obvious that open source is the major beneficiary. (I'm not saying it isn't, I'm only saying case unclear). |
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