A Tale of Two Graphs

This is restating a point I've made elsewhere: that the graph of hardware requirements for Windows keeps on rising, while that for GNU/Linux is practically flat:

What all this means is that Windows is becoming more and more resource reliant while Linux essentially maintains its requirements. Microsoft is already seeing the effects of their sloppiness in bad reviews of Vista and having to extend XP’s life, but unless they change soon, they will see it even more, and pay for it too.

In the future, it seems likely that a computer with Windows will cost far more than a computer with Linux, not because of the price of the operating system (since hardware manufacturers are constantly pretending Windows is free, when in reality it is not) but because the hardware required to run Windows is so much more expensive than the hardware required to run Linux.

It's why I think the ultaportable sector is so important: it exposes this trend most brutally.

Cracking a Hard(ware) Problem

It is a sad but true fact that hardware issues - whether or not a particular bit of kit is supported - still dog GNU/Linux, and remain a major obstacle to its wider use. Happily, a partial solution is available from the community of current users, who collectively have scads of info about what works and what doesn't. Now there's a site that seeks to bring it all together, UbuntuHCL.org:

Our mission is to provide a forum for Ubuntu users to share their experiences with different hardware, to ease the transition of new users to Ubuntu, as well as help users pick the right hardware for their Linux system.

Hardware's Race to the Bottom

I've written several times about the importance of the Asus Eee PC; here's another way of looking at it:

At Sony's annual Open House event, Sony's IT product division senior vice president Mike Abary said if the Asus Eee PC starts to do well, it could potentially shift the entire notebook industry into a race to the bottom.

If mainstream PC buyers start to find their needs met by a lightweight, simply featured, inexpensive portable, it's likely to impel all of the major players in the industry to pile on by lowering their prices.

This, of course, is precisely what open source has done to proprietary code, so it's interesting to see the same happening to hardware, again driven by free software.

A Flash of Recognition

Now, where have I heard this before?

I assert that there is something wrong with web-like "rich" formats that aren't hyperlink-able or indexable by search-engines. You could argue that these bugs could be fixed, and Flash is wisely becoming more URI-addressable and view-source-able over time. But it still ain't the Web. It is not hand-authored, easily tweaked incrementally, copy-and-paste-able. It's hardware.

Oh, yes, I remember:

I hate Flash animations even more: they are not only opaque - there is no cyber-there there - they are barriers to my free navigation of the Web and waste my time as they download. In effect, they turn the Web into television.

Well, television is, indeed, hardware.