Chris Anderson noted that Moore’s Law has reached an important milestone. Intel’s Core Duo now costs a penny per MIPS. Moore’s Law is not only about density of transitors, it is also about their cost.
Chris speculates that this will lead to wastage. Like Tony Hung I feel that waste is too strong a word for this. This will make the technology available for more experiments leading to more innovation. Of course, a by product will be wastage out of failed experiments, but this is an encouraging aspect.
One of the better impacts will be that the factor of cost in technology adoption will get weaker. Having said that, I think cost of software has been increasing for the reason that it is finding more applications in business. Well, you can also look at it as investment when you have to keep a tab on the ROI. As software methodologies have evolved we have become better at the ROI, but even the investment has got more expensive. Open source plays a big role in adopting software in a quicker way, but if the effort is counted along with the money, the overall effort in adopting software is much higher compared to the hardware. The lion’s share in this is the learning curve for using software and using it the right way is the only way of getting the optimum ROI. Nothing louder than this can shout for software being simple to use, but without sacrificing functionality. As Einstein says, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” This balance is the key to successful automation - the ultimate benefit of hardware and software both!
November 28th, 2006 at 7:50 pm
One thing that I have noticed over the years, is that, despite computers becoming ever more powerful, Microsoft Word always eats up a whole lot of processor power. Like on the computer I write on now, this one is used for professional video editing. Rather a power-horse. But when Word runs, it eats - even in idle mode - about 15% of processing power. For doing nothing.
One of the examples that abundance of computing power can lead to lazy programming.
That said, I know that there are many exciting developments going on - e.g. trying to deduct the user’s stress level from his behaviour. The computer can then decide on whether specific e-mail/phone messages/etc are put throuogh to the user.
December 2nd, 2006 at 11:45 pm
Yes, its true that we do take for granted anything that is available in abundance. It turns out to be a problem when we let this pass off as an assumption. If this assumption fails, the application can turn out to be unusable.
January 15th, 2007 at 6:12 pm
[...] Ever wondered about business models of spammers? Traditionally spam has not been a topic of interest for me. Until I personally faced it - in email, in comments or even in snail-mail! Even then I sometimes do feign ignorance behind tools like Akismet. That is why Allison Randal’s Spamonomics 101 served someone like me to understand some basics of their economics. The salesmen analogy worked well. It seems obvious as post-event wisdom, however it is difficult to pinpoint the exact factors. The cost of computing is the critical one, and unfortunately Moore’s Law is going to make it only easier for them! [...]