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What 6 billion could buy youWhat 6 billion could buy youPosted Jan 9, 2006 8:16 UTC (Mon) by jd (guest, #26381)Parent article: Winning the Linux Wars (MCP)
What does Microsoft do with 6 billion? They seem to file an awful lot of patents, many of which don't seem very useful. If this is something Linux distributors can't do, then how exactly is this a bad thing?
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What 6 billion could buy you Posted Jan 9, 2006 13:03 UTC (Mon) by Los__D (subscriber, #15263) [Link] "One year's investment would be enough to build several chip plants from the ground up. The next year's investment would be enough to design a chip with the actual logic of Vista on it, allowing computers to run Windows without using any CPU cycles - massively accelerating Windows, but also making all other OS' look slow because they'd still be running in software."
You really don't know much about microprocessors, do you?
What 6 billion could buy you Posted Jan 9, 2006 16:15 UTC (Mon) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link] I'll forgive that one point which has its issues - $6B only buys 2 Si plants these days...
However,
b. The reason that "hardware accelerated" OS chips have not appeared is that "Moore's Law" and DV make them obsolete before they could be finished... I don't know if you have noticed, but the clocks rates stopped going up! The barrier to doing hardware accelerated OSes these days is how to know that they actually work...
The "do it in software" mantra is one of captiulation of the verification gods... It cannot be verified prior to shipping, so we leave room to fix it later...
That is not to say that one does not need "programmability", but neither does one need to be able to program that which has not changed in 25 years...
What 6 billion could buy you Posted Jan 9, 2006 18:08 UTC (Mon) by jonabbey (subscriber, #2736) [Link] Microsoft has always included 'product and marketing development' in their 'research and development' budgeting, where 'product' means 'the customer and industry's perception of the bits in the box'.
What 6 billion could buy you Posted Jan 10, 2006 3:44 UTC (Tue) by mikec (guest, #30884) [Link] As with most rants, the question was rhetorical ;-)
Though I should point out that those VC funded startups I mentioned are also subject to the laws of marketing.
Even MS seems to understand the lack of return on their R&D dollars these days - thus the monstrous dividend pacakge.
Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.
Oh well, I guess I will enjoy the nice warm weather here on Earth...
What 6 billion could buy you Posted Jan 12, 2006 12:59 UTC (Thu) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link] Speaking for myself, if I had $50B to blow, you can bet I'd be doing some research on the moon, it amazes me that Gates and freinds, given that they are by original vocation computer geeks, aren't the ones doing the things that Branson is doing.Well, actually they *are* doing something about it: http://news.com.com/Geeks+in+space/2100-1026_3-5399507.html http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/SS1_ALLEN_040620.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Allen
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