Networking on tiny machines
Networking on tiny machines
Posted May 10, 2014 21:23 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954)In reply to: Networking on tiny machines by marcH
Parent article: Networking on tiny machines
Even some micro-controllers today are more powerful than the first systems Windows ran on...
True, but I don't know how that's relevant here, because the claim was that Microsoft bet that computers would continually get more powerful, not that they would always be more powerful than the first ones Windows ran on.
Actually, thinking about it some more, I realize that one of these backward steps happened well before the netbooks and tablets. It happened with laptop computers. The first laptops were far less powerful in every dimension than previously typical computers they replaced. They didn't even have color displays.
But I don't know how Windows fared in that transition.
Posted May 10, 2014 22:30 UTC (Sat)
by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
[Link] (1 responses)
This is a good point I hadn't seen mentioned before. What happened was that people ran Windows on both laptops and desktops, so Windows didn't suffer here, but people were highly award that laptops were inferior in almost every way so it is laptop sales which suffered, only people who valued portability above all else used them. Laptops only became generally popular in the mid 2000s when the specs finally caught up to desktops, or at least when single-core speeds leveled off.
Since we are on the subject it should be mentioned that the whole net book category of computers was designed for Linux first and in the competitive marketplace traditional Linux desktops lost fair and square, people returned them in droves.
Posted May 15, 2014 22:08 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
There was the highly publicised example of one manufacturer. I think they claimed "the majority of our linux netbooks have been returned", only for somebody else to point out they didn't make any!!!
And when I asked (at ASDA, our Walmart subsidiary) I was told that they'd had pretty much NO returns at all. That was where I bought my netbook (which unfortunately I broke - I ended up thanks to wifely pressure trying to install XP on it. Somehow that trashed the BIOS :-(
No - there was a lot of propaganda to try and make linux netbooks look bad, but as far as I can make out, every time anybody dug into the figures they discovered somebody was lying with statistics ...
Cheers,
Networking on tiny machines
Networking on tiny machines
Wol