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Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 00:41:16 +0200
From: Martin Dalecki <dalecki@evision-ventures.com>
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To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
CC: Cort Dougan <cort@fsmlabs.com>,
       "Eric W. Biederman" <ebiederm@xmission.com>,
       Benjamin LaHaise <bcrl@redhat.com>,
       Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>, Robert Love <rml@tech9.net>,
       Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: latest linus-2.5 BK broken
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0206201511300.872-100000@home.transmeta.com>
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U?ytkownik Linus Torvalds napisa?:

> At which point it doesn't _matter_ if you only get 70% or 30% or 12%
> improvement. If it's within "cheap enough", people will buy it. In fact,
> once it gets "too cheap", people will buy something more expensive just
> because a cheap PC obviously isn't good enough. That's _reality_.
> 
> Your "efficiency" arguments have no basis in the real life of economics in
> a developing market. Only embedded people care about absolute cost and
> absolute efficiencies ("it's not worth it for us to go for a more powerful
> CPU, since we don't need it"). The rest of the world takes that 66MHz
> improvement (in a CPU that does multiple gigahertz) and is happy about it.
> Or takes the added 12%, and is happy about it.

You don't read economic papers. Don't you? Or what is it with this
plumbing server/pc market around us? Or increased notebook sales.
(Typical marked saturation symptom, like the second car for the
familiy :-).

I suggest it's precisely the end of the open invention curve out there:

1. Nowadays the CPUs are indeed good enough for most of the common tasks.
    WindowsXP tries hard to help overcome this :-). But in reality Win2000
    is just fine for office work.

2. The technology in question is starting to hit real physical barriers becouse
   it appears more and more that not everything comming out of the labs
   can be implemented at reasonable costs.

> Humans are not rational creatures. We're _rationalizing_ creatures, and we
> love rationalizing that big machine that just makes us feel better.

Perhaps it's just still too deep in to my brain that
the overwhelimg part of the PC market is still determined
by corporate buyers (70%). And they look for efficiency (well within
wide boundaries :-). There is for example not much of an uprush from
Win4.0 or Win2000 to WindowsXP. Not only due to "political" reasons,
but becouse a normal PC from few years ago still does the job
for office productivity. Quite away from the days of yearly upgrades
all around the office :-)... And finally the whole thing driving
the movement behind AS/390 boxen running Linux OS instancies is consolidation
and costs too...

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