[ltp] Re: Bad news for us ...

[David A. Desrosiers]

On Sun, 2006-06-04 at 13:02 +0100, Peter B. West wrote:
> My feeling is that notebooks are becoming the mass PC market. I don't 
> think it will be very long before the majority of PCs sold for home an
> business personal use, including workstations, will be notebooks.

Actually, this is just the next evolutionary step in the final goal:
Ubiquitous "smart" electronics in everything that needs them. At some
point in the (very) near future, you won't know (or care) what OS your
airplane seatback is running, or your networked coffee maker or your
refridgerator. 

You'll probably be running multiple concurrent OS' on these devices
anyway, and you really won't need to know or care which ones it is
running. Its the capabilities and the data that matters, not the OS or
the applications that produce them. The only reason people care about
which OS they're running is when it fails to perform or limits them in
some way (cost, compatibility, capabilities). 

PCs, notebooks, PDAs, smartphones, and other "computing" devices as we
know them are, and will continue to go away, as they become anonymous
capabilities merged into common devices which simply make them
"smarter". They will move from "devices" to "personalities" of existing
(or future, smarter) devices.

The computer is really nothing more than a "data display device" now
anyway, a terminal. Your "network" will eventually become the Internet +
vpn/LAN (transparent to the end-user of said devices), and you will no
longer have to "sit down at" your computer, because they'll be all
around you, with multiple, overlapping capabilities. 

I'm glad that the technology is allowing us to miniaturize the power of
traditional desktop computers into smaller and smaller form factors.
This means we can now still "sit down at" our computers, only they're
now built into the desk, or the wall, the keyboard or the monitor
itself. 

This also allows us to add a brain to devices which would otherwise
never have had one before (an example is the recent HDD enclosures with
wireless, bluetooth, and a full Linux OS built into them, effectively
turning them into a cheap NAS device). 

Servers (which power that "network") and special-purpose workstations
are an entirely different beast here, and mostly outside the scope of
this kind of discussion, IMHO. 

I'm one of the most vocal opposers of "converged" devices (it reduces
and dramatically limits choice), but in the case of converging the
nature of traditional PCs and notebooks, I'm all for it. I haven't
personally owned a "PC" in over 7 years now, but continue to go through
many different notebooks/laptops over time.


-- 
David A. Desrosiers
desrod gnu-designs com
http://gnu-designs.com

"Erosion of civil liberties... is a threat to national security."