A personal computer as a 'commons' is a misleading idea.
First, a background issue. The computer you buy today is not "many times more powerful than one from 10 years ago." Moore's law stopped applying years ago:
although inertia keep sit in the public discourse.
Your computer probably contains more memory and a larger hard disc, but the performance is about the same.
But this is not my reason for commenting.
A PC is a vehicle intended to be infected with software.
It comes preinfected with 'free' software intended to extract resources from the computer's owner, e.g., personal data, attention, money (by paying for upgrades), internet bandwidth, etc.
Software tends to be a winner take all market, so companies want to get their product on the market first (so no resources are invested in making it unnecessarily efficient).
As you point out, people get what they pay for (which generates little incentive to fix bugs, but reputation can be a motivator:
If you are interested in data, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data.
Moore's law stopped applying (i.e. chip speeds haven't got much faster), but computers still get more powerful because e.g. they have more cores, new chip designs and/or more RAM. The 2010 Macbook air had a 2 core processor and 2-4 Gb of RAM; the current version has 8 cores plus a GPU, and 8 Gb of RAM.
I agree that PCs often come preinstalled with free software. I'm not sure that it is always designed to extract resources from the owner. A web browser might be preinstalled simply so as to make the computer more useful and hence valuable. Either way, this has no bearing on whether a computer's resources are a commons from the point of view software makers.
The jump to two-core does provide a big improvement (e.g., one for the operating system and one for the user application). With more than two cores you have to find something for the other cores to do. Good for people running jobs in the background, or specialist mathematical core. But really a marketing tool.
Memory performance rarely gets mentioned (because Intel's huge marketing budget dominates). But buying faster memory can improve performance:
Some PC companies make more money from the fee they get from preinstalling software, than they do from selling the hardware. Those paying t get their software preinstalled have to make their money from the buys.
Your first argument caught my attention first, and since I replied to the other issue a Moore's law throwawy point got made.
A personal computer as a 'commons' is a misleading idea.
First, a background issue. The computer you buy today is not "many times more powerful than one from 10 years ago." Moore's law stopped applying years ago:
http://shape-of-code.com/2013/12/13/unreliable-cpus-and-memory-the-end-result-of-moores-law/
although inertia keep sit in the public discourse.
Your computer probably contains more memory and a larger hard disc, but the performance is about the same.
But this is not my reason for commenting.
A PC is a vehicle intended to be infected with software.
It comes preinfected with 'free' software intended to extract resources from the computer's owner, e.g., personal data, attention, money (by paying for upgrades), internet bandwidth, etc.
Software tends to be a winner take all market, so companies want to get their product on the market first (so no resources are invested in making it unnecessarily efficient).
As you point out, people get what they pay for (which generates little incentive to fix bugs, but reputation can be a motivator:
https://shape-of-code.com/2015/12/07/so-you-found-a-bug-in-my-compiler-whoopee-do/
).
If you are interested in data, my book Evidence-based Software Engineering discusses what is currently known about software engineering, based on an analysis of all the publicly available data.
pdf+code+all data freely available here: http://knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/
Moore's law stopped applying (i.e. chip speeds haven't got much faster), but computers still get more powerful because e.g. they have more cores, new chip designs and/or more RAM. The 2010 Macbook air had a 2 core processor and 2-4 Gb of RAM; the current version has 8 cores plus a GPU, and 8 Gb of RAM.
I agree that PCs often come preinstalled with free software. I'm not sure that it is always designed to extract resources from the owner. A web browser might be preinstalled simply so as to make the computer more useful and hence valuable. Either way, this has no bearing on whether a computer's resources are a commons from the point of view software makers.
The jump to two-core does provide a big improvement (e.g., one for the operating system and one for the user application). With more than two cores you have to find something for the other cores to do. Good for people running jobs in the background, or specialist mathematical core. But really a marketing tool.
Memory performance rarely gets mentioned (because Intel's huge marketing budget dominates). But buying faster memory can improve performance:
https://shape-of-code.com/2015/11/18/peak-memory-transfer-rate-is-best-specint-performance-predictor/
Some PC companies make more money from the fee they get from preinstalling software, than they do from selling the hardware. Those paying t get their software preinstalled have to make their money from the buys.
Your first argument caught my attention first, and since I replied to the other issue a Moore's law throwawy point got made.