Moore's Law irrelevant? Afraid so, at least for ed tech

The UK version of Crave, another CNET online publication, posted an interesting piece today on how the OLPC XO (which just entered mass production) may make Moore's Law far less important to the industry. As the author asked:

Think about your own PC usage -- does it honestly include anything more demanding than Facebook stalking, laughing at idiots on YouTube or hitting the digg button underneath the latest lolcat? Can you justify spending £2,000 when a machine costing £50 will do exactly the same thing? Crave thinks the world can learn a lot from the XO, the ClassMate PC and its ilk. These devices could change the computing world as we know it. And despite its makers saying it's exclusive to the developing world, the XO absolutely should be brought to the West.

While I hope we're doing more than "Facebook stalking" in Ed Tech, the truth of this statement still stands. We don't need quad cores on the classroom desktop. The $199 mini-notebook from ASUS hitting the shelves this fall will be more than enough for many of us. Sure, there are serious power users and resource-hungry applications. A few of the exercises I did for my last number theory class at WPI could have definitely used more horsepower. However, most of our students (even at the college level) aren't looking at the relationships between Fibonacci numbers and very large primes or attempting to break matrix-based encryption algorithms. If you know what I'm talking about, then Moore's Law means something to you. Yet for the rest of the classroom teachers out there, the only thing we need to keep up with is operating system requirements. So much of what we do is web-based or resides in basic productivity applications, that Moore's law just doesn't matter any more.

Again, as the Crave author pointed out,

Moore's law is great for making tech faster, and for making slower, existing tech cheaper, but when consumers realise their personal lust for faster hardware makes almost zero financial sense, and hurts the environment with greater demands for power, will they start to demand cheaper, more efficient 'third-world' computers that are just as effective?

ZDNet has also been buzzing lately with the growing irrelevance of the desktop OS. As we turn to the web to supply our application needs, particularly applications and associated data that we can access anytime and anywhere, Moore's Law may dwindle for a lot of people, but perhaps in Ed Tech more than in the mainstream where budget and cost-savings (both in hardware, maintenance, lifecycles, and energy consumption) have particular importance.