Two Questions

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Monday, February 10, 2014 18:21:02 Steve Teale wrote:
> On Sunday, 9 February 2014 at 21:12:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
> 
> wrote:
> > so it's nice to have a lot of overhead (and with memory being
> > as cheap as it
> > is, I don't see much reason not to put as much memory in the
> > box as it can
> 
> Jonathan, you live in a different world. Memory is not cheap
> everywhere - maybe not even available, and not everyone -
> probably a minority in fact in world terms, has a recent
> processor, or even enough memory slots.

For a desktop? It's trivial to get a lot of memory into one of those. Laptops 
would be more limiting, but even there, I'd expect 4GB to be on the low side 
at this point, and that's already more than 32-bit machines can address. And 
it's been 5+ years since I even had as little as 8GB in a machine, so I'd 
expect most desktops and laptops at this point to have enough memory that it 
couldn't all be addressed with 32 bits (stuff like mobile and embedded are 
clearly a different world though). And I'd certainly expect a developer to 
normally have a machine with at least 4GB.

I definitely do use a lot more memory than most people do though - in part 
because I tend to leave everything open all the time. And I typically have a 
machine that's no more than 2 or 3 years old with hardware which was on the 
higher end of things when I bought it. Folks who don't upgrade as often would 
be more on the 4GB side of things rather than in the 64GB range, but it's been 
a numbers of years since 4GB was a lot, so I would have thought that having at 
least that much would be pretty common at this point.

Regardless, it's been quite a few years since any desktop or laptop chips were 
32-bit, so I don't see any reason to run a 32-bit OS unless your unlucky 
enough to have a 32-bit version of Windows, and IMHO, it really hasn't made a 
lot of sense to run a 32-bit version of Windows since Vista was released 
(though 64-bit XP was a joke, so prior to Vista, it would have made sense to 
be running a 32-bit OS).

But the fact that you're even asking the question shows that you have a very 
different world-view than I do with regards to computers.

- Jonathan M Davis