Leland, I can't speak knowledgably about gaming because I have no experience in that area, but these loosely related thoughts came to mind, so ...
When I heard of the $10/gb RAM purchase last week, I thought "that's just amazing", and given the history of hardware trajectories, we may well see that price drop even lower. Another thought is that this really paves the way for VM as a staple for anyone with any use at all for it, including VFP applications if/when MS ever does make a move to break it, all other options aside. This is particularly exciting because, in effect, it gives VFP applications "immortality". All we need to do is install a compatible OS along with our application. If MS should break VFP at some point, and we're left with the choice of going out of business or installing an older version of Windows under VM to stay alive ... [to be continued] I'll also make the general comment that these advances are monumentally valuable to software makers, no matter the language, because with hardware reduced to commodity status and thus making possible more widespread use of computers, the number of prospective customers rises at the same time that the action shifts from hardware to software. And on that note, it's the software that we've been given time to develop right that will be ahead of the competition. It's very hard to invest the time to get it right when we're stuck in the re-write loop. Isn't it far better to spend time polishing and adding features then re-writing? --- On OS bloat, OS makers have a powerful need to be organized, consequently they'll manage bloat of their own volition. Bloat due to the baggage of backwards compatibility is, well, worth the relatively small price. Worth mention, when an OS or an application 'goes to sleep', it's pages are subject to the paging subsystem to free up physical memory if needed. This kind of physical I/O is not the same as reading a disk device to bring in a program or data because everything about paging is highly optimized. Bill > Gamers are a special breed, and to them the holy grail is the fastest > computer. Gamers don't mind spending big bucks for even > small increases in spread, even though it makes each additional small increment in > speed/power more and more expensive. > > I think VMware will degrade performance on the guest OS about > 10%, and many of the newer VM(s), such as Redhat's Zen claim to be much faster > than VMware. > > Having a monstrous amount of memory on a desktop computer, even one > running many VM(s) really isn't necessary. The VM(s) not > being used can be put to sleep, so they are not using lots of memory. For a desktop > computer, I think 8G or 16G would be fine, and I think it would a big > mistake for Microsoft to up the memory requirements for it Vista and > future OS(s). At least for me, as the OS requirement for > more and more memory increases, the OS's attractiveness to me decreases and > decreases. > Someone mentioned a motherboard that supported 64G of memory > LOL, which seem a little much for a desktop computer. Heck, Ive run > complete OS(s) including all the applications and data on a lot less space > than that, so unless Microsoft or someone else decide to hold the entire OS in a > RAM disk or in a solid state HD, I don't see the advantage to lots of > memory, especially given that huge amounts of data can be > accessed in a database like PostgreSQL, MySQL, MSSQL, DB2, etc almost > instantaneously. Manipulating data can also be handled > plenty fast on a HD, like a bubble sort, etc, so huge amount of memory isn't > needed for that. The same goes for arrays, which can be put into a database for > manipulation, etc. Also, todays hardware is very capable of > managing memory and grabbing files as needed and then doing garbage > collection to clean-up and free memory as needed. However, if I were > running servers like alike VMware's enterprise, PostgreSQL, and busy web server, then > lots of system memory makes sense. > > For gamers the action all takes place on the video card, (eg GUP), so > they just add additional video cards to increase processing power and > memory. Still, even gamers don't need huge amounts of memory as the > graphics are switch out from the HD. > > Regards, > > LelandJ _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[EMAIL PROTECTED] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
