PC 4GB RAM limit

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tim Anderson
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Some buyers are geeks who feel compelled to buy the newest of anything.
Some are users who are forced to buy new systems because of the snowball
effect of any change or upgrade in a computer system. Some are
first-time users.


Complexity doesn't necessarily matter.


There are no alternatives.
Click to expand...


Since there are no gains to modern computers, I will just
use an abacus to post any further replies. As soon as I
gather up enough slave volunteers I will begin construction,
gathering up the beads and pebbles needed. I may need
airport clearance to build a 40 story high abacus capable of
enough calculations to run windows and access usenet, but I
estimate that by the year 2590, my descendents will have
completed the project and can then further correspond on
this issue.

Until then, I won't bother using an ineffective modern
system to reply to your posts.
 
Nobody is claiming otherwise.


It is unergonomic for anything other than that mimicry.


It's not a question of coordination, it's a question of small buttons.
I haven't seen anyone touch-typing on a cellphone keyboard.
Click to expand...

Maybe you haven't bothered to notice there are now cell
phones with the traditional asdfjkl; keyboards.

Since there are no gains to modern computers, I will just
use an abacus to post any further replies. As soon as I
gather up enough slave volunteers I will begin construction,
gathering up the beads and pebbles needed. I may need
airport clearance to build a 40 story high abacus capable of
enough calculations to run windows and access usenet, but I
estimate that by the year 2590, my descendents will have
completed the project and can then further correspond on
this issue.

Until then, I won't bother using an ineffective modern
system to reply to your posts.
 
Many people don't have a use for a PC, not even a primary one (whatever
that means).
Click to expand...

Since there are no gains to modern computers, I will just
use an abacus to post any further replies. As soon as I
gather up enough slave volunteers I will begin construction,
gathering up the beads and pebbles needed. I may need
airport clearance to build a 40 story high abacus capable of
enough calculations to run windows and access usenet, but I
estimate that by the year 2590, my descendents will have
completed the project and can then further correspond on
this issue.

Until then, I won't bother using an ineffective modern
system to reply to your posts.
 
Mxsmanic said:
Keyboards continue to shrink,
Click to expand...

No they don't.
as do displays.
Click to expand...

No they don't.
Just as watching a movie in the back of a car on a screen the size of a
paperback book in traffic doesn't match the experience of watching the
movie on a wall-sized screen in the comfort of home, struggling to use a
palm-sized computer with one hand in a subway car does not match the
experience of typing comfortably on a full keyboard in a comfy chair at
home (or in the office).
Click to expand...

Strangely I remember the pocket Tvs with the 1 inch screen from a
decade ago. Oh and the miniscule keyboard of the ZX81 which was about
half the size of a laptop one.
What are the margins on PCs, then?
Click to expand...
Bugger all. 8% to stay competitive.
 
Mxsmanic said:
Because volatile RAM is erased when you turn the power off, which isn't
much use if you need to write out data that is permanent. That's why
disks exist.
Click to expand...
Who says you need to turn the machine off? Also have you never heard of
NVRAM?
 
Mxsmanic said:
The user doesn't count; she is not part of the system being measured.
Click to expand...
Of course the user counts. The whole basis of your argument was about
perceived delays by the user.

The older OS and apps won't support modern hardware.
Bullshit.

Firewire and USB
are not supported by older software,
Click to expand...

Bullshit...go learn about Hardware Abstraction Layers.
 
kony said:
When all is said and done, a computer is a means to an end.
The time it takes to reach that end is significant.
Discounting the user is pointless, as the system is there
FOR the user(s).
Click to expand...

Since it is there for the user, the user's own decision to pause in
using the computer doesn't count, so user delays do not count.
You don't consider Win2K older than XP?
Click to expand...

Yes, I do, albeit only slightly.
What makes you think USB and firewire aren't supported by
Win98?
Click to expand...

I don't know if they are or not, as I've never used the Win 9x operating
systems.
What's the point here?
Click to expand...

That sometimes one is compelled to move towards a newer system by the
snowball effect.
You're claiming there are _NO_ boards with ISA anymore?
Click to expand...

You can find out what I claim by reading my post.
SCSI is also still available, but you also have the other
alternatives... so what?
Click to expand...

In a specific case I recall, the new scanner I wanted had a firewire
connection, and my existing NT 4.0 didn't support firewire.
Additionally, the version of the scanner software that supported the new
scanner wouldn't run on NT 4.0, whereas the version of the software that
supported the existing scanner wouldn't run on XP. And the existing
scanner was SCSI, and there was no driver for XP for the SCSI interface
to the scanner.

I still have two separate systems because of this.
 
Mxsmanic said:
David Maynard writes:




Perceptually it is. The threshold varies with a number of physiological
and environmental variables, but 1/60 second is pretty safe for video
displays.
Click to expand...

Doesn't matter how much you explain 'circumstances', they're not synonyms.

Just as "20 lbs" and "dog" are not synonyms just because someone's dog
might happen to weigh 20 lbs.
If it's not in a GUI, why mention it?
Click to expand...

Because it shows that 1/60'th of a second and "instantaneous" are not only
not synonyms but that it matters.

On all the monitors and video boards that do it routinely.
Click to expand...

Do what routinely?

It really is nutty for you to snip context and especially when the only
reference you leave is "that."
Mostly (2). Besides which many people are used to waiting and don't
realize that they don't necessarily have to wait.
Click to expand...

I hate to burst your bubble but Microsoft has done a lot more studying of
what people like/dislike in a GUI than you have.
 
Mxsmanic said:
David Maynard writes:




The magnitude of sales isn't that great.
Click to expand...

No, it *is* 'that' great, it just isn't 'that' great. LOL

What nonsense.
Twelve billion dollars is only
about $40 per person in the U.S., which roughly implies that only one
American in ten or twenty is buying a computer.
Click to expand...

A invalid analysis that not only ignores infants and others who are not
participants in the market, but families who use one computer for more than
one person and that one year of sales is only one year of sales, when the
discussion was about how many people 'have' computers (as part of your
fallacious argument it's equivalent to how many may, or may not, 'want
one'), not how many bought one in 2003 alone.
And PC penetration is
very high in the U.S.; it is dramatically lower in most other countries.
Click to expand...

There are a lot of things that are "very high" in the U.S. compared to
"most other countries." That says nothing about whether they'd *like* to
have them.

Not to mention that "other countries' are not the U.S. market.

Then assimilating it with desktops is fallacious, isn't it?
Click to expand...

Yes, so why did you do it?

I don't have exact figures, but I'm certain it is easily ten times what
it is for, say, commodity items like foods, which often have razor-thin
margins. It may even approach or surpass the margins of luxury items
such as perfume (50% or more).
Click to expand...

Transalated to plain English, you don't know and have nothing to base it on
either.

Since I spoke specifically of margins, what does this imply?
Click to expand...

A couple of things. For one, it 'implies' you're intentionally
misrepresenting the case because 'you' spoke of more than just "margins."
Which likely explains why you snipped all context of it and my reply.

It also implies that you didn't read, or can't comprehend, the simple
English sentence where I explicitly stated my point.
 
kony said:
Yes Sis integrated video on S370 was a poor joke, taking
same general system config but running from a BX board with
just about any old AGP card made even 2D faster.
Click to expand...

Yes, my tualatin machines are all separate AGP except for the Asus P2B-VM
but it's built-in video is an ATI Rage chip with it's own video RAM, not
'shared memory'. It truly is a built-in 'AGP card'. Good 15 buck motherboard ;)
Even a box
here with Celeron 500 & i810 video without
dedicated/discrete frame buffer onboard was faster than the
Sis video when it had a 33MHz higher memory & front side
busses.
Click to expand...

That highlights the RAM load. The extra bandwidth helps to compensate for
the shared memory, but i810 video is still a dog for anything but 2D.
Yep, I had a T'Bred @ 1.8GHz encoding @ 640x480 ok, "medium"
quality Divx v3.11 then v5.0(n). Later (unsure of version,
maybe 5.1 or 5.2) Divx versions have more optimizations for
modern CPUs but also effectively redefine what "medium"
quality is, calling what was formerly high quality/slowest,
now medium quality.
Click to expand...

Yeah, my XP 2000+ is the 'workhorse' machine, mainly because it sits in the
most convenient hole, but I use the 3400+ for encoding and, even then, it
takes seemingly forever.

I'm exaggerating, of course, but people have this notion they'll just 'zip'
through a DVD, but it don't. Takes a lot of crunching for that.
 
That highlights the RAM load. The extra bandwidth helps to compensate for
the shared memory, but i810 video is still a dog for anything but 2D.
Click to expand...

Yep, but it highlights how poor the SIS was even more, since
it should've easily outperformed the i810 due to the faster
memory bus or at least been close enough that in 2D you
couldn't tell a difference.

Sis did screwy things with their drivers then too, some sort
of incrementing a frame counter without actually rendering
the frame... some had speculated that it was to appear
better on benchmarks (or rather, not as poor).
Yeah, my XP 2000+ is the 'workhorse' machine, mainly because it sits in the
most convenient hole, but I use the 3400+ for encoding and, even then, it
takes seemingly forever.
Click to expand...

I use Divx most often for realtime TV recording, setting the
keyframe threshold low enough that odds are high I'd be able
to cut commercials on keyframes if desired.
I'm exaggerating, of course, but people have this notion they'll just 'zip'
through a DVD, but it don't. Takes a lot of crunching for that.
Click to expand...

Yep, it's not as bad if you can dedicate a box to it, though
after I upgraded my lan to GbE I just started doing ISOs
then plaing 'em back with Daemon Tools and whichever DVD
software. As I don't generally keep 'em archived forever, I
can recoup the HDD space if/when needed.
 
kony said:
Yep, but it highlights how poor the SIS was even more, since
it should've easily outperformed the i810 due to the faster
memory bus or at least been close enough that in 2D you
couldn't tell a difference.
Click to expand...

Oops. Sorry, I misread that. I thought you were talking about the 810
typically running the memory 33 Mhz faster than the FSB.

Sis did screwy things with their drivers then too, some sort
of incrementing a frame counter without actually rendering
the frame... some had speculated that it was to appear
better on benchmarks (or rather, not as poor).
Click to expand...

I don't know what is it with SIS but they don't seem to be able to make a
decent video chipset even if their life depended on it.

I use Divx most often for realtime TV recording, setting the
keyframe threshold low enough that odds are high I'd be able
to cut commercials on keyframes if desired.
Click to expand...

All things considered I get better performance from the MS Media 9 codec
when live encoding but if I want to archive I'll record raw and encode
later because my little tualatins just don't have enough 'oomph' to
compress real time at the highest settings.

But then I don't do 'automatic' commercial cutting, I manually edit.

Yep, it's not as bad if you can dedicate a box to it, though
after I upgraded my lan to GbE I just started doing ISOs
then plaing 'em back with Daemon Tools and whichever DVD
software. As I don't generally keep 'em archived forever, I
can recoup the HDD space if/when needed.
Click to expand...


Most of the encoding I do is from broadcast and then to CD/DVD if I want to
archive.

Btw, old Black and White movies compress REAL well. LOL
 
Most don't "want" their own 21 inch TV, either. One or two per
household is a huge market.

BTW: the famous Olsen quote is out of context according to Schein (who
worked for Olsen for about 30 years) in his recent book _DEC Is Dead,
Long Live DEC_. What Olsen said was that people didn't want PCs doing
stupid things like keeping track of what's in you refrigerator. That
being said, he did effectivley veto product proposals that may have
beat Compaq at it's own game (Compaq did not yet exist when Olsen made
this quote.)

(Don't argue with me about this. I'm only quoting the book)
Click to expand...

The funny thing was Olsen said it just as the early DEC machines (PDP1-9, early
11s and 15s) were heading for retirement - though still useful (Unix and B were
designed on a PDP-7 that Bell Labs had sitting in a corner) - and those old
machines were showing up in dorm rooms, home basements and garages, anyplace we
could find enough relatively vermin-free space for a mini or a midi (remember it
was an "acquired" long dusty 8-I from a university basement pile or a
multi-thousand Altaire at best, and the Altaire had less-available softweare or
storage power.

More important, I think is the Micro$oft quote that "no one will need more than
640K"

Incidently, C. Gorden Bell and team are still hard at work at MS trying to make
the computer a sensible kitchen appliance, a perfect memory-of-your-life
program, etc. and he was only Olsen's RH man.

Olsen was out of power long before the microP really came into being, pre-Q
creaton I believe. DEC should have stuck to its guns with a real replacement for
the PDP 11 -> VAX family beyond Alpha, and kept its original customer base
happy, rather than trying to build everything from the heavy iron that ran the
early Internet <if it hadn't been based on VAXen, the Morris bug would have
failed> to desktop users with expensive Rainbows, DECMates and VAXStations.

When Olsen was in charge, DEC was the computer company students loved best -
because it was dedicated to HANDS ON machines that filled the need of anyone who
needed a computer (except big iron that didn't timeshare like mad or pitifully
powerless <at the time> desktops. Every student had full sets of DEC manuals for
the ASKING and access to company support and...

well, what kind of computer do you think they specified when they got out of
school?

Besides, it was fun, and everyone enjoyed.
 
AT said:
The funny thing was Olsen said it just as the early DEC machines (PDP1-9, early
11s and 15s) were heading for retirement - though still useful (Unix and B were
designed on a PDP-7 that Bell Labs had sitting in a corner) - and those old
machines were showing up in dorm rooms, home basements and garages, anyplace we
could find enough relatively vermin-free space for a mini or a midi (remember it
was an "acquired" long dusty 8-I from a university basement pile or a
multi-thousand Altaire at best, and the Altaire had less-available softweare or
storage power.

More important, I think is the Micro$oft quote that "no one will need more than
640K"
Click to expand...

Except Bill Gates never said it.

Incidently, C. Gorden Bell and team are still hard at work at MS trying to make
the computer a sensible kitchen appliance, a perfect memory-of-your-life
program, etc. and he was only Olsen's RH man.

Olsen was out of power long before the microP really came into being, pre-Q
creaton I believe.
Click to expand...

Olsen was replaced as CEO in 1992.
 
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