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big RAM / 64-bit / etc. (Announce)

posted by marcov, 06.04.2009, 09:53

> > Better wait some years.
>
> Unlikely. Maybe six months to a year, maybe more. But it's definitely hit
> mainstream and is heading towards us. Then again, so is x86-64 (and I
> don't know what to do about that for DOS: I suppose dual mode .EXEs,
> DOSBox, DOSEMU, QEMU).
I don't know. E.g. the intel ones haven't become that much cheaper. Sure, there are now cheaper knockoffs, but the benchmarks show they don't hold up to an off-the-shelf HD.

> Most people have standalone players anyways
Indeed, and the BR thing is a matter of time I guess.

> I thought the C64 had 64k? (Okay, too lazy to look it up, I never used
> one, but still ...) Even the VIC-20 had more than its claimed 2k, I
> think.
I'm also to lazy to lookup. vic-20, C16 or PET. They were the "older" users of the computer club.

> > hit it, got into PCs rather late in that cycle (1980-1994, the dos golden
> > age)
>
> The original IBM PC supposedly came with anywhere from 16k to 64k. And
> Gordon Letwin (of MS fame) blames Compaq (exclusive 386 rights initially)
> and IBM (already promised 286 support) for delaying OS/2 32-bit for way
(snip, OS/2 vs WIndows)

I don't agree entirely with this. Some stuff is true (IBM's rigidity and attempts at control), but the main problem I think is that it happened at a time where every so an so many months, the number of computer users doubled, and that made the market very fluid.

> Anyways, for normal everyday use I disable desktop composition (which
> disables Flip3d, boo freakin' hoo) just because UAC took at least 5
> secs. to recover (fully blank screen!) each time it was invoked. That was
> just stupid, esp. since I didn't need it. (Silly Sidebar widget says I
> have 53% RAM used right now. It doesn't typically go too high for me, but
> I'm not really hardcore in that way. VMs are typically the greediest.)
I downgraded to XP with this (work) one. (core 1 laptop, 1GB of which 320MB is taken by the video card. Always!)

But that in retrospect was because of certain problems we had with instability that in the end turned out to be a bios problem (which only occured when the amount of memory was expanded). Vista probably used the higher memory more intensively than XP.

The memory corruption would also corrupt windows installs over time, making the issue even harder to detect. After close to an year(!), the vendor came with a bios update, and the laptop was suddenly stable.

> > It is if you try to get the binaries as small as possible.
>
> Not for GCC. -Os for them is even faster / lighter than -O2 (although -O1
> is recommended for best speed / RAM usage if you need at least some
> optimizations). Besides, don't forget BinUtils 2.17+ have
> --reduce-memory-overheads (for slower but less RAM used methods previously
> utilized).
GCC doesn't support smartlinking that way.

> But have they tried it? And if not, why not? :-)
No. Time, interest.

> > Hmm. I have to boot freebsd anyway this weekend. Will see if I can do
> > anything.
>
> I didn't mean you have to, just curious if somebody knew if it
> would build there or not.

It's an install for experimentation, no problem. Just didn't get around to it.

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