[MacGenius]

Excerpt from the Register article today The Register -Gates Interview

"64 bit is coming to desktops, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology. Right now, it is costly."

This is from the same guy who said in the early 80's that 640K ought to be enough for everybody...

I think he should stick to what he knows best -stealing and extortion- instead of making computer predictions.

P.S. His statement at the end of the article about "we invented personal computing" is a great laugh.

 

[Chealion]

Considering the quote was from the 80s, 860k of RAM is like our current position, why should anyone need more then x amount of RAM? At that time it seemed as if that amount of RAM would satsify you for forever, since programs were not being developed to require more. Time proved him wrong, and its quite possible that time will prove jfpoole wrong. (Though, I don't understand how yet, who, other then maybe Photoshop needing to work on a full sized, billboard in a million and six colors would need more then 4 gigs?)

P.S. Yes I know priting is done in CMYK. Its just an exaggerated (therefore inaccurate) example.

 

[MACSPECTRUM]

P.S. Yes I know priting is done in CMYK. Its just an exaggerated (therefore inaccurate) example.

You are more correct than you may think.
Many presses now have more than 4 colours.
6 colour presses (CMYK plus 2 spot colours) are not as uncommon as one would think.

Also, many poster type large format ink jet printers use 6 colours, usually CMYK plus a Light Cyan and Light Magenta.

 

[Script Kiddie]

jfpoole and Bill Gates evidently have never had to diagonalize large matrices. 8 Gigs would be sweet.

 

[elmer]

Gates totally misses the point: Running online encrypted virtual reality cybersex sessions

 

[JAMG]

Gates is wrong because of one simple fact....

People buy bigger computers because they want to... NOT because they need to...

Our administraion offices are filled with Pentium 4 with loads of options and RAM... almost everyone used by someone who can barely type in Word and can not figure out how to forward an email....

"Why can't I rewrite this PDF... I have Acrobat Reader..."

"That Illustrator file won't open in Word... I double clicked it and nothing..."


People buy the fastest Computer for 2 major reasons:

Photoshop

and

Unreal Tournement 2003 {or whatever come after that}


If you don't believe that, you probably think that high speed internet was developed for reasons other than distributing Porn....

I saw a PBS show on the birth of the internet... They said that the time between the first connection and the first transmition of x-rated material was very brief... although no one will admit to dates... It was probably a text story...

 

[Kosh]

(Though, I don't understand how yet, who, other then maybe Photoshop needing to work on a full sized, billboard in a million and six colors would need more then 4 gigs?)

The thing is you, like Bill Gates, are looking at what we currently are doing and not what we could do with 64-bit computers. Yes, currently, only photoshop, video editting (High-def could use 64-bit computing), and super computer systems (like the Virginia Tech supercomputer) could use it, but we should be looking at what new things we can do with that power... and believe me, it won't take long for people to think of things. That's what I think people here are trying to say, is that Bill Gates seems to be very short-sighted.

 

[MacDaddy]

ummm, has anybody heard of Final Cut Pro??
I know MANY editors that want a G5 with 4-8GB of RAM. Think of when you are working on a video project with 4-8 layers of video and it is writing information to RAM.
Now why would anybody want that much RAM??

And I think Bill had a misstatement there too, he didn't invent personal computing, he invented Personal Computing PROBLEMS!!!

[ October 17, 2003, 11:23 AM: Message edited by: MacDaddy ]

 

[Noodleboy]

...and how about 3D animation programs?

We are currently using Maya 5.0 to develop a show. We've created a location/set with over 100 props with individual textures - and that doesn't include all the geometry and textures of the room itself! And still we have the characters to include! Maya is a hog for RAM; so 4 gigs would be nice, 8 gigs would be even better! Quality, speed and efficiency are essential when dealing with production.

Just my opinion!

Noodleboy.

 

[jfpoole]

Maybe my brain is broken, but I can't think of many (if any) current desktop applications that would benefit from being able to access more than 4GB of memory. Right now, having a 64-bit processor and operating system is nice, but by no means necessary for most.

 

[Chealion]

I said earlier: "Though, I don't understand yet..." I have my yet coming into play. For the average user, I don't think 4 gigs will be that big of a play for a while, but for power users (read: Vid Pros, 3D Animation, etc.) the more RAM the better. It now makes a little more sense about what normal users see as an obscene amount of RAM is really for. (Why I couldn't think of that is beyond me... Or maybe it was the lack of sleep last night?)

 

[MacDaddy]

Chealion,
The G5 is geared towards Power Users, not Home Users, thats what the iMac and eMac are for. Of course Apple will push it to whoever will buy it, but any salesman that sells a G5 to somebody to surf the web and check their email has no morals (IMHO). I always push those people to the iMac or eMac, but if you REALLY want to drop that kind of money to check your email, I will not stop you, but I will advise against it if those are your plans for using the computer.

Myself and Noodleboy need them for work, and if I had the $$ I would load it full of RAM too

 

[TroutMaskReplica]

Our administraion offices are filled with Pentium 4 with loads of options and RAM... almost everyone used by someone who can barely type in Word and can not figure out how to forward an email....

my boss is like that!

it's funny for a while but then after the eight million tutorial on how to send a message from the Drafts folder it's more like

 

[Chealion]

MacDaddy - Technology isn't stopping in its movement forward, so all those specs you see in the G5, will come to Apple's consumer line (in time), and when Apple moves completely from Motorola to IBM (processors that is) for the rest of their line, 64 bit computing will be available on a Mac for consumers.

I will agree, a G5 is not needed to check your Mail, I still use a 33Mhz 68040 to check my mail occasionally. But the iMac and eMac are not very upgradable like the PowerMacs.

 

[Sonal]

There are a lot of great quotes in that article.

Personally, my favourite is "[Internet] Explorer is fully integrated with the operating system, take it away and the OS grinds to a halt."

Take away a browser and the OS stops? Shudder. There's something very wrong with an OS that depends on an application. (Of course, this is Windows; there's many things very wrong with it.)

 

[Kosh]

Our administraion offices are filled with Pentium 4 with loads of options and RAM... almost everyone used by someone who can barely type in Word and can not figure out how to forward an email....

It's strange, but in my department's offices the exact opposite of this was true. They had decent Pentium 3 or 4 machines, but starved them of RAM with only 64MB of RAM. As soon as you started openig up more than 2 or 3 applications at a time, you were getting errors all over the place and applications crashing. And what productive person doesn't have more than 3 applications open at once, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, Mainframe session, Windows explorer, Netron, etc... As soon as I started purchasing PC for my group, I made sure they had sufficient RAM... RAM's cheap. I can tell you my group was ALOT happier. I get a laugh when I go to other groups in my department and they are still suffering with insufficient RAM.

 

[PosterBoy]

It was said:
There are a lot of great quotes in that article.

Personally, my favourite is "[Internet] Explorer is fully integrated with the operating system, take it away and the OS grinds to a halt."

Take away a browser and the OS stops? Shudder. There's something very wrong with an OS that depends on an application. (Of course, this is Windows; there's many things very wrong with it.)

Mac OS X relies on an application too: Finder.app. IE (these days) is to Windows as Finder is to Mac OS (in really, really basic terms anyway).

It's also worth noting that regardless of how much RAM the machine can hold, I am pretty sure that a 32 bit OS (such as OS X or most versions of windows) can't address more than 4 GB of RAM to a single process (such as photoshop, final cut, or checking your email).

--PB

 

[Script Kiddie]

Interesting though, the G5's physical address range is 42 bits, or 4 terabytes.

 

[elmer]

Hard drive speed seems to lag behind more and more as time goes on. Surely we need to keep more stuff in RAM to keep our processor occupied in the future. For example, The Grand, a piano virtual instrument from Steinberg, can easily overload the amount of data my laptop's hard drive can push out (and even RAIDed Raptors on a G5 are not fast compared to RAM). The instrument is 2 GB on disk - I would love to have it all in RAM (and have as much as possible in L2 cache). Now extend that to more than one instrument ... imagine it's the next Hans Zimmer at the keyboard in his high school music lab ... Bill is just spreading fertilizer.

 

[Viivis]

Yeah Bill's a funny guy no doubt about it....

Tons of RAM is nice to have when you need it. But it's amazing how many people will go and buy a retail gaming video card and try and run 3D development apps or video editing suites with them. People say this all the time; " I have lots of RAM, and my video card is 3D with 64 or 128MB Ram, why does it take so long to render stuff? And it just doesn't look sharp and crisp.

It's not always about system RAM.

I know this was a little off the Billy topic, but you know...the whole RAM vs AGP vs FSB vs L3 CACHE always cracks me up I'll leave now.