I guess you don't understand how os's work or something? Are you thinking that somehow the applications cache themselves to memory? No, I'm thinking that the OS puts them them. there. As a cache. You know, just like the summary says. Hence my "didn't you even read the summary". Which, apparently, you didn't.
The OP said "4GB for the OS alone?". This was what I was responding to. The actual space the operating system takes up as itself is not the same as the space into which it caches frequently used applications and data.
E.g. in Linux, "free -m" will even explicitly seperate out the figures for memory used by the OS itself & running programs, and that which the OS is caching files into. Windows doesn't explicitely do this, which is possibly where your confusion stems from.
I'm afraid I do not see what is difficult to understand about this.
My XP box runs fine with less than 1G and runs pretty well with 1G. It is hard to see how 3G can be gobbled up by some eye candy and other "UI innovations". That an OS needs that much memory is plain crazy. I'm tired of saying this, but read the article -- or even just the summary. The guy is not talking about how much memory the OS needs just to fit into. 3G isn't "gobbled up by some eye candy". He's talking about the point at which adding more memory would not make any difference. His equivalent estimate for XP was 2GB; and yet, as you say, it runs find with way less than 1GB. The OS doesn't "need that much memory". It can, however, use any extra memory you do have to preload applications and data.
Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design. If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?
The apps don't use that memory, the os does. The application programs are stored in ram (you know, like a "ram disk"), so that when the program is actually called upon, the rogram is already in ram and doesn't need to be read from the hard drive (you know, cause the hard drive is slower than the ram).` Well, yeah. Just like the summary says. Hence my "didn't you even read the summary". If you really felt my quote was taken out of context and somehow implied that the memory use was due to running applications, the summary was only a scroll away.
This is a "feature" of the operating system. Well, yes. IMHO, it's a damn good feature. If I have XGB of RAM, I may as well be using it to speed up my system, rather than have it sitting there like a lemon. Where's the harm? It frees it up when anything requests it.
No shit. My Vista Ultimate system uses nearly 1GB RAM at startup, and I don't have many services running or apps installed, As it says in the *summary*, Vista will use available RAM to cache frequently used applications and documents. It frees it up automatically if programs request it.
anti-Vista crowd That would be everyone on earth who isn't a Microsoft fan boy or shill. So everyone who isn't actively anti-Vista is a Microsoft shill? Let's see, that would be a good 99% of the Earth's population. Shall we round down to 6 billion people for ease of calculation? Hmmm... Microsoft has $50billion in reserves, which would give around $1.70 per person, per year of Vista's development. Wow, being a Microsoft shill sure doesn't pay very well!
Seriously, though, grow up. THe world is not divided into Vista-hating FSF evangelists and Microsoft shills.
Um, just because performance increases up to that point, doesn't mean you have to buy it. DO you always opt for the largest engine you can whenever you upgrade your car, just because it'll give you more performance (which it will)? No, you balance it against price. Ditto here. If you don't want to spend £245 on RAM, don't.
"More RAM means more caching."
Well, Duh... You say it's obvious; but it's amazing how many Slashdot posts I've seen which consist of "I've got XGB of RAM [where X>1] and Vista's using up 75% of it running the OS alone; therefore Vista must need XGB of RAM to even run, never mind applications!" -- conveniently ignoring that Vista's just using the extra RAM to cache frequently used apps, documents, etc., and it'll automatically be freed up if any application requests it...
4 GB for the OS alone? This is ridiculous, even by Microsoft standards! Didn't you even to read the summary? How are "applications and data" the "OS alone"?
but does the UK document serve as just an extension of the ECHR? I think the common Slashdot description "Embrace and Extend" applies here, though in this case it's not a bad thing. From Wikipedia: "Its aim is to "give further effect" in UK law to the rights contained in the European Convention on Human Rights. The Act makes available in UK courts a remedy for breach of a Convention right, without the need to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg"
There are some differences, though. The Bill explicitely specifies what happens if a ECHR clause absolutely contradicts a clause in a piece of UK legislation (including the non-ECHR clauses in the bill itself). In short, according to Wikipedia, the court makes a Declaration of Incompatability -- which basically means the primary legislation has priority, but the government is put under pressure to remove the contradiction (and is allowed to do so with secondary legislation), and it strengthens the case of anyone appealing to the European court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Good point; I mainly made the mistake because I was adopting the language of the GP ("Fluorescent bulbs running on AC are strobe lights...").
Besides, if you want me to nitpick even more, I could say that DC is just AC with a frequency of 0Hz:-). No, really: I was recently asked to calculate the phase offset (current against input potential) when the frequency was 0Hz, 60Hz, and infinity Hz.
I (slightly sarcastically) pointing out the utter meaninglessness of a non-oscillating current having a phase offset (never the question of infinity Hz!).
...Turns out they were perfectly aware of this and wanted the limit as the phase tended to 0 & infinity.
Out-of-date. Modern compact florescent lamps step up the frequency to 25-40 kHz, rather than just using mains frequency as the old-style industrial 'tube' florescent lamps did.
Fluorescent bulbs running on AC are in fact strobe lights. If the frequency of the AC matches that of some repetitive motion (such as a spinning blade, cog, or other machine part) then the machine will give the appearance of standing still. Perfectly true, but mostly irrelevent; since compact flourescent lamps don't run on AC. The ballast boosts the frequency to the region of 25 to 40 kHz. True, some of the older 'tube'-style florescent lamps do run on AC, but the ones that are being sold as light-bulb replacements are CFLs.
Maybe because Vista requires activation and (last I heard) needed an extra server to handle activation every 180 days, and Office 2007 doesn't? Yes it does. All versions of office since XP have required activation (but you do get to start it 50 times before it forces you).
Were I work, we found out that we can't even buy XP anymore (we buy openlicense stuff through dell). To run XP on a new machine, we need to purchase Vista and downgrade. Given this kind of push, the disappointing numbers are surprising and even worse news for MS. The numbers from TFA are about retail boxed sales of Vista, not OEM copies installed on new machines.
Wasn't the consumer launch date of Vista, like, 2 weeks ago? How can any OEM manufacturer be so confident in it that they're discontinuing the former product already? Could it possibly be that OEMs aren't consumers, and so didn't have to wait until the consumer launch to get their hands on the final code and test it on their machines?
"Point being, the high RAM usage is a good thing"
Yeah, you keep telling yourself that mate. You're right! When I buy a machine with 2GB of RAM, I shouldn't expect the OS to actually *use* any of it. The whole point of more RAM is to make you feel smug; not to boost performance or anything like that. That's why I use an amazing program to free up my RAM if RAM usage goes above a certain level. This way, I get to pay for 2GB of RAM even though I never use more than 512MB! Isn't it great?
> Why? Is saving as "Word 97-2003" document difficult?
Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents. Office 2007 has this incredible new feature called "set as default". It allows you to choose a format to save in once, and it will continue to use that format in subsequent times! I can't believe no-one thought of this feature before Office 2007! Amazing, these Microsoft Innovations, huh?
Vista, however, is so rushed and incomplete that SP1 is actually coming later this year. 5 years in development, and over one and a half years in Beta (that's three seperate complete releases of Ubuntu in the time Vista's been in beta), and you're calling it rushed? You can accuse Vista of being many things, not all particularly complimentary, but I don't think rushed is one of them.
Re the SP1 thing, IIRC from what I've read that's a combination of bringing Vista up to date with the by-then-released Longhorn Server and pacifying the "Don't upgrade till SP1!" crowd; but I could be wrong.
This is why the World Wide Web was invented almost 20 years ago, so that people could share documents without having to worry about what kind of computer the reader has.... There are standard file formats for everything, you can put data into the right file format ONCE and put it on a server where it belongs and never have to fuck with it again You're right! Why just last week I started using NCSA Mosaic again. Checked my Gmail, watched some Youtube, played some games. Worked fine. No need to 'upgrade' in order to view web pages with newer features, unlike all those Office suckers who have to download a free update in order to view files made with newer versions.
2K is no longer supported by MS You should consider informing Microsoft that they don't support Windows 2000 any more. They themselves seem to be under the impression that it's supported until June 2010.
Perhaps I'm being dense here, but what exactly does UAC have to do with DRM? They're two completely unrealated technologies which don't interact with each other in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
The OP said "4GB for the OS alone?". This was what I was responding to. The actual space the operating system takes up as itself is not the same as the space into which it caches frequently used applications and data.
E.g. in Linux, "free -m" will even explicitly seperate out the figures for memory used by the OS itself & running programs, and that which the OS is caching files into. Windows doesn't explicitely do this, which is possibly where your confusion stems from.
I'm afraid I do not see what is difficult to understand about this.
Loading up all that RAM takes a lot of time and shows poor design. If you've got XGB of RAM, you may as well *use* it to cache commonly used data etc. and speed up your system, rather than just have it sit there like a lemon. Please tell me how doing this "shows poor design"?
Seriously, though, grow up. THe world is not divided into Vista-hating FSF evangelists and Microsoft shills.
Um, just because performance increases up to that point, doesn't mean you have to buy it. DO you always opt for the largest engine you can whenever you upgrade your car, just because it'll give you more performance (which it will)? No, you balance it against price. Ditto here. If you don't want to spend £245 on RAM, don't.
Sweet spot != required for good performance.
Well, Duh... You say it's obvious; but it's amazing how many Slashdot posts I've seen which consist of "I've got XGB of RAM [where X>1] and Vista's using up 75% of it running the OS alone; therefore Vista must need XGB of RAM to even run, never mind applications!" -- conveniently ignoring that Vista's just using the extra RAM to cache frequently used apps, documents, etc., and it'll automatically be freed up if any application requests it...
There are some differences, though. The Bill explicitely specifies what happens if a ECHR clause absolutely contradicts a clause in a piece of UK legislation (including the non-ECHR clauses in the bill itself). In short, according to Wikipedia, the court makes a Declaration of Incompatability -- which basically means the primary legislation has priority, but the government is put under pressure to remove the contradiction (and is allowed to do so with secondary legislation), and it strengthens the case of anyone appealing to the European court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
Good point; I mainly made the mistake because I was adopting the language of the GP ("Fluorescent bulbs running on AC are strobe lights...").
:-). No, really: I was recently asked to calculate the phase offset (current against input potential) when the frequency was 0Hz, 60Hz, and infinity Hz.
...Turns out they were perfectly aware of this and wanted the limit as the phase tended to 0 & infinity.
...Oops.
Besides, if you want me to nitpick even more, I could say that DC is just AC with a frequency of 0Hz
I (slightly sarcastically) pointing out the utter meaninglessness of a non-oscillating current having a phase offset (never the question of infinity Hz!).
...you want to be able to DIM your lights my experience would suggest you stay away from CFLs for those applications. Or just use dimmable CFLs.Out-of-date. Modern compact florescent lamps step up the frequency to 25-40 kHz, rather than just using mains frequency as the old-style industrial 'tube' florescent lamps did.
> If all the groupies were laid [...] I wouldn't be a bit surprised. I would.
Cringely posted the story in two parts, but the summary only links to the first. Second part here.
Yeah, when you have hundreds or thousands of documents. Office 2007 has this incredible new feature called "set as default". It allows you to choose a format to save in once, and it will continue to use that format in subsequent times! I can't believe no-one thought of this feature before Office 2007! Amazing, these Microsoft Innovations, huh?
Re the SP1 thing, IIRC from what I've read that's a combination of bringing Vista up to date with the by-then-released Longhorn Server and pacifying the "Don't upgrade till SP1!" crowd; but I could be wrong.
Or possibly I'm a compulsive liar.
I wonder which it is?
Perhaps I'm being dense here, but what exactly does UAC have to do with DRM? They're two completely unrealated technologies which don't interact with each other in any way.