"Andrei Alexandrescu" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > Nick Sabalausky wrote: >> Ah ha, there's that usual "if you go and buy a PC" catch. Which begs the >> question, why would I? My existing system does everything I need it to do >> perfectly fine. And since I'm not petty enough to allow anyone to shame >> me into buying a new system just by calling my *current* system "legacy", >> that leaves no real reason for me to buy a new one. > > I agree that often there is little incentive to upgrade. In particular > incentive can be negative when it comes to Vista vs. XP. >
I'm incredibly jealous of how Vista only highlights the filename (minus suffix) when you go to rename a file. I *really* want that. But yea, that alone isn't enough to balance out the reasons against upgrading. > [snip] >>> so supporting 64bit is just supporting the current technology. it's not >>> about fancy servers or anything like that, just supporting the current >>> standards. that's a minimun that should be expected from any compiler >>> implementation nowadays. >>> b) even though for now there is a compatability mode in most OSes, why >>> would I want to limit the performance and abilities of my PC to old >>> technology which is being faded away? >>> >> >> Even in 32-bit "legacy" mode, 64-bit systems are absurdly fast anyway. > > Talk about adding insult to injury. This is a rather random statement to > make. Really, browsing the Web, writing documents, or writing emails is > all you want from a computer? I'd say, until computers are not at least > potentially capable of doing most intellectual tasks that people do, we're > not in the position to say that computers are fast enough. When seen from > that perspective, computers are absurdly slow and scarce in resources. The > human brain's capacity bypasses our largest systems by a few orders of > magnitude, and if we want to claim doing anything close, we should at > least have that capacity. But even way, way before that, any NLP or speech > recognition system that does anything interesting needs days, weeks, or > months to train on computer clusters, when it all should run in real time. > Please understand that from that perspective the claim that computers are > plenty fast and memory is plenty large is rather shortsighted. > When a reasonably-priced computer comes around that can actually do those sorts of things, I may very well be finally enticed to upgrade. But like you said, as it stands right now, even the high-end stuff can't do it. So it's really a non-issue for now.
