Nick Sabalausky wrote:
"Andrei Alexandrescu" <seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote in message
news:gj6mds$28i...@digitalmars.com...
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.
I don't understand. This is like a reply to another thread. This anyone
would agree with. I agree that for your current computing work and
perceived needs you don't feel about upgrading your hardware. I mean,
what's really there to disagree. But that has nothing to do with the
generalizations aired before a la "64-bit systems are absurdly fast
anyway" or that there's no need for 64-bit. To write software that
tackles hard problems one really needs the fastest hardware one's budget
can buy. I can't understand what you say except in the frame that you
indiscriminately assume that everybody else has your wants and needs
from a computer (and consequently is a snob for getting a relatively
fast one). Really that's a rather... unsophisticated world view to go
by. I'm even amazed I need to spell this out.
Andrei
