Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking

Don Burnette writes:

> However, with the way technology has been advancing, I don't imagine it will
> be long when 4 gb will be the minimum needed...

I don't look upon a 4-gigabyte minimum as a technical advance.

In the old days, the _smaller_ your program was, the better. I still think
that's true, but hardly anyone is still around who knows how to do it.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 12:25 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma....TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
> No, it demonstrates that I'm not going to go into a detailed explanation of
> why this problem exists. The same engineers who make the mistake also have
> trouble understanding it, which presumably is one reason why they make the
> mistake.

Lets see either I'm an idiot and didn't learn my stuff right at Uni,
or you're an expert at just about everything. Which do you think I'm
going to believe.

> > Firstly "Encoding" information in an address space doesn't make sense.
>
> Yes, it does. As soon as you allocate addresses in anything other than serial
> sequence, you are encoding information in the address, and reducing the pool
> of available addresses. Unfortunately, a linear increase in the amount of
> encoded information produces an exponential decrease in the amount of address
> space available.

Complete and utter garbage. You can re-state it until you go blue but
it simply isn't true and sounds moronic to anyone with experience
programming.

> > You don't talk about "encoding" information in an address space you
> > talk about storing it.
>
> See above. This is simple information theory, or at least it should be
> simple, but it's hard for many people to grasp. I'm not going to write an
> essay on it for this newsgroup.

Nothing to do with not writing an essay. You could easily point at
information if this was true. You are just talking rubbish.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 1:19 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma....RemoveThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> Don Burnette writes:
> > Not to mention, the much higher amount of memory support with 64 bit...
>
> Thirty-two bits supports four gigabytes of memory. That's around seven
> encyclopedias. Just exactly how much do you need to load into memory at one
> time?

When I was doing my Astronomy masters, talking about research being
done on very large data sets wasn't unsual. When you're recording or
analysing lots of hi-fidelity signals it is desirable to load as much
of the data set into memory as possible, otherwise you end up paging
it in and out, and since disk access is much slower than memory access
that slows down your analysis many fold. People doing serious research
often run programs for days or weeks, sometimes months or even years
so this is absolutely important.

Since that's a bit out of the realm of what the average person wants
to do with a PC I'll give a more down to earth example: Video. 4Gb of
an uncompressed video data stream is only worth a few minutes of
video. Ask anyone using FRAPS if their files get that large. The
saving grace is that you don't usually need to load the whole file
into memory when you view or edit it...but it certainly would speed
things up to have a larger buffer.

Your problem when you bandy about figures like "seven encyclopedias"
is that you're only considering text and compressed image data that
doesn't need to be accessed all at the same time (unless you're now
claiming you can read every page of 7 encyclopedias simultaneously).
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 1:18 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma... DeleteThis @gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure, but that's quite a niche for applications. The very vast majority of
> applications used by home and office users will probably never need multiple
> gigabytes, unless they are really, REALLY poorly written.

Yes. You're right. Flight simulators and PC games are a "niche
application." (Regardless of what I think of FSX, if flight sims
progress to be more video like there's little question in my mind
they'll require more and more memory).

Are you really arguing it's okay if PCs don't support niche
applications? It's what's driven the hobby side of the industry and
pushed the boundaries for the last couple of decades or more. What
you're arguing for here is the death of anything but email, web and
office applications...and that includes our precious flight sim.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 1:18 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma....DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> If the software were better written, 64-bit would probably be a waste.

True for Office and email applications. Not so true for all software
in general.

I find it amusing that you think ALL software is so poorly written
though. What software have you written lately?
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 2:29 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma....DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't look upon a 4-gigabyte minimum as a technical advance.
>
> In the old days, the _smaller_ your program was, the better. I still think
> that's true, but hardly anyone is still around who knows how to do it.

There's a few reasons for optimization not being a focus:

1) As the software has become more complex, much more functionality
has become expected for much less money. In other words programs use
to do a lot less. Think of the stick figures a simulator use to draw
compared to loading textures and terrain maps in FS today. It's
expensive in terms of time and money to optimize code, and most of the
time optimization doesn't matter as much because you're running on
much faster machines than you were a few years ago. So the approach
taken now is to not spend much time or money optimizing it except in
key areas. If you optimized every single line of code it would quickly
make software much more expensive today (due to the increase in the
number of lines of code and the complexity of the software) and at the
same time you'd see very little benefit for over 90% of that code
because if your machine's fast 10ms vs 100ms may not make a difference
(whereas on old hardware 10s vs 100s might).

2) Optimization isn't easy and is a series of tradeoffs. If you try to
optimize code and don't know what you're doing it's very likely that
optimizing one flow of the program will slow down another. Also
optimizing for speed often ends up using more memory and using less
memory means slowing down the code. What's more optimized code can be
much harder to understand (since you use every trick in the book to
optimize when you have to) and so the next person who has to maintain
it may have to re-write it anyway because walking into code that works
cryptically can be very difficult and documenting that code so the
next guy understands can be even harder. In other words everything is
a trade off.

Take the Apollo Guidance Computer as an example. It is often used as
an example of extremely efficient coding as it is truly a remarkable
achievement to have packed so much code into so little space. You can
read the details on the following link but the entire code space was
kilobytes not megabytes or gigabytes. However people spent years of
their life on that code and it would take you a long time just to
understand any of it. Note also that it failed (fortunately in a safe
way) for Apollo 11's decent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_guidance_computer
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 8:09 am, Mxsmanic <mxsma....TakeThisOut@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sammy writes:
> > Lets see either I'm an idiot and didn't learn my stuff right at Uni,
> > or you're an expert at just about everything. Which do you think I'm
> > going to believe.
>
> You can _believe_ whatever you want.

Yes, and I'll base my beliefs on the evidence at hand thanks.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

Sammy writes:

> Lets see either I'm an idiot and didn't learn my stuff right at Uni,
> or you're an expert at just about everything. Which do you think I'm
> going to believe.

You can _believe_ whatever you want.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

On Jun 2, 7:10 pm, Mxsmanic <mxsma....DeleteThis@gmail.com> wrote:
> Sammy writes:
> > Care to tell me which implications I'm missing?
>
> No. If you don't understand by now, there's no point in explaining further.

No. Of course not. It's made up gibberish.

> > Is that suppose to scare me?
>
> No. I'm just indirectly pointing out that if you happen to be wrong, there
> will be proof of that for decades on the Net.

Mate, they won't care and if they did they wouldn't understand what
you're trying to say. They'd see unsubstantiated nonsense. I have a
reputation to protect as an IT professional and I'm not at all phased.
I'm entirely confident in what I'm saying.

> While everyone is wrong from
> time to time, when you stridently claim to be right and vituperate anyone with
> whom you disagree, it greatly magnifies the impact and impression created by
> being wrong.

I'd worry only I don't happen to be wrong in this case and you happen
to be talking vague rubbish.

1) You don't want to point to a source besides yourself (citing
rubbish about it being too much work to go look up sources and that
not being your job),

2) You don't want to argue a point (because you don't want to write an
essay for the group)

3) Yet instead obstinately insist on repeatedly stating something as
fact when I happen to know it's not true

4) Even more amusing is the fact that when I do provide a source you
just tell me my sources are biased without providing something more
authoritative or accepted.

Under such circumstances I'm not going to take you at all seriously.

You see I subscribe to a point of view called the scientific method
where I don't take random statements coming from anyone as fact but
instead actually require some proof that what a person is saying has
held true for others.

Since you obviously don't. Here's a link for you to enjoy.
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

Sammy writes:

> Care to tell me which implications I'm missing?

No. If you don't understand by now, there's no point in explaining further.

> Is that suppose to scare me?

No. I'm just indirectly pointing out that if you happen to be wrong, there
will be proof of that for decades on the Net. While everyone is wrong from
time to time, when you stridently claim to be right and vituperate anyone with
whom you disagree, it greatly magnifies the impact and impression created by
being wrong.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

Sammy writes:

> Yes, and I'll base my beliefs on the evidence at hand thanks.

You're welcome.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

"Sammy" <syousef.TakeThisOut@bigpond.net.au> wrote in message
news:1180788107.090556.134680@o11g2000prd.googlegroups.com...
>> No. I'm just indirectly pointing out that if you happen to be wrong,
>> there
>> will be proof of that for decades on the Net.
>
> Mate, they won't care and if they did they wouldn't understand what
> you're trying to say. They'd see unsubstantiated nonsense. I have a
> reputation to protect as an IT professional and I'm not at all phased.
> I'm entirely confident in what I'm saying.

Just guessing at the topic he alludes to here, the 64-bit address space is
insanely large: 18*10^18. It's difficult for most of us to relate to things
of that scale. In very rough numbers, that's enough to individually address
every living cell in every living human in a large city. (10 to 50 trillion
cells in a human body; roughly or slightly less than a million folks in the
large city.) Or, maybe closer to on-topic, directly address every byte of
storage on every disk drive in every PC in the US. (200 million PCs, each
averaging about 90 GB.)

Where do you even begin trying to make use, or even sense, of something that
size? The simplest, most elementary approach is to carve it up, much as they
did the 32-bit IPv4 address space. The scale is different, of course. But at
some point, somebody will look back and gawk and wonder at the waste. For
example, loopback is an entire class-A, just so we can refer to localhost as
127.0.0.1. I'm sure it looked like an empty, unfillable wasteland at some
point in the past. Just as we today might look at 18 billion billions as
inconceivably huge and unfillable.

Anyway, I thought I'd pop in and fan the flames a little. They looked in
danger of dying out without further fuel.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking 

Have a look here if you want some actual information about IPv4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

The words exponential and linear have very definite precise scientific
meanings. It really doesn't matter how large an address space or how
you carve it up and if you ask a programmer if they expect memory use
to be linear or exponential, and GOOD one will tell you its a linear
process.

Also note that network addresses are NOT the same thing as memory
addressing and there are differences you have to consider. Without
actually establshing boundaries for what way they are the same it's
like saying horses are like cars and expecting people to understand in
what way. Yeah both can be used to carry people but you don't want to
take a horse to a petrol station and fill it with unleaded.

In any case he's being cryptic because he's at the limit of his
knowledge and wants to sound mysterious and intelligent. He's actually
being a troll and you're feeding him, presumably because you have some
sort of gripe against me? Perhaps you think it's fun to get me worked
up. Who knows. Have fun with that. If Mx wanted an intelligent
conversation about how address spaces are carved up he could have one.
That's not what he wants. He wants to pretend to be superior with
extreme and unfounded views. This is the same guy that "believes"
anaphylactic allergies are all in the mind (despite mountains of
evidence to the contrary), that anyone could be taught on the spot how
to land a passenger jet (based on his observations on how easily he's
learnt to program the PMDG addon), and that disabled parking spots are
a personal inconvenience to himself. He believes presenting any kind
of evidence to support his case is beneath him. If you want to be
associated with that go right ahead.
 >> Stay informed about: Sammy, I am beginning to come around to your way of thinking