>I agree.  NT is for those who need and use large amounts of memory.  But
>how many desktop users with 32M of RAM are going to "upgrade" to win2k
>because they think it's the next logical step?  Do you think MS is going
>to tell them that's a bad idea?


Considering that I regularly use  most of my 96Meg memory using POV I think
that counts as "large amounts of memory"

>If I only had to boot once a day, that'd be nice.  Since I'm doing real
work,
>however, developing device drivers and applications, I have to boot NT far
>more often.  Real operating systems don't require you to reboot to change
>your IP address, or to install or remove a video driver, or to change the
>size of your swap file.


Windows2000 (aka NT 5.0) does that... we have two machines running the Beta
and we were pleasantly surprised when we changed the network driver, changed
the protocols and the IP addresses and it just happily used the nw
settings....

I write client server software for a mission critical system using NT. My
developement machine gets rebooted (on average) less than once a month. We
have NT servers (single and dual processors) that have been running
continuously for nearly a year....

>Obviously raytracing is a completely different task than 3DSMAX and has
>different priorities.  I thought we covered this.


Look at the POVBench site... I noticed almost no difference between the
different OSs... apart from DOS being about 10% behind everyone else!

>>For the first:  Why not?  The rendering station at my school seems to cope
>>well with it.  It is also only a P233 with 64Mb of RAM.
>
>Then it's four times the machine most consumers currently running 98 have.
>The average machine in the field is probably no better than a P166, and
>I'm guessing most users have 32M or less RAM.


P233/64Meg... you cannot find a machine in the shops less than P266 or P300
now!!!!
With RAM being so cheap (about $2/Meg) 64Meg is becoming the minimum spec...

>There is only one major network standard, and there's only one OS
>that was designed from the ground up to support it.  The standard is
>TCP/IP and the OS is Unix.


We run NT servers for Web, news, mail, real-time data all over TCP/IP with
no trouble at all...

>Most Unix servers stay online for months or years without restarting.
Before
>MS came along, rebooting or even shutting down a machine was virtually
unheard
>of.


Thats because it took four men in white coats to get it up and running
again! I repeat that we have NT servers that haven't been rebooted since
their last hardware upgrade a year ago!

>The result is the same: one resource-hogging app
>can kill every other app on the system, no matter what they tell you.
>Granted, the pool of available resources is a bit larger, but it is still a
>fixed-size pool.

Fixed by the size of virtual memory, rather than an arbitrary ("they'll
never need all that") limit in the OS... A badly behaved app kan shaft ANY
OS even UNIX... I know I've done it!

I am the last person to claim that NT is perfect, but it is better than
w95/98 and is no worse than UNIX for a processor/memory intensive task like
running POV...

Rarius

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