scott wrote:
>>> They don't!  If I open a blank Word document, that's 10 MB.
>>
>> ...which begs the question, "what are you using 10 MB for?"
> 
> I couldn't really care less.  10 MB is nothing on modern machines.  My 
> digital camera generates 10 MB per shot, it's not really making me lose 
> any sleep.

A digital camera uses 10 MB for a reason - it's capturing a highly 
detailed digital image. That kind of thing requires storeage space. I 
have no problem with that.

>> There used to be word processors that would run inside less than 60 KB 
>> of RAM. Sure, nobody could argue they had the same features. And sure, 
>> I can see how adding lots more features would require quite a bit more 
>> RAM. But 10,000 KB? That's not "quite a bit more". That's 170 *times* 
>> more!
> 
> You have more than 170 times more RAM now though.

...so it's OK to waste 170 times more RAM?

And that's just my point. Just because we have all this stuff available 
does *not* mean it should just be wasted on inefficiency. Just think 
what the hell we could do with all this stuff if it wasn't being wasted 
all the time...

> What Windows software requires more than 1 or 2 GB of RAM anyway?

Apophysis. ;-) Not that that matters here...

>> (Because if it did, you just massively reduced your potential market.) 
>> Back then, software only used memory if it was absolutely, unavoidably 
>> necessary. Which is kind of my point...
> 
> Because you only had 2MB to spare, of course you couldn't include 600K 
> of fancy bitmaps in RAM, a thesaurus, dictionary and grammar checker, 
> you made a "bare bones" word processor that basically did the bare 
> minimum to produce documents.  Now you can do all that cool stuff and of 
> course it uses more RAM.  What's your point?

My point is that 20 years ago I had a word processor with a spell 
checker and it didn't require 10 MB.

> So what if you take an AmigaOS program that tries to use eg 1.5 MB of 
> RAM and run it on an old Amiga that only has 1MB?  It doesn't work.  
> What happens when you try to run a modern piece of software on an older 
> PC?  It works ... but very slowly.
> 
> If you prefer the Amiga option, then just switch off virtual memory in 
> Windows.

Apparently you still don't understand what I'm trying to say...

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