> But I think that pointing out Emacs and the POV-mode could be
> appropriate here. Especially since Emacs can easily be run on Windows
> and on Mac OS X, in addition to the traditional Unix/Linux builds.

[Troll mode ON]

hmmm... Vim also has a pov-mode, a GUI, and can be run on a variety
of platforms...

[Troll mode OFF]


-- 
+--------------------------------------------------------------+
 | http://pingou.linux-site.net/~zebu/      ( o<     =P.O.V=  |
 |                                          / /\     =Perl5=  |
 |    [ Spammers'll be eaten! ]             \V_/_    =Fsims=  |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+

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"Jon A. Cruz" <jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote in message
news:3BBD04F9.FABBF4A5@geocities.com...
> For home use, Win2K is usually not a good solution.

    How so ?

--
Scott Hill.
Software Engineer.
E-Mail        : sco### [at] innocentcom
Pandora's Box : http://www.pandora-software.com

*Everything in this message/post is purely IMHO and no-one-else's*

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Scott Hill wrote:

> "Jon A. Cruz" <jon### [at] geocitiescom> wrote in message
> news:3BBD04F9.FABBF4A5@geocities.com...
> > For home use, Win2K is usually not a good solution.
>
>     How so ?

Well, the big one, games, are finally starting to work OK under 2K. But
still, a few have issues. Used to be that nothing would work well. But
it's starting to come up.

One big issue is the resources required. Hard-drive space, CPU power,
memory... 2K is a huge hog of all of these. These hit the average home
user _exactly_ where it hurts most: in the wallet.

Then there are some of the admin features. Nice for a corporate
environment, but not so easy for average users.

And also there's a general trend in software. Generally, 'professional'
software works better on NT/2K, whereas consumer software is more tuned
for Win9x. Over time it is improving also, but still the 'os
friendliness' of consumer apps is different (how NT does things
differently... the file systems, the registry details...). Things like
software development houses having only limited testing/QA resources and
focusing mainly on consumer os versions, etc., come into play.

Since I've avoided NT at home all along (I even have a few unused
licenses for it laying around), I get a lot of the current information
from my co-workers. They are fairly compentent when it comes computers,
tech, admin, etc. And many of them multi-boot with 2K & Linux, 2K & 9x,
etc.

Of course, some of them have also suffered enough pain to have now
uninstalled 2K completely.

--
Jon A. Cruz
http://www.geocities.com/joncruz/action.html

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>     Again you can allocate a full 4Gb, you'll get some hideous disk
> thrashing from doing it, but it'll work (most of the time).

Not correct; Win9x and 2000/ME/XP have a hard limit of 2gb per application
(due to the limit of virtual address space; the upper two gigs is reserved
for the system). Whether or not 9x can physically handle that much RAM I
can't say - the info above is purely related to the technical limit that
the OS designers placed upon application memory partitioning.

Win2k advanced server allows 3gb per application (it reserves "only" one
gigabyte for the system).

This 2gb limit is kinda scary when you consider that we have already seen
at least one POV image that uses more than half of that ... for users of
consumer Microsoft OS's, once scenes start hitting 2gb, no amount of RAM
will help the problem (POV will just fail with a memory allocation error).

  Bill Gates 1981: "No application will ever need more than 640k of RAM".
  Sidekick:        "And besides, home users could never afford that much!"

  Bill Gates 1991: "No application will ever need more than 2gb of RAM".
  Sidekick       : "And besides, home users could never afford that much!"

sigh.

-- Chris

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Chris Cason wrote:
> 
> [...]
> 
> This 2gb limit is kinda scary when you consider that we have already seen
> at least one POV image that uses more than half of that ... for users of
> consumer Microsoft OS's, once scenes start hitting 2gb, no amount of RAM
> will help the problem (POV will just fail with a memory allocation error).
> 

As long as Dell&Co continue selling Pentium 4 PC's with 128 Mb RAM there
is no danger. ;-)

I think you are quite right, even presuming that you can use full 4 Gb on
other OS's the limit will come at least within about the next two years.  

Let's hope that at that time there are cheap 64bit systems available.

And BTW:
No application will ever need more than 16 Million TeraByte of RAM

(Anyone who wants to know how much you would pay for that?)

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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>
> As long as Dell&Co continue selling Pentium 4 PC's with 128 Mb RAM there
> is no danger. ;-)
>

Compaq actually sells a 1.533 GHz Athlon with 512 MB RAM for 1249 $ IIRC.
My own 3 months old system can handle only 1.5 GB RAM at maximum and I
wanted to take advantage of the low RAM prices.
But even with some tricks, Win98SE works only with 1 GB RAM. :-(

I hope my next scenes memory usage grows slower than in the past.

Norbert

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Christoph Hormann wrote:
> And BTW:
> No application will ever need more than 16 Million TeraByte of RAM
> (Anyone who wants to know how much you would pay for that?)

Just for reference, a thousand Terabytes would be an Exabyte.  I have
no idea what comes after that, though.

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.scifi-fantasy.com

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GFA dpu- s: a?-- C++(++++) U P? L E--- W++(+++)>$
N++ o? K- w(+) O? M-(--) V? PS+(+++) PE(--) Y(--)
PGP-(--) t* 5++>+++++ X+ R* tv+ b++(+++) DI
D++(---) G(++) e*>++ h+ !r--- !y--
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

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"Timothy R. Cook" wrote:
> 
> Just for reference, a thousand Terabytes would be an Exabyte.  I have
> no idea what comes after that, though.
> 

Are you sure about that?

According to my reference: 10^12=tera, 10^15=peta, 10^18=exa

Christoph

-- 
Christoph Hormann <chr### [at] gmxde>
IsoWood include, radiosity tutorial, TransSkin and other 
things on: http://www.schunter.etc.tu-bs.de/~chris/

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Christoph Hormann wrote:
> > Just for reference, a thousand Terabytes would be an Exabyte.
> > I have no idea what comes after that, though.

> Are you sure about that?
> According to my reference: 10^12=tera, 10^15=peta, 10^18=exa

Hmm ok, missed one.  Still no idea what comes after exa ;)

-- 
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.scifi-fantasy.com

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.12
GFA dpu- s: a?-- C++(++++) U P? L E--- W++(+++)>$
N++ o? K- w(+) O? M-(--) V? PS+(+++) PE(--) Y(--)
PGP-(--) t* 5++>+++++ X+ R* tv+ b++(+++) DI
D++(---) G(++) e*>++ h+ !r--- !y--
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

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"Timothy R. Cook" wrote:
> 
> Christoph Hormann wrote:
> > > Just for reference, a thousand Terabytes would be an Exabyte.
> > > I have no idea what comes after that, though.
> 
> > Are you sure about that?
> > According to my reference: 10^12=tera, 10^15=peta, 10^18=exa
> 
> Hmm ok, missed one.  Still no idea what comes after exa ;)

zetta followed by yotta -
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci499008,00.html

-- 
Ken Tyler

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