On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 4:09 PM, Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au> wrote:
On Mon, 21 Nov 2011, Julien Goodwin <luv-lists@studio442.com.au> wrote:
I will say that some of this is new algorithms that are only practical with large amounts of RAM, some of the simulation stuff we use in Google NetOps is like that.
Sure, but then there's the fact that web browsing worked quite nicely on a system with 16M of RAM in 1995 and a significant part of my web browsing hasn't changed much since then.
Really? I can't speak for how you browse the web today, or in 1995, but my habits are vastly changed. There were no tabbed browsers back then, so I remember a very serialised process of loading a page, reading it, and then following a link. Doing one thing at a time. There was no webmail, so I didn't have gmail open, that was done via telnet and pine. There were no twitter, facebook, youtube, google music, web forums, wikis, and the like. Those use a lot of ram. Now, I have, on this computer, 4 Chromium windows open, each one with between 5 and 15 tabs open. I switch between tabs as I need, and open many tabs in the background then process them, rather than doing things in a serial way. This has a cost in memory, clearly, but that's why I have machines with 8gb of ram in them. I think if you're honest with yourself you'll admit that the way you browsed the web in 1995 has absolutely no similarities with how you do it now. cheers, / Brett