Digital BW, The Print

I said:
> You can't allot RAM in OSX.  The system does it for you by need.

Charles Bandes replied:

You are mistaken on this point. In photoshop's memory preferences panel 
you can specify how much RAM it should use. Makes a big difference!


and my reply to the reply:

You cannot change the memory allocated to an application in OSX.  You 
can change it by booting in OS9 and changing the allocation there, BUT 
it will not matter when booting back to OSX because OSX is UNIX and 
uses what is called Dynamic memory allocation.

Quoting the little computer company know as Apple:

"You do not need to adjust the memory. Unlike its spiritual antecedent, 
the Macintosh Application Environment for UNIX, the Finder in MacOS.app 
is allocated memory by Mac OS X's virtual memory; RAM is handed out on 
demand, so there are no defaults to be changed."

and from "Mac OS X - The Missing Manual" by David Pogue:

"Dynamic memory allocation.  Mac OS X programs no longer have fixed RAM 
allotments.  The operating system giveth and taketh away your programs' 
memory in real time, so that no RAM is wasted."



William
"Any important information has been removed for your protection."
This email made with only 100% recycled electrons!! 

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

William, 

You are generally correct, but mistaken as it applies to Photoshop.
Within PS7's memory allocation preference panel in OSX you can specify
what percentage of system memory to allow photoshop to _synamically
allocate_ to itself. This is a very very important setting - without
it photoshop might dynamically allocate nearly all of system ram to
itself if you were working on huge files, throttling the performance
of other items in your system. 

My advice, rather than looking through manuals for programs other than
PS - check out the program we're actually talking about :)