On a fine day, 22-03-2005, Garth Hjelte wrote:
>Why don't these programs just allow for excessive room and put every to 64
>bits or whatever? It degrades performance, among some other things.
The problem, imo, is that every amount of "excessive room" will one
day feel like a "crammed space". It's been like that for ages. Bill
Gates once said that '640 k (ram) should be enough for anyone'.
Doh... My first machine had 2 mb ram, then came 4 mb, then 64, 128,
500... and nowadays we're talking GB's. Ditto with storage: from a
30 mb harddisk, to 210 mb, 1 gb, 10 gb, 40, 60, and now having 500 gb
is absolutely feasible.
If things continue growing this way, we'll relatively soon have a
terabyte of ram and multiple terabytes of storage... and still run
out of memory or diskspace one day. Processing power: same story.
Using 32 bit integers, as the EXS seems to do, makes complete sense
-- or at least it used to do. Imagine opening a menu with 32k menu
items on an Atari... lol, that probably would take a day or so :).
The problem is not the limitation, since there'll always be one. The
problem is the speed with which programmers lift the ceiling once
they're able to. They simply don't keep up with the user's demands,
even when lifting the ceiling would technically be possible
(processors are fast enough to allow for 32k+ menus nowadays, for
example). As to the 'why' of that: I don't know, but it simply seems
to be a fact of life, and holds not just in the computer industry.
Stupid example: the average male over here is some 1.80 m tall (a bit
taller, I think, if you disregard the 50+ generation). A standard
bed is 2 m long. Allow for some feet- and headroom, a pillow and
such, and it's obvious that the average male doesn't really fit in an
average bed. The obvious solution would be to make beds that are
2.20 m, or even longer. Why don't they? Beats me...
Oh well, end of ramblings...
--
Hendrik Jan Veenstra h @ k n o w a r e . n l
Omega Art: http://www.omega-art.com/
