Hmm
In general I agree with you.
In specific --
* I don't think most people will be "stuck" with a 32 bit OS that long.
Micro$haft will try hard to RAM Vista and its successor down peoples' throats
whether they like it or not (e.g. ensuring MOST PCs will be bundled with
Vista or their OS lavor of the day without any real consumer choice).
LINUX is already trivial to install on just about any 64 bit capable PC
(i.e. most anything made in the last 3 years). I've run LINUX 64 for years.
I'm sure when the motherboards are SO powerful and the RAM is SO cheap
as it is today, and this powerful technology percolates out into the consumer
desktop area for another year, Microsoft et. al. will have no choice BUT to
provide cheap (relative to MS's usual) upgrades to a next generation
OS since it will be painfully clear that 32 bit is a pathetic joke, incapable of
using more than a trivial amount of RAM, dealing with the
$200 TERABYTE drives people will have, dealing with the 3rd
generation DX10+ video cards, etc.
MS is already RUSHING "MS HOME SERVER" OS to market because they
realize they're pathetically unequipped to control / satisfy the home
file-server, media-center / media-server
(digital photos, documents, movies, TV, games), et. al. markets for personal use.
Admittedly it's an abortion of a product, but even so you see media center types
enthusiastic about it because .... well ... it's the only game in town if you want to
use your Microsoft DRM infested media and XBOX media center stuff etc. etc.
Clearly they'll soon realize it sucks and Microsoft will have a more polished
generation 2 product in a year or two.
* Memory is dirt cheap now, true, and it's quite trivial to get 8-32 GB of
fast RAM if you want it; I'm already at the 32GB mark and climbing for just
some of the reasons you mentioned wrt. performance and memory / data hungry
computing. Clearly digital video, DVR uses, digital photography, and
"digital lifestyle" permanent archival desires for documents / photos etc. will
continue to drive the exploding growth of storage capacity RAM / disk, but also
the sophistication of applications / devices to USE that capacity.
Intel and Microsoft et. al. are big on the concept, and recently there's
been news from some Intel guy about terabyte data stores being needed and
"coming soon" for the average home to satisfy these consumer media needs.
* Problem is even though RAM is DIRT cheap, Hard disk space is like
*EMPTY SPACE* cheap -- RAM: 12 Gigabytes = same cost as DISK: 1 TERABYTE,
so that's like 83x cheaper for disk vs. ram and it'll continue to spread out in
disk's favor since disk makers are selling drives for more or less the money
they WANT to sell them for, whereas memory makers are lately selling on
uncomfortably thin margins due to a glut in the market and they WANT RAM
prices to climb, WANT DDR2 to be obsolete, and WANT to start selling more
expensive RAM like DDR3 to consumer / OEM markets at much higher revenue / GB.
So given the 83:1 cost difference between disk and RAM, RAM "cacheing" of the
disk or replacement for the disk becomes RELATIVELY unaffordable and useless.
What good is a "cache" that's like 1% of the size that you would use in less than
2 hours -- chances are high the data you WANT won't be in RAM!
I.e. 1 DVD = 4.7GB = $100 of cheap RAM, or $7 worth of DISK.
Browse through your PC-virtual-TIVO / movie-on-disk collection and suddenly
you're navigating in "real time" through hundreds of gigabytes of MP3s, 'DVDs',
DVR shows, digital family photos everyone in your family took over the last 10 years,
etc. Basically you need "real time" random access to lots more data than fits
in any affordable amount of RAM, even given the stupendous capacity of RAM per
the dollar.
* There are hybrid technologies like hydrid hard discs and flash storage and
emerging technologies like nanowire based memory, spintronics, ferroelectric memory,
nanotech hard disc drives, etc. that will not have the mechanical reliability problems,
fragility, or "high costs" of current rotating disc media. q.v. recent articles about
copper nanowire memory research and terabyte capacities cheap, etc.
You start to get "zero" or greatly reduced seek times, greater read bandwidth,
true random access, and long lifetime. Though it'll often still be an order of magnitude
SLOWER than "fast RAM" that might be the PC standard, it'll still be fast ENOUGH
and cheaper ENOUGH than expensive FAST RAM that it'll be a likely preferable
intermediate storage format for "quick random access" stuff as compared to whatever
kinds of true ARCHIVAL media end up replacing hard drives for terabyte level
cheap personal storage that's fast enough to spool video in real time (the killer
application for storage these days). Maybe the latter will be holographic storage
or nanomagnetics or whatever. So this doesn't make the cost effectiveness
of MERE gigabytes of RAM look good in the 3-10 year time frame.
* In the shorter term, who NEEDs *fast* access to 1-200 gigabytes of data?
Well consumers don't because the applications, OS, etc. aren't there to take advantage
of ANY of the stuff we need for making it all USABLE to average consumers for
media, documents, video, etc. TIVO hasn't replaced the VCR, but they're working on
it. Give it another 2 years, etc. and then information "appliances" will be ubiquitous
and people will start to think about more intelligent ways to architect the components
like OS, hard drives, RAM, applications, etc. to take advantage of it all.
Medium size business? Sure, ok, but any business over the size of about 20 people
probably ALREADY has 64-bit "enterprise class" computing OSs, file servers on
64 bit OS, file servers with doubly redundant RAID arrays, server class motherboards
which *DO* take many gigabytes of RAM and use them effectively for disk caches, etc.
So basically they'd say "yeah we could use it on our file server / web server, and,
hey, we already have it because we're using blade servers with 8 CPUs and 128GB of
RAM in front of RAID arrays, so anything that needs quick access is already in RAM or
is fast to pull from the disk array". Yes, it's hideously expensive hardware
for the servers and mainframes compared to the cost of PC parts, but it does
the job, the only job(s) they feel they need it for, and it's an acceptable
"capital equipment cost" to buy $50,000 server boxes with big RAM RAID caches etc.
* Should *everyone* have better use of their their RAM (e.g. ram disks, disk
caches that don't suck, operating systems that don't page/swap even though you're
JUST using a web browser and email application on a computer with MORE than enough
RAM, etc.)? SURE! It's one of the main areas Micro$haft claims is improved in
VI$TA, i.e. ReadyBoost, their "smart" prefetch / cacheing stuff, etc. Obviously
it totally sucks, but it sucks a lot less than XP, and they're CATCHING ON, SLOWLY.
Anyone CAN make a SSD or RAM disk software or whatever for Windows, it's
been done, and anyone can make a SAN drive / network attached storage unit,
etc. that lives outside the OS and has nice cacheing, fast response, intelligent
indexing, auto-defrag, auto-backup, security, whatever. It's been done and
small and large businesses buy this stuff all day long. The average USER
doesn't buy it or even install the ramdisk software because, well, they'd be
DELIGHTED with the speed of a PC that doesn't bog down, but it's just a 1/10th
solution to the OVERALL problems of managing / organizing / backing up / finding /
searching / storing / securing your files and media and whatever. Until the REST of the
OS / applications starts solving ALL those problems, it's going to be too "complicated"
(i.e. all solutions suck too bad in cost/usability to be bothered with them) for the
average user's uses. They'd BENEFIT from it just like they'd BENEFIT from
a 64bit OS, but nobody wants to be concerned with the DETAILS, it should JUST WORK,
transparently, and NOT depend on specific OS / APPLICATIONS / HARDWARE MODELS.
We're in a world where you can't even SYNC your PDA-phone nicely or sync files
on a thumb drive nicely or even have a half way decent photo-album application.
Nobody wants to talk drive letters or be worried about backups and bottlenecks and
accidental deletions, they want high performance access to the CONTENT, just
select a movie and hit PLAY, browse everything like a web site (or actually a lot
EASIER, hopefully), etc. So a faster CPU, more RAM, bigger DISK, whatever
can help you improve the speed at which everything that's a broken unmanagable
pain in the a$$ is a broken PITA, but speed/capacity (of CPU/DISK/MEMORY) hasn't
been the core ISSUE since 80386 days; it's all about seamless performance over
the use-cases of peoples' work-flows. There are MORE than enough gadgets /
components i.e. RAM, CPU, DISK, etc. to satisfy peoples' basic needs, but
the WAY in which it's all (FORCED -- by bad DESIGN) used is broken and
better "gadgets" won't fix it, it's a band aid where a tourniquet needs to be.
ENTERPRISE/BUSINESS customers DO appreciate the needs for PERFORMANCE
in their storage systems, but as I said they ALREADY pay for the (more or less)
right hardware for the job.
* Most of the RAM in PCs is ALREADY used about 90% for disk cacheing, given
that even on 32 bit OS versions your typical program still isn't more than about 50MB
in size, but its frequently used DATA is maybe up to 4GB in size. e.g. tiny bit for
CODE, ALL the rest for file data in a "most frequently used" or "most recently used"
access scheme. Pretty bad implementation in XP, better in VISTA, even better on
servers and the MAC. Sure you can multiply that out to 256GB RAM vs 2GB
of today's typical RAM, but it's not going to make a huge difference to MOST people
who email and browse the web (speed limited by the NETWORK, not the LOCAL DATA).
Gamers who are savy about laggy performance already know to buy 2GB, 4GB
or whatever lets their "load times" be basically zero because it's all in disk cache
after the first use. People with databases and such obviously tune this way too.
Usually 4GB (32 bit limit) or maybe 8GB (affodability limit) is pretty much enough
for a single-user PC since once your video game, your web browser, your email client,
and a few bloatware desktop applets all fit in RAM along with their most used data,
you don't benefit from more RAM or more disk cache whether that's ramdisk,
kernel level disk cache, or a network attached RAM cache / SSD.
What would make the need for more RAM cache a lot higher?
Multi-user systems; oops; beyond the "home computing net" serving the family
of 4, most people don't need it. Bigger oops, Microsoft is ADAMANTLY opposed
to "multi-headed" PCs i.e. hardware *OR* SOFTWARE that lets more than one person
get ANY use of a PC at once; they WANT you to buy 4 copies of the OS, 4
different PCs, 4 different monitors, keyboards, mice, 4 times the hard disk space
you need, etc. because they get paid that way. Windows Home Server and
"media center" are the ONLY concessions they've even made to encourage sharing
FILES within a home environment, and that's certainly NOT intended to create
a situation where more than one person's APPLICATION is running on one PC,
so single tasking single-user systems RULE while Micro$haft has ANYTHING to do
with it.
What else makes the need for more performant RAM cache a lot higher?
Multi-tasking (even single-user). Oops, 4GB is already enough to do all the
multitasking most people feel they want/need, web, email, multimedia, games,
office apps. It's hard to sell more than that into the consumer space, and
the business server space has it solved already.
So while I think your ideas are basically correct in identifying OPPORTUNITIES
to improve the DESIGN and PERFORMANCE of storage/computing systems
via engineering of the sub-components and low level software systems,
I don't think you or I or anyone has the PERSUASIVE CONTROL over the dominant
ROADBLOCKS to garning these seemingly "low hanging fruit" benefits.
Yes we all send in (politely) suggestions like "Hey, STUPID Microsoft,
DO IT THIS WAY, IT'LL WORK A LOT BETTER!!!", it's not ABOUT efficiency,
it's not ABOUT design, it's about PRESERVING THE STATUS QUO, POLITICS,
and MAKING A BUCK not *INNOVATING TO HELP YOUR CUSTOMER*, but
*SCREWING* your customer until they'll PAY you to stop (at least a little bit,
then maybe you screw them in a DIFFERENT way).
Look at WalMart, etc. Hear "race to the bottom"? Nobody wants to make
QUALITY DESIGNED products, they want to make everything as CRAPPY
as POSSIBLE just as long as you can sucker a few million people into buying
JUNK that'll break within 90 days (despite leaving the user profoundly UNSATISFIED
with the efficiency of the product), it's GREAT, because you saved $0.0001 / unit
and sold 10,000,000 units so now you can retire rich, and everyone gets to go
buy something 'new' and slightly DIFFERENTLY defective-by-design to replace
the previous cr*p.
New USEFUL features?
Better quality?
Integration?
Convergence?
Efficiency (energy, usability, or otherwise)?
You MUST be kidding. Save that $0.0001/unit and DAMN the rest.
Sorry, I wish it WAS all designed by people that CARED about
POSITIVE EVOLUTION and making things as good as they CAN BE, but
that's not who's in charge.
Write the 'killer application', make the next killer 'MP6 player' gadget,
whatever, you'll do FINE, and maybe cause a paradigm shift that'll make
people notice and emulate you. (look at MacOs vs VISTA).
But until you can get about 1,000,000 people to care/notice or
purchase your idea / meme / product, it's not going to become popularized
since Microsoft / Apple / Intel / Seagate / whoever will just value the status
quo they're happy with and see no reason to INNOVATE or be EFFICIENT.
Look at Firefox... started small, free software, now it's driven Microsoft
to redesign IE to emulate it because enough people realized how badly
the old alternative IE SUCKED and that there WAS a better choice.
They won't do that for a COMPONENT or a DRIVER, but write a better
APPLICATION or make a better APPLIANCE (e.g. media center / media player /
whatever), and then people will start to appreciate the usability advantages,
demand it, clone it, but they still won't CARE HOW or WHY it works, they'll
just like it THAT it works. Don't beg Seagate/Intel/etc. Make their CUSTOMERS
beg for your new and better "system", THEN they'll race to implement your ideas.
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