On 2/16/07, Jon 'maddog' Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You seem to be defining every "end user" as "mom-and-pop-home", or "bank teller". In the scientific and engineering world ...
NOTE WELL: The following exasperated rant is written with a smile on my face and laughter in my throat. :-) Oh, for crying out loud, *LIKE I WROTE IN MY MESSAGE*, "heavy duty" computing is outside of the scope of this discussion. Yes, I am explicitly defining the term "end-user" that way, for the purposes of this discussion, because that's what I'm interested in. It's already *well established* that large memories or bigger integers benefit heavy duty computing. Much of that world has *already* moved to 64-bit computing for that very reason. Which is why we *don't need to have a discussion about it*. :-) People doing that are not doing end-user computing. Nobody (well, almost nobody) models complex weather systems as a casual hobby. They do it because it's they're freaking *job*. It's not *end-user computing*. End-user computing is stuff my mom does, or your Aunt Marge or the high school teenager. :-) Meanwhile, I find the question of "Will the end-user -- the "mom and pop", the "bank teller", the "home user", the MySpace people, the big list of things they do I wrote in my original message -- will *they* reap any benefit from x86-64?", that question is more interesting. If there's a compelling reason for the *that* population to move to x86-64, then things get interesting. If there is *not* a compelling case for that, well, I expect 64-bit computing will remain in the domain of the "heavy duty" -- servers, multimedia production, engineering, scientific, all the back-room number-crunching and bit-moving operations where Linux already has a significant foothold. People in that space might use Linux (or Solaris or HP-UX or some other non-doze OS) precisely *because* Microsoft's support of 64-bit computing sucks so much. But meanwhile, in the "end-user" space, if some compelling reasons to use x86-64 exists, then that's one more selling point for Linux in the end-user space, and might well contribute to critical mass. Which is why I find this question interesting, and how I think it ties into FLOSS. It could be part of that "killer app" the pundits are always talking about. Is that clear enough, or do I need diagrams? ;-) -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
