Qbasicnews.com

I understand the latest PCs with 64 bit CPUs often fail to run much of the existing 32 bit software even MS Office. Do others find this is the case such as with QB and FB etc.

I read in the latest UK Computer Shopper magazine the problems many of us are having with the wonderful new IE 7 are due to its improved ability to protect us from spyware etc. The trouble is that though this might all work lovely on say a PC that has hardly ever been used on the Internet, if you have already managed to collect a load of such spyware, especially if it has already mucked about with the Registry, IE 7 cannot cope with it. So you might ask why the clever devils at MS had not taken steps to cope with the problems, since no doubt the vast majority of IE 7 will be installed on existing systems in use for some time.

Also apparently further delays are still likely with the new wonderful Windows Vista because as usual greedy MS refuse to divulge certain information of its code to allow the likes of Norton to alter their Antivirus and Adobe their PDF file software. Vista will have its own Antivirus and similar PDF file functions which might clash with others.

So the rule as always with all new technology is probably ‘ WAIT AND SEE ‘



Sionet

All major computer systems had problems going form 32 to 64 bit, the PC market is actually one of the last to do it. Mac OSX had difficulties when it first came out and had to have a virtual classic machine to run older software, Vista will probably do the same (the way they do the DOS box now.) Solaris doesn't support 32 programs at all.

Even though Vista will have it's own PDF view and virus software, people will still buy the 3rd party versions. Both Solaris and OSX have integrated PDF viewers, however most owners of Macs and Suns have Adobe also, they will do just fine.

I'm curious to see what will happen when we start moving away from the normal intel pipelines chips and go to cell or edge processors. They have potentials to be much much faster, but will be difficult to program for for a while.

Quote:Solaris doesn't support 32 programs at all.

You really need to start checking your facts. Solaris runs on both 32 and 64 bit architectures (including x86), see here. The Sparc V8 for example, is a 32 bit processor which runs Solaris.

64 bit operating system have been around for ages, for example IRIX supported 64 bit in 96 and OpenVMS was ported to the 64 bit Alpha processor in 92. Vista in 64 bit mode should be able to run most 32 bit applications, although it can't run most 32 bit drivers (see here). Due to the current lack of 64 bit applications for Windows it is recommended that most people stick with the 32 bit version of Vista, even on 64 bit hardware.

Most desktop user probably don't need 64 bit processing anyway. The main advantage of moving to a 64 bit processor is the increase in addressable memory. 32 bit processors can access 4GB (virtual memory), which is heaps for most desktop applications, especially considering that most desktop machines still have less physical memory than that.

The only reason these few OSes you pick out have trouble running on different architectures is because the vast majority of programs that run on them are closed-source binary blobs. *NIX systems have been running on every CPU imaginable without much hassle because once the C compiler is working, all that's necessary is to compile the huge body of programs written in nice standards-compliant, portable C - no need for ugly emulation layers or compatability hacks.

Not all Unix software is free or open source. There is a huge amount of proprietary software available for Unix that cannot be easily recompiled for 64 bit. I believe that Linux can run 32 bit when in 64 bit mode (although I'm not sure if this applies to all architectures).

Also, while it is true that any ansi compliant c code should be able to be recompiled without hassle for 64 bit, portable ansi compliant c code isn't particularly widespread, as there seem to be a lot of lazy c programmers out there ;-).

The problem with C is that it's rarely used anymore. That's mainly for operating systems or drivers or something else that needs to run exceedingly fast (games.) The big companies use higher level languages such as Cocoa (Mac,) C++ (Windows, Linux,) Java (Sun.) And even though there are C++ compilers for all 4 of those systems, lots of the libraries are different.

Why would Microsoft recommened staying with 32 bit because there aren't very many 64 bit programs out there? Won't it run 32bit programs at all? That's one big advantage of companies that make both the hardware and the software (Apple and Sun.) They forced users to go 64bit by making it the only option, but they added the Classic Mac Environment and *whatever the 32bit Sun mode is*. I never use Linux so I don't know how it supports 32bit from the 64bit mode.

I think it will be very soon that lots of programs go beyond that 4GB of virtual memory. I have a feeling that Office is close, I don't know because I can't figure out how to get the Task Manager to show me virtual memory, but iWork '06 uses close to 2GB and it's basically the same thing. I'll bet photoshop, GIMP, Mathematica are way up there too.

Intel Quad-core... Cool.

Google it.

I forget what the name of the rule is but it states that the speedup of a machine due to multiple cores will only be as much as the non sequential part of a program can allow. Most programs you run are very sequencial. If each core is as fast as the Power PC (4x as fast theoretically) and 15% of your program can be hyperthreaded, the overall program will run in 88% of the time that it took to run on a PPC. So having a Quad Core that has a theoretical peak 4x that of the PPC will only really run 113% faster.

I also think its something like 80% of the overall time of a program is spent waiting for I/O. Faster RAM, hard drives, and better caches is what you should be spending money on, not Quad Cores.

Not bashing Quad Core all together, games are very efficently hyperthreaded and it will do wonders for that aspect, also movie encoding, but I can deal with my G4 PPC chip for now.

Quote:The problem with C is that it's rarely used anymore.

Wow. Read my comment above again ;-). I have just been hired by a company which develops almost entirely in C, and was interviewed by at least two other companies where C was the primary development language.

Lots of things are written in C, Sun's (and most other) JVM are written in C. Many of the basic Unix tools (ls, grep, etc) are written in C. I can't seem to get the current Sourceforge stats, but Joel on Software listed them a while ago here. There are more than 14 thousand Sourceforge projects written in C, surpassed in number only by C++.

Cocoa isn't a language by the way, its an API. It is typically used with Objective-C (which is a derivated of C/Smalltalk), but can also be used with other languages such as Python.

Quote:That's one big advantage of companies that make both the hardware and the software (Apple and Sun.) They forced users to go 64bit by making it the only option, but they added the Classic Mac Environment and *whatever the 32bit Sun mode is*.

Again, Solaris supports both 32 and 64 bit native modes, they aren't forcing anybody to go 64 bit. Macos X a 32 or 64 bit operating system depending on the platform. On the G4 and the Intel, its 32 bit. On the G5 its 64. Until Leopard, however, Cocoa and the windowmanager still ran in 32 bit mode. The classic mode is to support applications from Macos 9, which was an entirely different system.

Quote:I think it will be very soon that lots of programs go beyond that 4GB of virtual memory.

Most computers at the moment only have 1 or 2gb of physical memory. If you start using more than 4gb of virutal memory for user space programs you need to map that to some physical memory somewhere. When you ran out of ram you start using the harddisk (swap space), which is slow. I just started up all of Office 2000 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access and Outlook), in addition to Firefox and MSN Im currently using around 700mb of memory.

Quote:Why would Microsoft recommened staying with 32 bit because there aren't very many 64 bit programs out there? Won't it run 32bit programs at all?

It can run 32 bit programs, however there may be some compatibility issues and its therefore not recommend. Why would Mircosoft recommend running in 64 bit mode? What exactly are the advantages to the home user?

Quote:Intel Quad-core... Cool.

Why have four cores when you can have 8, each of which can run four threads? ;-)

Quote:Wow. Read my comment above again ;-). I have just been hired by a company which develops almost entirely in C, and was interviewed by at least two other companies where C was the primary development language.

What kind of company, was it one of the ones that I mentioned? Big programs done by big companies are dominated by high level languages.

Quote:Most computers at the moment only have 1 or 2gb of physical memory. If you start using more than 4gb of virutal memory for user space programs you need to map that to some physical memory somewhere. When you ran out of ram you start using the harddisk (swap space), which is slow.

Windows is extremely aggressive with page swapping and does it very well. It does page swapping very quickly, in fact Windows runs MUCH MUCH faster with more virtual memory. OSX does it to. I started Finder, Safari, iTunes, iWork, XCode, Handbrake, iListen, DVD Player, and the Activity Moniter. I still have 422 MB of RAM available but 5.6GB of memory is used, (that's almost 3 times the amount of RAM I have) and it still is running fast as hell. There are 29750 pages that have been swapped to the hard drive.

The Windows Task Manager doesn't tell you how much virtual memory it is using, or at least it isn't obvious (anybody know how?)