- I remember that EMACS meant Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, a reference to the Emacs editor requiring a system with 8 MB of memory and then still swapping. It was considered an exaggeration. Even Windows 95 could run OK-ish on a system with 4 MB of memory, with 8 MB being plenty. We have gained some things in the meantime, and lost some too.
- It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.
- With a byte you can keep track of 256 things, with two, 64k things, or with a byte you can issue one of 256 commands, etc.
Of course, now we'll use a dictionary of objects with various properties to keep track of a bunch of 'true'/'false' strings...
We collectively act like RAM is free and so are cycles
Tangent: I abandoned C and then later Windows as a consequence of Charles Petzold's* book on win32 programming, the fact that so much bullshit boilerplate was required to get a GUI up on a OS literally named after its GUI windows...
*Fwiw I like his books, I just didn't like the way Windows wants me to do things then
by WarOnPrivacy
0 subcomment
- It can depend a bit on the use. I'm watching content (Jellyfin) on a ThinkCentre M75n IoT Thin Client.
It's underpowered all around. Athlon Silver 3050e, 4GB DDR4 (3.4 avail & not upgraeable) but it's running Win11 enterprise IoT 24H2. The device would sometimes throttle the CPU for unknown reasons (not thermal, no throttle flags). Universal x86 Tuning Utility completely fixed that.
The experience is really good up to 1080p videos. It can choke on 4k but it's a bedroom TV; it's fine. Videos on Firefox are no trouble. I'm quite happy with it.
by vivzkestrel
0 subcomment
- - stop making bloated stuff
- My local grocery store goes a bit further, selling € 280-350 laptops with 4 GB RAM and Win11 preinstalled. Absolutely bonkers.
- I think this is slightly misleading. Modern OSes intentionally use available RAM for caching and will reclaim it when needed. The issue isn’t that Windows is “using 6.7 GB”, but whether the system is under memory pressure and paging. I’m not convinced the author fully understands that.
by ButlerianJihad
0 subcomment
- My current "daily driver" Chromebook is 8GiB, and I've basically never felt a resource crunch while doing daily driver things.
I would never have chosen a Windows system with less than 16GiB, but the ChromeOS is so lean, and basically doesn't need to add a bunch of drivers or 3rd party software at all, and so everything fits in the 8GiB of system memory without any issue.
- Microslop should stop adding slop like candy crush and 1990 fossil, react native just for the shake of backward compatibility.
by throwawaysjskdk
0 subcomment
- Try using docker, then you’re really in trouble.
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