Re: 64-bit transition deadline (Re: Etch in the hands of the Stable Release Managers)
On Mon, 9 Apr 2007 19:16:12 +0200, Robert Millan <rmh@aybabtu.com> said:
> On Mon, Apr 09, 2007 at 10:12:54AM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
>>
>> What are the concrete reasons, you think, for thinking that 2008 (and
>> not earlier or later) is going to be the deadline? From the article,
>> it seems to be mostly hand waving and pretending that the past is a
>> perfect prologue, which is an argument I find difficulty lending any
>> credibility to.
> I think we agree that Moore's law predicts the available amount of
> memory.
Broadly. Precision, however, is not something Moore ever said
of his statistical law, so you can't base decisions to the precision of
months based solely on that.
> High-end application developers will always write software that
> accomodates to that amount, so when this amount is 8 GiB,
Then again, these decisions are made based on future market
share and prediction of future user bases on part of the application
developers. There is a uncertainty in the schedule here; and we are
engaging in even less educated guess work.
Secondly, these large application developers you seem to speak
of appear to be proprietary application developers -- which mean that
in my eyes the issue pales to insignificance. Are we talking about
closed source software here?
> This date is easily predictable.
Again, not to any degree of precision.
> There won't be a "big" migration at that time, but the decision of
> which will be the reference 64-bit platform will be taken and set in
> stone.
I personally find it very hard to credit that an initial
decision based on insufficient data and projected user bases is going
to be set in stone.
> After that, it doesn't matter how long it takes this new platform to
> replace win32, if this platform is ours, we've already won.
Wishful thinking, really. I doubt if things are likely to be so
cut and dried.
In any case, you have provided insufficient evidence to
demonstrate that the end of 2008 is a hard deadline; and nothing to
indicate that the proposed 24 month release is likely to be on the
wrong side of the deadline.
If you have any concrete data to offer, please do so, or else I
think I am done here.
manoj
--
I think... I think it's in my basement... Let me go upstairs and
check. Escher
Manoj Srivastava <srivasta@debian.org> <http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/>
1024D/BF24424C print 4966 F272 D093 B493 410B 924B 21BA DABB BF24 424C
Reply to: