RE: HW requirements

["Erik Jessen" <ejessen@adelphia.net>]

My home machines all have at least 512MB RAM.
(have to - my kid's games want at least that much...  I should go write
kid's games that suck up a lot of RAM, and buy stock in Micron, so I
make
all my money off the memory that people will buy to play the games ;)

At work we use 1-12GB RAM, but that's because we have to.

I really appreciate you doing the packed Boolean tables; it makes a big
difference to people with less memory.  (maybe we should think about
Xconq on PalmPilot or Cellphones?   Games on those things seem pretty
popular  ;>  )

Regards,
Erik

-----Original Message-----
From: Eric McDonald [mailto:mcdonald@phy.cmich.edu] 
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 11:45 PM
To: Erik Jessen
Cc: 'Jim Kingdon'; xconq7@sources.redhat.com
Subject: RE: HW requirements

On Sat, 10 Jan 2004, Erik Jessen wrote:

> So, is anybody even really considering HW resources when actually
doing
> development?  (other than the general rule of "don't be wasteful")?

Well, that's the rule I follow. I try to be as conscious of memory 
and execution efficiency as possible without writing code that 
is too convoluted.

Since I may be adding some more tables of precomputed values soon, 
I recently implemented packed boolean tables. On machines with 
32-bit ints, this means using 1/32 the amount of memory that one 
might otherwise use with 1 bool per int. (Bit vectors can easily 
be created from this implementation, since they are simply 1 by n 
or n by 1 packed boolean tables.)

That said, it is hard for me to "feel the pain" when it comes to 
memory crunches, as the machine I use for development has 1 giga_, 
I mean, gibibyte of memory. I suppose, for testing purposes, I 
could lie to the Linux kernel about how much memory I have by 
giving it a mem=64 argument from the boot loader or something....

Eric