Discussion on:

Safer and more efficient computer memory management

Our existing operating system choices are based upon technologies decades old with foundations either in large mainframe systems and/or have suffered "code bloat" over time. For the sake of backwards compatibility, all too often they are "patched" by adding more code, rather than by removing old, defective or superfluous code. As someone who grew up programming computers to do useful tasks with as little as a few thousand bits of storage, it appalls me how much computing power it requires today just to support a few dozen users concurrently.

While "Moore's Law" has fulfilled it's promise of amazing growth in capacity, "code bloat" has eaten up nearly as much of that gain.

Personally, I have always been one to shut off bloat wherever it may be. I liked the Win2K interface. It was practical and didn't use processor power and memory that I could use for something else. Windows XP was okay when you shut off the "Fisher Price" interface and animations. Vista had a horrible bloat, even with the Aero and animations turned off. Win7 was refined it a bit, it is still rediculous.

I'd still be using Win2K if all the software companies (M$ especially) didn't want me to upgrade and forced software to require the latest kernel. Imagine a 6-core i7 and 8 GB of RAM if Win2K came in 64-bit. As it is now, most brand-name vendors don't offer XP drivers for their new systems, and the 3rd party vendors have are close behind.

Now if Linux could run Windows apps natively, I'd switch to that comepletely. Even Ubuntu's new "Unity" interface is far more efficient than Windows 7's GUI and even Mac OSX, which is Unix based.

..."virtualization" is the answer to the problem. Instead of having 5 machines responsible for 5 different functions running separately, we'll combine them into a single machine running 1 primary, and 4 "virtual" machines.

It's a kludge that masks the real problem: That the existing OS can't cleanly deal with more than 1 function. That's why we can't just have the 5 functions on a single machine without segregating them via "virtualization". Yeah, it works, but it's absurdly inefficient and a waste of CPU cycles and RAM.

This interview didn't really acknowledge that all modern OSes already have some form of memory management. Most of them track a process' resource usage, and make those resources free when the process ends.

Maybe Mr. Guyer's point was that these processes don't always correspond to users? Some processes such as a login process or graphics subsystem live on after the user logs out, and don't know they can free resources associated with that user? Anyway, he could have been more specific for this audience.

Sorry but Prof Sam Guyer's comments, at least as reported, are complete gobbledegook. Operating systems already allocate and release main memory and disk space efficiently. The low speed of some websites is very rarely related to memory allocation/de-allocation problems and is usually due to bad application programming.

A good proof of my assertion is Google's search engine. The systems that support it are so fast that they are able to provide sub-second response times, responding on the fly as the user types a search string in character-by-character. This should become an industry standard and it provides a shaming lesson for all those sloppy programmers out there.

So, $443,000 for this rubbish project ... sounds like a gravy train to me.

Banks use systems not meant for the internet? Show me a bank with a 10 year old computer and I'll show you a closed bank.
Computers manage their memory very well. As you say, it's ignorant programmers causing low memory problems. Windows is the worst I know of, loading unbelievable megabytes of unneeded applications on start.
Firefox does too, but it's how I have it set for my convenience. It's faster for me to restart when needed and have history available quickly. I love tabs and multiple windows!