Re: st: Addressing > 2 gig of RAM

[James Muller <james.muller@internode.on.net>]

I promise this is my last email on the subject!

Yes, I agree with you. It really depends on the user, but getting into 
all that stuff I was talking about does take quite a bit of time and 
effort. I do it because I like it and because I'm young enough to 
justify building a library of functions gradually over time in a very 
specialist way. I think if you're a student and you've got some spare 
time, and the tools you build are not required immediately for whoever 
is funding your existence, then it's much more rational to do things the 
way I described. For one, there are many, many applications that I'm 
able to do now (big, crazy-sized, interesting simulations, for example) 
that are just inconceivable using anything else besides custom-built 
code. Even something like SAS is getting a bit too high-level. And it is 
fun to write - very interesting, very satisfying.

I should also make a note about the length of that last message... I 
probably got rather carried away, because I was sleep deprived from 
spending all my time programming.

Cheers, and thanks for the joust

James



Michael Blasnik wrote:


> In an attempt to finish out this already too long thread, I think my 
> main point was that, if a Stata user needs to work with a dataset 
> larger than 2GB and they work in mac OS X or Win XP, then they could 
> accomplish their work using a 64bit platform (whether Windows or 
> Linux).  I have seen no reports that using Win64 will suffer any speed 
> deficit, and certainly not a significant one.  Sure, Windows is not 
> great at memory management and suffers code bloat and isn't elegant, 
> but many people use it by choice or force or convenience and still 
> seem to be able to function in modern society and get work done.  As 
> someone with tasks to accomplish on time/budget, I find it much more 
> cost-effective to buy more RAM or a new computer and use software 
> tools such as Stata, than to spend endless hours writing source code.
>
> Michael Blasnik
> michael.blasnik@verizon.net
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