Well, it would be great if addressing spaces could be arbitrarily expanded on existing applications without rebuilding them - but we all know that this is practically impossible.  Unless the underlying system is doing some expert juggling, the addressing will never be expandable without a rebuild.

My question has always been this: if 32-bit addressing is capable of 4GB (2^32) why has it always been restricted to half that (2GB=2^31) except in special circumstances?   It has always puzzled me why this was the case since there is no reason except if you are employing relative values (positive and negative) - otherwise you have 0-Max (of whatever is available).

Seems that the OS developers/hardware manufacturers would rather do transitory twiddling than get right to the full fledged support of wider address ranges.  Heck, 64-bit can handle up to 16 EB or 17,179,869,184 gigabytes (yes, that's 17 BILLION BILLION - or 17 BILLION Giga - bytes) - why are manufacturers (e.g. cpus) and OS developers so curmudgeonly allotting the resouces for this vast-vast-vast amount of addressing?  Seems almost conspiratorial to stretch to 8GB here or 32GB there when the 64-bit address space is MILLIONS of times larger than this.  Can we say 'profit margins'?  Why create a full architecture that would be forward expandable when you can have people throw away their current systems and next systems and next and next and next and next (for ten to twenty years hence) as they alot a little more and a little more.  You are all being duped - demand full 64-BIT EXPANSION capabilities now (and a firm way to do this is to refuse to meet 0.0000001% of the way with these pathetic crumbs of 8GB etc.  Yes, they are working within the framework of current hardware limitations - to support 1000 GB of memory would require either vast improvements in DIMM capacity or many more slots for accomodation - but is it at all surprising that after 32-bit has been around for over ten years that memory maximums are still only two or three powers beyond this on most systems?

Moore's law forgot one thing about technological leaps - whence the profit margin supports dolling out portions, technological advancement will decrease thereby. (please quote that)

C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. C++ makes it harder, but when you do, you blow your whole leg off.

 -- Bjarne Stroustrup

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