Scoble writes on whether or not Longhorn will be a RAM hog.
I've had a couple coversations about this with friends and family who feel that with the kind of UI that Longhorn promises the OS will steal most of a systems resources. So I thought about it a bit and this is what I've come up with. Longhorn will debue in 2005, my guess is the middle of it but I could be wrong on the exact timing. Moore's Law has taught us to expect processor speeds to double every 18 months. Assuming his law holds like it has for the past 20 years or so we could expect at LEAST 6 Ghz chips to be shipping, probably closer to 7 seeing as it's 24 months away. Right there no matter how pretty the UI is it would be hard to eat that much power but I'll continue. When I bought my current PC two years ago 512 MB of RAM was a pretty new thing to ship in an off-the-shelf box. Now I'm starting to see 1 Gigabyte. So we'll also assume that the off the shelf models will be hovering inbetween 1 and 2 gigabytes (I think this could be conservative honestly). HD's are now available in 320 Gigabyte models but those are still pricey and 120 is more common on store bought PC's. Watching the HD market leads me to believe standard will be 320 to 640 in two years time. More and more computers are coming with decent to good 3D graphics cards as well. The higher end cards shipping today have 400 Mhz processors for just the graphics card and 128 MB of RAM or more for themselves. I don't think it would unreasonable to believe that slightly higher than this would be standard in an off the shelf if two years probably carrying more RAM and a slightly faster GPU.
Basicly what I'm saying is that on the computers Longhorn will ship with I don't think it will do a whole lot of eating precious resources because as we get to this level of availability, they aren't so precious anymore. For the people who will be upgrading to this OS there could be problems I suppose but I don't think anything more drastic than the switch from 3.11 to 95 was. I think Bill Gates said it best when he said (and this is from memory so it might not be exact) "We think we have the next revolution in computing on our hands." which to me means that some people aren't going to be able to take part unless they get their computers in to a more modern era.
One last point. Business's are notoriously slow for upgrading OS's ( I still use 95 at work) so the fact that this would be over their limits is not surprising. They also at least in the begining until the OS has been out and widely adopted and coded for have less to gain so I think it's safe to assume that by the time they'll be upgrading they'll be buying newer PC's as well.
All of this is my opinion and based on what little knowledge I have of anything so you may now liberally apply salt.
P.S. I do not work for nor am I affiliated with Microsoft in any way. I'm just a regular guy who loves technology.
4:20:26 PM 
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