Optical disc offers 500GB storage

A disc that can store 500 gigabytes (GB) of data, equivalent to 100 DVDs, has been unveiled by General Electric.

The micro-holographic disc, which is the same size as existing DVD discs, is aimed at the archive industry.

But the company believes it can eventually be used in the consumer market place and home players.

Blu-ray discs, which are used to store high definition movies and games, can currently hold between 25GB and 50GB.

Though machines with 4GB are not yet the typical purchase for home or business use, they are readily available from major manufacturers and it won’t be long before they are the typical purchase. But there are problems. You don’t have to stand for long in a computer shop to hear a sales assistant talk of 4GB as some sort of limit for 32-bit operating systems, and it won’t be long before this sales patter develops into outright promotion of 64-bit Windows as the only way to get past this limit. Some sense of this can be seen already in manufacturers’ advertising materials, as in the following fine print from Dell:

    The total amount of available memory will be less than 4GB. The amount less depends on the actual system configuration. To fully utilise 4GB or more of memory requires a 64-bit enabled processor and 64-bit operating system, available on selected systems only.

Let me stress now that I do not complain about Dell’s statement. Its first two sentences are correct for all 32-bit editions of Windows Vista exactly as configured by Microsoft and installed by Dell. In the last sentence, I might quibble that the talk of a 64-bit processor is superfluous since the machine on offer does have such a processor, but otherwise the sentence is correct because of the word fully. Yet although Dell’s statement is true, it is not the whole truth: there is something that Microsoft does not tell you, and perhaps does not tell Dell.

That 32-bit editions of Windows Vista are limited to 4GB is not because of any physical or technical constraint on 32-bit operating systems. The 32-bit editions of Windows Vista all contain code for using physical memory above 4GB. Microsoft just doesn’t license you to use that code.

Well, to say it that way is perhaps to put words in Microsoft’s mouth. I say the restriction to 4GB is a licensing issue because that’s how Microsoft’s programmers evidently have thought of it. The 4GB limit is retrieved from the registry by calling a function named ZwQueryLicenseValue, which is itself called from an internal procedure which Microsoft’s published symbol files name as MxMemoryLicense. If you remove this check for the licensed memory limit then a restriction to 4GB is demonstrably not enforced by other means. Yet I must admit that I have not found where Microsoft says directly that 32-bit Windows Vista is limited to 4GB only by licensing. The supposed License Agreement doesn’t even mention the word memory. What, really, is going on?

or 4,200,000,000 bits.  That's ~4.2GB.

(...the more you know!)