Re: Would a car buyer complain about the space the engine takes up?
Charles - logical and virtual partitioning is fine, but a physical partition, or one that is fixed at system compile time (or SYSGENs as this horrible mechanism was called on IBM) is a very bad idea. Modern computing moved on from that. You mean Android really goes backwards and does that (aside from Dalvik making registers visible to programmers - a really bad, but common idea).
Partitioning is static and is known to waste resources, particularly memory. Customers aren't happy when their disk space runs out and there is heaps of free wasted space because the OS can't make use of it.
Your PS is confusing two things. Programs are loaded into the same RAM memory as data. This is the von Neumann model. However, a program should not be treated as data itself which can be overwritten (except in a virtual environment like LISP and descendants).
If a program can overwrite program code, that results in all sorts of security breaches.
I really suggest you study the B5000 architecture where both these aims are achieved - so yes the two are possible (because it is dynamic and the system configures itself on the fly, not at SYSGEN time).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
