[extropy-chat] Optimal computer configurations [Was: Commentary: Does Karl Schroeder's opinion reallymatter?]

[Russell Wallace]

On 4/29/06, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> "Memory is cheap, don't worry about it."  Bad, bad, bad!
>

Good, good, good!

Back in the days when you had to time share 256MB between ~30 users
> (Harvard's undergraduate Science Center circa 1974-6) you had to really pay
> attention to such things as memory usage and paging/swapping efficiency.
>

Fettered limbs grow lame. As someone who learned to program on a Vic-20 with
5k including system and video memory, I sometimes wonder if progress will
only really get going when those of us who were thus mentally scarred have
died off :P

A significant limiting factor on continued progress in computer hardware is
demand going down because too much programming effort is spent wasting
computer capacity (by leaving it lying idle) rather than using it to improve
reliability (for a start, by switching to languages other than super macro
assembler! :P), functionality and usability. Serious workloads like
simulations always need more computing power, but the people running them
don't have the money to pay for chip factories at several billion a pop. It
all comes down to the people writing programs like Firefox and Doom 3 to put
the power to mass use - let them be praised, not criticized.
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