<HTML><BODY style="word-wrap: break-word; -khtml-nbsp-mode: space; -khtml-line-break: after-white-space; "><BR><DIV><DIV>On Apr 29, 2006, at 3:37 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:</DIV><BR class="Apple-interchange-newline"><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">On 4/29/06, <B class="gmail_sendername">Robert Bradbury</B> <<A href="mailto:robert.bradbury@gmail.com">robert.bradbury@gmail.com</A>> wrote:<DIV><SPAN class="gmail_quote"></SPAN><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> <DIV style="direction: ltr;"><BR> <DIV style="direction: ltr;"><DIV>"Memory is cheap, don't worry about it." Bad, bad, bad!</DIV></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR> Good, good, good! <BR></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV>No matter how much memory there is it still takes system resources to manage it and access it. Doing so inefficiently is a waste and in some cases can drag even a very powerful system to its needs. Plenty is not an excuse to be grossly sloppy.</DIV><DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><DIV><DIV> </DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><DIV style="direction: ltr;"><DIV style="direction: ltr;"><DIV>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. <BR> </DIV></DIV></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE></DIV><BR> 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<BR> <BR></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>On the contrary, it was those limits that taught us efficiency and the pain of those limits that caused many of us to work diligently to overcome them. We computer oldsters dreamed a deep dream of power to the people through technology. And lo, it came to pass. More or less. Now there is truth in what you say in that premature optimization and languages designed to be easy on von Neumann architecture predominate in and limit software progress to this day. </DIV><BR><BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"> 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.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>What is broken in even praiseworthy efforts MUST be criticized and fixed if we are to progress. It is the hacker way from which many of these efforts were born and brought to fruition in the first place.</DIV><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV><DIV>- samantha</DIV></DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"><DIV><BR class="khtml-block-placeholder"></DIV></BODY></HTML>