[Tfug] Cheap Memory = Lardy Men.

[keith smith]

If housing costs kept up with computer hardware costs you would be libing in a 75000 sq ft hours that cost $5.00 and came with it's own fire department.

"Bowie J. Poag" <bpoag at comcast.net> wrote: 
Ever heard those stories of people so disgustingly fat that the fire 
department has to cut a hole out of the side of their house to get them out?

That's how I feel about it.

What I would love, love, love to see is a University take a class of CS 
students, and give them an assignment like so:

"Build a prime number generator that spits out primes as fast as 
possible. Group A will have an Athlon 64 with 2GB RAM to develop their 
application on. Group B will have a Pentium 75 with 16MB RAM. Both 
team's submissions will ultimately run on Group A's hardware. The team 
with the fastest prime engine gets $500, out of my own pocket. Get 
started. You have two weeks.

I'd bet you *my house* that Group B's code will beat the pants off of 
Group A's code on Group A's own hardware, by virtue of Group A being so 
far removed from the real underlying capability of the machine, and so 
bloated on a result-per-clock basis, that they may have just as well 
developed their code *on* a weeny Pentium 75. With more limited 
hardware, Group B is quickly going to place more of an emphasis on 
refining the algorithm, and using every precious clock cycle at their 
disposal wisely. Meanwhile, more than likely, Group A will build some 
sort of E-Z Bake Oven applet in Java or .NET that delivers a fraction of 
the speed that the hardware is truly capable of, by virtue of the OS 
they've slapped on it without thinking, and by virtue of the 15 miles of 
bloat that the code has to swim through to get the job done.

Good news is, if Moore's Law begins to break down, more people will 
realize they're cutting holes in fat men's houses. The solution isn't to 
cut holes in the sides of buildings, or build a bigger houses for fatter 
and fatter men. The solution is to keep the fried chicken away from the 
fat man in the first place.

Cheers,
Bowie

keith smith wrote:
> That is how most will look at the statement of "It only has 1GB of RAM.".
>
> There is another school of thought.... if a techie cost upwards of $100/hr in a w2 situation and a Gig of ram cost $59 or so and if a little RAM can overcome some long hours optimizing code.... lets throw some RAM at it.
>
> So what are your thoughts?
>
>
>
> "Bowie J. Poag"  wrote: 
> It happened today.
>
> I was reading some message board, where someone actually said "It only 
> has 1GB of RAM."
>
> Thats a sad, sad statement when you think about it. Just how horribly 
> bloated an simple desktop-centric operating system has to be to not 
> manage or utilize such a resource correctly.
>
> Not to get Paul started on the elegance of OS/2, but, I can recall not 
> too long ago seeing my mid 1990's Amiga absolutely fly on 4MB RAM.  
> Thats 1/512th the memory.. With no such thing as virtural memory, it 
> forced application writers to create healthy, relatively fat-free code. 
> Now, the only qualifying factor is "does it run?"
>
> Sad.
>
> Cheers,
> Bowie
>
>
> Bexley Hall wrote:
>   
>> Greetings!
>>
>> --- George Cohn  wrote:
>>
>>   
>>     
>>> I needed to speed up my Windoze XP box because I am
>>> learning Adobe Flash 
>>> and it runs kind of slow with only 1gb.
>>>     
>>>       
>>   Doesn't *everything* run slow on Windows?  :>
>>
>>   
>>     
>>> I checked around and Circuit 
>>> City had Kingston 512 DDR PC3200 memory at $29.99.
>>>
>>> I grabbed the last one they had on the shelf at the
>>> Broadway store but they may have more in stock.
>>>
>>> Just passing this along if anybody needs more memory
>>> for an older machine.
>>>     
>>>       
>> Hmmm... I think I have several 512MB DDR sticks at
>> home.  How do I determine speed?  (I assume it is
>> marketing-hyped bogus number loosely related to
>> access time -- 1/rate -- and data width)
>>
>> Sure would be nice if they would print these things
>> in plain English on the devices (or, at least with
>> something larger than 2 pt. type!!)
>>
>> --don
>>
>>
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>>   
>>     
>
>
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>
> ------------------------
> Keith Smith
> (480) 584-4772
> PHP Programming
>
>
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------------------------
Keith Smith
(480) 584-4772
PHP Programming


       
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