On Wed, Oct 06, 2004 at 06:37:20PM -0500, Keith wrote: > I would guess that it is economics. As the price of space and speed go > down, and the price of efficiency (coding time) remains constant or > goes up, it's cheaper to put bloatware on bigger faster machines.
Sorry, I wasn't refering to the business/programming culture. I'm more than aware of the excuses for not optimising for space or speed. I even saw one book which said not to do it at all, even if your program was unbearably slow, because you are designing for the hardware of tomorrow. Or whatever. More to the point is this: my meager programming background has exposed me to the efficiency of algorithms, with respect to speed. That is to say O(n), O(n^2), etc. stuff. Yet I rarely hear about space efficiency (either code or data). In fact, I never hear about it beyond mention of the memory hierarchy (registers, cache, RAM, disk, and whatever I missed in between). When you think about it, it is kind of strange because memory capacity has been growing at roughly the same rate as processor speeds, or maybe even more slowly. I suppose this is because you rarely create much more data when you iterate something (you may increase the amount of data by n^2, but almost never more). If all programmers are given the same, limited, understanding, you would think they are (on average) the same throughout time. Yes, programmers of old had to be more conscious of memory usage (RAM and permenant storage). On the other hand, I would think that that would only change memory usage by a small factory. Maybe a factor of 2 or 4. Small, just like optimising code without considering the algorithm would produce small increases in performance. Yet I get the impression that the bloat is on the order of a factor of 10 or 100, even after you strip out the resources (because improved image/sound quality requires more storage). Byron. -- System6 is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... 123Inkjets.com <http://lowendmac.com/ad/123inkjets.html> Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> System 6 Heaven <http://www.euronet.nl/users/mvdk/system_6_heaven.html> System6 info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/system6.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/system6%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
