[geeks] Needed: A good sparc workstation

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Sun, 8 Mar 2009, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

>>   "Saying 8MB of RAM doesn't do as much anymore is like saying a gallon
>>   holds more than it did in 1988."
>
> I agree with that, except that since 1988, what we do with that gallon
> has changed. In comparison, while people in 1988 where driving small
> cars, we've moved on to personal 747's.

It largely hasn't.  There's no reason a mail client (Alpine, in my case)
should require 28MB of memory to display a summary of a mailbox whose
total footprint is 3.3MB.  There's no good reason why a web browser
(Safari 3) should eat up 350MB of memory to display a 20MB HTML file[0].

Except for the reason that most programmers are lazy and costly.

At the other end of the spectrum, I frequently converse with a fellow
whose footprint for all his work that is approximately the size of the
original IBM PC's ROM, and it has to do useful (modern) work, and he
shares it with three other programmers.

It's amazing what you can do when you have to count your code in
instructions rather than classes.


[0] Don't ask.  It really was 20MB of HTML--no applets, images, or flash.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke ( "They don't have the right to read a book out loud."
Elgin, TX         (                  --Paul Aiken
USA               (                    Executive Director, Authors Guild