3 ms·

I think you grossly misunderstood him. He's just saying that it's many orders of magnitude cheaper (more available) than in his days, if you go back a few decad

I think you grossly misunderstood him. He's just saying that it's many orders of magnitude cheaper (more available) than in his days, if you go back a few decades you had to do serious bit wrangling in almost every application to get things to fit in memory, while those days no one cares your app uses 1kb more or less of RAM; he's probably not talking about how much specific RAM cards cost on your PC, or how much those dev boards cost. On a side note, if you compare how much you pay for your college, directly or indirectly (including housing, books, food), $40 for an educational kit that you spend many hours on is almost free.

justinlardinois 11y ago
I understood him perfectly, and he had plenty of stories about limited resources back in the old days. One of my favorites was about the time he rewrote a routine his boss had implemented so it ran in O(log n) instead of O(n^2), only to be fired by his boss for one-upping him and then rehired by his boss's boss the next day. Overall his class was a great experience. I just think that, especially when it comes to money, there's a disconnect between Fermi estimates and reality.
- Florin_Andrei 11y ago
  On one hand, I can sort of agree with your prof. I learned coding on a system that had 16 kB total memory. The laptop I'm using now has 16 GB RAM and 250 GB storage. On the other hand, when I'm eyeballing a new environment I'm building in the cloud, one of the first things I'm asking myself is - how much total RAM? (because that's one major driver of cost) It's all in the perspective.
  - georgemcbay 11y ago
    Definitely all in the perspective, though of course the premium paid for more RAM does not necessarily represent an accurate extra cost incurred by the provider. Amount of available RAM is very often pretty far disconnected from the cost to provide the good or service and is just acting as a price tiering mechanism. This is true for cloud services as well as other things like cell phones (eg. the 2*X GB version is often significantly more expensive than the X GB version, way more than the cost of the extra memory alone would warrant if you just considered the cost of the chips).

justinlardinois 11y ago

I understood him perfectly, and he had plenty of stories about limited resources back in the old days. One of my favorites was about the time he rewrote a routine his boss had implemented so it ran in O(log n) instead of O(n^2), only to be fired by his boss for one-upping him and then rehired by his boss's boss the next day. Overall his class was a great experience. I just think that, especially when it comes to money, there's a disconnect between Fermi estimates and reality.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
On one hand, I can sort of agree with your prof. I learned coding on a system that had 16 kB total memory. The laptop I'm using now has 16 GB RAM and 250 GB storage. On the other hand, when I'm eyeballing a new environment I'm building in the cloud, one of the first things I'm asking myself is - how much total RAM? (because that's one major driver of cost) It's all in the perspective.
- georgemcbay 11y ago
  Definitely all in the perspective, though of course the premium paid for more RAM does not necessarily represent an accurate extra cost incurred by the provider. Amount of available RAM is very often pretty far disconnected from the cost to provide the good or service and is just acting as a price tiering mechanism. This is true for cloud services as well as other things like cell phones (eg. the 2*X GB version is often significantly more expensive than the X GB version, way more than the cost of the extra memory alone would warrant if you just considered the cost of the chips).