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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 routi

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).