3 ms·

Its a valid point, the average computer in the Western world is at least 4GB. However when I was in South Africa a few years back they were still running with

Its a valid point, the average computer in the Western world is at least 4GB. However when I was in South Africa a few years back they were still running with XP and < 2GB RAM with HDDs that I saw in a school and hotel. Ok, hardware components are cheaper and easier to come by but we shouldn't stop caring about system resource usage.

iamnotacrook 7y ago
If they're using old PCs running deprecated versions of Windows then they long ago stopped caring about resource usage and efficiency (energy usage and operator time) and are instead optimising for hardware cost. It's no reason to favour this or that platform for development.
- clappski 7y ago
  > instead optimising for hardware cost I imagine a big reason that they're on old hardware is cost - just because it's relatively cheap for someone in the West to get a decent modern machine at a reasonable cost doesn't mean that it's the same everywhere, especially when there's big disparities in the purchasing power of the native currency vs. the sellers/manufactures currency. It's not so much an optimization, I imagine most users on legacy hardware don't choose to be, it's more likely that they can't afford more modern hardware or it isn't available for them to purchase. Another huge reason for users to stay with older operating systems (especially in business and government) is dependencies on legacy software - if an organization relies on software that has never been updated after Windows 95/XP and doesn't function on later versions then they're going to be stuck using legacy machine configurations until the process can be changed to something else. > stopped caring about resource usage and efficiency (energy usage and operator time) How do you know that they don't care about how efficiently they can use a machine for whatever they're doing? It's a baseless assumption. Even if your user percent that's stuck using older hardware/operating systems is in the single digits, that isn't an excuse to ignore their requirements IMO. Doing so is a sign of sloppy engineering, akin to designing a new mode of public transport, for example, that doesn't cater for disabled people.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
wongarsu 7y ago
Also most apps are not the only app running on my system. I might have 16Gb, but I'm currently running multiple browsers with multiple tabs each, a PDF viewer, a spreadsheet application, a music app, an IDE, multiple terminal windows and a search program (Everything). Spotify manages to use only ~150MB. If it tried to use 1GB I would replace it since I have more important things competing for my limited RAM.

iamnotacrook 7y ago

If they're using old PCs running deprecated versions of Windows then they long ago stopped caring about resource usage and efficiency (energy usage and operator time) and are instead optimising for hardware cost. It's no reason to favour this or that platform for development.

clappski 7y ago
> instead optimising for hardware cost I imagine a big reason that they're on old hardware is cost - just because it's relatively cheap for someone in the West to get a decent modern machine at a reasonable cost doesn't mean that it's the same everywhere, especially when there's big disparities in the purchasing power of the native currency vs. the sellers/manufactures currency. It's not so much an optimization, I imagine most users on legacy hardware don't choose to be, it's more likely that they can't afford more modern hardware or it isn't available for them to purchase. Another huge reason for users to stay with older operating systems (especially in business and government) is dependencies on legacy software - if an organization relies on software that has never been updated after Windows 95/XP and doesn't function on later versions then they're going to be stuck using legacy machine configurations until the process can be changed to something else. > stopped caring about resource usage and efficiency (energy usage and operator time) How do you know that they don't care about how efficiently they can use a machine for whatever they're doing? It's a baseless assumption. Even if your user percent that's stuck using older hardware/operating systems is in the single digits, that isn't an excuse to ignore their requirements IMO. Doing so is a sign of sloppy engineering, akin to designing a new mode of public transport, for example, that doesn't cater for disabled people.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

wongarsu 7y ago

Also most apps are not the only app running on my system. I might have 16Gb, but I'm currently running multiple browsers with multiple tabs each, a PDF viewer, a spreadsheet application, a music app, an IDE, multiple terminal windows and a search program (Everything). Spotify manages to use only ~150MB. If it tried to use 1GB I would replace it since I have more important things competing for my limited RAM.