The memory, hard disk and CPU speed requirement of modern day PCs has also gone up substantially. I wouldn't call them lean. That, in my opinion, is where the f

The memory, hard disk and CPU speed requirement of modern day PCs has also gone up substantially. I wouldn't call them lean. That, in my opinion, is where the future lies and to get there we have to get closer to the hardware, not abstract it away further. Most CS background programmers tend to leave the details of the hardware to the OS's abstraction layers thereby isolating themselves from the hardware designs of the EEs. In the future, we need design teams that do both. That's driven by the lean requirement.