Just to note that some of us are the exception to these adequacy feelings, but that is possibly because I am a software developer. My current workstation has 3

Just to note that some of us are the exception to these adequacy feelings, but that is possibly because I am a software developer. My current workstation has 32GB of RAM and an 8 thread i7. That is the maximum amount of memory the motherboard can take, and Intel had a few faster i7 models but not sufficiently faster single threaded to justify the massive price difference. Even my laptop is an i7 with 16GB of RAM (again both maxxed out). I am having to go in and make all the work I do be increasingly parallel and pipelined. This is a lot more effort than straight forward code. I used to have a first gen i7 and am now on 3rd gen i7. I recently transcoded a DVD which I had done before and the performance difference was incredible. Before it would take several hours, and now it takes 10 minutes! (There may also be a lot of credit to improved software too.) I will admit that sometimes I do feel the adequacy. During the tail end of the Soduko boom I decided to write a solver as an intellectual exercise. I started out with a brute force solver that tried every possibility. It was written in Python and I gave no thought to optimising data structures or the code - I just needed a baseline. It solved most puzzles before the return key had sprung all the way back. It took less than 5 seconds on "hard" puzzles. The most difficult puzzle I could find took under 45 seconds. I gave up at that point.