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I agree that disk space has gotten a lot cheaper, but bandwidth speed hasn't increased tremendously. Binary sizes definitely are an issue. And re:memory, it's

by 23david 11y ago

I agree that disk space has gotten a lot cheaper, but bandwidth speed hasn't increased tremendously. Binary sizes definitely are an issue. And re:memory, it's pretty tight on most end-user machines. By default, most laptops only come with 4-8GB of RAM. And in the cloud, memory cost is perhaps even more expensive. On ec2, a 'large' instance usually has only between 4-8GB of RAM. The default small instances have only 2GB of RAM, which doesn't give much room left over for applications after you account for the OS and various utilities. It can definitely add up.

mwcampbell 11y ago
Does anyone else find it obscene that 4 GB of RAM is considered inadequate in a laptop? And I'm not just saying this in response to your comment; that seems to be a common opinion. For example, in the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ (which I found quite entertaining), the protagonist answers the question, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?" with, "Upgrade it immediately."
- Nadya 11y ago
  There are two sides of this coin. 0) As programs are expected to do more or run faster, they are required to use more computational power and memory. As examples, this is especially true of 3D Rendering or Video Editing software. 1) Because of the price and abundance of hardware - many programmers have stopped caring about nearly all optimization unless it brings their program to a halt. Requiring more computational power and memory to run many of these programs. To many people $50-$60 for 8GB of 2x4GB DDR3 RAM isn't a lot of money. It's about as much as a date to the movies and cheaper than going out to dinner with the family.
- mixmastamyk 11y ago
  Many people use laptops as their primary workstation these days.
- Psyonic 11y ago
  Welcome to the "NodeWebkit" world. Where wanting to open a file bigger than 2MB is considered "unreasonable" and an app taking 200MB of RAM to show a few small files is normal.

by 23david 11y ago

mwcampbell 11y ago

Does anyone else find it obscene that 4 GB of RAM is considered inadequate in a laptop? And I'm not just saying this in response to your comment; that seems to be a common opinion. For example, in the 2012 novel _Off to Be the Wizard_ (which I found quite entertaining), the protagonist answers the question, "What on earth can a person do with 4 gigabytes of RAM?" with, "Upgrade it immediately."

Nadya 11y ago
There are two sides of this coin. 0) As programs are expected to do more or run faster, they are required to use more computational power and memory. As examples, this is especially true of 3D Rendering or Video Editing software. 1) Because of the price and abundance of hardware - many programmers have stopped caring about nearly all optimization unless it brings their program to a halt. Requiring more computational power and memory to run many of these programs. To many people $50-$60 for 8GB of 2x4GB DDR3 RAM isn't a lot of money. It's about as much as a date to the movies and cheaper than going out to dinner with the family.
mixmastamyk 11y ago
Many people use laptops as their primary workstation these days.
Psyonic 11y ago
Welcome to the "NodeWebkit" world. Where wanting to open a file bigger than 2MB is considered "unreasonable" and an app taking 200MB of RAM to show a few small files is normal.