[thelazydogsback]

But (stipulating the attribution is correct) was Bill right?? Okay 640K is a little too far, but have we gotten 25,000 times more value out of the ~25,000 times more memory we now have? One could argue that we could have made much more ingenious use of, let's say, 1/100 of the memory and CPU we now have. We are so far at the end of the value-add curve, that we're running super-computers so we can clear up our complexion or make ourselves look like mice or potatoes in real-time video -- it's absurd.

[nwsm]

> One could argue that we could have made much more ingenious use of, let's say, 1/100 of the memory and CPU we now have.

The counter argument is that this is over-, premature, or unnecessary optimization. If we can put 2GB of memory in a computer for $20, why spend millions on R&D that will be rewritten to make it work on 128 MB?

There is also an environmental argument for your point, but everything will always be a tradeoff to companies trying to build and sell devices quickly.

[samatman]

You say absurd, I say awesome.

Why would we expect value to scale linearly with memory and transistor count? I would in fact expect it to be logarithmic: each doubling would lead to a roughly linear increase in cool stuff we can do.

I think that's what we see. Yes, our computers could be radically better experiences if it weren't for the bad habit of squandering improvements with layers of unnecessary abstraction and laziness. But the only thing standing in our way is those unnecessary and that laziness, so maybe we should stop doing that, now that real gains in speed are slowing down.