[cstross]

Comments like this make me wish I could occasionally grant more than a +1 upvote ...

It's so true. Sometimes we need more power to make a given job possible, but as often as not we could accomplish it with far less and all that throwing extra hardware at a software problem achieves is to allow sloppy coding to proliferate.

[adrianN]

Generally it's a pretty good deal to trade hardware requirements for programmer productivity.