"dsimcha" <dsim...@yahoo.com> wrote in message news:h8c52o$2a8...@digitalmars.com... > == Quote from Nick Sabalausky (a...@a.a)'s article >> And before I get the inevitable "D00d thats soo old U shud by a new 1!", >> yes, I *could* go buy a new system. But why should I? I don't do a single >> thing that can't be done just fine on my single-cores. And the only >> things >> that run poorly are the things are written by teenage lazy hack "I don't >> care about intelligent coding, because everyone should be just like me >> and >> want to sink all their money into new hardware just because they can!" > > Not sure I buy this. Let's analyze it in simple microeconomics. Both > programmer > time and computer hardware are scarce, expensive commodities. To some > extent, one > can be substituted for the other. (A programmer can either spend less > time > writing crappier code that needs more hardware or vice-versa.) All else > being > equal, you want the cheapest software you can get. > > For the sake of this argument, I'm going to assume that the software is > paid for > directly by the consumer, though the argument could be extended to cases > where it > is paid for indirectly (business websites, etc.) and free software. A > company can > either deliver really unoptimized software for little programmer time, and > thus > cheaply, or really fast software expensively. As a consumer, you only > care about > *total* cost. Therefore, as the cost of better hardware goes down, the > only > rational thing to do is spend less time optimizing software. > > Of course, this doesn't work for special purpose computers that only run > one piece > of software, but let's say the average computer user runs ~20 pieces of > software > regularly. If a new computer costs $400, and each piece of software can > be made > on average $20 cheaper by not optimizing it, then you break even.
There are a *lot* of 'if's and assumptions in that analysis. In general though, I find the "programmer time is more expensive than hardware" line to largely be a cop-out.
