scott wrote:

> Look, nobody in the world apart from you cares

Yeah, I noticed. And I guess that's why this situation has been allowed 
to come into existence.

> Microsoft are not going to employ 50 people for a few months 
> to go through and optimise for RAM usage just to make you feel better.

Indeed no - their job is to research new techniques for slowing software 
down as much as possible to boost sales of expensive new hardware. 
(Presumably this is why the hardware vendors love them so much...)

> I'm pretty sure that they don't just randomly insert code to use 
> up RAM for no reason...

Oh really? Do you have any actual evidence for that?

(I doubt most people make inefficient code on purpose, but M$ I'm not so 
sure about.)

>> You say "only" as if 10 MB is a small amount of RAM...
> 
> I can buy a 1024 MB USB stick for £5.87 (from ebuyer.com).  That makes 
> 10 MB cost about 6p.  Fast RAM for a computer is about 5 or 6 times that 
> price - not much is it?

Now I'm puzzled - when I bought 1 GB of RAM for my PC, I had to pay 
several hundred pounds for it... Am I living in an alternate reality or 
something?

>> I mean, 20 *years* ago computers could do that instanteneously with a 
>> fraction of the RAM and CPU power. Why are we not coding like that any 
>> more??
> 
> Because we (well, most of us) have better computers than we did 20 years 
> ago?

And that's just it, isn't it?

Why bother fixing the problem when you can just throw more hardware at it.

It's like those stories you read about on The Daily WTF where some idiot 
puts together a horribly inefficient SQL system, and rather than make 
the obvious change to improve performance, the client ends up buying a 
small cluster of high-end servers. What the hell is WRONG with the world?!

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