Comment by stavros
10 hours ago
The simple fact is that a 16 GB RAM stick costs much less than the development time to make the app run on less.
10 hours ago
The simple fact is that a 16 GB RAM stick costs much less than the development time to make the app run on less.
> The simple fact is that a 16 GB RAM stick costs much less than the development time to make the app run on less.
The costs are borne by different people: development by the company, RAM sticks by the customer.
A company is potentially (silently?) adding to the cost of the product/service that the customer has to bear by needed to have more RAM (or have the same amount, but can't do as much with it).
Yep, and since companies care about TCO, they reward the software with the lower TCO, which happens to be the one that uses more RAM but is cheaper to produce.
Until RAM prices increases significantly.
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One stick does. How about all the sticks needed for all the people who want to run the software?
Still cheaper, since it amortizes over all the software.
Some software has millions or even billions of users. The cost of 16 GB multiplied by million millions or billions would pay for a lot of refactoring.
That said, I think it’s more of a collective action problem. The person who could pay for the refactor to operate in 640 K is not the same person who has to pay for the 16 GB. And yes, the 16 GB is cheap enough in comparison to other costs that the latter group doesn’t necessarily notice that they are subsidizing inefficient development.
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