> If you make a program waste 500k, and 100,000 users do use it, it's 50
> gigs of harddisk wasted, which is worth several thousand bucks. From a
> holistic point of view, if you are worth 50$/hour and it takes you less
> than {several thousand bucks}/50 hours to do the optimization, well, why
> not?
Of course. But what if the optimization saves only 10K? Now you're saving 1G of
disk space, which is worth maybe $30. Not so long ago this disk space was worth
$500-$1000. And disk space has not declined in cost as quickly as CPU cycles and
proably RAM. To ignore the extent to which declining hardward costs have made many
optimizations uneconomical (and many inefficient implementation techniques
practical) is silly.
However, I do agree that optimization can be fun, and I also recognize that
programming is to a certain extent an art, where compactness and efficiency is a
form of beauty which has value beyond its economic savings.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu