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Comment by DabAsteroid | Hacker News Reader

bloated

4 gigs of DRAM costs less than $100, today. Who cares if software is bloated?

DRAM might be cheap, but disk bandwidth is not. A least until flash comes about with insane 250mb/s read speeds we need to worry about bloat.

I care. Bloated software tends to be less reliable and harder to use, as well as being harder to make.

Environmentalists care. The more bloated a software is, the more power it uses, the less greener it becomes.

"Bloat" typically means profligate memory consumption and unnecessary features, not rampant CPU usage: using a lot of virtual memory wouldn't significantly effect power consumption (unless you end up spinning up the hard disk to swap stuff out, but even then it should be marginal).

This has to be one of the more idiotic statements I've read on here. Sure, crappy software that uses more disk space, memory and CPU cycles probably requires more power, but you can't seriously believe this is a real issue. If you do, in fact, believe this nonsense then saying your priorities and efforts are misguided would be the understatement of the millenium. There are plenty more environmental issues that need to be tackled before even speculating about the power consumption of bloated software.

I'm still holding out hope that your comment was a joke gone awry.

Expect more comments like the GP on the back of reports like this:

    The global information and communications technology 
    industry accounts for approximately 2 percent of 
    global carbon dioxide emissions, a figure equivalent to
    aviation, according to a new estimate by Gartner, Inc.

despite software itself being accountable for only a small portion of that 2%.

http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=503867

I don't find that report the least bit surprising. I would only expect that figure to increase. But it's completely ludicrous for anyone to suggest that it's the result of bloated operating systems. I'm not surprised I was modded down given my tone, but I don't why on earth anyone modded up the GP.

People generally don't care if software is bloated if it has a reason to be. If you're not a hacker, you use a computer to run applications, not to run an OS, and there's no excuse at all for a fresh Vista install to consume 800MB of RAM to idle. It drops to 700MB with Aero and Superfetch turned off. Really stupid.

On the other hand, my modern, much-more-flexible-and-capable Linux desktop uses 250MB idling at the GUI. With all four workspaces full, Firefox running for multiple days, Sonata, Pidgin, many other apps all going right now, I'm still using barely a gigabyte of RAM. On Vista, that's enough to run the OS and Firefox. Kind of dumb.

In your stated case, you are saving about half a gig of DRAM ~= $10.

Really stupid. ... Kind of dumb.

If you say so. Meanwhile, higher consumption of resources (such as DRAM) causes those very resources to get cheaper. DRAM is as cheap as it is, because software is bloated. If (to wage war on bloat) we switched to hand-coding all of our software in machine-language, DRAM could get very expensive. More on that general subject is here:

http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource

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