RAM Shortage Looms

Hurry! Some of you shepherds need to begin selectively breeding for taller sheep... especially the males.

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_{(The word 'shepherd' looks pretty strange... have I been mispronouncing this the entire time, doesn't 'ph' make a 'f' sound? Why is it 'shep' instead of 'sheep'....;are the animals maintained in a past tense state?)}

But we're already sooo cute....

BWWWaaaahahahaha...

......and a few short years later.....

I wonder if this will provide any incentive to write more efficient code to reduce the amount of memory and processor power required in these devices?

A noble idea but efficient code use will not be a by product of a lack of hardware supply. What might induce a drive to improve coding is the clocking speed reaching a Physics limit with multi-core processing reaching an asymptotic practical limit. In other words, when hardware improvements can no longer mitigate coding bloat. Then and only then will efficient coders have a chance.

Code, whether source or machine, is a fraction of the memory needs of the typical consumer device. Data is many times huger than code. Look at your phone's, ipod's or PC's storage allocation: maybe a couple GB for apps, dozens of GBs worth of music, video and pictures. And, most of that app footprint is consumed by the art and noise in the program.

Only for an embedded system crippled by a need to minimize cost or use obsolete hardware does it make sense to optimize code for space.

Bill Gates infamous quote: "...but, who's gonna need more than 64K of ram?"