Michael,

>I guess you were joking, but this seems to be a very prevelant attitude of a large number of programmers I come across these days - if the software is too big or too slow, the customer can upgrade his hardware - its his problem not mine.

>If the bloat continues, then 1000mb ethernet & 560k modems will seem completely inadequate.

>Maybe it's my age, but when I started programming efficiency & economy of size were important - upgrading hardware was not an option. I still view the process in that light, if the user needs to upgrade hardware just to get my software to run reasonably, then I've done a bad job.


I think you're correct and I think the same arguments still count these day's. When doing projects, most of the time, I don't have anything to say about the hardware it should run on. My job is too do the project with the current hardware. In that light I try to make my solutions just a efficient as reasonable possible.

Besides this, some applications can't ever run fast enough. If you buy new hardware and have efficiently coded your application it will be even faster as before.

Walter,