ietf-822
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Re: LZJU90 compression example(s)

1998-09-21 14:34:31
Excerpts from bulk.interesting: 21-Sep-98 Re: LZJU90 compression exam..
Rick Troth(_at_)casita(_dot_)housto (2241*)

  "Memory is cheap;  bandwidth is cheaper"
 
With all due respect to Nathaniel, he got this one wrong.   ... 
 
      Yahh ... that's what I thought too when I first heard it. 
And then,  I wasn't sure if he was speaking tongue-in-cheek or some such. 
Eventually I decided it had something to do with economics,  programmer 
cost,  and annoying things like that.   So I only use it here as a prod. 

For the record:  this was indeed said at least 50% tongue-in-cheek.  I
was working for Bellcore at the time, and our official mandate was to
figure out applications that would suck down the "limitless" bandwidth
that future networks would provide.  This mandate conflicted --as you
might imagine -- with many people's sense of reality, which led me to
invent the above mantra as a way of encapsulating the mindset in which
certain new applications were being proposed.

It was also said almost 8 years ago.  If I were saying it today, I would
almost certainly have said, "Bandwidth is cheap; memory is cheaper."  
It would still be tongue-in-cheek, but now it would be aimed more at the
size of Microsoft applications than at bandwidth-intensive applications.
 -- Nathaniel
--------
Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb(_at_)nsb(_dot_)si(_dot_)umich(_dot_)edu> 
http://guppylake.com/~nsb/nsb-faq.html