I’ve heard people justify the memory consumption of this or that application they are either developing or evangelizing with the argument that “RAM is Cheap.” It can be a very seductive argument, especially if the app is really fast as a result of its memory consumption.

Unfortunately, the “Ram is Cheap” philosophy, like many similarly concise words of wisdom, is only appropriate in a limited set of circumstances, such as when your app is going to be the primary application on a machine. This might be the case with a graphics app, or a piece of server software, in which case the machine is probably speced for your app, and RAM is a small price to pay to make things run really fast.

But how many people can really claim to be developing such a mission critical piece of software?

Very few, and those who delude themselves into thinking otherwise are going to make it less and less likely that their app ever becomes a must-have.

Why? Because they are going to find themselves fighting for a place in physical memory with the one or two RAM hungry mission critical apps on the machine, along with all the other nice-to-haves, and RAM may be cheap, but it isn’t that cheap.

For one thing 1/2 GB of reasonably fast memory probably costs more than most any other single component in a mid-priced PC (excluding monitor). For another, most PCs can only address 2-3GB of RAM, and may only have physical space for half of that. If the slots are full, RAM has to be pulled to make way for any upgrades.

But really, who is going to upgrade for an it-might-be-nice app that seemed too slow on their system in the first place?

Last night I was watching Stone Reader ( a great personal documentary ) and got to thinking about how much more sensual and natural an experience it was writing with pen on paper, compaired to using a PC, then I remembered, that there have been times when I spent a lot of time writing at a computer, and felt connected to the experience, but it was on an old Mac Plus. Now I’m thinking about buying an iBook, or maybe an iMac.

Topix.net Weblog: The Secret Source of Google’s Power
Well considered speculation about Google. I’d been keen to build an serving infrastructure with high redundancy using cheap hardware that could be managed at the system level, so a failure would just mean culling failed boxes, rebuilding them and adding them back to the queue of spares. I never really got the chance to build it. Too many 3-tier aps built on expensive software and not a high enough user load to really force the architecture issue.

We came close on the last software project I was a part of as I was able to influence the architecture from the very start, but it was never deployed.

I’m pulling my hair out trying to find a resonably priced combo of case, socket A motherboard and video card for a home entertainment pc.

Ideally, the motherboard should be microATX with integrated sound and video (and svideo out) for cost effectiveness and compactness and it should support full overclocking options so as to allow underclocking the processor (or the use of a mobile processor) in order to limit heat production and reduce the need for noisy cooling.

Unfortunately, svideo out is pretty rare on mATX motherboards, only the Chaintech NIF2, the Albatron KM18G-Pro and the Aopen MK79G-N provide it (at least among Nforce2 boards, which, for some reason, I have limited myself to). Asus also has a board that supports it, but only by adding a $20 agp card. Whats worse, they don’t all have good support for digital audio in/out (S/PDIF)

Similarly, few if any mATX boards support a full range of overclocking options and near as I can tell, none of the Nforce2 boards with vid out do.

So I started looking at full ATX boards, since they typically offer more options for overclocking, but svideo out isn’t just rare on Nforece2 ATX boards, it seems to be nonexistant.

Whats more, just about every ATX case is huge, deeper than my stereo or TV cabinets can take. There are one or two cases from Silverstone that are relatively shallow but the are in the low to mid $100s with out powersupply, which is a lot to spend for something that 1) I’m trying to do on the cheap 2) might not prove very useful. I guess I could probably recoup my money ok selling the case on e-bay, but it sure wouldn’t work well in my office.

All this is giving me a headache. I think my next step is to see if there are any decent mATX motherboards with reasonable overclocking options and no onboard video that I can price with an ATI 9600SE vid card which will also give me a relatively inexpensive upgrade path from svideo to component out to my TV.

Blah blah blah. I thought I’d have everything ordered by now!