I'm working on workstations, they have 256MB RAM. They aren't got king's size, but it should be far enough for an ssh-session, for a browser and for an email reader. I don't need multimedia things for work. But nowadays, the Firefox browser eats 190 megs for a single presentation (S5) page. I cannot edit a picture larger than 1.1 megs JPG with Gimp, because out of memory... I cannot see an email which bigger than 4 megs, because Evolution and Spamassassin (the Evo depends on spamd in Fedora Core 4) eats 300 megs... Guys, are you serious?

When I was a child, the Billi boy said that "640K should enough for everyone". He said that in that time when my PC (a Commodore +4) has 60K mem... My first PC has 4MB RAM in '93 and I was the duke with that in the street. Today's developers don't care about the hardware, they said, the key is the scalability. But dudes, should I by a 64bit quad processor with dozens GB of RAM when I wan't to authoring a stupid presentation? Are you OK? Your stuff will be totally unusable if you don't care the performance of your code.

"The true programmer using assembly" :)