1) My problem with this attitude is it leads to, as gaius said elsewhere in this thread[1], "requiring a 2Ghz quad-core with 8G RAM to edit a simple document". Developers should not be relying on improvements to their users' hardware to boost their software's performance, at all.
2) My (soon to be former) work is in signal processing software for military applications. Our customers do not want to buy and upgrade hardware just because some new algorithms don't fit. This creates a situation like the console world (as klez mentioned in his reply) and the mobile device world, where hardware is basically fixed for some period of time for a given user. You have to pay attention to the efficiency of code in these circumstances if you want to expand the capabilities of your applications in any meaningful way.
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1) My problem with this attitude is it leads to, as gaius said elsewhere in this thread[1], "requiring a 2Ghz quad-core with 8G RAM to edit a simple document". Developers should not be relying on improvements to their users' hardware to boost their software's performance, at all.
2) My (soon to be former) work is in signal processing software for military applications. Our customers do not want to buy and upgrade hardware just because some new algorithms don't fit. This creates a situation like the console world (as klez mentioned in his reply) and the mobile device world, where hardware is basically fixed for some period of time for a given user. You have to pay attention to the efficiency of code in these circumstances if you want to expand the capabilities of your applications in any meaningful way.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3827096