How programmers think: Kryder’s law

I was reading about Moore’s law, which led me to Kryder’s law. What an interesting concept. I recently bought a new hard drive just last week, some $90 for a 250 GB drive. Just a few years ago, 4 GB drives were considered huge. Who could ever use that much space? Today, I can fill 200 GB in a matter of months, and that’s not unreasonable at all!

This is also gradually but significantly altering how programmers think: in many programming tasks there is a time-space tradeoff, so as space becomes cheaper and cheaper relative to CPU cycles the appropriate choice about time versus space changes. For instance in database work it is now common practice to store precomputed views, transitive closures, and the like on disk in order to speed up queries; 20 years ago such profligate use of disk space would have been impractical.

The things you can learn on Wikipedia. This is what I call quality content.