Why Your IT Spending Is About To Hit the Wall 301
CowboyRobot writes "For decades, rapid increases in storage, processor speed, and bandwidth have kept up with the enormous increases in computer usage. That could change however, as consumption finally outpaces the supply of these resources. It is instructive to review the 19th-century Economics theory known as Jevons Paradox. Common sense suggests that as efficiencies rise in the use of a resource, the consumption goes down. Jevons Paradox posits that efficiencies actually drive up usage, and we're already seeing examples of this: our computers are faster than ever and we have more bandwidth than ever, yet our machines are often slow and have trouble connecting. The more we have, the even more we use."
Re:There are two schools of thought (Score:5, Informative)
and you forget those of us in the middle. we buy the 6 month old gear for $0.10 o nthe dollar off of ebay and get to use higher end gear from the used market for lower price.
No company needs 1000bt for the accounting and sales department. But there is always some moron IT guy out there that thinks they do so they scrap all their perfect 100bt gear. and I snap it up for nothign and sell it to small businesses for a profit.
Re:Your mileage is not my mileage (Score:4, Informative)
"Urban America with its more efficient energy usage and lower distances traveled - basically won the war."
Until the power goes out. then I own you with my farm and it's source of food you dont have.
rural america will always rule urban america. You cant raise cows in central park.
Zoning code (Score:4, Informative)
Urban farming is enjoying a renaissance.
Good luck getting zoning boards in all cities to agree to allow urban farming. Some cities have even been waging war on vegetable gardens [minicontainergardens.com].
Re:There are two schools of thought (Score:5, Informative)
No company needs 1000bt for the accounting and sales department. But there is always some moron IT guy out there that thinks they do so they scrap all their perfect 100bt gear. and I snap it up for nothign and sell it to small businesses for a profit.
I see you aren't using more recent accounting and CRM/ERP packages and don't have people pushing multi-megabyte PowerPoint and video presentations around. (or in my case - Sales pushing around vm images of a couple gig) Or people moving between desks from other parts of the company. That moron IT guy that replaces everything with 1000bt gear is sitting there going "There. Now I don't have to worry which switch the conference rooms are plugged into or if the head of HR and the CEO snag someone's office so that person goes to an empty desk to do something... "
Re:I know what you're talking about (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on the app. If we're talking about an all-text game, that's a little extreme. On the other hand, if it contains any image assets at all, that is probably not unreasonable.
Remember that the original Palm hardware had 240 x 160 resolution in black and white. A current-generation iPhone has 960 x 640 resolution in 24-bit color, and it is usually bundled as dual-platform for iPad, which is 2048 x 1536 in 24-bit color. So if that 50k app on Palm were nothing but uncompressed image data, you would expect the iPad/iPhone version of the app to be a whopping 96 megabytes.
Obviously image compression helps with that, and obviously an app contains content other than image assets, both of which contribute to that being something of an overestimate. That said, using that as an upper bound, a mere one megabyte doesn't sound bad at all.
Tinfoil hat time (Score:4, Informative)