All of us at SUU know about the cool Jump/Flash drives that have made college life so much easier. Toshiba and SanDisk recently announced the release of an 1 gigabyte flash drive that runs 40% faster than the previous generation. I remember when my parents bought a brand new computer with 2 gigabytes of memory. Everyone said that we would never need that much space. Now that is hardly enough memory to do all the things school requires. Does the increased supply and reduced cost of memory cause an increased dependency on its use? Why don't companies work as much on making files smaller, more accurate, and more efficient as they do on increasing memory capacity?
1 comment:
You came to the right place - an economics professor who knows a lot about hardware and software.
They work on increasing memory because the gains from miniturization have not been exhausted yet. They don't work as much on compressing files because there isn't a lot of room in many of them - software compression isn't that hard, and the gains are not as big as hardware expansion anyway.
BTW: the first computer I bought had a 0.12 Gb hard drive (that was Christmas 1994). I still own (but don't use) a my first laptop - which had no hard drive at all.
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