[Spambayes] RE: .db files

[Tim Peters]

[David Reed]
> Much as it distresses me, I have to agree with Bob.
>
> Seems to me the major force in hardware advancement is software
> gluttoney, however.  :)

The HW manufacturers strongly encourage this, too.  For example, I worked in
computer speech recognition for 6 years, and Intel was always asking us how
we could make the product require more processing power, because they wanted
demanding apps to drive sales of new CPUs.  In speech recog, that's easy to
do, so Intel liked us a lot.  Seagate was a major early investor, in part
because they recognized that if speech recog caught on, it would stimulate
sales of new, bigger disks.  IIRC, memory chip manufacturers didn't talk to
us, presumably because Microsoft OS bloat and gamers were already doing more
than they could handle at the time to stimulate demand for new, bigger
memory chips.

In short, software gluttony feeds new HW sales, so the HW folks are big fans
of software bloat.  SW folks like bloat too, because "new features" drive
upgrade sales.  A happy consequence for us (SpamBayes doesn't have anything
to sell) is the modern PCs are so powerful that even a pig like SpamBayes
can run on them without strain <oink>.