Why Your IT Spending Is About To Hit the Wall

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."

Comments

Re:I know what you're talking about

[dgatwood]

Does a simple little game that was a 50K download on Palm OS really need to be a 1MB app on Android or iOS?

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.