everyone has heard the arguement that there is no point in spending days optimizing code because the speed of computers is increasing. it seems a bit ironic to me that brilliant phd's spend years researching smaller die techniques and improving processor performance so that users can run poorly designed software. the truth of this is computers are being made faster so that people can do more not run the next revision of crapware. i encourage any and all developers to at least read knuth's art of computer programming and get some basic idea of how to design software.