Performance-oriented development in the commercial computing world (was: Fixed point financial data versus floating point)

The issue still is storage, in some environments. I think the issue is more general, though, a kind of intellectual laziness. For example, just recently I was part of a job where there was a desire to turn something on for about 5-10 seconds every couple of minutes (mostly to save power; it's battery powered). Others were thinking of using something like an Arduino. I put together something with a 555 and some discretes and came in _way_ under their power budget; I see this as basically the same thing as coding for efficiency, just in another field. I co-run a mud. One of the other admins (who works for Intel, amusingly) has a connect message set saying "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." - Henry Petroski /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B