I'm surprised at the lack of any mention of the demoscene in an article about extreme software efficiency.<p>But there is a general observation that whenever there is an abundance of a resource, people will tend to act like it's effectively infinite. This has been true of the forestry industry, gas and oil (remember when fuel efficiency was barely a concern for cars?), etc. Software is only one of the more recent systems to follow this trend. I've always found it ironic that multitasking didn't bring more prominence to the issue, since every application is then in direct competition with every other application running on the system, and if they all act like they can use all the memory and CPU, none of them will get what they want.