s. keeling wrote:
> I use a GUI almost all the time; X Window. And yes, I do have
> multiple XTerms on it. That's still a lot lighter than some of the
> multi-megabyte MUAs we're seeing these days. Consider the cost of
> that one feature you're hoping to satisfy that you think mutt can't
> provide. Is that _really_ worth the cost in RAM, disk, and your time?
> If so, by all means, fire away.
Hmmm, let's take this argument and run with it, shall we?
Cost of a stick of 512Mb PC2700 RAM (what I us in my gaming rig)... about
$100. Thunderbird's footprint, 58Mb. Mutt, 5Mb. Numer of times my machine's
grown out of the 512Mb of RAM it has (different machine, not PC2700 but, hey,
only price I knew off the top of my head).... never. So total cost of enough
RAM for TBird.... $100 if I wanted to really go high. Less since I could
probably deal with 256Mb comfortably.
My average salary over the past 3 jobs which were email intensive:
$40k/year. Breaks down to $20/hour. That means if the change saves me just 5
hours per year it breaks even. Does it? I dunno. I'm not about to try to
calculate it out. But that one feature does save me time so, yeah, it's going
to break even and eventually earn a profit.
One of the most common mistakes geeks make when doing cost analysis or
attempting to use it as a benchmark for whether some program or another should
be used. The most expensive part of the equation is the geek's time. A
couple hundred dollars on another stick of RAM will pretty much always end up
being cheaper than the time lost by not having that stick in there.
--
Steve C. Lamb | I'm your priest, I'm your shrink, I'm your
PGP Key: 8B6E99C5 | main connection to the switchboard of souls.
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