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Eco Friendly Programming

I received a note from J's school a few weeks ago with instructions to go on a certain website where kids can practice taking a computerized test - a skill they will need to have learned before the upcoming assessment tests. When I went there and realized that I would need to download a 50 MB application that would then launch the sample tests, I completely forgot to gripe about the school's insistence on communicating everything in printed paper instead of  email -even the face of steep budget cuts this year, that has not changed.

Surely, it is possible to write a lighter weight application or better still deliver the material on the web directly.Each time, I download something for work or personal use I can't but help wonder about the huge footprints of the executable files. When and how did things get so out of hand ? And these are fairly simple applications - I am just the average PC user with fairly limited needs.

Just because processing power and memory is cheap, folks have apparently dispensed with making any effort to prevent code bloat. Back in the day, you had to keep things under control simply there was no horsepower to support  anything giganormous. Maybe it's time that programmers were provided incentives to be eco-friendly.
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