I used to work with a guy who insisted that since everyone has 3GHz quad cores and 4Gb of RAM we don't need to worry about writing efficient code. But that doesn't even make sense, since if you're processing ever larger amounts of data it becomes more and more important that your algorithms don't run in polynomial time.
There's a lot to be said for avoiding premature optimization especially if it comes at he cost of poor design, but I think that's taking it a bit too far. Reminds me of the Civ 4 updater that takes an hour to download the 100Mb patch purely because the process spends 99% of the time updating the bytes downloaded count
I downloaded it manually from the same url in about 3 minutes...
