Yeah, I don't get that quote: "Algorithms are for people who don't know how to buy RAM." Wouldn't throwing everything in RAM be an algorithm? Also, if the space complexity of an algorithm is something like exponential, it won't scale at all, no matter how much RAM you have. I think "Algorithms" was the wrong choice of word here. One of my own professors used to say, "Programmer time is expensive, memory is cheap," which is a worded better. He wasn't talking about algorithms when he would say this though. He was usually talking about using programming languages abstracted further away from the machine, writing layered/modular/object-oriented code, and stuff like that.