Why should you stop hearing it? Hardware is getting faster and SW is using the capacity.
> If hard drives had been advancing, errr, at all,
They have been, just not uniformly. There have been huge increases in capacity. Less so in transfer rate, but still significant. Seek time hasn't been improving much and rotational latency is stuck.
In the same time, arithmetic and logical operations have essentially become free. Branch mispredictions are a big deal. Cache misses are a killer but memory bandwidth is about to become the biggest problem. (It already is for some people.)
