NOPs, NOPs everywhere, but not a cycle in use (Kuro5hin)

NOPs, NOPs everywhere, but not a cycle in use by hardburn of Kuro5hin, which is notable for DeadBaby's comment, RAM and CPU prices are at all time lows, why should a programmer spend 3 months trying to make his code run well on a pentium 200? when my primary home system is a Pentium 233, and that the false-god of efficiency link in the article is a thing about Duff's device, which I was trying to think of a day or three ago when I was trying to describe language idioms.