On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Shaul Karl wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 20, 2001, Chen Shapira wrote about "RE: USB modem Linux driver":
> > > BTW, what's so bad about bloatware? Diskspace is pretty cheap these days.
> > > And I'd rather have that programmer at hp be working on new features,
> > > plucking out bugs, or writing neat tools rather than making it 1M smaller.
> >
> > Personally I'm not bothered by the disk space usage - I'm more bothered
> > by programs that because of their bloatware (for lack of a better term)
> > design take forever to run, take a hugeamount of memory while running,
> > and generally behave like elephants, not agile cheetahs.
> >
> > Star Office is the best example - I like it, and we don't have anything
> > better (correct me if I'm wrong), but it is a monstrosity. Takes a huge
> > amount of disk space (250 Megabytes!!), takes forever to run (about a
> > minute to start up) and uses half of the available memory.
I try to avoid it altogether.
BTW: I heard the name Siag Office once. Anybody tried it?
> >
> > Another horrible bloatware is Netscape 6...
>
> Those are good examples:
> If you have to add or change something fundamental, like Hebrew or other
> foreign language support, you have to redesign the app (netscape -> mozilla).
> Then you really get bothered about the size. And what about fixing bugs or let
> others view your code?
Mozilla is blamed to be a boateware because of "over-design". Their basic
ceocept is that everything should be displayed by their html rendering
engine (gecko). This means that the GUI is relatively slow and has a large
size.
However, this means that once you got gecko working properly on a certain
platform (and there are many of those for mozilla) everything is displayed
properly, including the menus.
For instance, once bidi (bidirectional languages, e.g.: hebrew) support is
in gecko, all the menus on all the plaforms will support it. Compare that
to konqueror or IE. (as a side note: theoretically, due to their standard
compliance aim, bidi should have been supported long ago, as it is part of
html 4.0. But it has proved to be hard to implement).
BTW: At the moment the bidi code from IBM is beeing reviewed, and should
be included in the main trunk of mozilla (thogh still not in the default
builds, at first) in a couple of weeks, probably.
> And from the user point of view, whatabout distributing the app to others: A
> small program can be copied with diskettes, no need to burn a CD or wait some
> long time on the net.
>
> To conclude: short sophisticated programs will probably be looked after
> forever,
> no matter how the chip speed will increase or how much memory space is
> available.
Handhelds?
>
> BTW: about not having something better then star office, how is abiword? Is it
> correct that star office does not have Hebrew support?
Not that I know of.
Anybody has been following abiword in the recent three weeks? Any progress
there?
>
>
> > XEmacs (or Emacs) is a half way to being bloatware. Most of the disk-space
> > it uses is packages that can be loaded when needed on runtime, so it doesn't
> > have to start slowly or use up tons of memory when it runs. But in reality,
> > when you use a dozen different packages like I use, startup can bepretty
> > slow (say, 10 seconds) and this becomes annoying - so annoying that I never
> > start and stop Emacs: I use "gnuclient" to start new windows on an existing
> > XEmacs process. With gnuclient, XEmacs is indeed a cheetah and a delight to
> > work with.
--
Tzafrir Cohen
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir
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