Jim Henderson wrote:
> A lot of the bloat comes from inefficient coding - after all, I can put 
> 32 GB of memory in a machine nowadays, so why do I need to worry about 
> optimisation?

Hey Warp! This is the kind of comment I was talking about when I was 
being amused by having a >32meg boot partition on Linux. "Oh, for the 
good old days, when your boot loader would fit on the biggest hard drive 
you could buy!"  :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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On Tue, 11 Mar 2008 12:06:42 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> And when the automated updates screw the machine up, the user is
>> basically screwed.
> 
> That's what System Restore is for. Which Linux doesn't have, to my
> chagrin. :-)

I've tried using System Restore in the past; nice idea, but I could never 
get it to work properly.

My solution is to use VMware and take a snapshot before doing something 
potentially bad.  No fuss, no muss.

Jim

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> It's not a question of "so many features *I* don't need to use", but "so 
> many features that *most* users don't need to use". 

A lot of the bloat comes from features you use without knowing it.

A lot of the bloat in Windows, for example, comes from domain services, 
remote management, and so on. None of that gets used by the home user.

A lot of the bloat in Excel, for example, is including the ability to 
write macros in any .NET language and link them into the spreadsheet, 
and talking to a SQL server from your spreadsheet. Do you do that? No. 
Does the accounting department of a 10,000 person company use that? Sure 
thing.

> I don't know that 1-2-3 would be completely useless by modern standards - 
> I think a lot of tasks that people use Excel for these days aren't much 
> beyond what 1-2-3 was capable of.

99% of *my* use is exiting CSV files. I'm hardly typical either, tho.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Phil Cook wrote:
> But do the people who don't use the solver or VBA have the option of 
> removing it from their installation? What features are deemed integral 
> to the programme? 

Look at the installer. The one for office has dozens and dozens of 
sub-packages.


-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Phil Cook wrote:
> an optional component? If it's plonked in as a base feature then 75% of 
> customers will have it sitting there taking up space and never being used.

Last disk I bought cost less than $0.02 per megabyte. So if you have a 
feature that takes ten meg on disk, it costs you less than a quarter to 
store it over the lifetime of the disk.

They don't take up space in memory. We have demand paging, remember? 
That's why you can't delete or write to an executable file while it's 
running.  (Which is true on Linux, too, for that matter.)

> Yes and am I saying those options shouldn't be there? No I'm not what 
> I'm asking is does the program dynamically load in the "embed video" 
> library when such an action is attempted or is it just loaded on principle?

It's demand loaded when it's paged in. Virtual memory was invented back 
in VAX days, remember? There's no distinction between "loaded on 
principle" and "loaded when I branch to the code."

> No and I'm not saying users are dummies (ignorant perhaps), what is 
> being said is that the core functionality of the program is being 
> expanded at the expense of memory when the majority of users may not be 
> using the majority of the functions.

*Virtual* memory. It's loaded off the disk into RAM when you jump to it. 
It's not even taking up swap space, let alone RAM, if you're not 
actively working with it. That's why they call it a working set.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> Most of the reason for 1-2-3's demise was similar to the reason 
> WordPerfect was killed off 

No it isn't. Jazz sucked. Lotos killed off 1-2-3 themself.

> - Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive 
> practices when it came to releasing API information for creating 
> applications for the first Windows platform.

Is it still bad when Apple does the same thing? :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New escribió:
> Note that if you have it set to "load but don't install", it'll even 
> prompt you to install when you turn off the machine, so you don't even 
> take any of your own time.

Yep, that's a very useful feature. Too bad it has an "install and 
shutdown" button but no similar thing for rebooting. It makes no 
sense... I actually tried it. I clicked reboot while updates were 
waiting to be installed, it rebooted and then told me the updates were 
still waiting! I then clicked Shutdown instead, it logged me out, 
installed the updates, and finished shutting down.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Saying "people don't restart the app all the time, so startup times 
> don't matter" is just like saying "computers are fast nowadays, so 
> optimization doesn't matter".

The first mainframe I worked on had swapping, not paging. The OS was 
organized that you had one page (Job Information Table) that stored all 
the important things about your process - credentials, quotas, etc.

When you got swapped out (rather, when you allocated pages), the OS 
looked for a space on the swap disk that would hold your process. But 
the way it did it was to first find a page for your JIT, calculate how 
many sectors would pass under the heads of the swap disk while it 
rewrote the channel program in the JIT to include the right memory 
locations, and then swapped out the rest of the pages, again rewriting 
the channel program to put them in a time-optimal order.

When you got swapped in, the system read the JIT, allocated the memory, 
and stored into the JIT the instructions for the disk drive as to where 
to load each block of disk into memory, and handed it to the IO 
processor just as the first sector was coming under the head.

Nowadays, you have disk drives that don't even tell you what the layout 
of the sectors on the disk are. And the processor actually takes 
interrupts for every block transferred. It's impossible to figure out 
how many instructions the processor will execute while any given sector 
passes under the heads.

Programmers these days, they just don't know how to write efficient code.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Darren New escribió:
> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> And when the automated updates screw the machine up, the user is 
>> basically screwed.
> 
> That's what System Restore is for. Which Linux doesn't have, to my 
> chagrin. :-)

That never did anything useful for me... Or for dozens of people who had 
system fuckups.

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Warp wrote:
>   The main point is whether you were able to run X with it or not.
> To simply use the console you could use a microwave oven. ;)

I worked on a diskless solaris machine with 4M of RAM at one point, 
swapping over the ethernet. It ran.  It took about 10 minutes to switch 
focus on the windows, but it ran. ;-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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