New Way To Grade Decay of Computer Installations

skojt writes: "I saw this link in Dr Dobb's Journal (the paper edition) about the behaviour of a slowly decaying computer installation. It refers to a Windows installation, but as the author writes, 'But there will shortly be ports to Linux, Mac OS X, and other Unices; we are confident these OSes are just as prone.'"

Comments

Re:Windows decay

[jonathan_atkinson]

Sure it will have it's problems, but right now it does not. More users and more bad or poorly written apps will cause bloat and decay.

I agree; which is part of the reason I quit using Mandrake and rolled my own LFS system. Anything I'm not sure about I make install to /opt/whatever, then add the /opt/whatever/lib path to ld.so.conf. This way I can check out new apps, and if they don't make the grade, I just rm -rf the whole directory. My whole system has stayed pretty clean this way.

--Jon

Real Player is a Great Example

[0xA]

I have this big time beef with Real One Player (free version). I make a point of cleaning my startup items out whenever some stupid thing like Real's Start Center gets in there. That is anoying enough but Real has taken it to a new level.

On my XP box Real One put "eventsvc.exe" in the run key of my registry, I removed it. Every time I run Real One it puts it back. This thing is even more anoying than the start center, it just sits in the background until another app steals one of it's file associations. It then pops up a little box saying "this app has stolen my media type". The box has two options, "OK" and "remind me later", there isn't even an X in the corner to close it, you have to use alt + F4. If you don't say OK and this stupid thing is running it will pester you again every 15 minutes or so. You have to kill the process and then remove it from the registry (or use msconfig).

This IMO is the worst kind of cruft. Maybe I want to use Winamp for MPEG 1 audio! Please fuck off!

This piece of junk just sits in the background sucking up a couple megs of ram and using some cpu time when it needs to check that nothing else is moving in on it's turff. The fact that I am playing WC3 when it decides to do this, isn't relevant, Real must protect thier position as the number one most anoying piece of shit in existence. God only know how many memory leaks and all round crappy code is contained in this thing.

Real guys, last time I checked it was still My Computer. Leave your bullshit at the door.

Re:Don't use it!

[irony nazi]

Another 30 second workaround is: Support the software by purchasing it!! It's amazing how effective it is. Since I purchased quicktime pro, it hasn't nagged me once when I started. This super-secret method also enables some super-secret features. For example, now I can save Quicktime in Mpeg or DV formats! I can cut and crop movies and parts of movies or even combine movies.

Doing this with software such as Quicktime is also rebellious, as it sends the word to Apple that *hey your software is worthwhile to me*. It states that *I don't succumb to predatory bundle-it-with-the-OS techniques* and most importantly *I support capitalism and the free market*.

Do you get to do that by playing with the calendar?