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Name Your Favorite Bloat-Free Software
An anonymous reader writes "I prefer software that takes as little hard drive space and RAM as possible. I can't stand bloated software like iTunes, as compared to Foobar or classic Winamp; or Windows Media Player, as compared to VLC or Media Player Classic. What are some of your favorite applications which are a little less bloated?"
I know it's a bit crap, but I must confess to quite liking MS Paint for it's simplicity. When all you need is to crop a screendump and save it as a JPG, nothing beats it!
Other than that, I'd second the VLC and Winamp combo. Ever since there has been iPod support in Winamp (via a plugin or 'out of the box') I haven't used anything else.
Especially in an era of 500gb HDs and 2GB of RAM.
My criteria are usability, utility, and functionality. For that reason iTunes is second on my list, with WinAMP all the way down at the bottom of 50. iPhoto recently shot up to #1 due to it's Web Gallery feature: Select an event, publish, and then edit the gallery at your leisure. The gallery is updated on the website "behind the scenes", so you never need to synchronize or revisit it, it's all done automatically.
iTunes is high on that list for a similar reason. Set up a few "Smart Playlists", and music is automatically added or removed from my queue as necessary depending on playcount, on ranking, on genre, or new additions. I never need to do anything except insert a CD, vote up or down my like of any particular song at the moment, or plug in my iPod.
Gives me more time to do other things... like rollerblading, taking pictures, or talking to people.
GPL Deconstructed
What's really fun is reading your email by telnetting to port 110.
/dev/null over the mailbox file, though customers tended to frown on that for some reason.
I actually used to do this a lot when I was working for a certain ISP that had very flaky homebrew mail software. Mailboxes were getting corrupted all the time. The only way to fix them was to telnet in and fiddle. Or just copy
Perl is my favorite unbloated language. I know you laugh but hear me out. Pick up the O-reily quick reference for almost any major language. with the exception of fortran (:-) the perl one is not just a little bit thinner, it's more than half as thick as most and that includes c++.
Basically I find it really annoying that to get even a fraction of the functionality of stock perl one has to import some library. Why do I have to import Regular expression or Strings in python? or for that matter, just to get the command line args I have to import a freakin library? And then why does it take a zillion pages in the quickref to explain it when it has less fearutes than stock perl.
I don't want to rag on python here and this is not a flame to say perl is better than python. (python is in very many ways superior to perl for organized project programming. It also used to be easier to read since there was only one way to do something but that zen is gone now.)
Once you learn perl you don't need a big set of reference books to explain every obscure library. Just the manpages or a quick reference will do. I hate language bloat.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
on the older classic OS, I always liked iCab browser and Soundjam MP3 player. Small, worked very well, I still use them on the odd occasion I have to use my old powerbook.
On linux, the mini OS distros,damn small, puppy, slax, austrumi, etc. proving you can have a decent functional desktop with a variety of useful applications in only 50 megs of space. You don't need hundreds of megs on a CD or an entire DVD with gigs of stuff, most of which most normal users will never use anyway. Browser, chat, email, media player, some sort of text editor, done.
Windows, no idea, haven't used it since 98se, which could run on some pretty marginally specced machines.
Yes, where Gimp will use a mere 280MB on a 4GB system, and take 15-16 minutes to perform one filter over an image, Photoshop would chew through 2GB and take about 20 seconds doing the exact same thing.
The simple point you're making: Hardware is for us to USE, not "NOT USE". Sure, we don't want our applications to be completely wasteful. But if software developers can focus more on useful features and code with less bugs, I'd rather they do that than save a few megs of RAM.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
main() { write(1, "hello, world", 12); }
Even though I'm (at least mostly) joking, the difference is real, and at one time would have given serious consideration to doing things this way in real code. In reality, you've shown exactly how a lot of bloat really happens. Much of it stems from people using large, general-purpose libraries where they didn't really need them. In some cases (including this one) they didn't really even gain much from the library. The C stdio library provides buffering that can help speed when/if it reduces the number of times your program calls the OS write routine. In this case, the code calls write exactly once either way, so it's gained you nothing, but cost you extra memory usage and data copying, as well as making your program quite a bit larger.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
No, they would merely reject any patches on one of the spurious grounds you have noted above: that the submitter had not fixed the problem on Irix (so they would refuse to fix it for 99% of users), or the patch would make things worse on multi-user systems (so they would refuse to fix it for 80% of users), or the submitter had not proven beyond a shadow of doubt that he had found a completely optimal strategy (so they would refuse to make it considerably better). Let's be honest - the GIMP developers do not care about end users, they only care about massaging their own egos and pretending that GIMP is a serious competitor to Photoshop.
Man, I thought the same thing. It took me a long time to understand why anyone would want windows when you had XTree gold. It was a beautiful application. Capable of reading all kinds of files (even autocad dwg!), searching was powerful. You could tag a bunch of files based on name, grep those files for some text, untagging the ones that didn't match as it went and reducing your search.
Pure Beauty, I haven't used it in many, many years, but I bet my fingers would remember the keys in 5 minutes of using it again.
I also remember the things that finally killed it for me. Lack (or late) support for long filenames, and the terrible windows port... man, those people should *have* written windows!
Is there a linux port?
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There are security updates to cat?
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