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All Hail Bloatware
Zarn writes "In Tuesday's Slate edition Andrew Shuman, in his
article The Love Bloat, argues that the problem with bloated software is that it isn't bloated enough and that we, the customers,
are the ones demanding bloat! " Heh. I'm wiping a tear off of my check from laughing so hard - Jonathan Swift, here we come.
i have 8 megabytes of ram. i have a gigabyte hard drive from
1994. i have a monitor and video card from 1991.
i program on it, i do my homework on it, i write papers on it, i use the web on it,
i get e-mail on it, i irc on it, i store recipes on it,
i play realaudio on it, i play music on it, and i will
part with it when i am old and gray and sucking the drool
out of the spoons the nice nurses feed me with, but not one minute before then!
in short, you all have a choice in life. you can chase the endless compu-peddlers
who spend their spare time reading 'industry marketing weekly' figuring out different ways to
extract money from your pocket via pathos, or you can use free programs as a tool against it.
Dancing paperclips... Actually I do believe people demanded this. And this is one of the reason why I am afraid of the masification of GNU/Linux: Perhaps we will begin to see dancing paperclips and similar appear everywhere.
It's just like the GUI-based Caldera installator. I am not saying it is a bad thing, I suppose it is nice... I don't know. Anyway, I can't see a *real* reason why having that GUI would be better over having a menu-driven text installer. But the problem is there are persons, lots of them, who believe the GUI is a real improvement over the menu-based interface. Can I say bloat? The depressing thing is many persons actually think that having a GUI makes it easier to install the OS.
I don't have problems with user friendliness, but I just hope massification won't turn GNU/Linux into just another OS designed for idio, erm, umm, user-friendly, expert-hostile. Please, please, please, please, don't add a dancing paperclip to GNU/Linux installation process in the name of user friendliness. The dancing paperclip pretty much shows how extremely annoying `user friendliness' can be to expert users.
And no, the GPL and the fact that we can change the code won't help in this case.
Alejo.
Open Source encourages people to add huge numbers of minor features, leading to more bloat--and it's not a terrible thing. It's one of the strengths of Open Source, whether angry kids on SlashDot like it or not.
(2) Monolithic design, which is NOT a feature. MS Word has features targeted at lawyers (and useless for everybody else), at accountants, at writers, etc., etc. You don't need most of them, but get all of them anyway. Pluggable modules would have been a much cleaner solution (you are a lawyer? plug in the "Lawyer" module...)
Actually this is one of the things that they were trying to do with COM/OLE/etc. Maybe they'll get there yet but I rather doubt it. It looks like the usual couple of big company problems: (1) too much legacy code to rewrite, and (2) a lot of internal groups with different goals and not all that much desire to work together.
The potential is still there but some of the Linux component platforms may have a better chance simply because the component support will exist before the applications are to bulky to change. Of course there's the eternal question of which component platform is today's favorite...
> Bloat is bad in that it adds complexity which is the enemy. Insofar it consumes computer resources it is tolerable.
Exactly. You can get a 20GB disk for around $300, so 200MB of storage costs about $3. Anyone know what 5-10MB of disk space cost in 1988? I bet it was a lot more than $3.
That sounds more like a problem with Visual Basic and your 'windows weenie' to me. I wrote a Pong game that uses the Keyboard and Direct Input, and it's only 100k including 78k of bitmaps. it loads in less then one second, and only 'nonstandard' DLL it uses is dinput.dll, witch is part of directX.
It is *posible* to write non-bloated win32 apps, if you feel like it
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Excuse me, but why is bloat in a competitor bad ???
If it weren't for MSbloatware, we wouldn't have $0.20/MHz CPU, $1/MB DRAM, and $20/GB disk. As someone (esr?) pointed out, Linux owes MS a great debt for making the fast hardware market cheap by its' volume.
Where would we be if MS-Win9* ran just fine on a 386/16, 4MB RAM, and 100 MB HD? It'd still cost $800.
-- Robert
Where do people come up with this stuff?
Windows 3.1 apps that need WINSOCK.DLL to function don't work right under Windows 98.
Then tell me why Netscape 2 works fine under Win98? Why does Eudora (16 bit free version) work fine under Win98?
Just because you had a problem once with a 16 bit app in Win98 doesn't mean *ALL* apps have that problem.
Windows 98 doesn't have enough conventional memory for most good DOS games
Ever heard of MS-Dos mode? Even so:
C:\Windows>mem
Memory Type Total Used Free
---------------- -------- -------- --------
Conventional 640K 64K 576K
Upper 0K 0K 0K
Reserved 0K 0K 0K
Extended (XMS) 65,472K ? 195,252K
---------------- -------- -------- --------
Total memory 66,112K ? 195,828K
Total under 1 MB 640K 64K 576K
Total Expanded (EMS) 64M (67,108,864 bytes)
Free Expanded (EMS) 16M (16,777,216 bytes)
Largest executable program size 576K (590,096 bytes)
Largest free upper memory block 0K (0 bytes)
MS-DOS is resident in the high memory area.
---------------
576K is enough for most Dos games. And I could have removed a number of other things from loading such as double buffering (which I should turn off anyways since it's only useful for SCSI).
there's no way to control a lot of the stuff that gets loaded
Such as? You can't prevent Himem.sys and EMM386.exe from loading, but other than that... you can control everything if you know where to look.
Backwards compatibility is a joke in M$-world.
I guarantee if Backwards compatibility were so poor, Windows 95 or 98 would never have succeeded.
and I used DirectInput for the mouse, windows messaging for the keyboard.
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
No offense intended, but you missed the point. If the paperclip were simply a graphic, there would be no problem. I've changed many of the icons I use in WordPerfect. But the paperclip is further work that MS is doing to bury the system so that users have little to no ability to configure systems to their own preferences. I tried to use Word97 at my old school but couldn't figure out how to make the paperclip stop appearing. All I wanted was a help system that waited for me to ask for help. WordPerfect let me do that, so I installed it (at a cost of $39 for the full suite--something my department chair was very happy about.)
As for "hotdog users", well, I think that you're referring to savvy users--those who take the time to learn about their tools and prefer craftsmanship to heavyhandedness. I've used keyboard commands in WordPerfect for years not because I feel cool doing it, but because I leave my hands on one input device rather than two. It's the same reason that I use one remote for my television and vcr--I don't want to be bothered with two of them. There are times when a mouse is useful, but when I can get things done faster on the keyboard, that's the way I will go.
No one at WordPerfect made anyone memorize keyboard commands. When you need one you can choose to remember it, look at the keyboard template, or go to the help system. I just don't want to deal with a program that forces me to use one method--this is what I've experienced when forced to use ms programming. It just doesn't work for me.
Last point: If you don't like bloat, don't buy it. There is only one language that commercial companies of any sort understand and that is the language of dollars and cents.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
As I was reading this page, I suddenly, without any action on my part, got a Blue Screen of Death. (I am, unfortunately, on a Win95 machine right now.) What was the culprit? Microsoft's fat, lazy Java VM - a Java app was running in the background.
Time to trim the fat (or VFAT, perhaps?) off of M$ products.
What, you mean that you are not supposed to use a spreadsheet to store record and field information? Why not? I mean, what else is it for?
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs.
Don't all programs just accept input from the user? To tell you the truth, I've never seen "just an editor" applied to Emacs. Usually it's the "kitchen sink" that comes to mind.
But anyway, speaking about bloat. I just started a new XEmacs process on a Solaris Sun box with 196Mb of RAM. Did a 'ps' which in my case evaluates to 'ps -e -o user,pid,pcpu,pmem,vsz,tty,comm | sort -r -k 3,3 | more' and lo and behold: my new XEmacs process (no files open except for scratch) takes 4.3% of my memory (pmem: that's the resident set and is equal to 0.043*196 = 8.4Mb) or 10072Kb (vsz: allocated space). I don't know about you, but from my point of view these are pretty high numbers for "just an editor".
Note that I am not complaining -- I have enough memory and XEmacs is one of the more useful things I've run across -- but it is not lean-and-mean by any count.
Also, the initial point was to contrast the one-program-does-all philosophy and the many-small-tools approach. Emacs does use other programs, sure, but the design goal of Emacs was that you never have to leave its environment -- shell, mail, compile, etc. are all available from within Emacs. Contrast this to the design of Unix: for example the 'ps' alias above uses three Unix programs to achieve the result I want.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs.
No. Shell can be thought of as a front-end to other programs, but I don't see it as useful to think of Emacs in these terms. If all you want to do is to call other programs, use shell scripts -- no need for a Lisp interpreter to be involved.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
It will.
I've heard they're moving to XML.
(A bell should have gone off, warning you that Microsoft is intent on making yet another proprietary perversion of a standard.)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I have all these programs, and not one does it all
(and I'm by no means a newbie at these programs).
LViewPro eats jpegs for breakfast, and loads very fast. I use it primarily for compression, converting and cropping. PhotoShop5 handles layers beautifully - it's how I made plates for a Shockwave movie - while in CorelDraw, the object and layers is more complex and even mystifying.
Neither PS or CD lay lettering down cleaner than
NetSketch, and MS Paint is what I use to put pictures inside the hollowed out letters from Netsketch. If I could have all these things rolled into one graphics package, I would be so happy! But then, it would probably take forever to load - filters, plug-ins, preferences...so there you have it...
I also tried PSP and found it disappointing...but it was a trim little program nonetheless!
Strange that my Word 2000 has 24 formats that it can save files in, including the last 4 versions of Word, Macintosh, and WordPerfect formats.
I'm not as sure how correct I am, I was just postulating and guessing, mostly.
> The "feature" of not being bloated doesn't sell
> because it has much less "features" compared to
Could it be that the world has gone crazy? Why won't people use the ordinary $20 screwdriver that 's made out of solid stainless steel by a respected company instead of the multi-faceted piece of junk from wallmart costing $30? I can't answer to that. Perhaps this is why there is natural selection, and the windows users, in a short few millenias, will fall by the wayside to more rational thinkers.
No, if rational thinking was a desirable trait, humans would have developed it already. Back to my NT workstation (which I use to telnet to a Unix.)
-Ben
"As for "hotdog users", well, I think that you're referring to savvy users--those who take the time to learn about their tools and prefer craftsmanship to heavyhandedness. I've used keyboard commands in WordPerfect for years not because I feel cool doing it, but because I leave my hands on one input device rather than two."
I was a WordPerfect user and I, too, used to know the keys by heart. (I still remember F11 - View codes!). I'm not sure what you mean by "hotdog users" though.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I think the only program I've seen that kept old versions for sale was Corel, with CorelDraw. When CorelDraw7 came out, you could still buy 5 and 6, and 5 was bundled with Lexmark printers (at least here in Canada). Why not check out a college or university computer store? By the time Netscape Communicator came out, the UofC Microstore still had 2 versions on the shelf.
Forget about Amaya as a browser. When I used it a few months ago it seemed unable to display any pages at all correctly. It makes a decent editor, however.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
> I'm much happier with the UNIX way of having small applications that do just enough.
Bingo!. You prefer the "many small utils that do one thing and do it well" approach over the "one big app that does everything" approach.
Realize that not everyone prefers things this way. I also like this way of doing things, but my mother (for example) does not.
I use her as an example often, because she is a "typical" (is there such a thing?) PC user. She teaches chemistry at college level, and uses MS-Word to make up her exams, MS-Excel to keep track of her students' marks, etc... and Netscape to surf the web. She logs in to her AIX account and uses Pine to get her mail, and is quite happy.
She has no interest in using any apps other than those 5 I just mentioned (Word, Excel, Netscape, Pine, (VT-Terminal)).
Even just using MS-Word to make up an exam, if she has to ermbed a molecular diagram or something in the document, she will use Word's built-in "MS-Draw" thingie (even though it sucks rocks); she will use the equation editor extensively and all the rest (actually, she uses a lot of the built-in features).
And you know what happens if she needs to embed an image that is more complex than the MS-Draw sub-applet can handle?
I head for the hills -- fast!
The amount of complaining and grousing she will do at having to use a different program to draw the image, then import it back into her document is more than I, for one, care to handle.
She's not stupid, she is quite capable of doing it. But she doesn't want to. She wants to be able to open a single application (MS-Word), and create everything she needs -- from scratch, if needs be, then print it out, without ever having to use another program.
And most of the time, Word allows her to do this. Which is why she's happy with it. And why I wouldn't even try to convince her to use something like vi, that can't even "format text to a given width" in and of itself.
It's a different philosophy, because it suits her needs better.
You (and I) prefer many small utilities that work together. She prefers a single large app. Neither approach is necessarily "better", just different.
So, perhaps you "cannot accept that many of the "features" in (say) MS Word belong in a word processor."
I can.
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Actually, here's what typically happens.
Most features of the OS usually debut in MS's front line apps such as Office. Toolbars, floating menus, flat look, gradient title bars, etc.. they are first programmed by the Office or whatever app team for inclusion in their app, then the OS division siphons the code off for inclusion in the next version of the OS.
What this means is that Office is typically the testing ground for new OS features. If people like them enough, they get added to the OS.
The always-informative Andrew Leonard has whipped up a quick response to this article. Read it here. :)
--
I went to lycos.com and played their games. They use a java application which takes a long time to download. However, once it is downloaded it works great. I played chess with an 11-year-old. Isn't that useful?
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
Uhhh... what?
I think you're a little off your rocker if you think that compression is any kind of accurate measurement of how well a program is coded.
There are lots of things in programs that can be compressed by quite a bit. Resources for instance. If your program has support for 200 languages, you can bet that all this text can be compressed by quite a bit. That's the beauty of virtual memory and discardable data segments. Resources (under windows anyways) don't take up any extra memory because if they're not used, they're discarded and never reloaded.
Every program expands until it can read mail!
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
"Err, uhh, last I checked, stuff like commctl.dll was considered a system *library*. Just a resource for programmers. Using this thing doesn't rely on tight connections between the OS and Apps folks."
No, but the commctl.dll IS tightly coupled to the OS version. Which means that the same code that is included in the Win98 system library was duplicated in the software in order to get the gimmicky menus and widgets to work on all OSs, instead of just linking dynamically to the version that was out there. If I'm a Win95 user, I think I can deal with not having the Win98ish menus and gui items. MS threw in the kitchen sink for the "neat-o" effect (which has no effect on me whatsoever).
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"In Excel 7.0 open a blank sheet and use your arrow keys to get to the 95'th row, highlight the entire row by clicking to the left of columnA and then hit TAB to col. B, then go to help about Excel and hold down Shift+Ctrl and click on tech supt. This should give you a doom like window. arrow keys move you around and d,c look up and down. if you turn away from the stairs and type EXCELKFA the wall will disappear and you can go into a room with pictures of the developers."
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
Consumers only want to buy an upgrade if it contains new features. But they also want backwards compatibility. Hence, bloat.
Once upon a time anything that ran in more than 512K of memory was bloated. Anything that required more than a 14.4K modem was bloated.
Love bloat. Bloat is your friend. Accept your bloatedness.
Marjo Wycam, Master of the Programming Arts
Yes MS Office is bloated. So is Visio, so is Corel Draw, so is IE4 and so is Netscape Communicator.... so is Just any popular non-shareware package you care to name.
There are lots of marketing driven reasons that this is the case. M$ Office is only a 'prime' example because it has beaten its competitors by becoming more bloated. Yes, I am one of those consumers who when faced with a choice between word processors (10 years ago) chose the one with more whistles and bells. M$ did a better job at consistently coming up with more of them and it 'won' the war of the office suites.
[ But you all can go back to bashing M$ now ]
Uh...I think bloat is driven by Marketing departments. Marketing can also take it's fair share of the blame for the poor quality of some of todays software. Today you have to pre-announce a product (MS is already talking about the Neptune system that is slated for release in 2001 :) and load it up with more *features* than the other guys stuff if you want to survive. Sad but true.
Bloat goes away when big software companies figure out that they can make more money by selling a base package for $x and then offering a buffet of other options for $y. Sorta like buying a car. I would love to have a lean mean version of MS Word (I need a little more than wordpad). But noooooooo...I've got to sit and wait everyday while NT plods through loading up an amazingly fat application of which I use about %10 of it's *features* Quite frankly Xemacs isn't much better.
Bloat is driven by Wall Street..not by bad coders.
In salon.com Andrew Leonard has an article about it.
Ford Expedition -vs- MS 2000 ?? yeah right.
Ford Expedition: Sure, it's too damn big, guzzles gas, and has annoyingly high headlights that bother other drivers at night. BUT I can still jump in the driver's seat, start it up, and go pick up a 6-pack without so much as an extra thought.
MS 2000: Similarly, too damn big (200 MB), guzzles CPU time, and has the famous dancing paper clip. BUT to write a letter, I have to fumble through the menus, uncheck every box that has the word "auto" in it, kill the paperclip, and do an ungodly amount of work before I can just type text.
The point is, Micros~1 does not understand the far-out concept of ease-of-use. They prefer to TELL me the easiest way to type a letter (anyone else had that f@#king paperclip say "It looks like you're writing a letter...". He's worse than Jar Jar for chrissake), and tell me which 'features' to use, instead of just letting me get my work done.
--Mid
Several problems. First, placing run-time checks to see if a flag is set adds bloat in and of itself. Second, the code to make the sliding menu is likely a very small tight loop of about 10 assembly language instructions. Yes, it might be annoying, but it doesn't likely use up much more resources. CPU, sure... but then have you ever noticed that if you move your mouse while it's animating it stops and displays the whole menu immediately?
You can turn it off. Get TweakUI.
The development tools that are used contribute to bloat as well. In the early 80's, when PC's and other computers didn't have much memory, developers often used Assembly Language, resulting in very lean, fast programs.
Of course writing a big app in assembly will drive you insane. As PCs got bigger, C and C++ were used, and developers increaingly linked in bigger and bigger libraries. This helped contribute to the bloat.
Of all the comments I've ever posted, this is definately one of them
Speaking as professional web developer(must fix user info here) I've seen a couple of uses for Javascript. Mostly for when you want to change a form element and have other form elements change, without sending the whole damned thing back to the server again. Another use was for surfing through a file structure that the client wanted to set up, more gracefully than normal directory indexing(and more securly as well).
However, Javascript has one major bad thing against it: most of our clients demand that we support Internet Explorer 3.0 And, as any programmers out there know, IE3's DOM *sucked*. It sucked hard and it sucked a lot. So until IE3 goes away, we can't use a lot of Javascript. Which means we have to, at times, come up with work-arounds that feel like kludges.
--John Christensen
Applications Developer
Auragen Communications
Bloat happens because you hire cheap inexperienced
programmers that you can treat like indentured
servants. Bloat goes away when you have a global
network of experienced talent working on the
code, looking out for each other.
I wonder where all the hunters are today. --Daffy Duck
It's not just _A_ bitmap.
First off, it is a series of complex animated images,
taking up a lot of room (probably as much as a graphics intensive web page) that was not needed.
Then, there's the code for displaying him, the code for determining which of his stupid actions will be performed upon a given question (that code either being a simple fuzzy login/AI code, or a HUGE database, or both), and then there's the code to tie in this into the system. And then there's the fluff to make the little blue buttons in the requester light up, and then there's the requester for changing the theme, and then there's the code that came into being for the abstraction layer that had to be inserted into the code so that they _could_ change to another image, and then there's the code for the other images, each of whom have a different behavoral database, and then....
And that's just the code for the stupid paperclip.
Even if you DID turn it off (which I don't think you can), just think how much code that just required...for what? A stupid dancing paperclip.
When all you needed, in order to incorporate _every_ actual feature of the paper clip, was a text gadget for entering a question, and a list gadget for listing the results.
I could apply this to every single feature of Office (not to mention Windoze), which if the coders hadn't gotten off their lazy ***, could have been streamlined into the system, instead of a bloated module-esque portion of code.
I'm not going to mention the processor time / memory consumption...there is NO reason why something like office should need geometrically more memory/proc time for what should be a simple increase in features, which are supposedly integrated in such a way they aren't causing more load...when mozilla incorporates a new tag, does the display engine go from needing a pII/300 to a pIII/450? Didn't think so.
People DO want features, yes, but the only reason they accept bloat is because they have no choice...all programs out there are becoming more bloated...
you want to see proof?
go to www.qnx.com...
they have a demo-disk (1.44 mb) which has a POSIX
compatible OS, Web browser, Web Server, TCP/IP code, graphics drivers, etc..all on that one disk,
bootable straight from the disk.
or, look at the Amiga OS.
Give any competent programmer enough time, and they could shirnk anything down...It is possible to fit a program with Office's features (w/o the graphic fluff) down to 1,2 disks...You just have to find the right approach to coding it.
-Just Another Pissed-off Coder
>Sadly enough, this is quite true, and quite disgusting.
Couldn't agree more. If you look at almost every aspect of American culture, that's what you see.
Las Vegas is the epitany of it, I think
Funny tho, that supersize it attitude can have very negative effects. The quest for "more" and "faster" in the world of agriculture provided the factory farm, which killed family farms, forces animals to live in an unnatural and stressed out way, introduced hormone and antibiotic abuse, not to mention a rampant spread in bacteria (pig farmers interestingly enuf have a higher level of e. coli in their intestines than average people).
Bigger is certainly not better, esp when you're running a slow computer like mine at home. It cranks along and pauses like a faithful old dog! But if something is perceived to be bigger and shinier, than it certainly "must" be better!
And I just spend 3 years learning tight optimized ASM for the x86 processers! I guess I will just have to try better next time.
I didn't have to much trouble finding out how to get rid of that thing IIRC, I just asked it 'how do I kill the paperclip?' It seemed to work pretty well.
WOW!
I totally never thought of that. I spent literally hours, as I used 5 different RegEdit sessions, and it took forever.
I'm kinda surprised the little monster helped you. If you were to ask "How do you kill SamIIs?" I probably wouldn't be the first to help you out.
If Microsoft office was a human it would a big 500 pound sweety guy screaming about the "voices" he hears. Bloated, buggy software, sounds like fun to me.
The thing is, some linux, has gotten bloated also. Anyone every use netscape!? It runs slow on a AMD 400 w/ 256 megs of ram.
I forgot the name, but i seen a X text editor that was also an email client, ftp client, and a address book, yea sure it was fast, but it had stuff that a text editor doesn't/shouldn't do. It also had a xproc applet, it didn't show the system down any, but wtf I need to know how much ram and what type of cpu in a simple text editor, fuck that, give me xterm & vi dammit.
Is there any open source browser that are faster, leaner, meaner, not as bloated or buggy as netscape? Just pictures and text, no java, no java scripts, no nothing , runs under X with pictures and text, that is all anything else in it, is bloat.
That day happened for us about 2 years ago when we decided not to upgrade to Win98 on one of our boxen (others running one of several Linux distros, currently Caldera 2.2 and RedHat 5.2). Now, where can I load up my truck with all the worthless (to them) hardware?
yeah right.
only wannabes use "mail".
REAL men (and women)
telnet to the SMTP port.
If you're really good, you hand write
the TCP/IP packets:)
This article is scary, since I don't think the author (a self-confessed Micros~1 programmer) is kidding.
>Sadly, it is you, the customer, who demands bloat, forever clamoring for new features.
[...]
> The day that Microsoft fails to convince you to upgrade--i.e., to buy a product that the malcontents call bloated--is the day that Redmond becomes a ghost town.
In other words, "the customer demands" that Micros~1 stays in business and keeps hauling in money. Yeah, right.
> Most bloatware complaints come from users who own 2-to 3-year-old machines. They don't understand that the new (bloated) versions of software are meant for the new 400-megahertz machines [...] not their Pentium 133 doorstops
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions. Otherwise, it's just a forced-upgrade circle jerk with the CPU manufacturers. "Sorry, your 1997 car doesn't work with the 1999 gasoline". AutoCAD is another program which regularly pulls this scam, and I think it's about time for customers to stop accepting this philosophy.
> The elegance of the Windows 98 operating system is that it runs practically every application from the DOS days and all those goofy Windows 3.1 programs.
Insert your own sarcastic reply here.
>Software companies take your wish lists seriously, and then make them happen.
So in closing, which customer asked for dancing paperclips, and can somebody please hurt him/her???
Not so much. Typesetting is not the same as layout. Typesetters would create blocks of text, while compositors shuffle that text around in paste-up, before everything goes to film.
Of course, computers have changed all that.
Now they've both sort of merged into a bigger and better version of layout. Text is actually editable while you're compositing, so we have the freedom to change things ourselves. Typesetting has not done too well though, because with so many documents created on computers from day one now, there's not a whole lot for them to do. Mostly typesetting now means making sure that styles are all properly in place.
TeX however, from all that I've seen of it, is not a layout program. It's a typesetting program, and very good at it. They're not the same thing, even though we're heading towards that.
Typesetting deals with the appearance of TEXT, while layout deals with the appearance and arrangement of all of the elements on a page. Text comes in big blocks like everything else and is not really treated as special.
If you think that the typsetters have had a rough time of it with the whole DTP revolution, just wait and see what's happening now. New techniques are being developed for going from computers directly to plates, and even from computers to the actual presses. This does not bode well for the strippers or plate-makers.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I think it goes like this: hardware man from Taiwan (hmft): Hi Bill, listen boy you must put more slow stuff in our office so everybody needs more memory!
Bill: ok hmft, but then our factory YingMin has to switch to WinNT 4 in return.
hmft: Well... Ok.
Bill: Do you have any sugestions for some features?
hmft: I dunno, hey, can't we do something with that paperclip?
(And so a new era begun)
How does clean/tight code result in bloat? Sounds mutually exclusive to me. What you seem to be saying is that clean/tight code results in more bugs than bloated code, which is something else altogether and I wouldn't want to get involved if you decide to start telling coders that their nice slim programs must be full of bugs while MS Word is relatively bug-free by comparison. What you're saying is probably irrelevant. Not only would I not agree with you, but the whole thing would get real ugly.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
We just had to write an custom application both for Win32 and OS/2.
The application was very simple, it just got some data from the machine, pops up a dialog so now and then and sends the data to the server.
I wrote the OS/2 version in Visual REXX (because I only had 4-5 days to write it), with a DLL in C for 2 functions that where difficult to do from anything else. The OS/2 package we sent to the customer was 180KB.
The Win32 version, got written by a windows weenie in VisualBasic. It took him a month, and it ended up as a 1.6MB package (i.e. to large to fit on a disk).
The process of getting the data, parsing it and sending it to the server is done within a second with the OS/2 version, and they had me put a 5 second delay in just so that they could see its status screen before it exited again. This was not needed for the Win32 version, it took much more then 5 seconds for its processing.
In any case, they are now having massive problems with the win32 version (DLL's on the different windows versions not providing the same functionality and instability in general). So now we have another windows programmer writing it in Visual C++......
Hooray for ad hominem arguments. Without them, the Anonymous Cowards around here wouldn't have much to say.
If you think about what he said, he has a pretty decent point. Without adding new features, how can Microsoft justify selling a new version? Answer: They can't. It's not that farfetched to believe that they might start taking a lot of suggestions from a few consumers here and there that would otherwise have never even been considered. It might be something that a couple of people want, but Microsoft has hundreds of millions of customers that don't want or need that feature. It gets tossed in anyway to add another bullet to the feature list on the back of the box. Looks impressive, no?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I've become so numb to sarcasm I don't know it any more. Was this sarcasm or just idiocy?
Back in the "good" ol' days of DOS, that boot loader trying to pass itself off as an operating system, any application that needed to do something had to do it itself. Want to talk to the modem? Include code to do it. Want a spell checker? Thow that in. What ever you need, throw it in. And the users learnt that everything should be integrated into one application. Hence,
every application must now contain an integrated
spell checker ( how 'bout it Mr. Taco? ), a drawing program, a program development envrionment, a file manager... or people get confused...
Try explaining the unix theory of small compatible programs, do one job well, to the average person on the street, and see what happens. Retraining a person in computer usage is nearly impossible.
Since we are on this topic, I'm trying to get people to test a program I made. This is Windows only right now, but it compresses a Win32 Executable and adds a stub program to it that decompresses the program in memory when it runs. This turns out to be a very tricky thing to do because of dll imports, resources, thread local storage, and so on. Anyway, if you have any programs that don't work with it, mail me...
-- Virtual Windows Project
ask a stupid question: where are these easter eggs?
I didn't have to much trouble finding out how to get rid of that thing IIRC, I just asked it 'how do I kill the paperclip?' It seemed to work pretty well
of couse, you need to *use* the paperclip at least once to get rid of it
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
You do realize, of course, that your hundred and some megs of ram are why it loads fast? Load up sysmon some time and take a look at the allocated memory. It's probably sitting around 130 meg. That DRAGS a computer with less ram to its knees. Sure, Word loads fast on my machine too ... it also crashes if I edit a 6 meg document. Why shouldn't it edit a 6 meg document, it can insert 6 meg pictures, can't it? Microsoft adds a lot of toy value to its software, but power-hungry users are left begging for REAL software. Unfortunately, we (the power people) are the minority ... that is, we're NOT Microsoft's market. That, and most power-hungry users just go out and buy more hardware to make the software run. I'll pay an extra $100 for a better video card to make my games go from 8 fps to 50 ... but to get a real-time spell checker? hello?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
>libc5 weighs in at 600k
/lib/libc-2.1.1.so /lib/libc-2.1.1.so*
>libc6 weighs in at 3mb!
#ls -l
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 1170636 Jun 15 10:30
Huh? 3 meg? Looks like about 1.1 meg to me.
This one had me rolling, really. Customers are asking for bloat? I've yet to meet one. Frankly, if it's really expected of us all to have a PIII/500 and 256MB of RAM just to run a word processor, a spreadsheet, a half-baked database and a broken contact manager/mail client, then I for one am content to fall behind - I do as well just installing something like StarOffice that does 95% of the same in useful functions and has a quarter of the disk footprint.
More frightening yet, though, is that best as I can tell, the author believes everything he's said. He doesn't realize that he's going to have to put on an asbestos suit to open his mail for the next several days (I for one won't be a part of this - he's below my response threshold, too brainwashed to bother). -Drayke
-Drayke
If all the world's a stage, it must have been an easy audition.
>Stupid features for stupid people I guess.
Gosh, who buys all the software? Linux still doesn't have a majority market share by any stretch of the imagination. Not to mention when anyone proposes you guys pay for software, you act like it's a crime and break out Molotov cocktails...
I of course don't mean you in particular, but I still mean to make a point. Slashdot is not the real world.
I have a K6-200, got 192MB ram (but had 64) and Word/Excel etc load basically as fast as IE5. eg. less than a second.
The first time you load it, it might take about 2 seconds, but subsequent loads will take less than a second.
And Word is pluginable (It's called COM/ActiveX)- and it is. It doesn't load up modules (spell checker, macro engine etc) until it's used for the first time per session.
Fortunately, I am not a typical consumer, and I'm guessing many others here at Slashdot aren't either. I prefer functionality, simplicity, and elegance. That's why I drive an Acura Integra rather than a Lincoln LandMass, a Buick SnootyStreet, a Cadillac UrbanSprawl, or a Ford BunkHouse. I don't have, nor will I pay for, auto-dimming rearview mirrors, automatic headlights, auto-on windshield wipers, auto-adjusting seats, massaging seats, or even auto-shift transmissions.
Every time I turn around, there's another marketing term that fabricates a difference in the consumer's mind -- "Intel Inside" -- "Where do you want to go today?" -- "Duratec V6" -- "Vortech V8" -- "StabiliTrak" -- "You may already be a winner" ...
I'm inclined to think that the US consumer is inordinately susceptible to this marketing propaganda. I'm not really sure why, though. We're all supposed to be individuals here, and think for ourselves, right? Then why do so many people believe such transparent marketing scams?
Or maybe I should ask the opposite question: why don't I always believe every claim or slogan from a salesman or commercial? Is there something wrong with me???
his is entirely offset however, by certain operating systems which require about half a gig to install comfortably. Moores law should not be used as a crutch or excuse for sloppy coding. I sincerely doubt that there is a single piece of microsoft software out there that could not be made in half the size with twice the speed.
.doc to word, etc).
Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid.
I did not say that Microsoft programmers are sloppy or stupid. I simply said that just about every Microsoft program could probably be made with twice the speed and half the size. That has to do with optimization. If they used assembly in key parts of the program, they could probably achieve both of these features, though it would take considerable time and effort, not to mention that it would make modifying the code a pain in the ass.
Standards evolve when vendors provide more features; this is normal and healthy, and the way the industry is supposed to work. HTML mail is good because it's a simple, portable, non-patented extension; in contrast, Word document attachments are evil because they're complicated, non-portable and proprietary. Given that people actually *want* more structure to their mail than ASCII can povide, this is a natural direction for the industry to take. (Remember that we can't (and shouldn't) standardise before we have implementation experience!)
HTML is far from the best choice for this though. HTML is, in many ways, quite limited in the degree of control it gives you over how your text is formatted. Not to mention that different browsers will display similar html differently. Attachments on the other hand, do not suffer this failure. Note that I did not say word attachments. You could just as easily use PDF, RTF, or any other format you please. You use the ascii text in the email to give a description of the attached files and a brief message, and leave the bulk of the data in seperate, attached files, from where it can be transfered to specialized programs (.cpp files to MSVC,
Most people don't know, at install time, which set of features they'll need; their requirements do change over time. Besides, would you really
want to spend hours figuring out which of the thousand features you want, specially when the resource you seem to be optimising for (disk/memory space?) is in fact quite plentiful? (A gigabyte of disk is worth ~$30; how many man-hours is that worth?)
First off, features can be packaged into components. You could have you "Basic Documents" component, with the base editor, spell checker, and grammar checker. Take on a "Label Editor" component, "Letter Editor" component, and so forth. Components could be installed from a CDROM, or over the net from a server (with proper authentication and license keys this would work). As for relying on large harddisks . . . remember that the more shit you dump on the disk, the longer the harddisk will have to seek to find data. And . . . let me put it this way. Would you rather have a 200 meg word processor and 800 megs of MP3s, or would you prefer one fat 1000 meg word processor? Harddisks are getting bigger, but so are data files. Use your resources wisely.
Sorry, someone had to use that word in here. But at any rate, part of the issue is Unix-minded people looking at Windows-minded people. I know people who honestly believe that Outlook is a good program because it does everything that it does. Mind you, they run Pentium-II 300+ machines with 8gig or more of drive space and twice as much RAM as necessary (in my mind).
:) whereas vi makes sense to others. Some prefer the feel of jed or joe. In the MS world, people all use Word and Notepad. That's it (most don't even use Notepad).
... but to make them built-in, Outlook's code stays in memory even if you just want one stupid sticky note on the screen. People don't know the feature exists because the software's intuitive enough to get them working without having to explore. No exploration = no novelties.
... they want stuff to work with. *nix has those things built-in, the difference is that we, the anti-bloat community, don't appeal to the masses because they don't want to type
:).
...
... but can we keep the server alive for an hour, please?
Unix has always aimed at having dozens (or hundreds) of tiny single-purpose programs to do individual groups of tasks. Shell scripting is a very powerful tool in this environment because combining grep, awk, sed and find you've got more tools than Windows has already (using ANY built-in tools). The issue is ease-of use.
Bill Gates wants "a computer on every desktop" and what he understands is that people don't want to write shell scripts. People here is defined as those who spend money on computers on average. We the *nix community do not fit into that category. We are not the vast majority of users. Therefore, bloatware gets built, not out of laziness or pressure tactics, but because of a philosophy of ease-of-use. Making a program intuitive and easy means adding hundreds of features to make it intuitive and easy to all the people who might come across it. emacs is intuitive to some people (I don't know who
Most of the people I've trained in Windows have told me they didn't even know Outlook (which they may use daily) had sticky-notes built in. I like those sticky notes
As people become more and more computer savvy, they start buying toolkits, like Norton or Nuts&Bolts to do things to their computer
/sbin/ifconfig | head -2 | tail -1 | sed -f 2 ' '
to get their IP address. Heck, they don't care that they have an IP address.
Should we fix this? I don't think so. I don't think that the Linux community will benefit from appealing to the general public because Linux will then become bloated as well. Linux is not bloated because it is limited in scope and tries to do what it does well. It's that different paradigm thing
Enough of my rambling
- Windows on the desktop, sure
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Office 2000 does this. You can mark most features "install on first run" then the menu items are there, but you're just prompted to insert the cd the first time you use them....if you never use 'em, you never use the HD space.
I guess that would suck if you were trying to fit as much as you could on a smaller hard drive.
say what you want about netscape, but IE *is* really good. its modular, and a lot faster at loading pages then netscape, witch is sad I guess... I use them both, usualy just netscape, but if a page dosn't load right, I just go to IE. it relly does work a lot better :(
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
[to tune of "With a Backpack On My Back"]
I love to sit and stuff my apps
with great huge chunks of code
and that is why performance is
beginning to implode.
[refrain]
Feature-eee, feature-iii,
feature-eee, feature-i-i-i-i-i-i,
feature-eee, feature-iii,
my programs are obese.
[idea stolen largely from a song sung by Garrison Keillor]
What is bloat? Bloat is the American dream: bigger, better, and everywhere all at once. Supersize it! From VCRs to food processors to Ford Expeditions, industry has historically provided consumers with features to have, not necessarily to use. How many of you have programmed your VCR? Minced carrots with your Cuisinart? Or gone off-roading in your SUV? Why should software be any different?
Well, let's see. If that is the American dream, I must be an accidental American. I hate SUVs, I drive a small sports car. I don't own a Cuisinart, and yes, I have programmed my VCR (it's really not that hard, god bless Sony's industrial designers).
Maybe that's why the software I use is different?
Who said that? I had a 386, 16m and it ran winword 6.0 and it had all the features that 90% of the people use today of their word 97/2000. With maybe one exception that it would not keep underlining words that it don't find in it's dictionary (3 out of 4 persons that uses word that I know HATE this, I actualy like but this is because I tend to make a lot of mistakes).
I now use linux, and I hear my boss saying that he likes linux but it will not catch untill it has a office suite that is 100% compatible with M$ office. He says that people need that, and WP, SO and other word processor for linux don't render the word docs the same way that word does.
The only problem I see in this line of argument is that not even word does render 100% the same in every computer, people usualy config diferent page size then your printer, have diferent fonts then the ones installed in your computer (and shure they will use theirs "mangalo extra bold italic 13pt" font in their email).
--
"take the red pill and you stay in wonderland and I'll show you how deep the rabitt hole goes"
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The problem with easter eggs is that they obviously didn't go through any formal review process. Flight simulators and the like may be an exception, but *some* easter eggs are nasty lawsuit bait that *no* company would ever let out the door.
Anything that doesn't go through a formal review process is an unknown. Maybe it's bug free, or maybe it has a nasty bug that will make the entire product look bad. Run "flight simulator" and corrupt your disk. Or maybe it has actively malicious code embedded inside. Run "flight simulator" and have a copy of all "encrypted" Office documents ftp'd to a remote site, if you also have network connectivity.
We simply don't know.
The software vendor simply doesn't know.
And that uncertainty, in itself, is enough to cast a dark shadow on the product. It brings to mind angry line workers who weld bolts into car body cavities so the victim will be plagued with an uncorrectable rattle. Or the angry construction worker who seals a carton of milk, with a small hole, behind the drywall so the annoying owner who comes by with his annoying requests will suffer from an unlocatable stench for years.
I don't mind a simple group photo or list of contributors; in fact I think it's very reasonable to put that information under the "About" button so the programmers can show pride in their work. But anything beyond that raises serious questions about the quality of the software produced in that shop.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
last time I checkd, (yesterday) 128Megs of PC100 sdram was only $58. very nice. that's about 50cents a meg. when I baught my computer in 1995, it was $50 a meg... hehe
_
"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Of course, getting the design right almost never happens the first time, and is nearly impossible while specifications and requirements are changing underfoot. In most real-world situations one almost never gets a chance to fix the design.
Given an imperfect design, one can write sneaky, impenetrable, yet tight code, or can keep things relatively clean -- and pay the price in bloat.
I would much rather maintain the latter...
The article was not clearly written. The author refused to separate bloatware from overly-feature-laden ware. Two big differences. Bloatware is badly written code that sucks memory ad HD space due to bend-over-backwards-compatibility, overuse of legacy code, etc. Feature-laden (something I never connected with MS...) is having a lot of features.
I'm all for features, but since when was MS more feature-rich than previous options or current alternatives?? Frontpage-- lots of buttons, but if you're making a serious webpage, where is the power to customize it to do exactly what is needed? GUIs in generall are feature-poor or at best overly complicated and hard to get to the important features compared to command-line versions.
As for bloatware...ugh. It scares me. IT becomes harder to deal with and requiring bigger and better computers to do the same (...or less!!) work as before.
PS: As per the autocorrect, a quick backspace will undo the autocorrect without deleting your typing.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
But the probllem is compounded -- and the customer is screwed -- by process, schedule, and market imperatives.
There is no time to do it right and meet the schedules. There is often no chance to coordinate and integrate with concurrent development efforts. Identifying opportunities for code sharing and consolidation requires dedicated time and energy that is usually allocated elsewhere.
And once its been slapped together with spit and glue, there is no chance to backtrack and revisit the implementation due to fears of destabilization -- especially if the feature was adopted by the customer base. If you do get a chance to fix it, it has to be timed carefully at the benginning of a development cycle. And even then you get the attitude that "It works (sort of) goddamit and if you redo it, what'll we get besides bugs?" Management has learned the hard way to adopt a very dim view of "elegance".
The problem is compounded again by consumer loyalty to market dominating products. New, better products cannot compete with industry standard gear on merit alone. Everyone knows M$Word, all documents are in Word format, all the corporate standards are built atop it,... The fact that product X can blow the doors off Word for this or that use means nothing. So everyone continues to buy Word and M$ continues to jam more stuff in the box.
PS: Everyone needs a clue about the 'backward compatability' issue. Typcial developer mindset. Its not the user being stupid and using older, out of date gear and expecting the software to save their asses. The fact is that the end result of using software tends to be data: documents, databases, etc. The wealth accrued to the customer is the data. The software, installing it, living with it, upgrading it,... is just an ephemeral nuisance.
The fact that until very recently the industry standard was to orphan old data had more to do with softweare vendor arrogance than anything else. One of the primary reasons our product has dominated its market is because of our consistent comittment to protecting the customer investment in their data. And document written by any version of our software on any platform can be read by any latter version of our product -- and no funky translation steps either. Just open the damn document. So blame my employer, among others, for the fact that customer are now saavy enough to demand backward compatibility -- and just deal with it.
Excuse me Mr. Shuman, but not all of us can afford a nice new system everytime a new Intel product comes out. Many of us have to make due with what we have until we can afford a new system. Becasue of Micro$oft and a few others, the typical lifespan of a home computer is greatly reduced, thus in the Micro$oft world your system becomes obsolete quicker
I think his point is that you don't HAVE to use the latest versions of software. No one's forcing you to run Office 2000 on your 486!
Nobody ever gives me credit for the job I do every day. Why are movie-makers and developers so damn special?
It's a Unix system - I know this.
Shuman - lying whore MS apologist. I sure hope any prospective employers read that article.
Try getting TeX or LaTeX for typesetting on Linux.
I think Netscape was adding bloat before IE ever exhisted. Netscape has also always been buggy in my opinion, it was just less buggy than Mosaic. Before IE Netscape pretty much had a monopoly on the browser market, and I'm not sure they would have abused that monopoly any less that Microsoft abuses theirs. They never seemed to care to develop a stable, modular browser. In my opinion IE became a better browser after version 4. I do still use both Netscape, and IE. But even though I think it's a better product, I doubt IE would have gained it's market share unless MS made the lisencing agreements they made.
While I don't feel a personal need for formatted email, I do see the attraction. What I don't understand is why more plain text email programs and newsreaders don't support MIME at least enough to only display the only the "plain/text" portions? They understand it well enough for attachments. The same goes for mailing list software that can't filter out unwanted attachments and HTML. I can't count the number of times that mailing lists I've been on have been accidentally bombed by a newbie that sends 3 Mb of GIFs to the list or the list digests and archives that include inappropriate HTML and binary attachments. Blech!
Dave Williams
www.eeggs.com has a list of easter eggs in various programs.
I did this project a couple years ago for an engineering class where we had a *very* simple java application that showed something resembling a light switch which you could use to turn the project on and off. The first time we showed it to the instructor, it popped right up and worked fine and he wasn't too impressed. A couple weeks went by, we added a jpg startup image and a Thread.sleep(3000) to the code and changed nothing else. The next time we showed it to him, he was very impressed with our work.
Just check the size of every release of Linux kernel.
It's getting bigger baby. More features = more bloat. Of course, you can also blame it on the use of C/C++ vs. assembly, but that is academic since large programs cannot be written in assembly within a resonable time period.
High tech, enterprise companies are different b/c they have IT staff. But small businesses are the same as joe user b/c usually the suits are dumber than stumps.
Really? So, can you honestly tell me that the IT (or IS, whichever they prefer to be called) staff in your company aren't buying into the 95->NT->2K, 97->2K upgrade-itis joy-ride?
"What do you mean, invalid parameters? 9000Gigs of RAM and it can't answer a simple question!" -- Earthworm Jim
The reason, forgive me, I still use Windows 98, the epitomy of bloatware, and not linux is because windows has a driver or hardware profile for just about any device I can plug in, snap on, or wire up to a PC. Everytime I've tried to install Linux (SuSe is the exception) it doesnt recognize all my hardware/perhiperals.
Case in point, my USB Quickcam.
Sometimes, I enjoy the fact that Windows sucks up a few hundred megs to store these things so when i buy a product i know i can plug it in and (usually) it works, drivers installed right then and there.
I also think that a vast majority of regular computer users enjoy this and the idea of having to check for drivers and recompile the kernal everytime they buy some nifty PC perhiperal is what, sorry to be the devils advocate here, keeps linux from really going mainstream.
-Z
side note: of all the Linux Distros I've tried, SuSe was the only one that recognized almost all, and accurately, my hardware.
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
Bookmark this article under "OSS Advocacy". Also take a look at his article on debugging. This is a in-the-trenches Microsoft coder; the poster child for propriatary commercial software development. He offers a first hand account of how the whole system works. It is (unwitting, I'm sure) proof of the issues OSS claims to combat.
In these articles, the author (Andrew Shuman) documents various development issues. These include marketing driving development, a "demand" for new features vs. efficiency to run on less-than-cutting-edge hardware (note that features apparently wins out), backward compatability, the complexity of bug hunting... just to name a few. The OSS mantra promises to solve these issues.
I'm not entirely sure if this article was meant to be satire. The tone seems to shift rather suddenly and I begin to get the idea that the author begins to seriously pleed his case. Either way, there's value to be found in it. And it doesn't neccessarily involve a good, fuzzy feeling about "bloat".
"Good, Fast, Cheap: Pick any two (you can't have all three)." - RFC 1925, 2.7.a
They already did bub, Office 98 and Office 97 aren't compatable. And don't see Office 98 is for the Mac so who cares. Try running Mac and PC Labs at schools, with people running around thinking everything is compatable in the MS world.
Did anybody notice the bottom of the page?
© 1999 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
Slate is owned by Microsoft. It's interesting to live in a world where our "news and commentary" sources are owned by bigger fish. Even Slashdot!
Yep...backwards compatibility...
Just yesterday, I was remarking to myself, "Now if only I could run some of those old GNU/Linux programs of yesteryear, not too mention a few DOS apps and a Win3.11 proggy or two as well." But hell, goddamn it, the Linux system ain't fat enough to fit them all. We need to add another 5 meg to the kernel at least. Not to mention huge quantities of drivers and assorted garbage. Where's my code shovel?
I hate bloatware, but, at least with M$ the problem is not the features, the problem is usually easter eggs. Why does Excel need a 3D flight simulator? why does word need a pinball game? why does outlook need a picture of the developement team. These are not features and I doubt they were on "consumer wish lists" if they are features they should be advertised as such. but they won't be because its just wasted code.
anyhow that's my $0.02
"Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos." -- Homer Simpson
There are lots of things in programs that can be compressed by quite a bit. Resources for instance. If your program has :-) But I think you're probably right in that compression is not such a good way to check program coding. eg, I can imagine that debugging symbols (if they're in), compiled-in strings, code for common constructs (such as function calls and loops), and other such things would be somewhat redundant. :-)
support for 200 languages, you can bet that all this text can be compressed by quite a bit. That's the beauty of virtual
memory and discardable data segments. Resources (under windows anyways) don't take up any extra memory because if they're
not used, they're discarded and never reloaded.
Well, in Linux these 'resources' are likely to be external, optional data files. So they not only don't take up memory but they might not even take up disk space
Not to mention the few times when you really need to allocate a 1000-member array in the code
Daniel
I used VMWare to create something with Microsoft
Publisher and it went very well.
Dammit! I was going to bring that up! ;)
Let's not forget the (badly done and slow) Doom like game hidden in an older version of Excel.
If the programmers would pull their heads out of their butts and write tight code and FIX THE DAMNED BUGS instead of sticking in easter eggs MS products might just suck a little less.
I wonder how Bill feels about his employees goofing of on his dime? Me, I'd fire them.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Uhh, this article lacked the touch of Swift, if indeed it was truly meant as satire in the first place. I wasn't entirely sure this was meant as satire at all (remember, it is posted on a not-just-for-geeks site, and comes from the MS universe).
It seemed to me that Shuman's point was to blame "the consumer" for bloated software, without much of a sense that he might be joking. I mean there's the crack about SWAT teams, but a lot of the stuff he mentioned about win versions supporting legacy apps rang true (disclaimer: not being a serious coder, I don't know enough technical details to know whether it's really true that support for legacy code is responsible). I'm not asking for a "wink" tag in there, but lemme tell ya, he could have done more exaggeration if his aim was satire.
"Oh, I hope he doesn't give us halyatchkies," said Heinrich.
Software shouldn't be allowed if it isn't multi-platform. Unless DTP programs are going to come out for all systems, they shouldn't be allowed at all. It's just not fair that there aren't Linux, BeOS, and Macintosh versions of everything anybody ever thought of and implemented.
My mom never would have put up with this kind of crap. If there wasn't enough for all of us, none of us could have it. It made it possible for even the weakest in the bunch to feel good about him/herself. And that's what all of life is about: making sure we're all equal.
Yes, that's exactly what programmers do! This is especially true for people working on projects like MS Office - the more features the program has, the easier it is to sell as an upgrade. I fully expect many programmers on the Office team to sit around talking about what more junk they can throw into their suite. In fact, it would not surprise me in the least if there was some kind of monetary reward program for people who come up with the most ideas. Certainly anything that can be patented is rewarded.
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
My (not extensive) experience is that while 'tight' (space-oriented) code generally starts out less "bloated" than other software, it leads to bloat in the long run because there is no good architecture for extending the program and things have to be done through gross hacks and kludges (which generally require special-casing everything and doing almost-the-same-job 500 times. Exhibit A, Netscape; I suspect Windows qualifies as Exhibit B but no-one has seen the code :-) )
:) If you're serious, I suggest that Microsoft either classifies less things as bugs ("the taskbar refuses to unhide after 25.7 minutes? The computer still runs, make it wishlist") or else doesn't receive reports because their image is so intimidating that users simply don't report bugs.
The comment about Microsoft's low bug rates is quite amusing, btw.
Daniel
I use the browser built-in to KDE most of the time. It's far
faster than Netscape, and actually goes back to the previous
page when I hit the "back" button instead of reloading it like
Netscape usually wants to do.
The worst bug in it is a memory leak, which forces me to
restart the X-server every couple of days.
Sure you don't have to run Office 2000...unless you want to open documents created by someone with Office 2000. Changing file formats forces users to upgrade to even more bloated ware.
While I've seen this argument before, I'm not sure I buy it. Office got mindshare at first because it was the only "pro-level" game in town for Windows--Word and Excel on Windows predate WordPerfect and 1-2-3 on Windows by at least two years, and the first Windows versions of both of those were terrible. By the time anyone mounted serious competition, both of them had over 50% of their respective markets on Windows, and Microsoft started using aggressive bundling tactics to make sure that many users had Office installed with their computers when they got them.
The "only idiots want to use too-friendly software" argument belies the fact that bloated or not, Word and Excel are very powerful programs. All of the obnoxious automatic features can be turned off quite easily, and there are fairly powerful features--outlining, mail merge, revision changes, groupware routing--that are as close to intuitive as you can get in Word. And I haven't seen a better spreadsheet than Excel yet. It does useful things that no other program in its class does; while there are better programs just for statistical analysis and just for flatfile databases, for example, there's no program I've found that does both of them together as well and as easily. I write statistics-gathering tools for our company's frame relay networks (information about which is scattered in SQL and Access databases), and Excel is simply better tool than Access for such things. (Its database handling is nearly as powerful, and its reporting tools are better.)
Bloat is not our friend.
Yes, it is true that people are demanding more and more new features, and they also demand backwards compatibility, and these things do take more space.
But it is mostly the fault of the software companies.
Any large system becomes bloated. Just look any large burocracy. The problem is communication between all of the people who are writing the software. They don't coordinate, and they don't care about the system for the system's sake. They do thier job with the least amount of effort on thier part. If it's easier for them to make a new file format rather than stick with the old one, then we have a new format, and one more bit of old code for 'backwards compatibility'. Why bother coordinating this fancy feature with the one the guy down the hall is writing so that we don't suck up all of the processor. Why don't we write the same routine as ten other people because we didn't know somebody else had written it already for their own work? Why not assume that everybody who wants to run this program has a computer under 2 years old? Why not add in hard-coded limits to data sizes and whatnot just for the sake of convienience?
Why doesn't anybody put any effort into making their software elegant, internally coordinated, optimized, and expandible for the future?
A couple quick points of my opinion to refute that nonsense article..
1.) With proprietary software, all features that users want get dumped into the final binaries, hence bloating them regardless of whether the features will be used. With Open Source, users can compile in only the features they need.. Therefore, you have the best of both worlds--gobs of available features and lack of bloat.
2.) With proprietary OS's (such as mentioned relating to bloated "compatiblity code" kludge to make "legacy apps" still work) the OS just keeps getting fatter and fatter with each revision. As Linus put it, "you can't fix bugs because programs rely on them.." (not direct quote but it was something like that..) Anyways, with Open Source programs, they can be recompiled when the OS changes--hence never becoming incompatible or inefficient due to changes in the kernel.
----
Of course there exists some bloatware in the world of Open Source, but it's managable--and if a program IS bloated it can always be "unbloated" later via compile options.
Read any magazine review, they all have feature comparison lists. This drives bloat, as corporate buyers use these to choose amongst competing products (along with free golf games from sales reps).
You can't quantify elegance and simplicity. If you do useability tests, the sales rep convinces your management they're flawed, takes them to a really nice golf course, and - voila - your recommendation is overridden.
I have spent several years at work forced to use a bogus e-mail package that has every feature you can think of, but crashes about once a day. It's the same with M$ products.
Maybe everyone on this forum is smarter than your average corporate nitwit - but think about the pointy haired manager in the Dilbert cartoons, they really do exist. Your next computer will have 14 cupholders, just because the competitors only have 6...
Nice to see a little dose of reality around here...
Does anyone really believe Microsoft would spend more money to do actual work developing bloat if it didn't bring in more money? People pay extra for bloat, it's popular with users of new machines--the same people who buy something like 80% of all software (according to a study I ran across a while back).
I can run the Win32 port of XEmacs any time I want to. In fact, I am slightly addicted to the sokoban game plug-in.
I run it on Windows 95, 98, and NT.
And which of Microsoft's prodigious production of bloatware is backward compatible? That's the thing that pisses me off most about Microsoft. If my clients upgrade to the newest version, I had better upgrade too to see their documents. Not only that, if I send them something in the "old version" most of the formatting magically goes away in the conversion.
So that's not much of an excuse.
But, as usual, I was right. So neener neener neener. And I didn't even have to hit a man page.
One was to register for a conference, and was used to check that the data was complete (not that this justified it). The other used it ust as gratuitiously, to get at the realaudio broadcast of foxnews.
Aside from that, I have yet to see a useful application of java or javascript on a webpage. But then, I also beleive in jail time for blinking text or gifs . . .
muLinux is probably the most versatile and interesting one-floppy-disk distribution of Linux out there. (Mr.) Michele Andreoli has written some incredible apps, such as an http server that's less than 1500 bytes in size. You can get X-windows on a second floppy, too. If you want it all (gcc compiler, ssh...), you'll have three floppies to deal with. I've been having lots of fun with this package...and very little bloat.
Check it out at www.sunsite.auc.dk/mulinux
Certified Microsoft Notworking Specialist
I have Office 2000 installed on my Toshiba laptop. It's an ancient 486DX-2 50 machine with 28 MB of RAM (the max possible). It runs just fine on Windows 95 on that hardware. I don't run Powerpoint on that hardware (it's a grayscale VGA machine, for starters) but Word, Excel, and Access all work fine on it. I also have Win32 ports of TCL/TK and Python installed. It's a heck of a snappy laptop for how old it is. And I spent a lot of time trying to find what was most comfortable on it, trying numerous X Window Managers on Linux and NetBSD before finally giving in and putting Windows back on it. If I was gonna run Netscape on the machine I would definitely want to use Slackware Linux again. But that's because Netscape is such a godawful pig on any platform, and has nothing to do with what OS is being run.
Everybody has their own priorities, I guess.
He says "the customer" demands new features, and he's
right about that. But it's THE customer, not EVERY customer,
or even a majority of them. There's probably somebody out
there who thinks a dancing paperclip is a really important
educational feature.
but I just couldn't read that beyond '... the elegance of Windows 98...'
I think their talking about conspicuous consumption and flaunting wealth - "Hey, everybody , I have a 9Gb disk and just fill it up with stuff that I don't even use, yeah!"
Chuck
Error #1287: tag line file corrupt or missing
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
they cant take any criticizm whatsoever
without pulling their goddam twitchy trigger finger.
At work I use a Windows95 machine.
A business partner handed me a copy of MS Office to install.
At this point I had only used an older version of MS Office and I wasn't very impressed.
I installed the new version of MS Office following the custom install and worked hard at stripping all the crap out.
Installation done, I started MS Word.
First up I disabled the "tip o' the day".
(enter paperclip man)
At first I was frightened by Paperclip Man. Then humoured.
I poked at him, called him names, then quickly became offended that Microsoft thinks of me as a little child who needs a cutesy animated "helper" designed after office supplies.
These are the following steps I took to rid myself of Paperclip Man.
I urge everyone to follow along.
1) Click Start.
2) Click Settings.
3) Click Control Panel.
4) In Control Panel find the Add/Remove Programs icon.
5) Click Add/Remove Programs.
6) Find Microsoft Office, highlight it.
7) Click the button labeled "uninstall".
8) Find Word Perfect CD.
9) Insert into CD-Rom drive.
10) Follow on screen promts to install into hard drive.
Following this routine, I have quickly removed the ill effects of Paperclip Man.
MSWord has never run better.
My studio - www.graylands.ca
The KDE browser rocks (but you gotta run kfm and qt) (SIDE NOTE: Anyone know how to disable the desktop icons that kfm creates? I'd really like to just use it as a web-browser/file manager)
Netscape has not become bloated linux software, it was always this bad. I'm using it now on a p2-450, 256 and its horrible. I switched to Navigator (version 4.61) and set it up to launch mutt for mailto's and netscape has not crashed in weeks!! This beats the heck out of the 3 to 4 crashes a day with netscape-communicator 4.61.
*Guilty secret* I really like lynx. what is stopping someone from making a console based browser with some minor graphical capabilites (image rendering/tables). Anyone know how plausible this would be? I could envision it with a GUI like linuxconf has in RH when executed from the console.
Hope this helps
Here, Here!
Netscape and Mozilla are the opposite of good.
Perhaps we should write an alpha "Slashdotter's" Browser. It could have all kinds of buttons that do not work (like mozilla) and a insta-flame button for the super-lazy. Hopefully it will keep track of my slashdot passwd too. and eat up 90% of my CPU and memory. And it should have a wyswig (sp?) editor that no one needs and it could have lame bookmarks/favorites that come back even after i delete them (just for kicks). Oh, and of course it should segfault just as i stop mindlessly browsing and begin to do something productive.
"How many of you have programmed your VCR?"
Me. Though not lately, but I don't watch TV much anymore either...
"Minced carrots with your Cuisinart?"
With my WHAT? Pretty sure I'll never own one of those.
"Or gone off-roading in your SUV?"
I go all the time in my Jeep. In fact, I'm going Sunday.
"Why should software be any different?"
Exactly. Buy/get what you need/want. Not what some company or magazine tells you that you need.
There have been efforts like the "good software group", or Linux or BeOS's streamlined systems, or even GNU to an extent. I mean to be skeptical. What is "better"? Do we mean our smaller, more manageable systems which have less features and don't crash? I argue that anyone can make a small program which doesn't crash... it's adding features that mucks things up. Microsoft has always pushed the envelope for features, at the expense of backward compatability, robustness, and even good taste (remember the Word Paper clip?) But isn't that what their consumers wanted?
This is how they won. Now they are the biggest company in the world because everyone else just didn't get it... push the envelope on features and market those features . BeOS, Linux, and every other system has to play catch-up on the stupid features, now, if they want the Windows marketshare.
But better designed, streamlined, and fully functional unix stations seem better to us. That's because we aren't Microsoft customers, never really were, and never will be. We want something else, all we really wanted is the *choice* of which features we get. And the coolest new features, not the most. Does this mean Microsoft is wrong and we're right? In a way, no. They have more money. But we have our OS, now.
-Ben
How are SuSE, slack, and stampede faster than RedHat? Are they not all optimized for i386? I could see how something like bero-linux (which as I understand is optimized for PPro) or simply downloading source and compiling with i686 optimization would be a little faster.
Is RH really slower? Why? are they not all using the same GNU tools, the same filesystem, and a similiar compiler? Perhaps you are refering to non-custom kernels vs stock kernels?
If my employees (I don't have aby, I'm a wage slave) were spending time and resources programming unaurthorised projects on my dime I'd fire them.
Unless I could make money on their project, which I would legally own...
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
If it ain't purdy, den da Microsoft peoples ain't gunna use it.
Here's a good case in point.
SETI@home
The SETI people need to make a nice looking version for windows users. They develop a very pretty screen saver. Lot's of nice graphs, colours, ect,. which mean nothing at all really. But, it looks good.
On my machine (K6-2 450 256mg ram) I can run a single SETI job in about 14 hours. That is running BeOS 4.5 with SETI in a terminal window. (pretty scale of 1-10, about 2)
When I boot the same machine to Win98, I can run a SETI job in about 15 hours using the WinNT command line exe. (pretty scale of 1-10, about 2)
When I run the SETI screen saver in Win98, I'm lucky to finish a job in 40 hours. (pretty scale of 1-10, about 9)
Now compare the file size of these programs,.
BeOS version - 81k
NT command line exe - 140k
Windows screen saver version - 727k
So, why would the SETI guys bother building a program that is much larger in file size and MUCH slower in it's process time? So it can get the masses to run it's calculations.
Last I checked, Windows users were at the top of the SETI list doing something like 1600000 jobs on just Win4.1 alone adding up to about 8600 years.
The average joe doesn't care about speed or functions, they just want it to be pretty.
The average joe also wants the newest version because they think it's better then the last version, which we all know isn't always true to form with Microsoft.
Being a computer tech in a small computer store and I don't know how many times I've had this conversation,.
"Should I upgrade to Win98?"
"I don't know, does Win95 work for you?"
"Yes, it runs fine."
"Then I wouldn't if I were you."
"But Win98 is better right?"
"No. Not if Win95 is running really good for you."
"Oh"
Next thing I know I get a call from them because their appX doesn't work after they upgraded to Win98. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Man, Microsoft has them by the balls.
Yes, I agree that the average joe wants all the extra features even IF they never use them.
I myself have no use for these "feature rich" programs.
That's my $0.02
My studio - www.graylands.ca
The two top reasons why people upgrade software
1. New versions usually have incompatible, proprietary file formats
2. And how else do you get bug fixes from Windows software
New features is not a reason to upgrade to the next version of a software package. Most IT people that I deal with are of the mind that 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it'. But since all software is 'broke', we are stuck in the endless upgrade cycle...
"Create [software] that even and idiot can use, and only an idiot will want to use it."
I don't know who came up with this quote, but it seems to fit. Seems that bloated software is mostly for people who don't "get" computers, but who *do* use them every day. This accounts for over 90% of the computer-using populous.
The downside is that the other 10% (or less) are nearly forced to use the bloatware also because the first 90% say "Here's that file I wanted you to look at, it's saved using Office 97." These are the same people who use MS Excel (or Word) to store record-and-field (read database) type info because they don't know what a database is or does.
I spend approximately 5-10% of my time writing scripts that do data conversion because someone decided to use "Bloatware" to do a particular job rather than the "correct" software. Why? Because "It's so easy to use!"
On the flip side, I *can't* use some of these products, because they're "too easy" to use. I still create HTML using a text editor. I'm the only one at my company (a multimedia company that produces web sites) who does this. Everyone else uses Frontpage, then wonders why the pages don't work right in Netscape. I will not use Word because it *insists* on correcting my "mistakes," and tries to anticipate what I want to do. If I put the letter 'c' in parentheses, it automatically converts it into a copyright symbol.
If I wanted a freekin copyright symbol, I would have used charmap.exe.
Enough soapboxing. =)
Because a 386/16 isn't powerful enough for word processing.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
libc5 weighs in at 600k
libc6 weighs in at 3mb!
(it also references other libraries for many functions!)
I'm sure this extra size reflects extra functionality, but creating statically linked binaries for libc6 systems seems to give them a bloated feel.
I've also had a nightmare with the libnss files, especially when running under a chrooted file system.
Developers should bear this in mind when creating new apps and system functions. Its very easy to let things get fat!
Lets learn from mistakes made by (cough) other OS's
Microsoft has always have a smaller, tighter Office -- Microsoft Works.
I do very much agree that most ppl upgrade just to be able to read/edit the current file formats which their work uses. File formats incompatibility has always been the driving force of the MS Office upgrades.
I heard Office 2000's native file formats are backward compatible with Office 97 though I haven't confirmed it from real users. If that's the case, WordPerfect and Lotus SmartSuite may be able to compete with Office 2000 on a more level ground.
I'd have to disagree about HTML mail, however. Most messages double in size *only* if they're relatively short. Longer HTML messages usually contain enough HTML tags and embedded images that the the size of the plain text version become insinificant in comparsion. And such overhead is only required for compatibilty -- a very good reason.
More importantly, I'm hoping HTML mail will emerge as the standard rich text format (or document container format for that matter) -- like PDF, but editable; like OpenDoc/OLE, but it actually exists and usable. Sure it doesn't provide acurate reproduction but it's the second most common file format in use today (next to plain text of course). It sure beats upgrading Word even 2 years just so you can read your boss' memo just because he/she wants a bold header in it.
Here are a few things that really bug me:
1. Neophytes always blame you if they send you a file and you can't read it. I mean, if they have Office 2000 they'll write a *plain text* memo in Word and bitch at you if you can read it. Which brings me to....
2. Neophytes don't care about file formats. They never ask "What file format would you like that in?" and save/export their files accordingly. Macs users are the worst. I say that not because I hate Macs (I love them actually), but because it's a lot easier to save PC-format files on the Mac than to read Mac-format files on the PC. In many occasions they could've saved me hours if only they spent a couple mins to export.
I think one of the interesting points made in the article was when he said "Bloat is the American dream: bigger, better, and everywhere all at once. Supersize it!". Are Microsoft making bloatware because they see that as what the American consumer wants? The thing is, they're selling into a global market which doesn't necessarily share the same values. Certainly here in Europe the market is one which drives small cars not huge ones, one that produces browsers like Opera and not IE5, and that doesn't supersize it! I don't want more, I want better.
As for fast lean web browsers, chimera, arena, and amaya all come to mind, except they've all been in beta-state with no development since 1996. Arena would be great if it didn't segfault trying to load most web pages. Amaya would be even better if it didn't try to be something I don't need (an html editor) and crash whenever I try to follow a hyperlink. Chimera looks nice but I have yet to see it do anything Mosaic couldn't do. And the newest version won't even compile for me. Of course, the newest version was released over 2 years ago. I'd be willing to work on some of those older browsers, trying to get them to a functional state, if there was any interest. Anyone else? mail me if you're interested in something like that. I don't want the newest and shiniest with all the features, like the Mozilla team, just something that works right and doesn't take up more than 4 megs of ram to run.
Netscape is bloated because of the mail, news, composer, instant messenger, and everything else even vaguely internet-related built in. I remember that 3.0 was a lot better for not using up as much ram but I had to dump it because it was hideously unstable. Heh. Now I can't even surf without filling up my 32 megs of ram and watching netscape fandango on core.
I'm really looking forward to Opera's linux release. Unfortunately, it's payware, but if the linux version is as good as the windows version, I'll shell out the $20. It's definately worth the money. Until then, I'm finding Mozilla to my liking. Everything except the hideous "chrome" bits. When I use mozilla, I only use the "viewer" part, with the bare-minimum user interface and the "my, that's alpha" feel. And it only consumes 10 megs of ram running. (heh. Only. I seem to recall running netscape 2.0 in 4 megs of ram sometime long, long ago.)
Maybe I need to try Mosaic again. If I remember my specs right, it didn't support any of the things I dislike about the "modern web", things like animated gifs, java(script), CSS, dhtml, and frames. Maybe I should just get off my duff and start coding something better. Mozilla tries too hard to be like netscape. I want something for just plain old browsing the web. Is that too much to ask? Oh, and it has to have pictures. lynx is great, but I need to get my pr0n somehow.
Enough of my ranting. Please feel free to point me in the direction of any other projects like this, or if there isn't any, I can damn well do it myself. Or die trying.
Leapfrog, (pfitzger@fyiowa.infi.net)
Even the programs I've mentioned are tainted by bloat. ksh is a pig. xterm too. Netscape, hah. Even tcl has gotten fat without much new in the way of useful features. I wish the BTL folks who gave us UNIX (and its kin, Plan 9 and Brazil) had given more direction to the modern commercial OS biz. Cruel fate.
But I'm damned sure I don't want my editor to spawn a dancing paperclip window everytime I hesitate at the keyboard. Makes a guy want to throw his crt out the window.
Call me crazy, but the guy was basically saying "bloat" is nothing more than new features in a program (as well as features that allow backwards-compatibility)? ...
Don't get me wrong, each version of software may get bigger and consume more resources. But in my mind, the term "bloat" means that the programs are written sloppily (is that even a word?), thus consuming more resources just because the programmers are inept and/or lazy (a couple people already touched on that).
Let's say I take my time and write a really good program with all the bells and whistles I can put into it. If Microsoft wrote the same program, it'd be much bigger and be more of a resource hog, although it'd functionally be the same thing. That's what I'm getting at. It's not that Microsoft adds "features" to their new versions, it's that they're really really lazy and in a lot of cases probably just trying to push their bloatware out the door to make more money. As a side-note, the "eligant" operating systems Microsoft writes are basically beta-quality when they ship and it's takes a couple years to get things ironed out... just in time to get a new upgraded version with a lot of nice new "features" - - which in turn are buggy and beta-quality so it just keeps going, and going and going
> good c/c++ compiler and especially a good linker can make code that is about 98% as efficient as pure assembler code.
No it can't (well theoretically it can), ask anyone programming 3D engines, games, DSP chips, Real Time audio DSP on pentiums and any other FPU intensive stuff. The C language doesn't include as primitives all the opcodes of assembler, because it's generic. For instance, how many C compilers produce the "FLDPI" instruction if you use the constant PI ?
One of the comments in the article referred to linking with ever bigger libraries. Hence after installing a few apps, the eagle-eyed will spot that there are now a number of separate copies (and versions) of various runtime libraries around such as 'MSVCRTxx' and (heh heh) 'VBRUNxxx'.
Happens quite a lot with OS/2 apps. A lot of OS/2 developers use VisualAge C++ and the OpenClass libraries. Problem is (depending on your perspective) that IBM specifically prohibit redistribution of the OpenClass DLLs unless they are renamed. So, after installing a few apps on OS/2, I see lots of DLLs called 'xxxOOB3' and 'xxxOOU3' littering my hard drive. Some apps even install multiple copies of the DLLs themselves to support different components!
Now, these libs only account for about 3MB of disk space, but when there are a few copies around it soon adds up.
Finally with Warp4 IBM released a common version of these libs called 'OS2OOC3' but (in typical IBM fashion) don't tell anyone about them. If all the apps linked to this common version, I could go some way to unbloating my hard drive. Not to mention the reduction in memory usage by having only one copy of the code in memory.
I altered my PMICS chess client recently to link to the Warp4 supplied libraries (instead of statically linking) and dropped the exe size from over 2MB to about 500k! I like that.
Anyone care to start a "Campaign for Common-Sense RTL Installation"? Maybe apps could start being nice and co-operating. E.g. "Ahh, I need V5 of the MSVC runtime but I see that app XYZ has already installed it. I'll use that one rather than copying my own version."
Wishful thinking?
I second that and must confest IE5 is great when compared to Communicator 4.x and IE4.
IE5 loads pages in a breeze (as fast as Navigator 3,0x, which I used to use for speed and IE4 for features). CSS/DHML has always been cleaner in IE and DOM is still nothing more than promise from Mozilla. OpenType sucks but IE can support TrueDoc via a transparent download of an ActiveX control.
Most importantly, IE5's history no longer hogs my system resources. IE4 used to eat up more resources as I followed more hyperlinks, and I'd have to close it to recover the resources. Now I can open 3 IE5 windows and browse all day with no problems.
I can see the flame mail flooding in alreay....
The same _Slate_ issue has a satire of Slashdot in their ongoing serial, "Silicon Follies"
> (1) One-program-does-it-all philosophy, which by,
...). You load what ;-) ...
> the way, is a valid design viewpoint. Emacs
> belongs to this school of thought,
> while Unix takes the opposite extreme
> (plenty of small interacting programs).
The idea of Emacs is:
plenty of small and interacting functions and data objects in one environment
The idea of a the Lisp machine OS is:
plenty of small and interacting objects in one environment
The original idea of Unix was:
plenty of small scripts and programs exchanging text data
In a Lisp machine what you see as Emacs
(actually called Zmacs) is only a small part
of the OS.
But it is basically the same idea - imagine having Emacs as your OS - this time object-oriented.
An OS that is a big soup of objects. You could
name it "bloatware" - but it's the philosophy
and basic building blocks that are different.
Emacs has a lot lisp objects (lists, numbers,
symbols, buffers, functions,
you need as software packages. The Lisp
Machine OS my computer is booting comes from a 100 MB Lisp image - but it contains hundreds of thousands of objects. These objects then will be typically alive for many weeks. So Emacs really is the small brother...
Unix on the other hand has a lot of scripts, programs,
It runs fast as hell on my Dual Pent Pro 200...with 128M of ram...and runs decent on a Pent 233MMX with 32M of ram here too...perhaps your linux/X is just not optimized for speed...you are probabaly running Redhat out of the box or something. Try slackware, stampede or even mandrake if you require redhat like version, I would say try SuSE as its fast, but its a little overkill on useless apps for most people (4 install cdroms, of course you dont have to install it all).
This article would make sense if said companies would be willing to sell you old versions... which seems to be his take on the matter. The problem is that if you don't own copies of the old stuff (esp. before it was distributed on CD-ROM) it's a PITA to get old versions, compared to getting the current version.
I think the Unix minimalism has gotten to the point where you need to use more than one app to do things. That leads to interdependancy which is bad (before you say it is not try installing X and KDE and compiling an X program on a computer that did not have X on it before. At one point I think I had to install Bison.) And one should not HAVE to use multiple programs to do tasks. People want to learn one program and have it suit their needs. However, Office apps can be bloated, I don't mind. When it extends to the OS + GUI, (ahhemm KDE, X) that is bad.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Oops...I was the one who requested the doom-VR and pinball game...doh!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
http://www.salon.com/tech/follies/1999/07/07/chapt er_33/index.html
I can't believe Microsoft would allow one of their minions to shine a spotlight on their most criminal behavior. No, I'm not talking about bloatware specifically - I'm talking about users being FORCED into buying - thus "demanding" - the latest bloatware, just to read a .doc file.
It's like saying "life" prisoners ASKED to be used in government sponsored medical testing. After all, they chose to go to jail right?
Didn't you ask for a local cable monopoly too? I get cable TV from my only provider, so I must be demanding less choice... [/sarcasm]
Best article I have seen on the causes of bloat in MS products is R.A. Downs's analysis of bloat in RegClean Version 4.1a Build 7364.1. In a program of 818KB, he finds 350KB (that's over 40% of "bloat," including unused cursors, dialogs, string entries, tool bar, menus, icons, etc. You might quibble with some of what he counts, but the basic point is powerful.
A. Michael Froomkin
U. Miami School of Law,POB 248087
Coral Gables, FL 33124,USA
I have a blog.
If the "thing" you want to do is really two things, then yes, sometimes Unix minimalism requires you to use two programs. This is a good thing.
Would you have the KDE guys reimplement everything X does, just so they can avoid being dependent of it. That's just silly - making work for the sake of it.
I even get cross when a mail app contains SMTP client code, instead of just calling sendmail.
--
Am I the only one that finds it funny that a writer on a Microsoft website is defending bloat? :-)
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Cheers,
Vic
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Seems to me this guy doesn't get partitionning: you don't need multiple copies of features in multiple programs. Just use libraries and servers to share functionality.
a) So windows needs bloat to run old programs? Nope, you need a virtual machine like dosemu to run the older programs, which does not affect the loading speed of newer ones. Similarly for Win 3.1 support in Win 95: wipe the slate clean. The old programs get loaded by a Win 3.1 virtual machine with Win 3.1 libraries. Win 3.1 was small and loads quickly, so this should at most double the size of your OS -- less more like since you need only have one copy of the GDI, etc.
b) If Microsoft had their way every app would contain a 99.9999% voice recognition engine... well first of all he misses the point that 99.9999% voice recognition engines require really good semantics/pragmatics, which do not currently exist. But leaving that aside, you only need 1 voice recognition engine in the box that all tools use.
YOU GET WHAT YOU ACCEPT.
that's cheek not check ;P
unless of course you were crying over how much it costs for bug fixes in 98SE (sounds like a car to me)
"If you're truly anti-bloat, there's a whole subgenre of dainty, low-bloat computers out there for you: [...] Windows CE handheld devices."
--
Brent J. Nordquist N0BJN
Hmmm, I thought your point was that
satisfying consuder demand was paramount. But I'm not convinced that consumers *want* all their information tools merged into 'one seamless whole'. What's so great about seamlessness?
I like modularity. Let's not forget, the entity
doing the "seaming" has vested interest in seaming together useful tools with gargabe we
don't want. Remember push-technology seamed-in
with the browsers... wasn't that just grande; advertising seamlessly packaged with the
browser (and OS?), pushed right into our faces.
Is this what we really want?
Do we really want our software to anticipate our needs. Or is MS and other corps. telling US this is what we need? When you type a search term into a search-engine, do you prefer the engine to respond to your direct request for pages containing keywords, or do you prefer the engine to figure out what you 'REALLY' are asking for?
Modularity over seamlessness, Responsiveness over anticipation, any day.
"Is this just useless, or is it expensive as well?"
If you can disregard the Open Source requirement, NetPositive on the BeOS is exactly what you want - small, fast, works great.
Unfortunately, there are many sites that just won't load properly without JavaScript. Sad but true.
D
----
I can give you a very serious answer to that. I write bloatware for a living. I am directly responsible for a handful of bloated DOS apps.
And the reason is this: Nobody pays me to spend the time to rewrite a system from scratch. They just want features added. And they always want the lowest short-term cost they can get.
It's just like evolution. Code is bloated for the same reason that your optic nerves are wired backwards, or that giraffes have an esophagal nerve that goes down, around their heart, and back up to the brain. Greedy optimization algorithms.
For example (this is a real life example): I just added Yet Another Report to a clinic's billing system. The report in question is very similar to one that I did last year. So what I did was this: I copied the old code and modified it. Now the program has two modules that are very similar with a lot of (nearly) duplicated functionality.
I could have rewritten the old code to be more general-purpose and called it twice: once from the "old" version of the report, and once from the "new" one. But this would have taken me a little bit longer. Likewise, you're probably wondering why I didn't just write it in a general way to begin with. Well, I try. When I know that I'm going to end up reusing some code, I'll do that. But if I don't know, then it's sometimes hard to justify the additional time taken to do the Right Thing.
That's the problem with doing the Right Thing: sometimes it just takes a little bit longer. Someone has to pay for that time, and non-programmers usually don't get what I'm talking about when I bring up issues related to the "cleanliness" of code. Quick and dirty almost always wins over long-term maintainability and elegance.
Oh, and there's another reason for bloat too: Once you have an installed base, you can never remove anything, no matter how braindead you think it is. Why? Because I never know how many (if any at all) of the end users are using some feature. Making the program better isn't worth the risk of getting complaints like, "I loaded the update and now my old inventory system doesn't work."
FWIW, in amateur projects where I don't have to be accountable to anyone, I do try to do the Right Thing. Heck, I used to be a VIC-20 programmer who would actually spend hours on a program to make it 12 bytes smaller. The part of my brain that used to do that, is still with me, it's just not the part that gets the bills paid.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The reasons for the phenomenal bloat in many software packages (particularly MS's) my include user requests for features, but that's a minimal part of it.
In order to sell a product that's competing against another, you have two options. You can advertise that it simply does its job better, that it costs less, or that it does MORE. "More" is generally the easiest to sell. "It works better" is kinda nebulous, and doesn't hold up against a product that has "100 additional features."
Users don't ask for these additional "features"... software developers come up with them in order to better compete. This is especially true in the case of Microsoft, which is often primarily competing against itself. Need to convince users of MS Squeegee87 to upgrade to Squeegee2010 EX Plus Beta Turbo Edition Gold? You pump up the feature list. Saying "we stripped it down so it'll run faster than Squeegee87" or "Yeah, so we made it $30 cheaper" doesn't so much work when they already have a version that "does more".
It's not the coders, mind you... I'm sure the coders would love to strip Office down to a clone of Notepad and a calculator. And this brilliant professional would have you believe that the coders do the design... generally not true.
This article is a perfect example of the arrogant attitude that seems to pervade Microsoft and its ilk. "Why don't you just get a bigger machine like everyone else, you idiot?" seems to be their mantra. My reply: I will. And since it's running a real operating system and decent apps, it'll actually run FASTER than the 233MHz box I'm running now. I don't upgrade to maintain poor performance...I upgrade to better it.
Trust me, I work with people who don't know computers. This is not the reason for bloatware. People who aren't nerds don't give a damn about bells and whistles, as far as I can tell. They really care if the can use the software. If they can open it up and start using with the least amount of fuss, then they are happy. Things like wizards are what they crave, not the latest bell and whistle. Wizards aren't all that bloaty... they are basically scripts that just sit on the application, taking the user through steps he or she wouldn't be able to figure out by themselves.
In addition, the vast majority of people in this situation do not have a choice as to what they use. They have to follow along what their IS department or computer manufacturer installed on their system. Blaming them is like blaming drivers for poor highway design.
The major reason for bloatware is, of course, to continue the cashflow of the manufacturer. Force people to ugrade by selling them bug fixes (which they should get free) or make the file formats incompatible.
Of course, there is also the programmer's seeming inability to declare a project "done." Take EMACS for example. It used to be a text editor. Now... it's... well... more. A lot more. Creeping featuritis is a disease that can be caught by OSS, as well as the commercial sector.
Personally, I think that every application gets to an ideal point of features/bloat. Wordprocessors, for the most part, reached that level years ago. To hammer on them more is counterproductive. Other applications, such as some 3D programs I use, have plenty of room to grow... there is always more things you can do that will add realism, for example. These I don;t think of as bloat, as long as they are easily accessable from the main application. When you start to create obscure little corners of your application that take the user minutes of hunting to find... that's when you've gone into pur bloat mode.
The author of the Slate article is quite right. When you spend you time reacting to 'user demands' from users you cannot get in touch with to try to question their requirements, which have probably also been filtered through a couple of layers of management and tech support staff somewhat less competent in the use of the software than the user, you do get big, ugly, baroque, bloated software. Especially when you burn on in there and make all those changes in a codebase that was never designed for them, because, of course, redesigning code you've already written doesn't provide any new marketing check boxes.
In short, users do not cause bloat. Mismanaged software companies cause bloat by trying to provide what users ask for, rather than what they really want, and by separating the users from the engineers who actually write the code behind a million walls of beauracrats.
Just so long as the flight simulator in Excel doesn't do what the first releases of MS Flight Simulator 98 did to computers. I fixed several computers that had installed an early release of MS FS 98, and it had put something it the autoexec.bat file, and something somewhere else that caused the machine to load Win 95 then go directly to FS 98. If you quit, and or died due to any cause, it would reboot the machine, and you couldn't alt-tab out of it.
After I fixed the second machine I told everyone in the dorms NOT to install the !@#!ing thing.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid.
If Microsoft had some intelligence and foresight, they would have designed a half decent filesystem. Then they wouldn't have to worry about the conversion between FAT and FAT32. Hmm. Is it elegance when they make kludges to patch up bad decisions? Hmmm . . .
If the Linux programmers had some intelligence and foresight, they would have designed a half decent filesystem and not have had to worry about ext/ext2. Repeat the above for a.out/elf, or the glibc compatibility nightmare.
HTML mail?!??? What in the hell are you guys smoking? The only thing as annoying as html mail is html newsgroup posts. GAAARGGH!! SLAP!!! *BONK* HISSS!!!! Cool features my ass. Why can't people stick to ASCII and attachments? Sigh.
Standards evolve when vendors provide more features; this is normal and healthy, and the way the industry is supposed to work. HTML mail is good because it's a simple, portable, non-patented extension; in contrast, Word document attachments are evil because they're complicated, non-portable and proprietary. Given that people actually *want* more structure to their mail than ASCII can provide, this is a natural direction for the industry to take. (Remember that we can't (and shouldn't) standardise before we have implementation experience!)
Most people don't use even a hundred of the gazzilion word features. Few people even used the spiffy label editor that comes with it. So why package it all into one blob? Keep it as seperate components and let users install precisely what they need.
Most people don't know, at install time, which set of features they'll need; their requirements do change over time. Besides, would you really want to spend hours figuring out which of the thousand features you want, specially when the resource you seem to be optimising for (disk/memory space?) is in fact quite plentiful? (A gigabyte of disk is worth ~$30; how many man-hours is that worth?)
- '()
...That is the question.
The department I work for will, in the near future, be upgrading their copies of M$ Office 97 to M$ Office 2k. Why? Is it because Office 2k has features that, if gone without, would cripple the department? No. Is it because Office 2k will perform superior to Office 97. No? Is it because the deployment and maintenance is easier. No?
Well, then what is it?
The reason they so feverously upgrade is simple. They NEED to maintain compatability with other departments that are upgrading. If they don't, documents between depts will be unreadable. They are being FORCED to upgrade only because others are doing so. They jump on the bandwagon and they can't get off.
So this begs the question, "Why are other departments upgrading?" The answer to this is even simpler. If you have worked as a SysAdmin for any lenghth of time, no doubt you have realised that when one person in the dept gets a "new", "cool" toy, every other clown will whine and whine until they get the same thing. Thats it. Its that simple. They just don't want to be the only one without the latest gizzmo. And you know, there is always someone in the dept that gets the latest toy because they THINK they need it.
Thats where M$ comes in. Thats where bloatware comes in. If they didn't chock the new software full of "must have" features, no one would buy it. Nevermind that when they do buy it, they won't use any of the new features. In fact, I think I would be hard pressed to find anyone in my dept that uses anything other than spellchecker.
So, to upgrade or not to upgrade? It all comes down to who has to have the latest toy. Features are packed in, thus making the software bloated, so that one person will want it just badly enough to buy it. Once that happens, everyone else follows the herd.
Go figure.
Mark
Okay, I'm sure there are many users who want some new features. Why does that mean that every user should have to pay the price (not only in money, but also in drive space, load time, training, etc.) for every new feature? I use Word for Windows, but I doubt that I use more than a handful of the new features that have been introduced since, what, version 2.0? Background spell checking is nice, and I guess a decent scripting engine (security issues aside) is useful for any program. Oh yeah, they did recompile in 32-bit mode when Office 95 came out.
How much of the added functionality would be better implemented using some sort of plug-in architecture? Most of it, IMHO. But that's not the Microsoft Way.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Well, not always -- he does talk about the elegance of Windows [shudder] -- but his basic point is valid: people like to have features not necessarily to use them. IMHO bloat is caused by:
...
(1) One-program-does-it-all philosophy, which by, the way, is a valid design viewpoint. Emacs belongs to this school of thought, while Unix takes the opposite extreme (plenty of small interacting programs).
(2) Monolithic design, which is NOT a feature. MS Word has features targeted at lawyers (and useless for everybody else), at accountants, at writers, etc., etc. You don't need most of them, but get all of them anyway. Pluggable modules would have been a much cleaner solution (you are a lawyer? plug in the "Lawyer" module...)
(3) Feature competition between programs, which is driven by users: "What, your program cannot do a mail-merge to an index which includes animated GIFs and print out each third line?? It sucks, mine can do it!".
(4) The need for backward compatibilitly. This is less visible in application programs and more visible in system tools which often must be bug-for-bug compatible with everything going back ten years or more.
(5) The need to support all hardware under the sun. And the number of cool devices that you can plug into a computer grows and grows and grows and
(6) In the trade-off between a clean/tight code and speed of development, speed almost always wins. In the current business environment projects that are 50% over budget and on time are much much better than projects that are on budget but 50% late. Basically, the slogan is: "who cares whether it is optimized, if it works, ship it!" (in case of MS or games it is often "who cares if it works properly, ship it anyway!")
So I don't believe it is the malice of Microsoft or the incompetence of programmers that gives us bloated programs. Basically the definition of a bloat is "this program demands more resources than I expected it to". Having more resources available is a (not necessarily the) solution. Yes, Office 2000 needs ~200Mb of disk space to install. So what? I recently bought myself another hard drive -- it cost under $200 and is 10Gb in size. Do I care that much about allocating 2% of it to MS Office? Guess.
Bloat is bad in that it adds complexity which is the enemy. Insofar it consumes computer resources it is tolerable.
Kaa
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
I think the article spells out a weakness in the American people: hyper-consumerism. The need for more. This is not limited to software but to hardware, stereos, tv, et all. This does not affect everyone of course but the vast majority. I fall prey to it myself. I recently purchased a TNT2 Ultra card. My old TNT card was working fine - it was fast, had great color, and supported my monitor's maximum resolution. Still I felt the need to have the newer version. I think that is why we all get excited when new kernels come out. I have accepted the fact that everything gets bigger/better.
Every program expands until it's a desktop publisher!
Hey, I've been setting my newsletters in HTML and printing from Netscape. It's a step up from doing it in a spreadsheet, and a darn sight faster than WordPerfect, which got so fat when it was turned into a publisher that it's now too slow.
It's all relative. My office package 10 years ago was 10Mb on a 40Mb drive. Today it's only 200Mb on a 15 gigger. Lots more room for them pictures.
Oh, yeah, because GNOME is such a lean, mean fighting machine. And X/Emacs, man, what fast and furious editor. In fact, someone should send Emacs to M$ and all those other companies to show them how an editor should work.
Dionysus
bromius@usa.net
The author of this article has apparently fallen into the trap that so many other people have; namely, the mindset that the larger a piece of software is, the better it must be. I base this conclusion off of the fact that he seems to correlate bloat with "nifty features" such as voice recognition and "HTML mail."
Is this the bloat you know? Because it isn't the bloat that I know.
We're seeing a trend in software, and it's not a Microsoft-only trend (although one might argue that Microsoft is perhaps the best example.) When you see version 2.0 of a product that has double the system requirements (disk space, memory, processor speed, etc.) of version 1.0, it's pretty hard to explain away the bloat as being "nifty new features" if version 2.0 only provides a few new pieces of functionality. This author would have us believe that if the system requirements of a particular package double from one version to another, then that means that the functionality/usefulness of the new version is double that of its predecessor?
Does anybody really believe that?
For a period of about eight years, I used AppleWorks to do most of my home productivity work. For those of you that may be unfamiliar with it, it was basically an integrated applications suite that contained a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a rudimentary database. The integration was pretty nice; you could insert spreadsheets into your WP documents and the database had features like the always-useful mail merge. And it fit on one side of a 5-1/4" floppy disk, which was 144K.
Now, nobody in their right mind is going to argue that AppleWorks is more powerful than Office 2000. But let's use the author's estimate that a full install of Office requires 200M of disk space (this seems a bit low to me, but what the hell.) By the author's assumption, this means that Office 2000 has 1,422 times the functionality of AppleWorks. Whee! Viva la Office!
It doesn't matter, really; he's preaching to the pew. Microsoft has a large base of loyal customers who have demonstrated time and again that they're really not interested in issues like this. And quite frankly, maybe it's because most of their customers simply don't know enough to complain. (It's hard to suggest this without sounding like an elitist bastard, I know.) In reality, maybe it's pretty tough to blame Microsoft for consistently cranking out some of the most shameless bloatware around. After all, if their customers don't care, then why should they?
The bottom line is this: if you have to "up" the processor requirements and grow your executable size by 20% to accomodate a new, sophisticated rendering engine, then that's one thing. But if you throw in a flight simulator, 600K of unused bitmaps, and a mishmash of other junk and then start complaining about "deadlines", that's something completely different. If it makes me a "whiner" or a "malcontent" to complain about the latter, then I guess I'm proud to stand among the rank-and-file of whiners and malcontents.
Sorry, Redmond; one of the reasons I don't use your stuff is because I don't want to buy a new machine every year. And guess what! Thanks to Linux, I don't have to.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Yes, making a OS moduluar has it problems, such as you create depencies. But that's life. You have to use depency every day in life (you need money before you can buy that car), the other way just doesn't work. The same thing is true with Windows, a program might require you have Windows 98 installed and some werid graphics lib before you can use it. The Mac isn't much different either, you often need shared libaries for programs to run (Word 6 on the Mac required like 21 shared libaries to just run! Forently, Word 98 doesn't require any, because of a tool that automantains the shared libaries on your system.)
Forently, packaging systems makes this easy to deal with, for example installing the qt package will tell you kindly, you must have X11, and this and that installed.
But not everybody needs/wants qt on their system. So build it as part of your X Server? That would add bloat.
So this is a good idea to make stuff modulized.
Consider automobiles and their evolution, for instance. Features have been creeping in for years. Compared to software, however, the bloat rate is much slower. Why? 'Cause features cost money when you have to make them out of real hardware!
As another example, consider toothpaste or laundry soap. What ``feature'' can you possibly add to either of them to make them actually perform better? Both have hit the performance plateau long ago. So instead of adding new features, they give us the same old product in a great new package.
Software , on the other hand... Where do I begin? Where does it end? What new feature will we think of next that simply MUST be in our own free software? Don't get me wrong, I don't want to get a zillion replies to the effect that ``if you don't like (package X)'s bloat, you don't have to use it''
My point is simply that as long as machines get faster, software will expand to fill the available cpu cycles, and it doesn't cost anything more than it did before.
I understand that it is hard to keep the bloat down, that you have to do it quickly, and that once a feature is added it can never be removed. But that still doesn't explain the sheer size of some programs.
PKLite and it's kin are a testament to the redundancy inheirant in today's software. A quick test to see if an executable is tightly written is to see how much it can be compressed. A really tight executable will be the same size or a little larger after being compressed. Sure, things like unrolled loops will give a few percent, but you get a performance boost from them. There's no exuse for having both poor performance and a large, reduntant product.
Someone have a reliable procmail recipe for it?
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Windows 3.1 apps that need WINSOCK.DLL to function don't work right under Windows 98. Windows 98 doesn't have enough conventional memory for most good DOS games, and there's no way to control a lot of the stuff that gets loaded. Backwards compatibility is a joke in M$-world.
grep -ri 'should work'
Like the man said: "one of the reasons Windows 95 and Windows 98 are so "bloated" is so that they can run the old applications".
How big/bloated do you reckon Gnome/KDE/Window Maker will be by the time they really do what they're meant to do?
Regards, Ralph.
He makes some valid points in the article. For the average user (not the ubergeeks who hang out here), that user is going to purchase their software, and unless they have a reason to get "morebetterfastershinier", they'll buy virtually all the software they will ever use in the first month or so of owning the computer. If that's the case, software manufacturers don't make very much money (not just billg). Now I'm not saying that the upgrade treadmill is a Good Thing, but under the current economic and development model, I understand why it happens. Heck, you can even take a wonderful free program like Emacs that can be extended and it will be.
That said, there's two ways off the treadmill I can think of:
Moore's law finally runs out of gas (not any time soon).
More users get annoyed and just stop upgrading all the time.
Well, I suspect the second choice is the likeliest, but I'm afraid we're stuck for now. Ultimately I'd rather see small products rather than big products, but I'd be happy if they just could improve the quality of what does ship. And it's not just Microsoft - it's virtually all commercial developers who are guilty. How many people who use Windows and hate bloated office suites do their word processing with Yeah Write?
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
The basic premise behind Mr. Shuman's argument is that bloatware is the consumer's fault/problem. We wanted it so we got it. And those of us who complain should shut up and deal with it. This has been Microsoft's primary attitude since Winblows 95. Everytime a Windows 95 box crashes the user is led to believe that the problem is something he/she did.
Another point, I felt was in typical Micro$oft fashion was his statement . Excuse me Mr. Shuman, but not all of us can afford a nice new system everytime a new Intel product comes out. Many of us have to make due with what we have until we can afford a new system. Becasue of Micro$oft and a few others, the typical lifespan of a home computer is greatly reduced, thus in the Micro$oft world your system becomes obsolete quicker. Okay power down rant mode.... the end
-------------------------------------------- It looks just like a Telefunken U-47! -Frank Zappa
thanks for the correction
Well, the he negated his own comment, so I call his bluff. I don't think the arguement should be between old and new, it should be between bloat and non-bloat.
New applications are all bloated, so therefore, I have to use the bloated software. How else will I get the bug fixes? If I am not forced to buy the new bloatware, why can't I load a Word97 document with Word95 if none of the cool features are used?
I also like a previous comment. Where can I buy the old non-bloated software? Therefore, my conclusion is that purchasing nonbloat is not an option.
Then again, there's open source....
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I believe 'command | tail -1' will do it. Or something very like that. Read the manual page.
Why can't we just use our old packages?
Umm becauase every new verion of MS Office has a file format which is incompatible with the old versions? And if one person upgrades then to read their documents then everyone has to upgrade...
The fundamental error Mr. Shuman makes is when he equates features with bloat. As many of us know, the two are not synonymous. In fact, true bloat usually works against extra features, by making them run inefficiently. Another error he verges on making, but backs away at the very brink, is that of thinking that more features means better. He does in fact note that many new features aren't actually used, it's just important that they be there. But that assumption--that bigger software means more features means better--lies like a distant cloud over his whole article, cutting off its light and air. Common press mistake. Ever read a software review in a major trade magazine? Did it have a feature-comparison table? And did it have a "these features are useless" table? For me, the answers are "yes" and "no", respectively.
Simply having too many features can be a bad thing. About eight years ago, my company went looking for a successor to "roff" for the developers to use to create documentation. The commitee settled on Interleaf, a full-blown document preparation system. The developers hated it, and used it only when forced. Why? Their most common complaint was that it was "too complicated". Interleaf isn't a bad program, and these aren't stupid people, just people who don't want to spend months learning how to do something that isn't central to their lives. I can't blame them.
Ding! Compile is done--must run.
Oh. My. God.
If these are the people making the TOOLS, imagine what stupid DEVELOPERS are capable of. No wonder everything is bloated in Windows! The best programmer in the world is only as good as the tools/code he/she has to use. To give them credit, it would appear that *most* Windows developers are much more intelligent than the bozos who made Regclean. Heck, I'm not even familiar with VC++ or MFC, and I bet *I* could make a less bloated version. What type of monkeys do they hire at MS?
"Re:My humble responses (Score:1)
by nil on Wednesday July 07, @12:58PM EDT (#101)
(User Info)"
[snip]
"Quite unprovable; I'm not convinced that MS programmers are either sloppy or stupid."
BE convinced. VERY convinced.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
>DOS applications, circa 1988: WordPerfect, Lotus 123, dBase, Crosstalk, etc.
Ahh yes. 1988, 80286, 2 megs RAM, and a whopping 40 meg hard drive dual booted with SCO, DOS. I remember those grand days of the blue screened WordPerfect with the cool little plastic function sheet. And Crosstalk, dialing up to a local BBS to play hack and superrogue.
Those were the days.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
I find myself in the odd position of defending Micros~1. Autocorrect does belong in a text editor / word processor. It's a useful feature (to the point where I use it in vi, for example). However, they screwed up in two major ways with Word:
Fortunately, you can at least disable all the automatic corrections in Word (and in fact, this is one of the first things I do on the few occasions I'm forced to use it). There's enough things genuinely wrong with Word (no ligatures, hopeless maths layout, poor underlining, etc.) that we don't need to pick on one of the few things they nearly got right!
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Why are you using a "mail app" at all?
The mail command isn't good enough for you?
In the beginning of the article he quotes his GF: "why is ms soft so bloated, so full of junk [...]?"
About 1 paragraph lower he says "I'll let you in a little secret.. the problem is not that it's bloated, the problem is that it's not bloated enough."
I read: "We at Microsoft think that our software has tons of junk as of now but not enough as of yet. We are however determined to work in the direction of fixing this annoying shortcoming."
heh.
He also referred to 133mhz computers as 'doorstops'. This article lets us peak into the MS's mind. They view old hardware and people who use it as enemies. They view old versions of their own code as an enemy. Their dream is that every person would spend TONS of money on microsoft software and intel hardware as to drive the progress and make it possible for them to make some useful things like voice recognition, et cetera. The problem with microsoft is that they drive the wave of computer obsession and try to make this wave bigger. Think of the people who bought win98 and really loved it because of menus sliding out in a cute manner, and you'll see what I mean. What really saddens me is that Microsoft does not deliver on their promises. World has already plunked what.. 100 billions or something in Microsoft.. if we were told we would do that in '80 we'd think by now we should have something cooler than voice recognition. Possibly a 3d windows interface, natural language commands (something like "find all
files that I downloaded in last two weeks and that have a word 'zip' in it". *I* don't need this. I like my linux console just fine. But people that spent $100 bill. have gotten a piece of bloated garbage with few features for it. Oh, it also runs old dos programs, joy. Oh wait, i think i missed something.. it EVEN runs goofy win 3.1 programs! Well, I stand corrected. 100 billions well spent, folks.
As a side note.. sift through vim documentation.. about 1 meg (1000 pages) text file describing features. Binary size is about 1 meg. That's proof enough for me that bloat does not mean features and vice versa. If anything, bloat is used to distract you from the fact that no new useful features are present.
- Rainy
clean/tight??? Clean code is more likely to result in bloat than anything else. That's one reason why massive monsters like Microsoft Word have so few problems relative to tiny tools like GetRight. As I recall, Microsoft's bug rates for shipped code are something like 1/10 that of the average software company--and it's not because of dumb luck.
I've gone off roading in my Toyota Tercell, it was fun, and I've programed my VCR, I used to do it all the time
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
At first I couldn't figure out this article. Of course users have diverse needs, and of course software companies should write code to satisfy their customers. Our problem is with how MS forces these highly specific bits of code on everyone -- it's not like Windows totally lacks the concepts of dynamic libraries and soft menus.
It's like Toyota said that, to satisfy other users, my 2-seater MR-2 much now include a large cargo space (like a pickup) and high wheel clearance (like an SUV). The impact on the sports car's performance is... regretable.
There is no technical reason for this type of universal bloat, in fact there are several technical reasons to keep the code lean and only add what each customer needs. Decent programmers would *never* continually issue new releases where each file format is incompatible with the prior one. (Sometimes major changes are required, but they should be rare - once a decade is too often.) Only marketing benefits from the current setup.
Marketing.
Defense of a monopoly position.
Then it hit me. The article wasn't written for us code warriors - he knew that we would easily see through his smoke&mirror defense of the technically indefensible. The article was nothing more than FUD to make Joe User fear that MS's inevitable loss in the DoJ action will somehow lead to him losing the feature or two that he needs for his specific business. Or a bright shining future with voice recognition (like a bullpen full of chatting staff is somehow better than typing staff) and "Jewish Mother"/"Drill Sergeant" software ("Coyote, from your exercise log application I see you're slacking off again! Drop and give me twenty!") Technically, that's utter nonsense. Legally, that's utter nonsense (since neither the courts nor the DoJ want to harm the ultimate user).
But as groundwork to prepare Office users to write letters to their congressmen about how they are "harmed" by the court sanctions... it's brilliant. Why bitch about the cost of upgrading your system every year or so when the alternative is losing your business?
Expect to see more future articles refering this article as the definitive word (no pun intended) on this issue. Even the Weekly World News has learned that trick! A lot of people don't realize the tight relationship between Slate and Microsoft, or the significance of the fact that this site doesn't provide an immediate feedback section. And they'll certainly miss the significance of the missing OS between Windows CE (and palm pilots) and Windows 98, that awkward platform that shows you don't need 64 MB of memory to simply turn on the power (unlike Windows 2000).
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
This would be OK, _IFF_ there was any form of document compatibility between versions.
:)
The file format didn't change from Office 97 to Office 2000, and after the fiasco with Office 95 to Office 97, I'll be surprised if it changes again in the near future
I thought Emacs was exactly the opposite.
Emacs is just an editor. All it does is accept input from the user. Well, that and run Lisp programs. You can create Lisp programs to do whatever you want, but there is a difference between that and having that functionality inside of Emacs (which would be bloat), as a part of Emacs. Would you say Bash or Perl are bloated? Well, look at all the things they can do, that has to be bloat! NO.
Compare Emacs with just about any other IDE. What people calls Borland C or Visual C is a compiler, an editor, a debugger, a help system and a lot of other things. Emacs, on the other hand, just `connects' programs. I tell it to recompile (by pressing F9 according to my configuration) and it executes make -k. Make, on its turn, executes (according to my Makefile's) some Perl scripts, shell scripts and GCC. Emacs just parses their output. Then I do M-X gdb and Emacs acts as a front end to GDB. So I can debug my code and edit it within the same program, but using different programs. Emacs just talks with GDB, that's all it does, act as an awesome interface between me and the programs. But never does it attempt to compile or to debug my executables. When I tell it to check my spelling, all it does is fork and talk with ispell... and I could go on and on.
Anyway Emacs is just a front end to other programs. And it has a Lisp interpreter so I can tell it exactly what to do. This is kinda like saying that the GNU readline library is bloatware, since it attempts to provide a user interface to every command-line program. It is exactly the opposite: don't code the way to read info at a prompt, use another program (a library) to do it. And that just rocks, I really wish every command-line program I have used GNU readline, instead of providing their own (stupid) prompts.
Alejo.
i read an article/interview with bill gates once.
he basically told the guy '95% of the telephone calls
we get are asking how to do stuff with our programs,, they arent
about bug fixes' and he says basically that people
dont buy for bug fixes they buy for new features..
personally i think they find ways to work around the bugs...
To write a file, I use ':w', simple as that. No need to make sure my terminal thinks meta means the same thing as my host. Control-x control-s? Yes, flamewars will start. Everyone's got their own favorite pet editor, which happens to be their favorite because of personal preference.
If you scale down emacs, you're left with just a plain old text editor. Kudos to you! I had that to start with. 'Meta-x eliza' never meant much to me.
uh, hit the delete key once, and it removes autocorection
the worst thing about that is that it creates lazy typers, who are dependent on Msft software to write corectly...
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"Subtle mind control? Why do all these HTML buttons say 'Submit' ?"
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n