When I browse round the internet, there's a little inward groan every time I realise I'm going to have to click a link that has (PDF) after it. It's like driving down a motorway and suddenly seeing a 30MPH limit sign. The IE plugin is unbelievably slow on everything I've tested it on - it's always quicker to download the file to desktop and then run it into the standalone viewer, then rely on the IE plugin. Firefox is faster, but has little hiccups and crashes when you try to close a tab containing a PDF. As for the reader itself... does anyone else sit there watching those messages flash past on the splash screen get reminded of the joke messages from Maxis software? Reticulating splines, please wait... Inverting career ladder, please wait... Multiplying mammal matrix...
It's still painfully slow even on a fast machine (yeah, okay, I'm impatient). I hope MS manages to do it a bit faster and cleaner in their own implementation.
Of course, I really hoped that the rest of the world, like me, would feel no need to upgrade to Vista/Orifice12, and this might work against that hope...
If you want to know for sure whether two files are identical, you're probably better off comparing them, byte-for-byte. After all, to compute a hash, you have to read in every byte anyway (albeit in blocks) AND compute complicated bitwise rotations and xors etc, so it's probably easier and faster just to compare byte-for-byte.
I must admit, I've used a SHA-1 hash to conduct a file compare in my code, but that's just 'cos I'm lazy and I'd already written the code for a SHA-1 compare:)
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When I browse round the internet, there's a little inward groan every time I realise I'm going to have to click a link that has (PDF) after it. It's like driving down a motorway and suddenly seeing a 30MPH limit sign. The IE plugin is unbelievably slow on everything I've tested it on - it's always quicker to download the file to desktop and then run it into the standalone viewer, then rely on the IE plugin. Firefox is faster, but has little hiccups and crashes when you try to close a tab containing a PDF. As for the reader itself... does anyone else sit there watching those messages flash past on the splash screen get reminded of the joke messages from Maxis software? Reticulating splines, please wait... Inverting career ladder, please wait... Multiplying mammal matrix...
It's still painfully slow even on a fast machine (yeah, okay, I'm impatient). I hope MS manages to do it a bit faster and cleaner in their own implementation.
Of course, I really hoped that the rest of the world, like me, would feel no need to upgrade to Vista/Orifice12, and this might work against that hope...
If you want to know for sure whether two files are identical, you're probably better off comparing them, byte-for-byte. After all, to compute a hash, you have to read in every byte anyway (albeit in blocks) AND compute complicated bitwise rotations and xors etc, so it's probably easier and faster just to compare byte-for-byte.
:)
I must admit, I've used a SHA-1 hash to conduct a file compare in my code, but that's just 'cos I'm lazy and I'd already written the code for a SHA-1 compare