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#121
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Mike on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 19:28:12 -0800 typed in
alt.windows7.general the following: On 3/2/2019 7:02 PM, Bill in Co wrote: pyotr filipivich wrote: Ken Blake on Sat, 02 Mar 2019 18:05:21 -0700 typed in alt.windows7.general the following: On Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:39:53 -0800, pyotr filipivich wrote: "Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 15:46:24 -0500 typed in alt.windows7.general the following: In that world it's not your computer and you have no business doing much of anything other than writing Word docs and saving them to your docs folder. I have been using Wordperfect since it was Wordstar. WordPerfect was never WordStar. They were two different competing products. You're probably correct. No probably about it, he is correct. And don't forget PC Write, but I might be dating myself. PC Write was I think written in assembly, and was lightweight and super fast. Not as full featured as the others, of course, but infinitely preferable to EDLIN (egads). My students don't know how good they have it nowadays, by not having to use EDLIN to write their reports. Or having to use a typewriter. You ain't lived until you've had to walk 100 yards across the building to get a printout to see if your text formatting was was you wanted. Those who popped out of the womb with an iPad in one hand will never appreciate what they have. GF would use the punch card machines. Turn in the deck, go to class, come back with the results. "Beat waiting for a terminal." -- pyotr filipivich Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing? |
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#122
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 20:22:57
-0700 typed in alt.windows7.general the following: Except for stuff that is baked into windows like OFFICE, I run as many apps as possible as portable apps. I put all my files in a separate directory tree so I never have any issues writing there. Stuff that automagically writes into downloads gets moved immediately. IT is possible to largely decouple yourself from the OS. It depends entirely on what you are doing. So it may be possible for some, but not so for others. But admitely perhaps so, at least for most users simply running their programs. As I've observed befo most computer users have no idea what is happening behind the screen. Save to hardrive makes as much sense as "save to the cloud". ("How can it save tot he cloud when the sky's are clear?") -- pyotr filipivich Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing? |
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
"Mayayana" on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 10:44:41 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following: | Fire it up when you're bored and learn. | | I'm never bored for periods long enough for them to be worthwhile for | such sessions. | I was thinking that, too. I used to love exploring tweaks. These days I can't be bothered. If I have to spend two weeks of intensive work to make the product usable then that's just 2 weeks wasted that I'm not getting paid for. Assuming you have the two weeks. -- pyotr filipivich Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing? |
#124
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
On 3/2/19 3:23 PM, Ant wrote:
[snip] Have you guys considered dropping Windows and going to another OS like Linux, mac OS, etc.? I considered that when Win2000 was becoming unusable. Changing gradually, I now use Linux most of the time. It's not that hard for normal internet stuff (web, email, newsgroups). I have one system with Win 10 for testing*, but it's a lot harder to use. For anything that actually requires Windows I use 7. [snip] * - mainly that's website testing. I do development on Linux (currently Xubuntu). Win 10 allows testing on Edge. -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "I don't see any god up here." -- Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), Soviet cosmonaut |
#125
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
On 3/2/19 4:00 PM, Bill in Co wrote:
[snip] Yup, considered it. Spent "a bit" of time using Cinnamon Lint, but for me it's just not worth all the hassle (like in getting and customizing the programs, etc). Plus I expect most of us are already too heavily "invested" in Windows, both program wise and knowledge wise. Mac is a closed off, walled garden, and expensive, so that's out for me. I like more freedom of choice. :-) The change is MUCH easier it you don't try to do it all at once. My first use of Linux was with the web (on Firefox which I was already using on Windows). I've done over 90% of that change. There's no need to make it complete, when you can keep Windows for when you need it. BTW, most things I heeded help with on Linux, have solutions on the web. -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "I don't see any god up here." -- Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), Soviet cosmonaut |
#126
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
"pyotr filipivich" wrote
| It's beyond my expertise. I'm more intersted in the prayers. | | Shall I add you to my list? 8-) Or were you asking what they | were? (FYI Pretty much straight out of the Eastern Orthodox Prayer | books, main change is that where they have "Pray for N[NN]." I | inserted the names. So I don't have to try and remember who I said I | would pray for. Lord have mercy the memory isn't what it used to be.) Just curious. I don't know anything about EO. My impression was that it's more directly spiritual than Catholicism, but one doesn't see the books around. I once read a history of Christianity, partly out of curiosity about EO, but it turned out to be basically a backward family tree from Chuch of England. EO seems to be largely erased from W. European history. I got a book recently. The Cloud of Unknowing. Translated by Carmen Butcher. Not EO, of course, but a very nice piece of work. I'd describe it as one of the most profound works on the most profound meditation that I've ever come across. And in a pleasant, homey, Christian style. |
#127
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
On 3/2/19 4:47 PM, Mike wrote:
[snip] The user interface is a non-issue.Â* You CAN learn the differences and make 10 work.Â* Yes, it's a PITA, get over it.Â* There is no viable alternative. Summary: INEVITABLE Maybe, but DEFINITELY NOT 100% of the time. |
#128
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
"pyotr filipivich" wrote
| I was thinking that, too. I used to love exploring | tweaks. These days I can't be bothered. If I have | to spend two weeks of intensive work to make the | product usable then that's just 2 weeks wasted that | I'm not getting paid for. | | Assuming you have the two weeks. These days I have more time. I'm a semi-retired building contractor with a sideline of writing Windows software and doing web design. But I have projects I get into. I'd prefer to be doing something useful rather than researching how to shut off inane messages. |
#129
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
In message , Char Jackson
writes: On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake wrote: It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes a lot of disk space. I think bloated means different things to different people, and I think people's personal definitions have changed over the years. Mine have. Toward the beginning of the PC age, it could certainly have meant that a program has gotten physically larger, thus taking longer to install, longer to launch, consuming more disk space and more RAM. I'd also include longer to type in, (remember those?), and longer to download, Yes, I do (-:. for things that came that way. Those are all aspects of a program that has gotten *bigger*. For me, all of those things have fallen by the I'm _mostly_ in agreement with you so far; certainly, disc space is cheap and we have more RAM than we used to (though IMO bloat easily keeps up with that). wayside and don't matter anymore. For completeness, I could add a complaint that bloated programs run slower than their leaner counterparts, but today's computing hardware largely masks that kind of thing because current hardware is so powerful. I'm _beginning_ to diverge there. If a prog. now needs oodles of both RAM and processor power _to do what its predecessor did_, then it's probably sloppily written, and therefore _likely_ to be less reliable. Not 100% so, though, I grant: some modern behemoths are reliable, even if the computer groans running them. In the past 10+ years, to me bloated means that the features in a program that I want and use are slowly disappearing into a mist of ever-expanding other features that I don't care about. IMHO, the poster child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups, users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief. I don't care about disk space or any of that other stuff. The program itself is bloated to the point of being entirely unusable. Now there, I disagree completely. Not only is it small (to the extent of it being the poster child for compact software - and I still feel it works perceptibly faster because of that), but to do what I used to do with a version from several years ago, I still press the same keys. (Unlike, for example, Word, where the commonest question type is "where has xxx gone?") Because all (or nearly all - there may be _some_ that have changed, but I can't think of any) its functions are where they've always been, any extra functionality that has been added _isn't_ intrusive. As with any software, you have to use it a bit to learn where things are; I note you don't tell us what you use to do what IV does, but I suspect if you did I'd find it just as non-intuitive as you find IV (and I bet it'd be slower to do things, too). (What was it you were wanting to _do_ in IrfanView that you found so frustrating? What _do_ you normally use instead to do that?) [] We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how The stability tends to suffer with (what _I_ call) bloat. comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it uses. I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make no sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to know. To me, added features are bloat if they cause existing features to move around. I do _sometimes_ agree in principle that features are added in a higgledy-piggledy way, so there comes a point where a major rearrangement is a good idea - but in practice, I nearly always think "wish they'd kept that to the next version", or even get a third-party patch that makes the new look like the old. (I got a very good one of those - from .ch-land, I think - when the "ribbon" version of Office came in. With that, I could get round the "bloat" of that version.) There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat that I object to. Not disk space. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf in the kingdom of the bland, the one idea is king. - Rory Bremner (on politics), RT 2015/1/31-2/6 |
#130
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
On 3/2/19 7:05 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 02 Mar 2019 16:39:53 -0800, pyotr filipivich [snip] WordPerfect was never WordStar. They were two different competing products. I bought my first personal computer in 1987. I started out using WordStar on it, but quickly changed to WordPerfect, which I liked much better. BTW, I have used the last version of WordStar from when the manufacturer was still MicroPro. I don't have that software anymore, but I remember it came with a real manual. Thick one (about 1000 pages), not like the "institutional toilet paper" (one thin crinkly sheet) one you often get now. I still use WordPerfect and still like it much better than all its competition. -- Mark Lloyd http://notstupid.us/ "I don't see any god up here." -- Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), Soviet cosmonaut |
#131
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Ken Blake wrote:
On Sat, 2 Mar 2019 21:35:27 -0700, "Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote: Mayayana wrote: "pyotr filipivich" wrote So far, I have found one thing Word does, which WP doesn't: break a large brochure up into signatures. But all the rest, - ?ave you ever tried to track down where the style change was made which is screwing up the document?" You lost me there. I used to use WordPro from a magazine CD. Then I switched to OO and now Libre Office. But I only use it a bit, to write out receipts, contracts, bills, etc. I made the template files years ago, so I've never really had to master office programs. Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office now), or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then either OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you need, not sure. Just wondering. It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes a lot of disk space. My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices, when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives) 1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10 if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care. I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each. That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents. We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it uses. Your assumption was only partially correct. By bloated, I mean hog wise in terms of resources used and responsiveness. So mostly that, but in addition to the filesize, which is only secondary. And yes, I am concerned about what the program does, and how much extra junk has been added in there to dull down my experience of using their program (like needless eye candy, or extra baggage functions of little use, such as (you want a good one? social app crap access) I also had only a 10 GB HD back then too. Actually, I didn't have a hard drive at all, with the original IBM PC, and was swapping out 5.25 floppy disks for a "large" program to run, until some friend came over and gave me a 10 GB HD, and I then was in heaven. No need to swap out floppy disks for some program to run anymore! |
#132
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Ken Blake wrote:
On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 11:21:06 -0600, Char Jackson wrote: On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake wrote: It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes a lot of disk space. I think bloated means different things to different people, and I think people's personal definitions have changed over the years. Mine have. Toward the beginning of the PC age, it could certainly have meant that a program has gotten physically larger, thus taking longer to install, longer to launch, consuming more disk space and more RAM. I'd also include longer to type in, (remember those?), and longer to download, for things that came that way. Those are all aspects of a program that has gotten *bigger*. For me, all of those things have fallen by the wayside and don't matter anymore. For completeness, I could add a complaint that bloated programs run slower than their leaner counterparts, but today's computing hardware largely masks that kind of thing because current hardware is so powerful. In the past 10+ years, to me bloated means that the features in a program that I want and use are slowly disappearing into a mist of ever-expanding other features that I don't care about. IMHO, the poster child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups, users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief. I don't care about disk space or any of that other stuff. The program itself is bloated to the point of being entirely unusable. My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices, when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives) 1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10 if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care. I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each. That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents. We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it uses. I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make no sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to know. There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat that I object to. Not disk space. OK, but you and I have very different definitions of "bloat." You just need to expand your definition a bit. :-) (It truly is a broader term). |
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Mayayana wrote:
"Ken Blake" wrote It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes a lot of disk space. My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. It never means nothing. I think I probably don't want to see what your attic looks like. "Who cares if we have 5 fans that don't work? There's plenty of space up there." There are a number of different reasons to avoid bloat. 1) Simple attentiveness and orderliness. There's something to be said for keeping house. That's true no matter how big your house is. If the programmer is a slob then what should we expect from their software? And why let the disk get filled for no reason? It just makes it harder to do regular backup of data and store disk images of the OS. 2) Speed and resources. Libre Office takes about 425 MB on my machine. All I want is the word processor. I avoid using it because it takes several seconds to load. I've got an 8-core, 3.3 GHz CPU and yet LO brings me back to the old days of showing a splash screen while the program lumbers into functionality. It uses 90 MB RAM just to sit there. Maybe you don't remember, but there was a long period when splash screens were thought to be a thing of the past because CPUs were so fast. Yet 3.3 billion operations per second isn't enough for LO to get on its feet in less than 5 seconds. (And that's just one core.) 3) Sloppiness and lack of professionalism. Bloated usually means sloppy and/or ignorant. Sloppy because people keep adding functions without cleaning up. Ignorant because most bloat is due to wrappers. By wrapper I mean something that packages other functionality. If you write code to produce an editor, that's software. If you write code that uses an editor component then your software is a wrapper. If that component is written in Java or .Net then you now have an editor that's a wrapper, which itself is a wrapper of something that's also a wrapper. A 2 MB editor becomes 500 MB without any change in functionality. The difference is that you don't have to know how to code in order to use wrappers. Which means you probably don't know what you're doing. So why should I use your software. I have a good example of that close to home: My most popular download currently is an MSI unpacker. It unpacks MSI installer files. The only other program I know of that can actually do the same thing is called Less Msierables. All other programs I know of that are claimed to do the job actually can't. (They run an admin install or maybe, like 7-Zip, they can extract a CAB file. But they can't actually unpack the installer.) LM is open source. But there's not much code. Because LM uses the Microsoft Wix toolset for working with MSIs. A wrapper around msi.dll. Wix, in turn, and LM itself, use .Net. In this case it requires at least .Net v. 4. .Net itself is an extremely bloated, slow wrapper. Something like 1/2 GB for v. 4. That's why very little Windows software is written in .Net. LM does the job and it's got a nice UI. But the program starts at 1.5 MB. I don't know what it might need to download. Then it requires the .Net 4 framework. So it's going to have an enormous memory footprint. My version is 196 KB. It uses msi.dll directly. It runs fast and light, on virtually any existing Windows system, without needing installation or support files. The memory footprint shows 5 MB on my system. The functionality is all in msi.dll and cabinet.dll, which are system files. I don't mean that as a brag. The point is there's no excuse for bloated multi-wrappers. There's no excuse for Java or .Net on desktops. There's no excuse for needing 5 seconds of splash screen on an 8-core, 3.3 MHz CPU. Take a look for yourself. Avidemux and Audacity, pro-level video and audio software, are only 45 MB each on my system. The program I use more than any other, Notepad, is 67 KB. The Sysinternals programs are all small and dependency-free. Sumatra PDF reader is 11 MB, while Adobe Reader was something like 120 last I saw. IrfanView, a beautifully-made image viewer that borders on being a fullscale image editor, is about 3 MB without the plugins. I show it using 5 MB RAM to sit there, while Pale Moon is using about 150 MB... just to sit there! That mess adds up. Mike was just talking about how one of the reasons he thinks he needs Win10 is because browsers are so resource-hungry. How did we get to such an absurd point, where modern hardware -- multi-core CPUs and multiple GBs of RAM -- can't handle the software load? Sloppiness and bloat. The space was there, so people used it. They got sloppy. The same reason you probably have 5 rusty old fans in your attic. Hopefully you don't buy a toboggan that you need to store. This is why I recommended you grab a copy of the older version of Kingston Office, which is instantaneous upon start up, unlike OO and LibreOffice and all the rest, and is only 50 MB And no registration is required. |
#134
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Sam E wrote:
On 3/2/19 1:43 PM, Bill in Co wrote: [snip] I tried Linux (Cinnamon Mint, etc), but found it's just not worth all the hassle, at least to me. Plus I've got way too much invested (program wise) in Windows at this point. There is no rule that says you can't use more than one OS (different computers, dual boot, or a virtual machine). You don't have to give up Windows to try Linux. That is true, but I didn't find anything about Linux that was all that attractive to me, except for something to tinker around with, and mostly at the command line level. |
#135
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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"
Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake wrote: It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes a lot of disk space. I think bloated means different things to different people, and I think people's personal definitions have changed over the years. Mine have. Toward the beginning of the PC age, it could certainly have meant that a program has gotten physically larger, thus taking longer to install, longer to launch, consuming more disk space and more RAM. I'd also include longer to type in, (remember those?), and longer to download, for things that came that way. Those are all aspects of a program that has gotten *bigger*. For me, all of those things have fallen by the wayside and don't matter anymore. For completeness, I could add a complaint that bloated programs run slower than their leaner counterparts, but today's computing hardware largely masks that kind of thing because current hardware is so powerful. In the past 10+ years, to me bloated means that the features in a program that I want and use are slowly disappearing into a mist of ever-expanding other features that I don't care about. IMHO, the poster child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups, users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief. I don't care about disk space or any of that other stuff. The program itself is bloated to the point of being entirely unusable. My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices, when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives) 1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10 if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care. I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each. That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents. We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it uses. I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make no sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to know. There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat that I object to. Not disk space. I agree. "Bloated" (in reference to software) is a very broad term, and includes most of what you've said, IMO. |
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