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Questions about the "end of Windows 7"



 
 
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  #121  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:41 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
pyotr filipivich
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Posts: 752
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:41 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
pyotr filipivich
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Posts: 752
Default 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?
  #123  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:41 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
pyotr filipivich
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Posts: 752
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:41 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
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Posts: 1,756
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:48 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
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Posts: 1,756
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:48 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
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Posts: 6,438
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:51 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
notX
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Posts: 68
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 06:52 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mayayana
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 6,438
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:01 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
J. P. Gilliver (John)[_4_]
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Posts: 2,679
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:04 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Mark Lloyd[_2_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 1,756
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:08 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
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Posts: 303
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:11 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
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Posts: 303
Default 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).


  #133  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:14 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
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Posts: 303
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:17 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 303
Default 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  
Old March 3rd 19, 07:19 PM posted to alt.windows7.general
Bill in Co[_3_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 303
Default 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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