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The definition of "bloat" - RE: Software

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f0dder:
Nero is the prime bloatware example for me, too. 5.5 was ~12 megabytes, 6.3 was ~28 megabytes but still in the realm of usable (I think that's when they added the cover designer? Never used that, though). I used to love Nero because it was good at burning CDs.

Then I bumped into a mysterious error, it looked like Nero (on purpose?) burned bad copies. Not coaster level bad, mind you, it just meant that read speed would suck with those media. Upgraded to latest nero version as well. I might've been using a pirate keygen (even though I had valid OEM licenses for my drives), so it could be an anti-piracy thing.

Shortly after that, teh über-bloated 100+ megabyte versions of Nero hit the scene, and I completely ditched the app. It had gone from a nice "does it's stuff well" app to a bloated "want to do everything". Fortunately, imgburn exists, and is now my "does it's stuff (very) well" app.

Sometimes bloat is about disk size and/or resource consumption, sometimes it's about packing too many things into product, So ein Ding müssen wir auch haben style. I dunno if I would classify Opera as bloat, but I do prefer my browser not to come with e-mail and torrent support in one package.

PowerBASIC - #BLOAT metastatement
DOH!  ;D
-Mark0 (February 07, 2008, 12:43 PM)
--- End quote ---
PowerBASIC is just plain lame allround :)

Josh:
So, is Nero itself a bloated application or is the nero SUITE bloated? I would like to see a burner only option too, but I dont consider nero ON ITS OWN to be bloated. Quite the contrary. Yes, I have to download ~200mb of data, but I only install about 20-30.

f0dder:
So, is Nero itself a bloated application or is the nero SUITE bloated? I would like to see a burner only option too, but I dont consider nero ON ITS OWN to be bloated. Quite the contrary. Yes, I have to download ~200mb of data, but I only install about 20-30.-Josh (February 07, 2008, 07:15 PM)
--- End quote ---

The suite definitely is, when you're only interested in the burner. Downloading 200 megabytes isn't a problem on a 20mbit ADSL line, but it certainly a different experience on 512kbit. Haven't used Nero for a while, so I dunno if it really is 20 megs for just the burner, but that's also too much... imgburn is less than 1.5meg :)

But okay, there's a few things imgburn lacks that could be useful (but that I haven't used myself for ages) - one that springs to mind is being able to add .mp3/whatever files and burning an audio CD from that. But iirc DeepBurner free supports that, at less than 3meg download.

Josh:
OK, let me ask this, why should apps be as small as that in size in the modern age? Is hard drive space that expensive or lacking? I mean, I have over a TB in my pc, and most modern pc's have 500-750 standard now. I mean, what is another 17MB going to add if it gives you so much more functionality-wise?

f0dder:
Call it professional pride. Probably the most important reason. I just don't believe in needlessly wasting disk space, memory, et cetera. And download size matters too, not everybody is on blazingly fast broadband. Then there's also the issue of stuffing things on USB pendrives (yes, those are growing too, but even a 1- or 2-gig stick can only hold so much).

Then there's also the issue that even if harddrives are very large and cheap, not everybody wants a super big system partition. My drives are punily small, 2x74 gigabytes - but 10k rpm disks. People running solid-state disks would have even smaller.

Oh, and I like how fast imgburn boots up. Even with my fast raptor drives, I'm still sensitive to application boot time :)

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