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More offensive — Resource bloat or Feature bloat?

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Darwin:
It's hard to switch from the Win9x era and RAM mindset to the CPU mindset. I have gig of "slow-ish" RAM and a 1.4 GHz Centrino  (single core) processor. I'm often convinced that the sluggishness of my machine is due to RAM but when I go looking I'll find that the processor is being pegged by WinPatrol, Spysweeper, or Zone Alarm. I'm becoming increasingly tempted to go App's route and stop running my firewall. I spend 99.9% of my time online at home behind a hardware firewall - I could just run ZoneAlarm when I need to... (airports, primiarily).

People have been pointing the finger at Nero for bloat - Sonic/Roxio are the same. Check out RecordNow!, which is supposed to be a fairly lightweight DVD/CD burning app - it's a 625MB download! Compare this to Ashampoo Burning Studio 6 at about 10 MB.

This is an interesting thread and is echoed, in some ways, by a thread over at talkgraphics about Xara Xtreme, which was taken over by Magix recently. There is a lot of worry about bloat creep as an apparently to-be-paid-for upgrade due in May looks like an attempt to attract new users (and current user's money! - XX Pro has only had one point release update since release in December) with expanded features.

EDIT: started this note to give a +1 to the suggestion that simple applications that do their job well and as advertised definitely trump bloated mediocrity!

zridling:
Man, you guys are new school! Hell, the only thing I got in my tray is AutoHotkey. With a fast computer and enough memory, I don't know need to preload any app or process except drivers (and normal Services).
________________________________________________
*MrCrispy — what is a PHB? Pretty Hot Babe? Pushy Hoarding Butthead? Let us know!

nosh:
Man, you guys are new school! Hell, the only thing I got in my tray is AutoHotkey. With a fast computer and enough memory, I don't know need to preload any app or process except drivers (and normal Services).
________________________________________________
*MrCrispy — what is a PHB? Pretty Hot Babe? Pushy Hoarding Butthead? Let us know!
-zridling (April 28, 2007, 10:30 AM)
--- End quote ---

What about anti-virus, firewall, desktop search, backup app, mail/RSS clients? 

Ampa:
IMHO Opera gets an awful lot right...

 I have been using it for at least 5 years, and during that time the download size has remained consistantly small (< 5MB), but it has seen the addition of...


* a mail client
* iRC chat
* a widget engine
* simple notes
* a basic bittorrent client
* user javascript (like GreaseMonkey)
Not only has the feature list improved, but the speed of the basic function, web browser, has also increased significantly.

Ampa

MrCrispy:
"*MrCrispy — what is a PHB? Pretty Hot Babe? Pushy Hoarding Butthead? Let us know!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy_Haired_Boss

"he Pointy-Haired Boss (often abbreviated to just PHB) is Dilbert's boss in the Dilbert comic strip. He is notable for his gross incompetence and unawareness of his surroundings, yet somehow retains power in the workplace.  The phrase "pointy-haired boss" has acquired a generic usage to refer to incompetent managers.

He's every employee's worst nightmare. He wasn't born mean and unscrupulous, he worked hard at it. And succeeded. As for stupidity, well, some things are inborn. His top priorities are the bottom line and looking good in front of his subordinates and superiors (not necessarily in that order). Of absolutely no concern to him is the professional or personal well-being of his employees. The Boss is technologically challenged but he stays current on all the latest business trends, even though he rarely understands them."

I could definitely use some "Pretty Hot Babe's" at work :)

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