If you want to see some of the cr*p that these bloated packages load (at least on Windows), do a Google search for "Windows" "autoruns", download it and run it. This little program will allow you to see & disable a huge number of background processes that are loaded by default. Apple is one of the worst, but Adobe is right behind them, in starting up all kinds of background processes that chew up memory and processor. You should easily be able to cut the number of these background processes in half, and also reduce your boot time significantly. You really don't need a separate process for every single software package whose entire job it is to look for an update for that package. The most obvious thing to do is to look for an update when the program runs; if you never run the program, you obviously don't need the update. (You'd think by now that Windows would have a single process that looked for updates for all packages, but that would be too easy.) I just got an HP machine & spent an entire day cleaning out all of the HP-related junk that didn't do any better job than the standard Microsoft software that it was trying to displace. At 03:46 PM 2/5/2012, Robert Munafo wrote:
The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-)
On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:
* Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:
There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.
[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in <=60 secs).
Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript").
And there is xpdf: executable < 300kB (but loads a couple
of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:
Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports
[...]
acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,
nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.
Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.
-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com