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Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

joelonsoftware.com

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Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#51

Post by WildUtah »

quanticle wrote: post #23

The more I read Joel Spolsky, the more I realize how wrong he is. He's like the Thomas Friedman of software. He writes lots of things that sound good, but aren't actually true. For example: In fact, there are lots of great reasons for bloatware: For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make your life better (…

"The more I read Joel Spolsky, the more I realize how wrong he is." -parent

"There are trivial truths and the great truths. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true." -Niels Bohr

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#52

Post by sliverstorm »

oakwhiz wrote: post #43
colanderman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife's HP laptop had some software that monitored the "audio mute" key so it could turn the associated LED on and off. That herculean task required a constant 50% of the CPU.

A whole CPU just for a single GPIO task? Now that's bloat.

Yeah but just think about how quickly they were able to release the software, by using 50% of the CPU. Isn't that what really matters? :)

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#53

Post by fuzzix »

quanticle wrote: post #23

The more I read Joel Spolsky, the more I realize how wrong he is. He's like the Thomas Friedman of software. He writes lots of things that sound good, but aren't actually true. For example: In fact, there are lots of great reasons for bloatware: For one, if programmers don't have to worry about how large their code is, they can ship it sooner. And that means you get more features, and features make your life better (…

"The more I read Joel Spolsky, the more I realize how wrong he is."

You're lucky you've just read him. I've used his software. In fact, I've written software to integrate one of the most popular revision control systems with his software - I think Fog Creek may be pretending git does not exist.

How did this integration work? Same as all the others, update of data via GET request, tut tut :)

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#54

Post by microcolonel »

sliverstorm wrote: post #2

Joel writes this like bloat doesn't exist, and discusses how programs are large because of all the features they have. Two contrasting examples spring to mind: - Outlook 2010 in Exchange mode usually occupies about 50MB of memory, at least for me. Think of all the functionality Outlook 2010 has in those 50MB. - An old notebook I used a few years ago had a disk-parking feature, in case of drops. The service applicatio…

Especially funny when the page with the logic to decide whether or not to park your drive head is in swap.... on that hard drive.

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#55

Post by sliverstorm »

nivla wrote: post #34
sliverstorm wrote: post #2

Joel writes this like bloat doesn't exist, and discusses how programs are large because of all the features they have. Two contrasting examples spring to mind: - Outlook 2010 in Exchange mode usually occupies about 50MB of memory, at least for me. Think of all the functionality Outlook 2010 has in those 50MB. - An old notebook I used a few years ago had a disk-parking feature, in case of drops. The service applicatio…

>Outlook 2010 in Exchange mode usually occupies about 50MB of memory, at least for me. Think of all the functionality Outlook 2010 has in those 50MB. Ohh I wish my beloved thunderbird only took that much memory. I remember it occupied somewhere between 150-250MB on my netbook. It was impossible to keep it running in the background, especially when you only have 1GB of total RAM. My routine was to open, check for mail…

It's really a great example of how well they are actually doing with Office, IMO. I was absolutely floored when I saw how little it uses!

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#56

Post by agumonkey »

quink wrote: post #4
sliverstorm wrote: post #2

Joel writes this like bloat doesn't exist, and discusses how programs are large because of all the features they have. Two contrasting examples spring to mind: - Outlook 2010 in Exchange mode usually occupies about 50MB of memory, at least for me. Think of all the functionality Outlook 2010 has in those 50MB. - An old notebook I used a few years ago had a disk-parking feature, in case of drops. The service applicatio…

The Bluetooth driver for quite a few Lenovo Thinkpads is a 210 MiB download. It includes btrez.dll (two seemingly near identical copies for x64 and one for x86, each about 25 MB) and all of the .NET 4.0 runtime, among other things.

I'd give Lenovo a little slack, because they're (or were a few years ago) probably the only brand to provide an automated driver update program that works pretty fine. It's not light nor fast but still. And since they have to support a ton of different environments I could accept static inclusion of dlls. That said I often avoided installing the bluetooth software stack (almost never used bt) because it was so fat. :)

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#57

Post by quink »

agumonkey wrote: post #56
quink wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bluetooth driver for quite a few Lenovo Thinkpads is a 210 MiB download. It includes btrez.dll (two seemingly near identical copies for x64 and one for x86, each about 25 MB) and all of the .NET 4.0 runtime, among other things.

I'd give Lenovo a little slack, because they're (or were a few years ago) probably the only brand to provide an automated driver update program that works pretty fine. It's not light nor fast but still. And since they have to support a ton of different environments I could accept static inclusion of dlls. That said I often avoided installing the bluetooth software stack (almost never used bt) because it was so fat. :…

You mean the same driver update that broke my VPN with no fix no matter how long I looked without a reinstall?

'pretty fine' is always going to be a subjective thing.

Re: Bloatware and the 80/20 Myth (2001)

#58

Post by drill_sarge »

The only real bloat I know are vendor specific programs that come for free with certain hardware. I don't know who writes such shit sotware. From the HP Windows driver suite (not the driver itself but all those useless programs which come along with it; funny enough hplip is the best thing on linux), horrible tools which come with motherboards ("omg make the ui look like it is a spaceship cockpit"), shitty tools from laptop manufacturers for wlan, bluetooth and so on. who the heck writes these!?

Commercial programs are mostly not bloated and don't scatter around the whole system.

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