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Studied Chemical Engineering but soon falled in love with computers in the early 80's (yes, I started programming in FORTRAN, as most Real Programmers . Punched cards, used green terminals, and started using windows when it required a single floppy to work (and started to hate it since then). Founded my QA company last year after leaving Novell Ximian Group where I really learned the beauty of FOSS.

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23 08 06 23:32Resource Hogs

I was happily reading some LDTP documentation that happens to be in pdf format. To make things funnier I was using the Windows machine at home when I got a popup window from Acrobat saying that there were some updates available.
With time to spare, I accepted and then I was asked to close the document I was reading. I did it. Waited some time, saw a couple more of dialog windows saying it was downloading the acrobat updater. Then it finished and got amazed because:
1. Acrobat reader started and at the same time
2. I was asked to restart windows.

Well, restart.

At restart, have a glimpse of a system console, and a new message from Acrobat: The updater had just been updated, now you need to update Acrobat... and a new instance of Acrobat started.
Of course I was told that I had to close all running Acrobat instances (even those the installer started without asking me). I did. The "updated updater" then started downloading the main course.
So, wait while Adobe eats your bandwidth. Download ends, your disk rumbles and guess what... yes, another empty reader is started and, of course, you have to restart.
That's user friendly. And wait for the version that will be the "all in one" stuff that rumors say it will be, integrating flash into Acrobat.
And thinking about Adobe Acrobat Reader itself... does it have any sense at this time?
Why does that fatware exists? I guess it's basically a piece of software from the early internet by modem days whose purpose was: 1. Send and receive documents with standard fonts when Microsoft Office formats changed every other day and 2. Send it in a compact way (no zip/unzip needed).
However, nowadays Office is widely compatible (even with itself), PDF documents are as fat as any other format, and high bandwidth is a commodity, so compression is no longer a must.
Other than that... does anyone thinks

Gerardo - one comment - §

11 08 06 00:53FP!

This is my first post on my tech weblog. Most posts here will be technical related, but I plan to have a few rants and comments about other themes.

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Gerardo - No comments - §