Red Hat Diaries/002c

Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 XXV

All that's left now is Resources, and we've already been to Resources - we covered that a few days ago, remember? So that's it.

Seventy-six point six megabytes of 'something'. So how bad was it?

76.6MB for a PDF reader is a lot. And there are a whole lot of totally empty files we might dispense with - but they won't net us any disk free space. We could delete fourteen of the language trees we don't need, and that will save us a lot. Finally, we could trash all the help files and maybe the WebBuy plug-in to win back even more. The executable and its direct dependencies weighed in at about 10MB. Par for Adobe I guess, and not a lot worse than a lot of the other shiteware out there.

What really hurts is this idiotic architecture which makes directories into applications and vice-versa and forces ISVs into a considerable rigamarole to just leverage a single application file.

The earliest iBooks (of the new generation, not the toilet seat ones) have 10GB hard drives; Adobe Acrobat Reader represents over .7% of that disk space, meaning that even if there is no OS or anything else on the drive, the iBook owner would only be able to install a total of about one hundred such applications and the disk would be full.

Which is sad - not only dumb and wasteful, but sad. Software engineers with self-respect would not deliver such a product.

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