Despised software, anyone?

[time]

Cool! Which CPU is that?

 

[Santilli]

Best time is 30 seconds with my Xeons.


G

 

[Jake the Dog]

don't mind me, just changing the subject back on topic

iTunes for Windows. I despise it.

 

[Tannin]

Jake! Good to see you back here. And nice to see that, in our lengthy discussion of pox-ridden software, you have cut straight to the chase and mentioned a serious contender for the most pox-ridden app of all. Not saying it ain't got some serious competition in the poxville stakes, but definately a contender.

 

[timwhit]

If all you use iTunes for is dragging music onto an iPod, it really isn’t that bad. There are dozens of other software packages that are loads worse.

 

[ddrueding]

If all you use iTunes for is dragging music onto an iPod, it really isn’t that bad. There are dozens of other software packages that are loads worse.

But if that's all you use iTunes for, there are lots of better apps for under $20.

 

[timwhit]

iTunes is free. I don't pay for things unless I HAVE to. If I only open iTunes about once a month and use it for 10 minutes or less should I spend money on something else? It is not like I am supporting Apple by using it. In fact it probably costs THEM money for me to download the latest version.

I don't need any of the features that other programs have. I have tried other iTunes alternatives in the past and one (ephpod) has even required me to format my iPod after the filesystem became corrupt. This is not a good feature.

 

[Tannin]

Oh dear. I don't use Itunes. (What do you take me for, darling? - he says, waving a wrist in the air) I just fix machines after people install it and the system falls over. To be fair, I think Itunes is one of those programs that seems to be particularly sensitive to spyware infections: on a clean system it usually seems to be OK. But I hate it anyway. Point of honour.

 

[Tannin]

Back to the subject: I just gave up on Acrobat 7. Pox, pox, pox.

I gave it a clean system, 100% healthy, and it just falls over all the time. You can usually get away with a single instance of it - usually, not always - but it's slow, it has offensive advertising, and it just generally sucks. And it still sometimes falls over.

Start running multiple instances and you are frozen-screen city. Utterly hopeless. You can usually shut the thing down, but it is unusable for people (like me) who need to cross reference between multiple documents.

It gets worse. It disables your old Acrobat 5 on install and steals the shortcuts to it, and it fails to uninstall properly. After reinstallig Acrobat 5 (which is clunky but actually works quite a lot of the time) I had to manually reset everything: *.pdf open with, Thunderbird open with, browser open with settings, the lot.

Adobe: go directly to the bottom of the class. Hell, Microsoft do better than that.

 

[Mercutio]

iTunes is a pile of shit. It gives software in general a bad name.

And Acrobat 4 is usually better behaved than 5. But then, the minute you use something not from Adobe to view a PDF, you find they suck a lot less anyway.

 

[time]

I'm sitting here looking at 20 different Acrobat Reader documents, each in their own window. Some are over 100 pages and Acrobat 7.07 is using 142MB of memory. I can scroll, search, resize, tile and generally do what I want. While doing all this, the Reader recommended a Chinese character set download/update, which went through without interrupting my messing around at all.

Adobe has made some dreadful software, but that doesn't include Acrobat Reader 7.07. It's the best yet by some very considerable margin.

Either Tannin's Windows installation is broken or his hardware is flaky.

 

[Will Rickards]

I remember when MS Word was flaky because of video drivers. To fix word, you installed different drivers. Adobe's software may be the same way.
I use adobe reader without any problems on any of my systems but yes in firefox I do disable the plugin and use a full instance.

 

[Tannin]

Either Tannin's Windows installation is broken or his hardware is flaky.

Not a chance.

Brand new machine, perfect condition, 100% fresh install, not the slightest sign of any other problem. Gets used many hours a day, works very hard with lots of tasks, so if there were systemic problems, I'd know about them.

Will's video suggestion has some merit - indeed, I did catch myself wondering at one point if it was a video driver problem as it looks a bit like that, but then remembered that (thankfully) this Thinkpad doesn't have an ATI chip in it. But although I distrust them less than I distrust the ATI junk, one certainly wouldn't want to write home about Intel video drivers.

And let's remember: Acrobat 5.05 is working just fine.

 

[time]

It must be your proximity to the South magnetic pole, then.

Have you checked your installation package?

 

[timwhit]

Sounds like a good 'ol pissin' contest to me.

Let me join. My system is so stable that any program will run well. Even iTunes and Acrobat at the same time.

 

[Jake the Dog]

Jake! Good to see you back here. And nice to see that, in our lengthy discussion of pox-ridden software, you have cut straight to the chase and mentioned a serious contender for the most pox-ridden app of all. Not saying it ain't got some serious competition in the poxville stakes, but definately a contender.

Hi there! Good to be back thank you

Sounds like a good 'ol pissin' contest to me.

Let me join. My system is so stable that any program will run well. Even iTunes and Acrobat at the same time.

You are using a windows machine right?

 

[Tannin]

Seeing as 5.0 is working for me, Time - well, as "working" as Acrobat ever gets, which isn't very - I think I'll sit on the current situation and wait till there is a new video driver update for the Thinkpaad, then try 7.x again.

Thanks for letting me know, by the way, that Acrobat 7 actually can functon well. I just assumed it was yet another pox-ridden Adobe product and blamed it without any further investigation.

 

[time]

S'okay. Believe me, I suffer from serious anger management problems when confronted by stupid software. :evil: And Adobe products have been a major contributor to my psychosis, reminding me so much of Apple's badly written spawn - particularly Acrobat, which I have never forgiven for being a half-assed alternative to Tumbleweed's Envoy.

But this one actually seems to work - 7.07, that is. I had to uninstall 7.0 and install 7.07 from scratch because the embedded update feature didn't work ... I haven't tried that route again. :-?

As an aside to Merc, I tried Foxit Reader and it looked fine; only marginally slower than Acrobat 7 but didn't have a Print-To-File option. Unfortunately, it faces a grim future if Adobe starts to leave the suckiness out of their free software.

 

[GMac]

Oh dear. I don't use Itunes. (What do you take me for, darling? - he says, waving a wrist in the air) I just fix machines after people install it and the system falls over. To be fair, I think Itunes is one of those programs that seems to be particularly sensitive to spyware infections: on a clean system it usually seems to be OK. But I hate it anyway. Point of honour.

I think you nailed that one Tony - I've used it (and still do) at home and it just works without any fuss and bother as long as the machine it's on is malware-free (apart fom version 5, but that was a seriously buggy version that was quickly pulled by Apple when it started messing up people's CD and DVD burners). Acrobat Reader though sucks big time :x - it's habit of not shutting down (and staying resident in memory) when you finished with it really annoys me.....

GM

 

[Santilli]

PLEASE!!! Apple releases buggy operating systems, expecting their loyal to sort out the bugs for only 129 dollars a year. :roll: WHY would ANYONE expect their free software to work, even at all?

S