[ale] Rant[ish]: government and states requiring proprietary software

[mike at trausch.us]

On 09/20/2012 05:51 PM, Michael Campbell wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 4:43 PM, mike at trausch.us <mike at trausch.us> wrote:
>> > On 09/18/2012 09:45 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>>> >> Ah. So get the stupid Adobe reader. Problem Solved.
>> >
>> > Yeah, sure.  Which breaks a whole schload of stuff, and is still at
>> > version 9, and is horribly written enough to bring my hexacore system
>> > with 8 GB of RAM to its knees.  No, thanks.  It's less resource
>> > intensive to boot Windows, sadly.
> I have to call "shenanigans" on this.  I hate Adobe and MS as much as
> the next guy, but... hexacore with 8G slowing to unusable on a PDF!?
> Something's not right here.   (Granted, I've been wrong before, so
> this may be one of those times.)

It is a proprietary 32-bit program running in a 64-bit environment, and
as such is the norm.

This is why I don't run 32-bit proprietary programs on my system.

To be fair, the reason that it brings my system down to its knees is
MOSTLY due to I/O storms with the disk.  It'd probably do a lot better
if it and all of its dependencies were on a separate disk, but I'm
totally not going to buy a disk for that.

I just use Evince: It's light, it's fast, it's simple, and it won't have
vulnerabilities due to specially crafted JavaScript code.

I just wish that "graceful degradation" were something that people
generating PDF documents were aware of.  Of course, half the Web hasn't
heard of it, either.

That said, I'm not even sure HOW you can lock out a document such that
JavaScript is MANDATORY to load it.

	--- Mike

-- 
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”

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