Bloated Software Makes Me Sick
512 wordsPosted by Scott on August 11th, 2009
Filed under: General
Tonight’s brief entry is nothing more than a rant against a disturbing trend in the PC industry. I sit here half past nightnight screaming at my computer screen. To make a long story short, I need to do an incredibly simple task: burn a video file to a DVD. It’s a ~30min slideshow in AVI format. This should be incredibly easy, right? In linux it’s only a process of typing a few commands into a console. No biggie.
I’d use this method, but 
I only have one linux box with a DVD burner and it’s flaking out very badly. I try to burn DVDs, but it has power issues and it fails 9 out of 10 times. I should throw away the drive. The only functional DVD drive is on my wife’s PC, a computer running Microsoft Windows Vista.
How do you burn an AVI to a DVD in Windows? You can’t. Well, not easily. Sure, there are simple commands for Linux and it can do everything using free, small software only a few MB in size. Apparently the only way to do similar things for windows is to use pirated software, or fool around with a million steps to use a combination of multiple quasi-free programs. I know I’m being somewhat irrational about its complexity on Windows, but I’m mad, so I’m forgoing logic at this point. I knew that Nero 9 should be able to do this. I looked for it on a popular torrent website (yes, it seems the only way to be productive in Windows is to use pirated software) and downloaded it.
| I can’t wrap my head around what Nero 9 does that requires almost 1GB of my hard drive space, requiring over 45 minutes to install on my wife’s 64-bit dual-core2.4 GHz Vista-running PC with 4GB of ram. Have software companies COMPLETELY abandoned the principals of simplicity, speed, reliability, and functionality? Why is it that common common software distributions (think about Microsoft Office programs and virtually every Adobe product) increase in size exponentially with every release, offer virtually no improvement in speed, and with questionable feature upgrades? |
FREAKING UPDATE: After going through an hour of frustration, I concluded that Nero 9 is incapable of creating a DVD from my AVI file. My wife reminded me that my linux-running laptop has a DVD burner. I hopped on it, typed apt-get install devede; devede and burned my DVD in 5 minutes with a 14MB program. Soon, people will start rising up and demanding lite, cheap, and FUNCTIONAL products for Windows. Until they do, I will just avoid it when I can.
Bah! I need to go to bed. I’m getting mad at my computer -_-
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3 Responses to “Bloated Software Makes Me Sick”
| Kyle wrote the following at 02:37:39 PM on August 16th, 2009 |
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Live CD…? |
| FredE wrote the following at 08:48:16 PM on August 26th, 2009 |
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Ha! Here you go… C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools>dir dvdburn.exe 04/18/2003 06:07 PM 15,360 dvdburn.exe In the Windows 2003 server resource kit. Get this: only 15kb. With all the .NET stuff going on in windows. It seems that we are all behind the times. I never thought I would know linux better than windows. It’s time to re-learn Windows from the ground up. |
| FredE wrote the following at 09:00:58 PM on August 26th, 2009 |
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I spoke too soon on the previous comment. I just looked up devede. Windows needs to go open source… |
