Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 19th Oct 2012 20:07 UTC
Interesting little tidbit from the Reddit AMA session with Microsoft's Surface team. One Redditor wondered just how much disk space Windows RT takes up - in other words, if you buy the 32GB Surface RT tablet, how much space is left for your stuff? It turns out that while Windows 8 RT is considerably smaller than its Windows 7 x86 predecessor, it's still huge by mobile standards.
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RE: Windows is notorious for this
by tanzam75 on Sat 20th Oct 2012 01:29
in reply to "Windows is notorious for this"
Member since:2011-05-19
It is also known to grows in size over time.
This can be because of installation files being left over even if the application is uninstalled.
This can be because of installation files being left over even if the application is uninstalled.
Interesting. Under what circumstances are installers left over after applications are uninstalled?
I've noticed that a lot of installers extract to a temporary directory, and then forget to delete it when the MSI finishes running. But this has nothing to do with uninstall -- they eat up the disk space even if you never uninstall the app.
The \Windows\Installer directory should clean up after itself. It's those pesky temporary directories that bootstrappers extract into that tend to hang around.
RE[2]: Windows is notorious for this
by henderson101 on Sat 20th Oct 2012 02:21
in reply to "RE: Windows is notorious for this"
Member since:2006-05-30
Sometimes MSI will leave files to "aid uninstallation". IIRC, Borland did this with Delphi 2005. It was very annoying. Something to do with a catalogue of files installed or similar. I've also encountered at least one installer that did the same so that features could be "installed on the fly" without the original medial being present. Some installers are just crap though and son't clean up properly.
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
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Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 21:41 UTC
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Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/16/13 17:04 UTC
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2006-01-17
It is also known to grows in size over time.
This can be because of installation files being left over even if the application is uninstalled.
To make it worse, there is no easy way to know which installation files can be removed (already uninstalled apps for example) and which are needed(e.g. to uninstall app or add a component - which is a bad way to deal with it anyway)
WinRT uses the new application store, so maybe it no longer suffers from this, but it was certainly not the only reason why Windows takes up way too much space. It looks like vast disk space on modern machines spoiled OS developers too much, especially as dumping information to disk is sometimes an easy workaround over a more complex problem.
Btw. are there going to be 16GB WinRT tablets? I hope not.