dell_jockey wrote:ah, cool, now I can bloat initial releases and with each successive update claim smaller memory footprints due to further optimizations ...
If it's a case of appearing competitive in the eyes of a user who might have concluded that a 30Mb download must be really something special compared to 100kb download.
Bloat away!
Believe it or not, some customers will look at you funny if you supply a 100k app that fulfils their needs but will be happy when they recieve a 2.5Mb app that does the same thing.
Something very similar happends in some nitche of the furniture business.
A friend of mine make furniture and he found that when selling expensive furniture it HAS to have at least some 'decent' weight, otherwise some clients do not feel comfortable.
He had to find a way to add weight to his furniture before tring to sell it.
dell_jockey wrote:ah, cool, now I can bloat initial releases and with each successive update claim smaller memory footprints due to further optimizations ...
Don't laugh; that's an EXCELLENT idea! I'm going to take it on board. It's all about the marketing, after all.
ricardo wrote:Something very similar happends in some nitche of the furniture business.
A friend of mine make furniture and he found that when selling expensive furniture it HAS to have at least some 'decent' weight, otherwise some clients do not feel comfortable.
He had to find a way to add weight to his furniture before tring to sell it.
When i was a young lad i used to like taking things apart to see what was inside, i couldn't believe the amount of items that had lead weights inside, doing nothing other than adding extra weight to make the product seem better quality.
Have we all gotten it wrong? I sort of thought that one of the goals for coding was to reduce bloat?
In relation to the post about the furniture; the reason the weight seems to affect sales is because people have the economic/financial implied concept that weight in certain items means solid in a sturdy and long lasting context. This might be more suitably explained by a childhood experience that a lot of people have had when mom or dad bought you clothing, especially shoes. You might have heard your parents say something regarding the durability of an item or maybe they had questions about it, they might have overlooked fashion clothing (contrary to your desires) in favor of durability and "lastability". It was a common sense determination that something would last for a while based upon its construction/material (for example, Regular Levi or Wrangler jeans are more suitable for a kid playing then fashion jeans) and thus be more suitable economically or financially because the longer an item lasted meant the less frequently it needed to be replaced or repaired. The weight of certain items such as furniture conjures up the same general "seems sturdy so it will last" concept because weight implies more material which implies for certain items better construction which implies its sturdy which implies its quality which implies its "lastability".
BTW, there is also another way to put bloat into a program without really putting bloat in to affect the memory footprint. You create an empty .txt file of the size you choose and simply include it in your program. There is code in the forum for producing empty .txt files of any size that you choose. Its more precise then guessing that 100000 = nearly 400kbyte as you can choose the exact size. Plus it doesn't affect the memory footprint as long as the .txt file is really empty becauzse there is no data in the .txt to allocate memory too.
The advantage of a 64 bit operating system over a 32 bit operating system comes down to only being twice the headache.