WildWestDesigns
Active Member
Some of those tasks can be disabled using MSConfig. That was one trick that I used to speed up Vista as there were quite a bit of startup tasks that were bogging the system down with truly unnecessary startup tasks that were redundant (not all the time, but some of the time).
Sure there are. Usually those can be seen in one of the Help menu options, as they usually list the EULA for each of those components (or at least a blurb of the 3rd party's EULA). I think for the longest time that even the spell check module in Word was a 3rd party module (may still be, it's been a looooooonnnnnggg time since I messed with Word).
This is one of the main hurdles that most people don't realize that makes their request of Open Sourcing software that a vendor is "killing".
One of my favorite digitizing programs used a 3rd party module to handle PDF exporting (and that caused issues in one update). Even the 3D visualization in that same program was a 3rd party rendering engine.
Some of these "new possibilities" have already been implemented in other programs and it is quickly becoming more of the standard and they are being left behind in that manner. I would think that a little bit of prioritizing would be a good thing to make sure that they are still relevant with new tech.
Anything is possible.
I am not unsympathetic to the plight of software development. I wasn't apart of the horde going after a couple of vendors that didn't have their drivers or program software ready for getgo when High Sierra was first released. And the horde's main argument as to why they should have been ready as the Beta of High Sierra had been out there for quiet some time. And of course, we had the ironic Su bug issue after the release of High Sierra as well (or the irony).
The closed source software development pipeline has it's pros and cons, but the biggest con (in my mind) is that it moves glacially, just due to the inherent nature of being closed. That's just the fact of the matter. I release at least some of the pros and some of the other cons of Closed versus Open, but development is inherent slower and that does have a direct impact on resources that you mention earlier.
When I came onboard one open source project, it was only supported on Linux (which would have been fine with me as that was the OS that I was switching to). In the space of 2 yrs, it has Windows and Mac support. It's portable, even with the dependencies it needs, that's all bundled together in each release, so if something else changes (like going from Python 2 to Python 3), it has little to no impact on the program. There have been a lot of other back end changes, some of which aren't found at all on the closed source variants, those that are are only on the expensive versions of those programs.
Compare that to one closed source program that is only Windows support (so that's not a drag on resources) and it's still 32 bit (which is something else that isn't dragging on resources) even though it's latest release was 1.5 yrs ago.
Again, I would stipulate the closed nature of software development does run at a much much slower pace. It does have pros and cons outside of that, but that is a big con (for me anyway).
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm pragmatic and will use the software that gets the job done, open or closed that doesn't matter. I prefer open and that's actually a total reality now as there was only one program type that was the hold out (in my case and only my case), but I use what works for the job at hand.
