The reason we lose more performance than Moore's law gives back is because there are so many programmers (undeserving of the title "software engineers") who would rather use some huge, unoptimal software package or library than spending days, weeks or even years learning how to do it efficiently. (Market forces play a role too :-) On Sun, Feb 5, 2012 at 09:09, Joerg Arndt <arndt@jjj.de> wrote:

* Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Feb 05. 2012 14:48]:

...

There are now some free pdf reader apps that are about 1/10th the size of Adobe Reader.

[In Adobe Reader] You can disable Javascript by renaming some directory in the installation btw. (could not find out what the name is in <=60 secs).

Wikipedia says: [To] disable JavaScript in Adobe Reader [...] [use] the General preferences dialog (Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and un-check "Enable Acrobat JavaScript"). And there is xpdf: executable < 300kB (but loads a couple

of dynamic libs). Memory footprint about 13MB on my system:

Ghostscript is useful too. xpdf and ghostscript are both available to Mac users via Macports [...] acroread used to be better in "repairing" broken pdfs,

nowadays it has clearly lost it's lead in this respect.

Still, some documents, notable scanned books from arxiv, take bloody ages (>10secs) to render a single page. Somehow we are losing more performance over time than Moore's law gives us.

-- Robert Munafo -- mrob.com Follow me at: gplus.to/mrob - fb.com/mrob27 - twitter.com/mrob_27 - mrob27.wordpress.com - youtube.com/user/mrob143 - rilybot.blogspot.com