In my Dashboard, I have: six copies of the World Clock, five copies of the little weather forecast applet, the Apple calendar, the dictionary, and the Yahoo! traffic alert widget.

 

On what planet in which strange universe does it take 7% of the CPU of a 1.5GHz RISC machine to handle a *^%(@# clock?  Those six clocks, which I need on a trip like this, combine to take 42% of my CPU when the Dashboard is open.  And, they take sometimes 20 seconds to draw when I invoke the Dashboard.  That’s just idiotic.  Perhaps I can find a clock that doesn’t burn CPU cycles emulating the crappiest quartz movement in the world, with a second hand that wobbles around with each tick.  But, should I have to look?

 

I think I must hunt down whatever happened to Konfabulator and see if they’re better.

 

Add to that the fun fact that iWeb, when “exporting to a folder” my modest web site with a dozen blog entries, 2 pages of photos and a welcome page consumes 1.25GB of VM.  ONE-POINT-TWO-FIVE GIGABYTES of VM.  Give me a break.  Thanks to the sorta lame way MacOS/Mach VM works, you usually end up losing VM swap space even after you quit an app, too.  My understanding is that there’s no VM file compaction, so if more memory gets allocated on top of the giant blob some bloatware allocated (practically guaranteed to happen), then that VM file is around for the duration.  To get rid of it, it seems that you have to reboot.  The other day, I had 280MB of disk left, and the OS was warning me of dire consequences.  So, I rebooted the machine.  3.4GB free on disk after reboot.  Sigh.

 

I don’t know what to make of this incredible resource bloat out of Apple these days.  Is it the Cocoa stuff that they seem intent on using?  Are they just pressed for time and taking the easy way out by loading everything in RAM?  Seriously.  Until pretty recently, the very modest little photo viewer I wrote for the PhotoBridge was much faster than iPhoto.  300MHz MIPS with 32MB DRAM versus 1.5GHz G4 with 1.5GB of DRAM.  Hum.  Maybe Apple caught the “faster hardware will make up for our bloatware” virus from Microsoft along with the $150M investment.

 

(Photo above: Kraptacular iPod fakes in Shanghai — Apple’s outstanding ID is pretty hard to fake.)