On 10 Mar 2006 at 10:28, Eric Dannewitz wrote: > Good design in my thinking. Why would you want 5 different instances > of Adobe Acrobat open to read 5 different documents? . . .
In order to have independent virtual machines for each instance, so that if one of them crashes, it won't take down all the others. Your example is fairly well chosen, given how ill-behaved Acrobat Reader happens to be. > . . . It's a waste of > resources. . . . Not really. All shared libraries will load only once. Yes, there's overhead for the graphical support, and each virtual machine will duplicate certain basic memory structures, but it's not going to be using anything close to the same amount of memory for the second instance as is used by the first instance. It's probably a lot less than half the memory for the second instance (though that will depend on the engineering of each application that allows this). > . . . I can't think of anything off hand where I'd want to have 2 > different copies of the same program running. . . . The way certain applications are designed it's required if you want to open more than one file. > . . . And does Windows do > this? . . . . No, it's up to the application designers to implement it. They either allow it or they don't. > . . . I don't think so. I just tried running Mozilla thunderbird email > again, and it still shows (in Task Manager) one program running. . . > . . . Same > for Word. Same for FireFox. Er, on WinXP, all application windows with the same parent application name in the title bar are grouped under a single Taskbar button. This feature can be turned off so that you can see the actual number of Windows being spawned. I'm not sure how post-Office 2000 Word works. That version introduced the SDI so that you can't actually tell the difference between two instances of Word and two Word documents open in the same instance. The only way to tell would be to look in the Task Manager list. If Winword.exe is listed twice, it's running twice. In Word97 and before, even though it used the MDI, you could launch multiple instances. As to Firefox, I can launch multiple instances of it very easily. Each time I doubleclick the icon, I get a new instance. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
