Hi Nate:
This responds to article
from "Nate Goldshlag" said:
Sorry but I just do not believe this. If I have a pdf I can print it
fine from Preview, Adobe Reader, and other applications. But insert it
into Word and it prints fuzzy. This is a longstanding and well known
bug. You can say it is Apple's bug all you want but I do not buy it.
So read apple's documentation for the CarbonLib calls involved, then get
into the document with a hex editor and look at the byte codes in there.
According to Apple's documentation, the TIFF is supposed to be on layer 0
and the EPS on layer 1. It is in Word. The other apps do not call that
particular function in CarbonLib.
I never said it was all the time. But sometimes it is 10% with no
document open. And quite often it is way more than it should be under
other circumstances, compared to other applications. Again you are
telling me that the unix top command is lying. Maybe you think so but
I do not.
No, I am telling you that you do not understand what Top is doing. Top is
telling you that Word is using ten per cent of the allocated time slices.
Not ten per cent of the CPU cycles. Word is handed a time slice containing
one million CPU cycles. It uses 300 of them and flags "Return control". OS
X does not return to service the interrupt for 930,000 clock cycles, which
go to waste. If another application is busy, OS X will scan the queue
looking for apps waiting to relinquish, return the interrupt and Word's
apparent CPU usage falls dramatically.
Just because OS X "sends" Word one million clock cycles each time it
requests CPU does NOT mean that Word wants them, or is using them, or even
can use them. But Top can only measure allocated time slices, not clock
cycles. So Top is only "accurate" when the system is busy.
I never claimed anybody cares about whether or not I personally
upgrade. My point is that Word X has had some serious problems for
over 2 years that were never fixed.
Yeah. I don't like it any more than you do, but that's the nature of
shrink-wrap software. Anything they "claimed" would work when they sold it
to you they will fix. Anything that did not get mentioned in the sales
brochure will not get fixed, no matter how bad it smells. That's the
shrink-wrap game.
You can call whatever problems
there are with 2004 teething problems but you can be fairly sure that
once 2004 comes out Microsoft will not fix some real problems and users
will be stuck with what they've got. That is their history.
Yes: That is the nature of the shrink-wrap software industry. No company
will ever fix anything they did not promise would work in a certain way
before they sold it to you. I hate it too, but that's how it is. IBM has
some tragic bugs in Lotus Notes that they won't fix. Some of the bugs in
WordPerfect have been with us for ten years, and they won't fix them.
Picking a "good" release of CorelDRAW is a black art requiring magic
incantations: the rule of thumb is that the odd-numbered releases are better
than the even numbered ones...
If Microsoft wants us to upgrade from X, and it may indeed be a
worthwhile upgrade as you say, they had better fix the problems that I
detailed and make the new features worth the hefty upgrade price.
It's a chicken-and-egg situation. If they sold a lot more copies, they
would have a lot more to spend and a lot more would get fixed. Currently we
just have to hope that the PC guys fiddle with the code that contains the
bugs we have. When the PC side makes a change in that code module, that
gives the Macintosh Business Unit a cost justification to open the source
code, and while they are in there they try to fix all the bugs that are
logged against that module. Word 2003 was a fairly major upgrade on the PC
side: it has hit almost everything, so Mac BU has a fairly extensive licence
for the next version.
And yes, I am someone who believes that Word 5.1 was the best Word that
Microsoft ever put out.
It took me a long time to find a better one. I am now a believer in Word
2003, and Word 2004 is going to be very good indeed.
Cheers
--
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]