I'm really aching to ditch Windows. Unfortunately, I need to view PowerPoint and RTF files faithfully; Open Source tools aren't quite there yet (and I haven't yet convinced my clients to bite the bullet and move to PDF).
Doing some routine maintenance on my Win* box, I inadvertantly left virtual memory turned off. Shouldn't matter too much; the box has 256MB of RAM.
Today, I was comparing two RTF documents side-by-side; one just under 1MB, the other about 1.5MB. With nothing else running concurrently but for a bash shell, I got a "low memory" warning from Word; the entire machine slowed to less than a crawl as it valiantly tried to figure out how to task switch, but couldn't remember how...
Now I read this, where Brett McLaughlin talks about his new TiBook:
Instead of looking like some nerd that should have on horn-rimmed glasses, I can code on a machine that would fit in more at an IKEA magazine booth than an Internet cafe. And with 512 MB of RAM, I can edit Photoshop images that are 50 MB+ without having to kill my Java processing (an XSL transformation running under Ant) in the background; my Windows desktop (also with 512 MB) chokes on the exact same task. So now I've got the sleek, sexy exterior with the under-the-hood power I want.Freedom to innovate? Greenspun was right; in a few years, Microsoft just might be delivering 1985-era advances to the masses.
I love my TiBook, too. I wrote an article on getting some of the requisite stuff that Perl hackers need, so you can use it when you've made the upgrade, Ziggy.
Re:OS X
ziggy on 2002-05-30T00:27:52
I'm just wondering how the RTF support in NeXTSTEP / OS X compares to modern versions of Word. The original RTF spec is intended to be forward compatible, so that if the native RTF widgets in OS X are only capable of dealing with v1.1, they should (in theory) be able to read most portions of v1.5 documents, ignoring the new and unknown control words.If that works, it would go a long way to helping me read the files I need to read on a daily basis.
Re:OS X
Theory on 2002-05-30T00:52:49
I have no idea. I use Office v.X. I'm not sure there's a native RTF viewer on OS X. AppleWorks would probably work, though, and it often ships with OS X systems.
No, wait, hold the phone. I just saved a text-only document to RTF in Word v.X, and it opened quite nicely in TextEdit, the default OS X document editor. Cool! If you want to send me a document, I can try to open it in TextEdit and see how it looks.
One thing that's really cool about OS X is native support for PDF. In the print dialog box of any application, I can click the preview button, and it takes me into the Preview application, where I can save a document to PDF. I use this for sending invoices, contracts, etc. I can even send a PDF dump of an RTF file you send me and I view in TextEdit.
Jason
Re:arg
pudge on 2002-05-30T21:30:56
"It is so choice. If you have the means I highly recommend picking one up."Re:arg
Purdy on 2002-05-31T14:05:33
Thanks, Ferris...
