On 6/30/05, Carol Spears <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > and even with other current software that is available to me, i am still > asking the question "what is the reason you need to get a whole freaking > office suite and install it so that you can simply read a file that ends > in .doc?" oh, the origins for this application can be found on a
Assuming that you're only READING the file, and not editing it, on Windows, the Microsoft Word Viewer (created by Microsoft, available for free from microsoft.com) serves this purpose nicely and answers the question. Problem is, no one knows about it (it hasn't been oft-used since 1997ish, IIRC, even though they keep it up to date). On Linux, antiword and/or Abiword (the former converting all the words out of a .doc file and putting it in a .txt file, the latter being a Word Processor, not a Office Suite) will do fine. > in .doc?" oh, the origins for this application can be found on a > different operating system that needs every single freaking tool to be > loaded to do a simple task and the users cannot see any reason to work > differently or manage their own resources better. This just promotes consumerism society, and makes us want to buy bigger, faster, more expensive things, just to do the same thing. That's why it takes as long to start a Microsoft Word 2005 on a new computer in 2005 (or longer) as it did to start Microsoft Word '97 on a new computer in 1997. Because they added so many new features, that the "faster" CPU (which isn't really faster, but that aside), and "faster" memory are consumed and everything starts swapping out to disk. That said, The GIMP technically *shouldn't* load *all* of it's brushes on startup, should it? (At least not when a user has this many brushes and patterns.) Like there should be a threshold, e.g. The GIMP will only load 32-128 brushes/patterns (this is a combined number, and should be configurable, and based on memory requirements) concurrently in memory on startup, and the rest will be left stored on disk and read as necessary. Then again, this sounds like Windows XP's prefetching method of "speeding up the launch of applications" -- which is nice if you start the same thing every day, but if you have 200 applications and you maybe use each one 3 times a month, the computer might end up trying to prefech (e.g. 5 files per application) 1000 files on startup, causing it to "freeze" on startup for a minute before you can use it. There's no way to win. Has someone mentioned this "bug" to GIMP-devel? Maybe we can put it on a TODO list [consider changing pattern/brush management system(s) in The GIMP]. Or someone can submit a patch? *shrugs* -- ~Mike _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user
