Re[4]: Word's Macro Virus

[Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- COM]

      I scan my entire hard disk with over 800 mb of word proposals and it
      never took more than 45 minutes.

      I scan my network drives with my company's entire proposal repository
      of about 6 gig of word files and it never took more than 2-3 hours.

      Granted...I'm running a 133 pent.

That's what I was talking about, John. Notice please I said "For the mac"
in my statement characterizing Word as bloated and slow. MS simply doesn't
know how to write software that executes quickly on any platform but Intel.
According to the benchmarks I've seen, Word runs even slower under Windows
NT on a non-Intel platform than it does on a PowerMac. Yes, even under
Windows on Intel there is a speed drop with Word 6.0. But that drop is
infinitessimal compared to the one they inflicted on the Mac crowd.

This isn't a chip issue, or even an OS issue, as other companies are quite
able to write code which takes advantage of the speed inherent in the
PowerPC to run blazingly fast. (Adobe's Photoshop, for example, picked up
almost an order of magnitude in speed over their Motorola Mac version; MS
Word gained little if any speed -- I think it even got slower -- while
Excel only gained about 30%. The difference in performance between the old
Motorola chips and the PowerPC chips, for you Intel devotees, is about like
the difference between a 386 and a Pentium. And, given that increase in
processor speed, Excel only managed about a 30% increase in performance
over an '040, even though being moved to a chip with 50% faster floating-
point performance than a Pentium.) It's just ineptness on the part of MS
programmers.

I'm wondering how long it's going to take MS to corrupt the Fox programmers
they have. The betas of Visual FoxPro for PowerMac are reportedly running
much faster than on similar clock-speed Pentiums. I'm sure they'll do
something about that before shipping, however. Simply wouldn't do to have
the Fox programmers outperforming the rest of the crew, now, would it? ;{>}
It'd make the Word developers look bad. (Too late. The excremental job they
did this time around did that very well, without needing any help from
anyone else, thank you. I've been a Word user since version 3.0, and for
the greatest part of that time I was satisfied. With 5.0 I began to get
second thoughts. Version 6.0 did it. I've moved completely off MS Word at
home, now, and I only use it at work because I have to. MS did what no
other company in the industry had been able to do despite long years of
trying -- they got me interested in word processors that were not MS Word.
And once a customer walks away, it takes a lot more to bring him back than
it took to get him in the first place.)


Have fun,
Arlen
Chief Managing Director In Charge, Department of Redundancy Department
DNRC 124

Arlen -dot- P -dot- Walker -at- JCI -dot- Com
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