Microsoft's print system

[Killer360]

It's terrible!  And when you print to file, you get a driver-dependent file.

Call me impractical, but when I print to file, I kinda expect to be able to view the file or print it somewhere else.  Instead I got a bunch of machine code sludge for which no viewer exists, and only a specific printer can print!  Everyone else uses postscript...call me crazy, but that makes more sense!

A couple years ago, I wrote about CUPS on vL forum.  Boy, I thought that was a pain in the ass.  But in retrospect, I understand the rationale for it.  You have a daemon that listens for print requests and calls a filter that translates documents to the printer's format.  Many printers are so similar, you need only one filter that outputs with minor modifications.  CUPS uses ppd files that describes those minor differences.  When you install a filter, you usually get ppd files for thousands of printers...you can easily add printers anywhere you go in minutes!

Windows uses drivers and those things usually only work for a specific printer and come with crappy VB software to pollute your workspace and filesystem (and registry)!  Why do printers need a kernel-space driver...nobody else does it this way!  What are those jerk offs thinking!?

CUPS is elegant, its portable, extensible, and it can use varieties of mediums without much hassle.  And surprise, its owned by Apple!

So the story is:
Tomorrow is first day of classes.  I was at a friends house and printed my schedule to file on Windows XP and scp'd (he has cygwin) it home.  I assumed it was postscript because everything on Unix outputs postscript files when you print to file...quite handy to save paper and keep online payment receipts, tickets, etc...NAH, that would make too much sense!  Instead, I got a Lexmark EMF file...its a proprietary format and nothing can read it...and no, its not EMF.  It can probably only print to my friend's printer.  Now, the database that holds the schedule is offline and I cannot print it again.

Windows:  Easy to install, Easy to use, Easy to break, Hard to fix (so hard, companies and products exist to fix it!), and often not reliable!
Unix: Custom to install, Verbose to use, Hard to break, Easy to fix, often very reliable (FreeBSD and Linux hold records on netcraft)!

   "They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages...but that's nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!"
- churchofbsd.org

I indulge in reading John C. Dvorak's PC-MAG columns on annoyances in copying files in Windows.  They can't even get that one right, let alone kept computer technology in the DOS era into the 21st century.

Short: Windows didn't output data in the format I wanted, a for a non Windows operating system. As a result, I'm going to write an emotional half page bellyache about "When things don't go my way" part four.

Either accept what it outputs, use Microsoft's XPS, or you can cry yourself to sleep. Does PDF not exist to you, or is your whining purely based on you being ignorant of the facts?

Why don't you go date Bill Gates?

[Warrior]

It's terrible!  And when you print to file, you get a driver-dependent file.

Call me impractical, but when I print to file, I kinda expect to be able to view the file or print it somewhere else.  Instead I got a bunch of machine code sludge for which no viewer exists, and only a specific printer can print!  Everyone else uses postscript...call me crazy, but that makes more sense!

A couple years ago, I wrote about CUPS on vL forum.  Boy, I thought that was a pain in the ass.  But in retrospect, I understand the rationale for it.  You have a daemon that listens for print requests and calls a filter that translates documents to the printer's format.  Many printers are so similar, you need only one filter that outputs with minor modifications.  CUPS uses ppd files that describes those minor differences.  When you install a filter, you usually get ppd files for thousands of printers...you can easily add printers anywhere you go in minutes!

Windows uses drivers and those things usually only work for a specific printer and come with crappy VB software to pollute your workspace and filesystem (and registry)!  Why do printers need a kernel-space driver...nobody else does it this way!  What are those jerk offs thinking!?

CUPS is elegant, its portable, extensible, and it can use varieties of mediums without much hassle.  And surprise, its owned by Apple!

So the story is:
Tomorrow is first day of classes.  I was at a friends house and printed my schedule to file on Windows XP and scp'd (he has cygwin) it home.  I assumed it was postscript because everything on Unix outputs postscript files when you print to file...quite handy to save paper and keep online payment receipts, tickets, etc...NAH, that would make too much sense!  Instead, I got a Lexmark EMF file...its a proprietary format and nothing can read it...and no, its not EMF.  It can probably only print to my friend's printer.  Now, the database that holds the schedule is offline and I cannot print it again.

Windows:  Easy to install, Easy to use, Easy to break, Hard to fix (so hard, companies and products exist to fix it!), and often not reliable!
Unix: Custom to install, Verbose to use, Hard to break, Easy to fix, often very reliable (FreeBSD and Linux hold records on netcraft)!

   "They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages...but that's nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!"
- churchofbsd.org

I indulge in reading John C. Dvorak's PC-MAG columns on annoyances in copying files in Windows.  They can't even get that one right, let alone kept computer technology in the DOS era into the 21st century.

Short: Windows didn't output data in the format I wanted, a for a non Windows operating system. As a result, I'm going to write an emotional half page bellyache about "When things don't go my way" part four.

Either accept what it outputs, use Microsoft's XPS, or you can cry yourself to sleep. Does PDF not exist to you, or is your whining purely based on you being ignorant of the facts?

Why don't you go date Bill Gates?

For one, he's married. I don't think I'm his type :[.

[Hitmen]

Warrior has insane trolling skills

[Killer360]

It's terrible!  And when you print to file, you get a driver-dependent file.

Call me impractical, but when I print to file, I kinda expect to be able to view the file or print it somewhere else.  Instead I got a bunch of machine code sludge for which no viewer exists, and only a specific printer can print!  Everyone else uses postscript...call me crazy, but that makes more sense!

A couple years ago, I wrote about CUPS on vL forum.  Boy, I thought that was a pain in the ass.  But in retrospect, I understand the rationale for it.  You have a daemon that listens for print requests and calls a filter that translates documents to the printer's format.  Many printers are so similar, you need only one filter that outputs with minor modifications.  CUPS uses ppd files that describes those minor differences.  When you install a filter, you usually get ppd files for thousands of printers...you can easily add printers anywhere you go in minutes!

Windows uses drivers and those things usually only work for a specific printer and come with crappy VB software to pollute your workspace and filesystem (and registry)!  Why do printers need a kernel-space driver...nobody else does it this way!  What are those jerk offs thinking!?

CUPS is elegant, its portable, extensible, and it can use varieties of mediums without much hassle.  And surprise, its owned by Apple!

So the story is:
Tomorrow is first day of classes.  I was at a friends house and printed my schedule to file on Windows XP and scp'd (he has cygwin) it home.  I assumed it was postscript because everything on Unix outputs postscript files when you print to file...quite handy to save paper and keep online payment receipts, tickets, etc...NAH, that would make too much sense!  Instead, I got a Lexmark EMF file...its a proprietary format and nothing can read it...and no, its not EMF.  It can probably only print to my friend's printer.  Now, the database that holds the schedule is offline and I cannot print it again.

Windows:  Easy to install, Easy to use, Easy to break, Hard to fix (so hard, companies and products exist to fix it!), and often not reliable!
Unix: Custom to install, Verbose to use, Hard to break, Easy to fix, often very reliable (FreeBSD and Linux hold records on netcraft)!

   "They say when you play a Microsoft CD backwards you can hear satanic messages...but that's nothing, if you play it forward it will install Windows!"
- churchofbsd.org

I indulge in reading John C. Dvorak's PC-MAG columns on annoyances in copying files in Windows.  They can't even get that one right, let alone kept computer technology in the DOS era into the 21st century.

Short: Windows didn't output data in the format I wanted, a for a non Windows operating system. As a result, I'm going to write an emotional half page bellyache about "When things don't go my way" part four.

Either accept what it outputs, use Microsoft's XPS, or you can cry yourself to sleep. Does PDF not exist to you, or is your whining purely based on you being ignorant of the facts?

Why don't you go date Bill Gates?

For one, he's married. I don't think I'm his type :[.

Haha. 

[Warrior]

Warrior has insane trolling skills

You can never really tell, tbh. Well the first post for sure was a troll, the rest had some bits of seriousness with sarcasm.
I just find it funny to complain about something so silly, imo

[Camel]

When you compare the way Windows prints to the way OSX prints, most of the arguing in this thread gets nullified. In OSX, the concept of a driver does exist, but 99% of users will never have to install one (not counting system updates) for any purpose, even if it's without their knowledge.

All generic hardware has a generic language which they must speak in order to work generically. For HIDs (Human Interface Devices - keyboards, mice, gamepads, etc), there is the concept of a button, a trackpad, and a joystick. There are also subcategories, like "101-keyed keyboard" or "three button mouse" or "xbox controller" that aid the OS in identifying each input.

In OSX, if you plug in hardware that speaks the generic, the hardware will just work without any kind of driver. In Windows, if you plug in hardware, you will be locked out from that hardware until you resolve the "please insert driver now" popup window, regardless of whether the hardware speaks in the generic or not.

While Microsoft may have been justified by legacy support at some point in time for setting up the system the way they did, they certainly are not now. You can't support everything forever; you need to deprecate old systems when they get in the way of progress.

[nslay]

When you compare the way Windows prints to the way OSX prints, most of the arguing in this thread gets nullified. In OSX, the concept of a driver does exist, but 99% of users will never have to install one (not counting system updates) for any purpose, even if it's without their knowledge.

I am fairly certain OS X uses CUPS.  If thats the case, it uses filters not drivers.  Unix represents lpt/ulpt (printer ports) as files that can be opened by user space processes - such as CUPS.  CUPS uses the filters to translate documents into a printer's format (much like old old BSD lpd) and writes it to the lpt files or over the network.  Many printers use similar language and one filter can usually use hundreds to thousands of printers.

A filter is a program that processes streaming input to output.

The only driver involved is lpt and all it does is probe the parallel port or USB for a generic printer (parallel port has special way to identify all printers, USB has tags to identify devices like printers, mice, etc...).  lpt provides a generic I/O interface.

All generic hardware has a generic language which they must speak in order to work generically. For HIDs (Human Interface Devices - keyboards, mice, gamepads, etc), there is the concept of a button, a trackpad, and a joystick. There are also subcategories, like "101-keyed keyboard" or "three button mouse" or "xbox controller" that aid the OS in identifying each input.

In OSX, if you plug in hardware that speaks the generic, the hardware will just work without any kind of driver. In Windows, if you plug in hardware, you will be locked out from that hardware until you resolve the "please insert driver now" popup window, regardless of whether the hardware speaks in the generic or not.

That's right.  Unix is distributed with generic drivers that are designed for chipsets, instead of brand names.  For example, D-Link, Netgear, and Linksys all produce WiFi cards that use the Atheros chipset...on Windows, you cannot use a D-Link driver to drive a Netgear card, even though D-Link's driver can talk to Netgear's Atheros chip.  In Unix, there is one umbrella driver that doesn't care about the brand...hence, if you plug in any device with an atheros chip, it works. 

Sometimes drivers don't exist, but some Unix systems create generic device nodes so that userspace programs can still drive the hardware.  FreeBSD has one for USB called ugen.  ugen attaches to my fingerprint reader (since nothing else attached) and a UPEK userspace driver opens the device (like any file) and drives it.  I think this is a great approach to something as trivial as a fingerprint reader.

Not every device class has a generic driver like USB's ugen...if no driver attaches to a device, it is simply ignored by the kernel and inaccessible from userspace...as far as I know anyways...maybe you can play games with /dev/kmem.

While Microsoft may have been justified by legacy support at some point in time for setting up the system the way they did, they certainly are not now. You can't support everything forever; you need to deprecate old systems when they get in the way of progress.

If brand-names weren't such a big deal, there'd be far fewer drivers for Windows...its no surprise because a good chunk of our hardware's internals are produced by the same companies with the same or similar components.   For example, WiFi cards are quite numerous...but there are only a handful of chipsets.  You reduce hundreds of drivers to a handful.