The Unix way, OTOH, expects the application to produce Postscript and it's the driver/printers' problem to render this appropriately on the page. Which, arguably, is the whole damn point of a printer driver
The point of a printer driver is to turn visible output into hard output. Not to reformat the contents of a document *without showing the user what the result will be until that content is printed*.
Whoa, it is really sad that it's now accepted behavior for a word processing document to look vastly different (note my example: wrapping text around a table, page breaks, etc.) depending on the printer Windows was using.
It was _always_ expected behaviour, dating back to (at least) the days of Wordperfect. Indeed, it was even more prevalent back then when things like laser printers with essentially 100% printable area were high-end luxuries, rather than consumer commodities.
I might understand if the text were rendered a little different due to fonts (installed on the printer) being slightly different from the fonts Windows is using. But I do not accept that text flowing around a table should be any different on one computer+printer vs another computer+printer. If that's really how Windows works, I'm even less of a fan.
How else do you deal with different printable areas, margins and page sizes ?
Word processors are not typesetting tools. If you want something to look identical on one computer as it does on another, then pick a tool that is designed to do so. Word Processors are not - they are designed to turn text on the screen to text on paper.
And yet, Microsoft makes a big deal that if you run Microsoft Office, you will be able to share your documents with others running Office.
And you can. Sharing documents in no way implies identical output on dissimilar systems.
And yet, if you cannot guarantee that your document on a Mac (in my example, at least one person printed their copy of the doc on a Mac) will look the same as on Windows, how is that seamless???
Because the alternatives (cropping bits of the document, disproportionately rescaling, running text off the side of the page) are dramatically *less* seamless.
I think the Unix method makes more sense.
The UNIX method is making poor assumptions and will produce worse (if not outright broken) results, without printers that have identical (or very similar) capabilities.
Once again, a Word Processor is not a tool for making a document look identical on different computers with different output capabilities. If you are trying to do that, you are using the wrong tool for the job.
I'm saying I have no more choice than a gay man when it comes to marriage, because to get married you have to find someone to marry.
The rather large and fundamental difference being that if you do find someone you want to marry, you can. A gay man cannot because a discriminatory *law* stops him from doing so.
Perhaps you missed the main subject of the discussion. They can't get married.
It is illegal to discriminate because of sexual orientation these days, you know.
Apparently not only can you, but several states have explicitly discriminatory legislation.
But you can deny me a job or housing because of my being single quite legally.
I sincerely doubt you can be (legally) denied a job for that reason. Certainly, when I interview candidates for any of our US positions one of the things I am explicitly not allowed to discuss is marital status. I'm not familiar with rental regulations in the US, but I'd be similarly surprised if someone's application could be rejected due to their marital status.
And it's not my choice to be single -- I would marry in a minute if I could find a suitable mate.
You appear to be suggesting that "being gay" is a choice.
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Exactly. If you want something that is guaranteed to look identical on someone else's screen (and printer) as it does on yours, then you want a program that's designed to do that - and Word is not.
I think marriages create stability for society, whether or not procreation is involved. In your opinion, what are the social benefits of marriage?
Overall, it creates a 'stronger' community. On a more individual scale, married couples generally live longer, make more money and and have higher employment rates. Additionally children brough up by married couples tend to have better health, better school results and fewer problems with the law.
The problem isn't discrimination against gays, it's discrimination against single people whether gay or straight. As a divorced straight guy I face the same discrimination as any gay.
No, you don't. Stop trying to conflate separate issues.
Not in the slightest. You are criticising with neither context nor justification. Or, to use the colloquialism, "spewing mindless crap".
All I'm curious about is whether you're criticising because you really do have an opinion on what would classify as "innovative and interesting", or if you're just a garden variety Slashbot making up your quota of anti-Microsoft rhetoric. Given your responses thus far, I'm going to go with the latter.
Personally I think I have great way to solve this problem; eliminate completely the concept of legal marriage. Its not needed, and the issue is causing us to waste time better spent on other work. Make it a purely religous or spiritial cermemony, that means nothing legally.
That would be *extremely* disruptive to pretty much everyone on multiple levels. Do you have any idea how many legal issues are bound to 'marriage' ?
On the other hand, simply removing discrimination against homosexuals wouldn't be disruptive to anyone except small-minded bigots. All it would effectively boil down to is a bunch of searching and replacing through existing legislation, rather than revisiting dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of legal decisions.
If Microsoft were to "block" Firefox from running due a security vulnerability it had, the sheer level of rage released from Slashdot would probably be enough to melt monitors on the other side of the world.
EasyJet flight to pretty much anywhere in Europe: £80 (max).
Moving all your stuff by boat: £200+ (Or, if you can spare a few days hire a van and drive.)
If you think relocating to another country is even remotely that cheap, you are in for a brutal shock if you ever try to do it. Stick another zero on the end and you might just be starting to get within shouting distance of how much a bare-bones, everything-goes-according-to-plan relocation might cost, if you're lucky.
And that's just within Europe. For international moves (say, to America), add that zero then multiple by about four.
The registry is the configuration system of windows, so even if you are clicking bottoms, the settings will be saved in hives. My point is: even if you do not know it, if you use windows, you edit the registry with nearly every mouse click.
Congratulations. You have won today's "I'm a facetious twat" award.
What do you mean by a "narrow path"? Most things that a non-geek user is expected to do for themselves is doable though a GUI in most versions of Linux meant for that market - e.g. Ubuntu or Mandriva, not Arch or Gentoo.
That's exactly what I mean by narrow path. As soon as you're trying to do something even vaguely different to whatever the distro maintainer has envisaged (and the people maintaining Linux distros generally aren't particularly good at putting themselves into the shoes of the average Joe), then you're going to have to start messing inside textfiles. When I'm messing with Linux-distro-of-the-week, I find this typically happens at the point I want to configure multiple monitors, but that's far from the only example.
The same is true of Windows (and OS X), of course - but the difference is that the path is far, far wider.
I don't know if you're an accidental or intentional troll, but there you go.
Speaking the truth is not trolling, intentionally or otherwise.
The Windows "search" feature by default will not search all the files to find by content, in fact it ignores a considerable number of file types. Linux (or cygwin) will happily -- and very quickly -- find portions of a config quite easily.
This is what's called irrelevant.
The Windows registry is significantly more difficult to use, has significantly more entries, and you can prevent the machine from booting all too easily.
You can stop a Linux box from not booting quite easily as well. The difference, as I already said, is that on a Windows machine messing directly in the Registry is extremely uncommon. On UNIX machines, messing with text config files is business as usual.
It's vastly more common for an inexperienced user to render a Linux machine unbootable during normal behaviour, than a Windows one.
This kinda invalidates the argument that Windows fanboys have been spouting for years, namely "...but in Linux/BSD/Whatever, you have to edit files, which is too hard for Joe Sixpack to do!"
The big difference is that Registry editing is extremely uncommon in Windows. Trawling through textfiles in Linux (or BSD) is - ironically - something you're almost certainly going to have to do as soon as you step off the narrow path of basic setup and usage.
If you bork the registry, discover it's borked only after a full reboot/log-in, then try to reboot again thinking it's some other problem, that backup copy of the registry just went 'pfft!', and you may or may not be able to get to a point where you can use System Restore
If it booted far enough the first time to delete the backup, then it booted far enough to get to System Restore.
The registry makes a great place to hide stuff in (see also half the malware to come down the pike in the past 9 years)
No more so (and probably far less so) than the maze of rc scripts in your average Linux or BSD.
So yes, that means government provides laws, military, police, and arguably infrastructure where not practical for private sector and limited safety net (for disabled etc) and it is financed by taxes.
I want to know why government-provided healthcare is philosophically any different to government-provided army, police, fire services and/or a "limited safety net, etc".
Slashdot Mirror
The Unix way, OTOH, expects the application to produce Postscript and it's the driver/printers' problem to render this appropriately on the page. Which, arguably, is the whole damn point of a printer driver
The point of a printer driver is to turn visible output into hard output. Not to reformat the contents of a document *without showing the user what the result will be until that content is printed*.
Whoa, it is really sad that it's now accepted behavior for a word processing document to look vastly different (note my example: wrapping text around a table, page breaks, etc.) depending on the printer Windows was using.
It was _always_ expected behaviour, dating back to (at least) the days of Wordperfect. Indeed, it was even more prevalent back then when things like laser printers with essentially 100% printable area were high-end luxuries, rather than consumer commodities.
I might understand if the text were rendered a little different due to fonts (installed on the printer) being slightly different from the fonts Windows is using. But I do not accept that text flowing around a table should be any different on one computer+printer vs another computer+printer. If that's really how Windows works, I'm even less of a fan.
How else do you deal with different printable areas, margins and page sizes ?
Word processors are not typesetting tools. If you want something to look identical on one computer as it does on another, then pick a tool that is designed to do so. Word Processors are not - they are designed to turn text on the screen to text on paper.
And yet, Microsoft makes a big deal that if you run Microsoft Office, you will be able to share your documents with others running Office.
And you can. Sharing documents in no way implies identical output on dissimilar systems.
And yet, if you cannot guarantee that your document on a Mac (in my example, at least one person printed their copy of the doc on a Mac) will look the same as on Windows, how is that seamless???
Because the alternatives (cropping bits of the document, disproportionately rescaling, running text off the side of the page) are dramatically *less* seamless.
I think the Unix method makes more sense.
The UNIX method is making poor assumptions and will produce worse (if not outright broken) results, without printers that have identical (or very similar) capabilities.
Once again, a Word Processor is not a tool for making a document look identical on different computers with different output capabilities. If you are trying to do that, you are using the wrong tool for the job.
Neither can I.
What law is stopping you ?
I'm saying I have no more choice than a gay man when it comes to marriage, because to get married you have to find someone to marry.
The rather large and fundamental difference being that if you do find someone you want to marry, you can. A gay man cannot because a discriminatory *law* stops him from doing so.
How is a gay being discriminated against?
Perhaps you missed the main subject of the discussion. They can't get married.
It is illegal to discriminate because of sexual orientation these days, you know.
Apparently not only can you, but several states have explicitly discriminatory legislation.
But you can deny me a job or housing because of my being single quite legally.
I sincerely doubt you can be (legally) denied a job for that reason. Certainly, when I interview candidates for any of our US positions one of the things I am explicitly not allowed to discuss is marital status. I'm not familiar with rental regulations in the US, but I'd be similarly surprised if someone's application could be rejected due to their marital status.
And it's not my choice to be single -- I would marry in a minute if I could find a suitable mate.
You appear to be suggesting that "being gay" is a choice.
An example I wrote about a few months ago:
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Exactly. If you want something that is guaranteed to look identical on someone else's screen (and printer) as it does on yours, then you want a program that's designed to do that - and Word is not.
I think marriages create stability for society, whether or not procreation is involved. In your opinion, what are the social benefits of marriage?
Overall, it creates a 'stronger' community. On a more individual scale, married couples generally live longer, make more money and and have higher employment rates. Additionally children brough up by married couples tend to have better health, better school results and fewer problems with the law.
Cart before the horse, man. There are economic incentives and benefits because the government is involved, not the other way around.
Government is involved because there are social benefits to marriage. Therefore, marriages are encourages via economic incentives.
The problem isn't discrimination against gays, it's discrimination against single people whether gay or straight. As a divorced straight guy I face the same discrimination as any gay.
No, you don't. Stop trying to conflate separate issues.
Get rid of them. It's ridiculous to incentivize marriage, for straight or gay people.
Whoa there, tiger. There's a wealth of evidence indicating that marriage provides an overall net benefit.
What a ridiculous answer.
Not in the slightest. You are criticising with neither context nor justification. Or, to use the colloquialism, "spewing mindless crap".
All I'm curious about is whether you're criticising because you really do have an opinion on what would classify as "innovative and interesting", or if you're just a garden variety Slashbot making up your quota of anti-Microsoft rhetoric. Given your responses thus far, I'm going to go with the latter.
Personally I think I have great way to solve this problem; eliminate completely the concept of legal marriage. Its not needed, and the issue is causing us to waste time better spent on other work. Make it a purely religous or spiritial cermemony, that means nothing legally.
That would be *extremely* disruptive to pretty much everyone on multiple levels. Do you have any idea how many legal issues are bound to 'marriage' ?
On the other hand, simply removing discrimination against homosexuals wouldn't be disruptive to anyone except small-minded bigots. All it would effectively boil down to is a bunch of searching and replacing through existing legislation, rather than revisiting dozens (if not hundreds or thousands) of legal decisions.
I always wondered why marriage has anything to do with the government anyway.
Because there are economic incentives and benefits to being married.
Does it? It seems like it would require a VERY complicated answer to me.
Probably.
Since it's so simple, perhaps you could help us get started by describing your innovative OS concepts.
Why ? I'm not the one making any claims about whether or not something is "innovative or interesting".
Are you guys SO desperate for ideas for Win 8 that you have to ask random Slashdotters for hints?
I just want to know what you would consider "innovative or interesting" for the average user. Seems like a simple request.
For instance, why would you want your quicklaunch icons to move around all over the taskbar every time you open or close a window?
Because they're not meant to be looked at as "quicklaunch icons", they're meant to be looked at as "Taskbar buttons".
They can't take a risk by producing an innovative or interesting OS, [...]
What would qualify as an "innovative or interesting OS", in the context of the average user ?
If Microsoft were to "block" Firefox from running due a security vulnerability it had, the sheer level of rage released from Slashdot would probably be enough to melt monitors on the other side of the world.
EasyJet flight to pretty much anywhere in Europe: £80 (max). Moving all your stuff by boat: £200+ (Or, if you can spare a few days hire a van and drive.)
If you think relocating to another country is even remotely that cheap, you are in for a brutal shock if you ever try to do it. Stick another zero on the end and you might just be starting to get within shouting distance of how much a bare-bones, everything-goes-according-to-plan relocation might cost, if you're lucky.
And that's just within Europe. For international moves (say, to America), add that zero then multiple by about four.
I would prefer to think of him, and myself, as citizens of Earth. The world might be a better place if we thought that way more often.
Not nearly as better a place it would be if "they" thought that way more often !
The registry is the configuration system of windows, so even if you are clicking bottoms, the settings will be saved in hives. My point is: even if you do not know it, if you use windows, you edit the registry with nearly every mouse click.
Congratulations. You have won today's "I'm a facetious twat" award.
What do you mean by a "narrow path"? Most things that a non-geek user is expected to do for themselves is doable though a GUI in most versions of Linux meant for that market - e.g. Ubuntu or Mandriva, not Arch or Gentoo.
That's exactly what I mean by narrow path. As soon as you're trying to do something even vaguely different to whatever the distro maintainer has envisaged (and the people maintaining Linux distros generally aren't particularly good at putting themselves into the shoes of the average Joe), then you're going to have to start messing inside textfiles. When I'm messing with Linux-distro-of-the-week, I find this typically happens at the point I want to configure multiple monitors, but that's far from the only example.
The same is true of Windows (and OS X), of course - but the difference is that the path is far, far wider.
I don't know if you're an accidental or intentional troll, but there you go.
Speaking the truth is not trolling, intentionally or otherwise.
The Windows "search" feature by default will not search all the files to find by content, in fact it ignores a considerable number of file types. Linux (or cygwin) will happily -- and very quickly -- find portions of a config quite easily.
This is what's called irrelevant.
The Windows registry is significantly more difficult to use, has significantly more entries, and you can prevent the machine from booting all too easily.
You can stop a Linux box from not booting quite easily as well. The difference, as I already said, is that on a Windows machine messing directly in the Registry is extremely uncommon. On UNIX machines, messing with text config files is business as usual.
It's vastly more common for an inexperienced user to render a Linux machine unbootable during normal behaviour, than a Windows one.
This kinda invalidates the argument that Windows fanboys have been spouting for years, namely "...but in Linux/BSD/Whatever, you have to edit files, which is too hard for Joe Sixpack to do!"
The big difference is that Registry editing is extremely uncommon in Windows. Trawling through textfiles in Linux (or BSD) is - ironically - something you're almost certainly going to have to do as soon as you step off the narrow path of basic setup and usage.
If you bork the registry, discover it's borked only after a full reboot/log-in, then try to reboot again thinking it's some other problem, that backup copy of the registry just went 'pfft!', and you may or may not be able to get to a point where you can use System Restore
If it booted far enough the first time to delete the backup, then it booted far enough to get to System Restore.
The registry makes a great place to hide stuff in (see also half the malware to come down the pike in the past 9 years)
No more so (and probably far less so) than the maze of rc scripts in your average Linux or BSD.
Oh, sure, they've got a history of horrible transitions. HotMail comes to mind immediately.
One data point isn't even enough to establish a trend, let alone a history.
So yes, that means government provides laws, military, police, and arguably infrastructure where not practical for private sector and limited safety net (for disabled etc) and it is financed by taxes.
I want to know why government-provided healthcare is philosophically any different to government-provided army, police, fire services and/or a "limited safety net, etc".