Printing queues to hard for Microsoft to get right?
Is it me, or is is still impossible (as of Windows XP/SP2) to take a document sent to one printer and move it to another?
I've got a printer at home that I used to connect to my work laptop (the last bastion of Windows in my home). Now it's on the file server (a Linux box, of course) and shared over the network.
But I only just configured that networked printer this morning, after I had mistakenly sent a print job to the old queue for the previous USB connection.
The job is sitting there in the queue. It's not store in some kind of USB buffer or anything- it's just waiting in the queue. Taking those bunch of bytes and putting them in another queue should not only be easy as hell to code, but should be something that the guys at Microsoft have noticed and needed by now.
Just one more way Windows makes life easy for us, I guess.
Labels: assclown, Microsoft, rootofallevil
posted by Michael at 8:03 AM
2 Comments:
interesting idea.
I'm guessing becuase of your hatred for microsoft, you can do this in linux? One of those things that I just figured "you can't do" because I'm a Windows guy. Go figure.
Of course you can do it in Linux. A print job is just a file stored in a queue, which itself is just another file. Long ago utilities were developed to handle access to these queues, which are just part of the printing process.
What makes Linux a great operating system is that everything is simply a file. Each file has a fully disclosed format. The utilities built are small, with well-defined scopes to which you have full access, including source code. This in contrast to Microsoft's confusing array of binary files and registry settings.
Another large problem with the Windows world of commercial closed-source software is bloat. In order to sell more software publishers are compelled to add more and more features. While this is great for the sales team, it produces over-sized, under-performing software. This also directly contributes to instability and crashes.
This is also why Windows XP requires a minimum of 512MB of memory, even though is does little more than Windows 2000 can do with only 128MB. I have many times the hardware of an average US family, and do much more with it, but I spend much less then they do. That's something I really love about Linux.
You really don't need a modern dual-core processor to process documents and read email. A 4 year-old computer is more than capable of handling my grandmother's needs. But a 4 year-old installation of Windows would force her buy a new computer if she didn't have me to reinstall it every other year. It's wasteful and inexcusable, but it generates revenue for Microsoft, so that's good because we're patriotic U.S. capitalists, right?
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