"BillW50" wrote in
:

In
. 97.131,
DanS wrote:
"BillW50" wrote in
:

In ,
Tom Lake wrote:
"J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote in message
...
In message
,
Mortimer writes:

No, I would say it _is_ Microsoft's, for making an OS
(or OS variant) which can't use older drivers. Why
should hardware manufacturers have to keep producing
new drivers (especially for kit they no longer make -
don't know if that's the case in this case)?

Why should MS (or ANY OS maker) support all old hardware
ad infinitum? In order to advance the OS, keep it able
to use the latest hardware and keep it secure, some
things must be left behind or you'd end up with a huge,
ungainly mess. If the manufacturer doesn't support the
newest OS, then MS certainly doesn't have the resources
to write drivers for every piece of obsolete equipment
out there.

Tom L

In the early days, an OS was screwed big time if it
didn't support the legacy factor. You can have the
world's greatest OS ever seen, but it is totally
worthless if it doesn't support the past. Same is true
today. If you burn bridges as you go, you will always
lose.

"In the early days"....of what... teletypes and ASCII only
printers ?

Do today's printers even have an ASCII mode anymore whe

copy file.txt lpt1

actually prints the text file ?

Who's burning bridges here ?

The printer mfg's, not MS.

Actually Microsoft is burning bridges here. There is no
good reason why you can't use a Windows 95 printer driver
under Windows 7.

I'd assume the difference is the NT kernel vs. 9x which was
just really a shell running on top of DOS.


Have you ever written a printer driver for
Windows before Dan? I have.

I have not, however I have written a ton of other software. A
lot for personal use..utilities that are fairly specific in
nature, so there's no a huge choice, if any, out there to
choose from, so I'd have to roll my own.

Some was for the places I've worked. Programs distributed to
customers, and for internal use, even database programs. These
were all done in a variety of programming languages.

And in the past, Microsoft
didn't break older printer drivers. But those were people
at Microsoft who had learned those hard lessons before.
Nowadays Microsoft has new programmers who are naive about
such lessons.

Let's not make this seem like there's a 100 years of history
here. We're talking roughly 20 years of the PC age....

Win 3.1, 16 bit. Win 9x, 32-bit DOS-based. Then NT-based OSs.

Did drivers from 16-bit 3.1 work under 32-bit Win9x ? Or
driver's for 9x work in NT/XP ?

There's a couple breakages right there.

With the introduction of Vista, there was changes in the
driver model again and security model.

And again, going from 32 bit to 64 bit. CPUs with new added
instruction sets and other advances in hardware architecture
can require changes to take advantages of it.

And now with the whole HP printer exploit that's in the news,
who knows what's going to go on with printing
technologies...maybe there wil be a push just back to dumb
peripherals for most.



Since most of the old people at Microsoft has retired.
The new replacements just don't know any better. And I
see Microsoft getting into trouble because of this. Even
Microsoft had to layoff people in recent times because of
this (the first time in history).

I'm sure the layoffs were just like every other company on
Earth, the economy.....

In today's world, people can't live without computers. Far
different than just a few decades earlier. And computers
are not going away soon. And if Microsoft can't convince
the masses that newer is better, then they have to have
layoffs. Just the same as it was decades ago. Remember
WordStar and Lotus? The economy was great back then but
they couldn't convince the masses either.

Sure I remember Wordstar and Lotus, and bunches of other s/w
companies, but Wordstar was one of how many word processor
packages available ? Yes, they are gone because MS created an
Office Suite that was lower cost, that was a viable package
for most, so people stopped buying the really expensive 3rd
party Word Processors.

There are only 3 OSs now that are viable for everyday
use.......Windows, Linux and OSX (MAC).

The last two releases of Windows...Vista, and 7, sold more
copies faster than each preceeding release.

MAC is *very* slowly growing, the last couple Linux pushes
were commercial failures, and, unfortunately, will continue to
be because of the lack of unity among distros, and yes, TOO
MANY CHOICES for those that just want to turn the thing on and
go.

....not anything to do with whatever you're going on about
above....or below.

Everything to do with it actually.

Still, not really...ALL companies, in ALL industries have gone
through the same thing. (Well, mostly all.)

......it was happening because of costs skyrocketing,
everything from utility costs, to worker healthcare expenses,
sub-contracting, office supplies, bulding supplies...pretty
much all expenses.....and instead of taking from the profits
to cover these costs, these corporations choose layoffs, which
is somewhat wrong, as there should be some type of middle
ground.


Buy anyway, you have your opinion, I have mine. We can leave
it at that.