*BSD News Article 12780


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From: peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: How to vote on POSIX Printing
Organization: NeoSoft Communications Services -- (713) 684-5900
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1993 00:58:49 GMT
Message-ID: <C3p9E2.6xy@sugar.neosoft.com>
References: <1993Mar10.025832.17665@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <WCS.93Mar9232624@rainier.ATT.COM> <1993Mar10.172755.27350@fcom.cc.utah.edu>
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In article <1993Mar10.172755.27350@fcom.cc.utah.edu> terry@cs.weber.edu (A Wizard of Earth C) writes:
> Ever use a NeXT machine and picked a printer from a list of printers as a
> user and had the whole thing "just work"?  THAT'S what an API buys you.

No it isn't. That has nothing to do with there being an "API". That has to
do with having interfaces (in general) properly defined, and used. That has
to do with having a single organization building the whole thing from scratch.
Homogenous systems properly designed *do* tend to work better. They have a
simpler problem to solve.

The Amiga has the same facility, as does the Mac. The Amiga API is totally
useless for a shared printer environment, but the *drivers* would work
perfectly well in that environment because the *driver* interface is well
defined.

For the areas Palladium is targeted, a good networking interface (as opposed
to a poor one, like the BSD one) is more important. From my reading of the
Palladium documents, it doesn't have one... in fact it assumes NFS or an
equivalent for most of the interfaces (plural) it defines.

I don't think Palladium is worse than lpr or lp, I just really don't think
it's any better.
-- 
Peter da Silva.  <peter@sugar.neosoft.com>.
 `-_-'   Oletko halannut suttasi tänään?
  'U`    
Tarjoilija, tämä ateria elää vielä.