Printer issue - new

[Fairlight]

That's a coat of paint on a 100yr-old farmhouse, Richard.  It doesn't fix
what's wrong by design, nor internally.  

Chiefly, the 80x24 limitation (***even in their web-based product***) is
insanely dated.  That's the #1 reason they cannot get any sort of
traction in anything but niche markets.

'Database' is being kind.  It's not an RDBMS.  We've discussed that on
this list for 27 years.

Indexes...look, people are -still- needing (or at least think they need to
after something goes belly-up, which happens way too often for a mature
product) to rebuild indexes regularly.  It's BTree+.  I don't deny it's
a whiny little bitch to work with, having researched it.  If you look at
animated applications which illustrate how it works, it's a miracle it
works at all.  That said, if XFS and every other filesystem and database
that uses the algorithm can get it right, you'd think filePro could after
three decades.

There are a lot of issues that need to be addressed.  PDF creation is
one of the -last- things I'd focus on.  One coat of glitter does not
polish a rotting board.

But wait!  People got a...spell checker.  A spell checker which they
didn't even write, I might add.  I believe it was aspell.

m->



On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 02:45:59PM -0500, Richard Kreiss thus spoke:
> Mark,
>  FilePro has updated its technology as it now ca produce outputs in a PDF  format and has a browser based interface (yes, this is a screen scraper of sorts). However the.database runs on a lot of platforms and has remained backward compatible. 
> 
> Hardware on the other hand becomes uselessly after a while and will not work as the drivers and possibly the firmware are not compatible with the new hardware. 
> 
> I gave a Zip drive and disks that work but why use them when a much larger USB memory stick is cheaper and faster then the the Zip disks. Even memory sticks are not backward compatible. Not being to being able to use a dot matrix printer on with a new computer should not be surprising. 
> 
> Even HP which owns PCL has dropped support for their own print control language in favor of ???dumb windows printers???. They save money and make hardware that works with today???s OS. 
> 
> YES, filePro is based on old technology but it has kept up with current hardware and software. I agree that it does not have all the bells and whistles that some of the newer programming languages have but none of them has lasted as long as fp. 
> 
> Richard
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
> > On Feb 25, 2020, at 1:42 PM, Fairlight via Filepro-list <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com> wrote:
> > 
> > ???You literally just criticised wasting money on old tech, while you
> > (presumably still) advocate using filePro.  Ahhh, smell the irony... :)
> > 
> > m->
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 10:18:01AM -0500, Nancy Palmquist via Filepro-list thus spoke:
> >> Jose,
> >> 
> >> I have to agree.  I just helped a tech that was trying to make a parallel
> >> printer work for a customer, because it "always worked with the old Windows
> >> XP" they had.  Suggestion - adjust to a Laser Printer.  Suggestion ignored,
> >> time was spent trying to make it work with some crazy printer spoolers. 
> >> When the output was still garbled after 2 weeks of attempts, in a few hours
> >> we moved the system to use a laser printer.  While wasting money on old tech
> >> is the customer's choice, I never understand it.
> >> 
> >> Nancy
> >> 
> >>> On 2/20/2020 10:38 AM, Jose Lerebours via Filepro-list wrote:
> >>> Wouldn't `netcat` be a generic solution to reaching printers across
> >>> intra/extranet?
> >>> 
> >>> Why use USB only printers and then struggle with this!?!  Get a printer
> >>> that can be given an IP, regardless of the PC it is attached to and use
> >>> `netcat` in lieu of "print" or "lp".
> >>> 
> 
> 

-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.