Clean is loosing portability in favour of Windows :(

[Antonio Eduardo Costa Pereira]

>
> My hint is to buy an Apple Macintosh. I for private use Macintoshes only.
I
> have a 4 year old Performa and a few weeks ago I bought a second-hand
> Powerbook.
>
I think this is a very good tip. Specially, if consinder that Macintosh has
the best
tools for the kind of job Ms Joyce is doing (image processing).

> Okay, that is a fact that Linux (and especially Mac OS) does not support
> every device driver. But could it be possible that the fault lies at the
hardware
> makers?

There is no question about this (that the fault lies with the hardware
makers).
Hewlett Packard, the maker of 720C concedes that it wants this printer to
be used with windows only. They keep the protocol secret, to prevent people
from porting it to Linux, Oberon, or other operational system. A former HP
employee cracked the protocol, and created a filter for Linux. His filter is
black and white only (no collors). In his page, he states that it is a
policy of
HP not to publish information about the protocol. Although Okidata is not
so blunt, I think that the same think happens to the LED printers (they want
them to run in Wintel only). In the last issue of Linux magazine, they talk
about the DeCSS stuff. The fact is that makers of DVD did not want its
encription system to be ported to Linux, and used a public key system to
encrypt it. This was cracked by a young man from Norway. The manufacturers
of DVDs and film makers are suing  the guy.

Of course, the Linux community has at least this parcel of guilty: Since
filter
making has no glamour, not many people work on this part of the system.
Even for the well supported printers, Linuxes would rather use Aladin's
Ghostscript than trying to develop their own systems.  Since vendors
are supposed to pay Aladin to package Ghostscript with their products,
Linux distributors mail their system with old versions of GS. Again, this is
from Linux magazine.

Eduardo Costa