tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) (05/07/89)
Has anyone gotten 0.9 Mathematica to print anything at all? No matter what I do, I just get a blank page. I've tried saving out the postscript file, and what gets generated is a prologue followed by some moveto's and rlineto's which when printed just prints a blank page. I don't think I'm doing anything wrong, but without source code I can't be sure.
jgreely@previous.cis.ohio-state.edu (J Greely) (05/09/89)
(this one I know, and I don't even have 0.9 yet!) In article <11181@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) writes: >Has anyone gotten 0.9 Mathematica to print anything at all? No matter what I >do, I just get a blank page. According to the release notes (which are on-line), 0.9 Mathematica doesn't print. I imagine the best way to get printouts is by cut-and-pasting into WriteNow. If you can't get the PostScript objects to work, how about converting to TIFF? I spotted this somewhere on the menus when I had a chance to look at it. >I don't think I'm doing >anything wrong, but without source code I can't be sure. Well, this is the worst attempt at a reason for having source code I've seen yet. In fact, I can't imagine what earthly good source code (presumably for the Mathematica front end) would do you in this case, particularly if you're not sure whether it's your problem or the program's. RTFM before you BT(W)FN. I'm not trying to run you through the toaster here, but I think you jumped on the source bandwagon for the wrong reason. I want source, but I don't want to *use* it unless there's nothing else I can do. Proprietary source has a way of tainting the reader, preventing you from being able to do any work in that area later. Your suggested use sounds a bit too casual for me, especially since I know this is a documented limitation of the program under 0.9. My experience with 0.8 is that most major bugs were known before it got out the door, and documented in the release notes. Knowing this, my first response to something that looks broken is to see if NeXT knows about it yet. So far, the few they didn't know that were really bugs (as opposed to philosophical issues) were quickly reported by several locations. According to rumor, most of those have even been fixed already. While we're on the subject, do you really *want* to see beta source? Personally, I don't want to know where they've buried the children. "But *sniff*, you will come back to play with us again, won't you?" "Of *course* I will! On the second Tuesday of next week." "Hooway! Hooway! Wait! The *second* Tuesday?" -=- J Greely (jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu; osu-cis!jgreely)
tytso@athena.mit.edu (Theodore Y. Ts'o) (05/12/89)
In article <47558@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu> J Greely <jgreely@cis.ohio-state.edu> writes: >>I don't think I'm doing >>anything wrong, but without source code I can't be sure. > >Well, this is the worst attempt at a reason for having source code >I've seen yet. In fact, I can't imagine what earthly good source code >(presumably for the Mathematica front end) would do you in this case, >particularly if you're not sure whether it's your problem or the >program's. RTFM before you BT(W)FN. You're right, I was probably being a bit too casual about source code. But then again, I haven't seen any documentation for it either. (OK, OK, there was the release notes --- but I don't consider release notes to be documentation --- and I didn't know about the Mathematica release notes at the time.) My experience is that the source code is much more reliable for determining how a program works; much more so than TFM. In fact, I'll prefer looking at the TFS, since I can usually wade through the source faster than I can wade through the manual. This may be saying something about the quality about most computer documentation. All I can say is that I hope that the NeXT's final documentation will be more informative than your average Mac documentation (which has close to zero information content). With source code, I can usually also fix problems much faster than going through normal channels. I would much prefer to fix the problem locally, and then send them a diff of the changes. As long as it works on my site, I don't care if it takes the n+plus weeks for it to wind its way up and down user support to the people who know what they're doing. If you think I'm just being impatient, may be I am. But then again, when people are combating things like the internet worm (or the anonymous ftp bug, or the Sun login bug, or the Ultrix login bug) time (and therefore sources) are important! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Theodore Ts'o bloom-beacon!mit-athena!tytso 3 Ames St., Cambridge, MA 02139 tytso@athena.mit.edu Everybody's playing the game, but nobody's rules are the same!