#Post-Seybold
3 messages in this thread
Steve–
Thanks for the reply on printer controllers. I see that some of the Varityper
DAs are available elsewhere in this forum, so maybe the person who put them on
can help me hunt up a copy of PrintMaster. I'll also contact Southwest
Software, although $500 is a lot of money (although it might be worth it to
have some control over our run times; we have Freehand jobs that regularly run
4-7 *hours*, and I want to bill for every minute).
On the subject of MultiCrasher: what is your opinion as to the culprit? Is
the Mac OS poorly designed, or are crashes the result of misbehaving
applications? We seem to have problems with some programs but not others. On
the other hand, I come out of the IBM world, and I've *never* before seen a
system where you replace the System and Finder files to solve a problem. How
are they getting corrupted? Any reactions, opines, etc. you (or others) may
have is appreciated. –Russ
Russ,
Officially PrintMaster is only available with Varityper imagesetters.
Unofficially, you might be able to get a copy from a friendly Varityper rep.
Other advantages of PrintMaster from Southwest Software are: (1) A customizable
job slug is printed at the beginning of a job. This helps to identify a job if
you run a series of jobs before advancing and cutting paper, and a company logo
could be included to send with the job. (2) A record of PostScript errors is
contained in the job log. (How many times has this happened to you? After
walking away from the Mac, you come back to see the message: A PostScript error
has occurred…. but you weren't watching to see the error message.) (3) A
measure is kept of how much paper in left in the paper cassette for the Lino.
We do use MultiFinder on our production machines, but don't on our output
machines. There are too many things that can go wrong when outputting jobs, so
we simplify things as much as possible: We also don't use any spooling
software, because we haven't yet found any reliable enough.
I can't give you a precise explanation of how Mac System files get corrupted
except to tell you that the Mac OS uses resources, like screen fonts, dialog
boxes, etc., many of which are stored in the System file and which are
accessable to all Mac applications. I presume that, if these applications were
not carefully written, in the course of accessing these resources there were a
crash or lockup parts of the System could become corrupted. As I understand it
the system software in the MS-DOS world has a much more limited purpose; there
are no such things as system-wide resources. It seems to be a fact of life that
as things get more complex and you get more capabilities, the possibilities of
screw-ups increase as well.
I've heard our programmer, who has experience in the UNIX world, talk about how
it's essential to have a system manager when using that much more complex
operating system. For example, in UNIX, you cannot just shut off the file
server. You must follow established shut-down procedures or you risk making
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major parts of your system inaccessible.
^Steve^