Windows 2000 and Printing: What were they thinking?

[Martin Radford]

> Well, I thought the whole idea of having a print server with downloadable
> drivers was that you didn't need local printer drivers any more and that
> all the resources were set up when the share was mounted.  The advantage
> of this is that you can change the printer driver on the server and all
> the clients get updated automatically (not to mention not having to worry
> about installing drivers on the clients in the first place and being able
> to add and change printers without having to much with the client
> install).

The point is that the drivers still get installed locally - it's just
the installation is done behind your back without you noticing.  This
is the way it works with NT4 and Win2k.

<snip>
> 
> <rant>I'm annoyed at the X people for not allowing for kernel mode video
> device drivers sooner (think games) and Corel for not getting it together

It's not necessarily the X people who object to kernel mode video
drivers - it's the people who decide what goes into the kernel.  While
they make the driver run faster, it's at the expense of stability.
When they put the graphics drivers into the NT4 kernel, it allowed
user-level code to crash the OS by using invalid parameters to API
calls.  It took MS a while to get the bounds checking right.  But this
is off-topic, so I'll leave it here.

Martin
-- 
Martin Radford              |   "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ 
martin at zamenhof.demon.co.uk | men just upload their important stuff  -o)
Registered Linux user #9257 |  on ftp and let the rest of the world  /\\
- see http://counter.li.org |       mirror it ;)"  - Linus Torvalds _\_V