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From: omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Page Rectangles
Message-ID: <52782@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 11 Oct 90 00:35:38 GMT
References: <10603@goofy.Apple.COM> <52630@brunix.UUCP> <10652@goofy.Apple.COM> <1990Oct10.205616.3028@eng.umd.edu>
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: omh@cs.brown.edu (Owen M. Hartnett)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 38

In article <1990Oct10.205616.3028@eng.umd.edu> russotto@eng.umd.edu (Matthew T. Russotto) writes:
>In article <10652@goofy.Apple.COM> casseres@apple.com (David Casseres) writes:
>>Well, the correct message would be "there is no *supported* way to do it." 
>>Apple is certainly not alone in declining to support each and every hack 
>>that some developer has gotten away with on a particular version of the 
>>software and hardware.  Apple makes reasonable efforts to avoid bombing 
>>out useful features that are hacks, but it does not make unreasonable 
>>efforts and it does not make advance promises.  Consequently, such 
>>features have been known to stop working when a new Apple product comes 
>>out.  At that point, developers who have stayed within the guidelines are 
>>in a position to laugh loudly at those who have not.
>
>Unless 'those who have not' are microsoft, in which case developers beat their
>head against the wall because their conformant application was broken
>by some patch or another placed into the system to keep those bozos in
>business.
>

At one of the Boston Computer Society's MacTechGrp meetings, we had someone
from GCC come in and talk about how he wrote the driver for the first
GCC PLP.  One of the things he said was that there was a patch in the driver
which he couldn't figure out what it did, until he did a search on the
string "Excel" which finally made it make sense.  The driver was checking
to see if the application which is creating the output was Excel and
was then acting in a different way if so.

Now, prior to posting this, I ran my copy of FEDit plus on the newest
LaserWriter Driver, which turned up nil, so this behaviour probably
does not exist on the new driver.  Also, I don't know what version of
the driver (or even which driver) contains the string or whether he made
the whole thing up to try to impress us hackers.

-Owen

Owen Hartnett				omh@cs.brown.edu.CSNET
Brown University Computer Science	omh@cs.brown.edu
					uunet!brunix!omh
"Don't wait up for me tonight because I won't be home for a month."