newbie needs help with GUI

[Scott Chapman]

On Saturday 04 October 2003 12:34, Cliff Wells wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-10-04 at 12:28, achrist at easystreet.com wrote:
> >   The messages might go to a secret place, IDK.
> > I can imagine that when this computer reaches its final reward,
> > the recycler will smash some component deep in the guts of this
> > machine and all of that previously unseen print output will splill
> > out all over the floor.
>
> That's just silly.  Everyone knows computers recycle unused characters
> for later use.  Unix often stores them in /dev/null which is why so many
> scripts send unwanted characters there.  Windows, of course, leaks
> characters, which is why all MS applications ship with something called
> a "font pack" which is really just extra characters so it doesn't run
> out.

This has been a major problem at Microsoft that their engineers have been 
wringing their hands over for a long time.  When the computer temporarily 
runs out of characters through this leakage, it makes a blue screen and gives 
you a cryptic error message that doesn't mention character loss at all, while 
it digs around through the font packs trying to find some unused ones.  The 
faster CPU systems currently available are seen as the fix for this issue, 
combined with Microsoft's recent breakthrough -- they can use the wasted CPU 
cycles on these machines to generate new characters within the system!  This 
is actually the main reason that the newer versions of Windows are somewhat 
more stable than their predecessors, although it's a very CPU intensive 
process.  I find it ironic and very humerous that Linux has so many extra 
characters that it can just send them to the recycle bin while Windows is so 
wasteful of them that it causes operating system instability!  Anybody that 
doesn't know how much superior Linux is to Windows is just plain ignorant.

Scott