L
liviabster
Any words of help for the Phaser 6110 problem of blank document
printing?
printing?
B
Beth Rosengard
Only this: <http://word.mvps.org/mac/Word2008Issues.html#BlankPrint>
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Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP
Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>
My Site: <http://www.bethrosengard.com>
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***Please always reply to the newsgroup!***
Beth Rosengard
Mac MVP
Mac Word FAQ: <http://word.mvps.org/Mac/WordMacHome.html>
My Site: <http://www.bethrosengard.com>
J
John McGhie
No.
It's a confirmed bug. We're waiting on patches from Apple/Microsoft and
Xerox to fix it.
Given the complexity of the fix, it may be three months before a fix has
been tested by all three companies and released.
Sorry...
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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
It's a confirmed bug. We're waiting on patches from Apple/Microsoft and
Xerox to fix it.
Given the complexity of the fix, it may be three months before a fix has
been tested by all three companies and released.
Sorry...
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
W
wsmknicks
This has been a known issue since 10.5 was released. We're now on
10.5.2, and it's still not fixed. Xerox's drivers are from 1/07 - over
a year old. More than your "three months" has gone by on this...my
first email to Xerox was back in November.
John - please find out what is really going on and get an estimated
fix. With all due respect, repeating that a bug will take three months
to fix - when we're already in month four plus - isn't making anyone
feel any better.
Thanks
Will
10.5.2, and it's still not fixed. Xerox's drivers are from 1/07 - over
a year old. More than your "three months" has gone by on this...my
first email to Xerox was back in November.
John - please find out what is really going on and get an estimated
fix. With all due respect, repeating that a bug will take three months
to fix - when we're already in month four plus - isn't making anyone
feel any better.
Thanks
Will
J
John McGhie
Hi Will:
Sorry mate, I am just a "user" like you are. I know how frustrating this
is, I have a $750 graphics card in exactly the same condition. It won't
work, and they "might" fix the driver "sometime". I would love to be able
to help, but I have no more way to make Apple, Xerox, or Microsoft disclose
its release schedule than you do.
The Release Date for this product was January 15th. Until then, nobody that
I know had the released version of the code, so nobody knew about the bug.
If you knew about the bug when 10.5 was released, then you must have been on
the Beta program for Office 2008. So was I, yet I did not see your bug
report. Nor did I see anyone else report this bug. If there had been a bug
report, there is a chance the bug would not be there now.
From memory, this bug was first reported in here in the first or second week
after release of the English version. By that calendar, we're about two
weeks into the "three months".
The "three months" is just my guess, based on past experience, of how long
it will take for the first patches to be released for a new product. My
only purpose in publishing a figure at all was to help people understand
that it would not be "three days".
The depth of my ignorance on this one is pretty great. I do know that it
has been confirmed as a bug by the Microsoft testers. That's all I know. I
do NOT know which company's code is responsible. That's a normal state of
affairs for bugs, by the way: Unless the company that owns the code puts
their hand up and says "that's our bug", we will never know whose it was.
I am talking only to Microsoft: Microsoft will not necessarily tell me even
if it's their own bug. They will never tell me anything, if it's someone
else's bug.
Logic and gut-feel leads me to suspect that this one is not Microsoft's bug,
since Word does almost nothing with the printing subsystem, and it's
printing fine on everyone else's printers. Word sends the document off and
waves it goodbye. Not much to go wrong with "Hey, Apple OS X, please
print this."
Now, one user reported that his instance of this issue was solved by the
10.5.2 update. I didn't see it, I do not even know where that user is. But
if what he reports is true, then this indicates that the bug at least partly
involves Apple code.
If Xerox' drivers really are over a year old, I would be extremely
suspicious of them. OS X has acquired quite a few new tricks since then.
Xerox would have been in the same position as Microsoft: some of the new
features they would have gotten pre-release documentation on, some they
would have received overview documentation on, and some they would never
have heard of until OS 10.5 arrived in the post. Large software companies
DON'T put their hot features in the beta where their competitors can find
them and knock them off
OK, one other piece of knowledge I have is that Microsoft is working on the
bugs in its product. All large software companies are "continuously"
working on bugs in their products ‹ no new information here.
Having "confirmed" the bug, they then determine whether it's theirs, and
lodge a bug report if it's not. If it is, they estimate how many users it
affects, how badly, what it will cost to fix, and what the risk is of
breaking something else. They multiply those things together to give them a
fictitious number called an "impact". They then enter this information into
a spreadsheet.
Now, it's a sad fact of modern software that many large, complex
applications such as Microsoft Office have hundreds of such bugs in the
database. Someone counted them up for Word a few years back and said it was
something like 600. I would be surprised if the total was much lower.
Then they sort the list, and start picking them off the top. Anything that
causes crashes or loss of data, for 100 per cent of users, and for which
there is no work-around, comes first. Anything below half-way will,
realistically, "never" be scheduled for fix.
Sadly, in your case, Xerox Laser printers with a resolution high enough to
trigger this bug probably make up around 1.8 per cent of sales. And there
is a work-around. You can see where this is heading?
The numbers don't look a lot better if it's Apple's bug. They would use a
very similar methodology.
You better hope it's a Xerox bug If it is, the market share rises to
around 18 per cent, the percentage of users affected is 100, and the
work-around (use some other manufacturer's printer) will not delight their
little corporate hearts of stone.
My best guess is this: A month from the shipment of a new product, all
vendors involved start shipping Emergency Fixes for the data-loss bugs. The
lower-priority stuff appears in the first service release, three to six
months after on-sale day. The rest of what they are going to fix will be in
Service Release 2, which will appear about six months later.
In the case of Office 2008, this is a flagship product, so I think the fixes
will be a little closer together. On the other hand, it's a very complex
product, and some of the fixes will thus take longer to complete.
The truth is: while each of the three companies has "an idea" when they will
put out their next update, none of their dates are cast in stone. They will
cheerfully slip them a month of they hit a problem. Nor have any of them
determined utterly which fixes will be in the release. They do know which
ones they're hoping to include (and NO, not even Microsoft will tell ME what
is on that list...) but there's no guarantee. If one of them does not make
it through testing, it will simply be dropped, or they will slip the
release, or both.
That's what is "really going on". Don't you wish you never asked
You now have all the information I have. I invite you to make your own
estimate.
Cheers
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
Sorry mate, I am just a "user" like you are. I know how frustrating this
is, I have a $750 graphics card in exactly the same condition. It won't
work, and they "might" fix the driver "sometime". I would love to be able
to help, but I have no more way to make Apple, Xerox, or Microsoft disclose
its release schedule than you do.
The Release Date for this product was January 15th. Until then, nobody that
I know had the released version of the code, so nobody knew about the bug.
If you knew about the bug when 10.5 was released, then you must have been on
the Beta program for Office 2008. So was I, yet I did not see your bug
report. Nor did I see anyone else report this bug. If there had been a bug
report, there is a chance the bug would not be there now.
From memory, this bug was first reported in here in the first or second week
after release of the English version. By that calendar, we're about two
weeks into the "three months".
The "three months" is just my guess, based on past experience, of how long
it will take for the first patches to be released for a new product. My
only purpose in publishing a figure at all was to help people understand
that it would not be "three days".
The depth of my ignorance on this one is pretty great. I do know that it
has been confirmed as a bug by the Microsoft testers. That's all I know. I
do NOT know which company's code is responsible. That's a normal state of
affairs for bugs, by the way: Unless the company that owns the code puts
their hand up and says "that's our bug", we will never know whose it was.
I am talking only to Microsoft: Microsoft will not necessarily tell me even
if it's their own bug. They will never tell me anything, if it's someone
else's bug.
Logic and gut-feel leads me to suspect that this one is not Microsoft's bug,
since Word does almost nothing with the printing subsystem, and it's
printing fine on everyone else's printers. Word sends the document off and
waves it goodbye. Not much to go wrong with "Hey, Apple OS X, please
print this."
Now, one user reported that his instance of this issue was solved by the
10.5.2 update. I didn't see it, I do not even know where that user is. But
if what he reports is true, then this indicates that the bug at least partly
involves Apple code.
If Xerox' drivers really are over a year old, I would be extremely
suspicious of them. OS X has acquired quite a few new tricks since then.
Xerox would have been in the same position as Microsoft: some of the new
features they would have gotten pre-release documentation on, some they
would have received overview documentation on, and some they would never
have heard of until OS 10.5 arrived in the post. Large software companies
DON'T put their hot features in the beta where their competitors can find
them and knock them off
OK, one other piece of knowledge I have is that Microsoft is working on the
bugs in its product. All large software companies are "continuously"
working on bugs in their products ‹ no new information here.
Having "confirmed" the bug, they then determine whether it's theirs, and
lodge a bug report if it's not. If it is, they estimate how many users it
affects, how badly, what it will cost to fix, and what the risk is of
breaking something else. They multiply those things together to give them a
fictitious number called an "impact". They then enter this information into
a spreadsheet.
Now, it's a sad fact of modern software that many large, complex
applications such as Microsoft Office have hundreds of such bugs in the
database. Someone counted them up for Word a few years back and said it was
something like 600. I would be surprised if the total was much lower.
Then they sort the list, and start picking them off the top. Anything that
causes crashes or loss of data, for 100 per cent of users, and for which
there is no work-around, comes first. Anything below half-way will,
realistically, "never" be scheduled for fix.
Sadly, in your case, Xerox Laser printers with a resolution high enough to
trigger this bug probably make up around 1.8 per cent of sales. And there
is a work-around. You can see where this is heading?
The numbers don't look a lot better if it's Apple's bug. They would use a
very similar methodology.
You better hope it's a Xerox bug
If it is, the market share rises toaround 18 per cent, the percentage of users affected is 100, and the
work-around (use some other manufacturer's printer) will not delight their
little corporate hearts of stone.
My best guess is this: A month from the shipment of a new product, all
vendors involved start shipping Emergency Fixes for the data-loss bugs. The
lower-priority stuff appears in the first service release, three to six
months after on-sale day. The rest of what they are going to fix will be in
Service Release 2, which will appear about six months later.
In the case of Office 2008, this is a flagship product, so I think the fixes
will be a little closer together. On the other hand, it's a very complex
product, and some of the fixes will thus take longer to complete.
The truth is: while each of the three companies has "an idea" when they will
put out their next update, none of their dates are cast in stone. They will
cheerfully slip them a month of they hit a problem. Nor have any of them
determined utterly which fixes will be in the release. They do know which
ones they're hoping to include (and NO, not even Microsoft will tell ME what
is on that list...) but there's no guarantee. If one of them does not make
it through testing, it will simply be dropped, or they will slip the
release, or both.
That's what is "really going on". Don't you wish you never asked
You now have all the information I have. I invite you to make your own
estimate.
Cheers
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Sydney, Australia. S33°53'34.20 E151°14'54.50
W
wsmknicks
John - thanks for the expansive answer.
To be clear: 10.5 broke printing on Office 2004 with this printer as
well...that's where the "three / four" months comes from (e.g last
fall). My first bug report note to Xerox was in November 07.
I purchased Office 2008 in January hoping it would set things right.
It didn't
So now: $300 printer that won't work with Office
$150 in Office software that won't print, and an unneeded upgrade.
This is just unacceptable in my book.
Will
To be clear: 10.5 broke printing on Office 2004 with this printer as
well...that's where the "three / four" months comes from (e.g last
fall). My first bug report note to Xerox was in November 07.
I purchased Office 2008 in January hoping it would set things right.
It didn't
So now: $300 printer that won't work with Office
$150 in Office software that won't print, and an unneeded upgrade.
This is just unacceptable in my book.
Will
J
John McGhie
Hi Will:
I know the feeling... Shall I tell you about my graphics card and my copy of
64-bit Vista??
Cheers
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia
I know the feeling... Shall I tell you about my graphics card and my copy of
64-bit Vista??
Cheers
--
Don't wait for your answer, click here: http://www.word.mvps.org/
Please reply in the group. Please do NOT email me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
http://jgmcghie.fastmail.com.au/
Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory, Australia