Is it ok to print a Word document from a USB flash drive?

[Aalaan]

Well, IMO your friend would be well advised to adopt the habit of copying
from his removable media to the hard drive he's working on, as a matter of
course. A bit more tedious yes but a heck of lot less tedious than a
corrupted file.

 

[Terry Farrell]

Well if the temp locking file was placed in your temp folder, how would
someone else with access to the same folder on the server be aware that the
document was already open and stop them from opening and editing the
document at the same time as you. Chaos would reign.

Terry

 

[Stan Brown]

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:45:25 -0500 from Suzanne S. Barnhill

I would imagine this would be a setting in your newsreader. If I *didn't*
use the signature delimiter, others would complain. And *many* (including
me) would complain if I bottom-posted.

You mean a setting in my newsreader to do it wrong? Not available.
And if it were it wouldn't be appropriate -- like saying "I'm in the
US but I want to drive on the left, so everyone else must go around
me."

No one should complain if you stop using the delimiter wrongly, or if
they do then they are complaining out of ignorance.

The RFCs exist for a reason -- if people follow them then everything
works better. The problem is that you're doing two nonstandard
things, and the combination creates a conflict.

 

[Tony Jollans]

Outlook Express (or Windows Mail) by default puts quoted text below the
(delimited) signature - as per this message. Are you saying that's wrong?
And, if so, could you point me to the RFC (I can't see anything about it in
RFC 1036)?

 

[Tony Jollans]

There are (at least) two different issues here.

Operating system (e.g. Windows) locks must be placed somewhere where the
operating system can find them and relate them to the locked resource.

Where appropriate (e.g. concurrent updating in multi-user environments),
application-level (e.g. Word) locks must be placed somewhere where other
instances of the application can relate them to the original resource. I
don't think any current versions of Word require such locks.

Application temporary files should normally be placed in local temporary
space. Instead of using the %temp% directory provided by Microsoft's own
operating system specifically for this purpose, Word chooses to use the
document's source folder. This does confuse users and does cause problems
when working on networked devices and/or removable media.

The only time there is any real reason to use a file's source folder for
temporary work space is when saving a file - to make sure the file is
properly saved before removing the original - overwriting in place is
inherently risky.

I am inclined to agree that Word's behaviour would be considered bad
programming practice, and I can't think of a single thing in its favour.

 

[Stan Brown]

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:53:04 +0100 from <"Tony Jollans" <My forename at
my surname dot com>>:

Outlook Express (or Windows Mail) by default puts quoted text below the
(delimited) signature - as per this message. Are you saying that's wrong?

Yes, I'm afraid it is.

The signature delimiter says "in a reply, don't quote anything that
follows". I don't think you're going to find an RFC that says "'don't
quote anything that follows' means not to quote anything that
follows".

I'd prefer not to fatigue folks who come here for discussions of Word
by getting into a long thing on Usenet formatting. I had thought
Suzanne was simply unaware of the convention, and offered a polite
reminder, but I don't want it to turn into an of argument so I won't
post again on this topic here. (Anyone who wants to pursue it in
email is welcome to.)

For those who might be interested in the reasons behind the
convention, here are a couple of good references:

news.newusers.questions FAQ:
"Quoting Style in Newsgroup Postings"
http://www.xs4all.nl/~wijnands/nnq/nquote.html

"The Advantages of Usenet's Quoting Conventions"
http://www.mccaughan.org.uk/g/remarks/uquote.html

"How do I Quote Correctly in Usenet?"
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote2.html

 

[LurfysMa]

Well if the temp locking file was placed in your temp folder, how would
someone else with access to the same folder on the server be aware that the
document was already open and stop them from opening and editing the
document at the same time as you. Chaos would reign.

That's crap. If Word is using the temp file as a locking mechanism,
that's another piece of lazy, shitty code. Right up there with a text
registry. Absolutely shitty, inexcusable coding.

 

[LurfysMa]

There are (at least) two different issues here.

Operating system (e.g. Windows) locks must be placed somewhere where the
operating system can find them and relate them to the locked resource.

Where appropriate (e.g. concurrent updating in multi-user environments),
application-level (e.g. Word) locks must be placed somewhere where other
instances of the application can relate them to the original resource. I
don't think any current versions of Word require such locks.

Application temporary files should normally be placed in local temporary
space. Instead of using the %temp% directory provided by Microsoft's own
operating system specifically for this purpose, Word chooses to use the
document's source folder. This does confuse users and does cause problems
when working on networked devices and/or removable media.

The only time there is any real reason to use a file's source folder for
temporary work space is when saving a file - to make sure the file is
properly saved before removing the original - overwriting in place is
inherently risky.

Quite right. This would be one possible exception, but even then, if
there isn't enough space on the removable media, I would move the
original file to the hard disk, write the new version on the removable
media, then delete the old version -- all with appropriate flags to
facilitate recovery in case of power failure or premature ejection.

Again, any good undergraduate programming course would teach this.