The following is a very lengthy ‘comment’ I was going to leave on a wonderful blog I found, but I instead decided to spare the wall of text there and post it here instead.
@ Samuel:
M$ Silverlight, thankfully, isn’t a standard technology yet. I don’t believe it should ever become one either. Your fondness for M$ makes me question why you believe they ‘treat their customers well’ after the fiasco where they had to be sued to hell (and lose) in multiple class-action lawsuits in order to offer the current ‘warranty’ for their crapware Xbox360s that have the dreaded ‘RROD’ (red ring of death) problem. M$ doesn’t have the customer in mind, as just like any other company they’re all about the money. Their company philosophy/strategy is: Dominate, Integrate, Exterminate, aka ‘DIE’. That’s what they want, they want ZERO competition (or only the weakest competition possible that’s still under their thumb). They want everyone to always use everything made by M$ whether they want to or not. When Vista wasn’t selling worth crap, they FORCED every computer software vendor to have Vista by default on all new computers. When customers started crying about antitrust issues, they offered XP ‘only on low-end computers’ aka netbooks, which is an overglorified term for a laptop that is purely for using the internet and not much else, something you could’ve done with a laptop 15+ years ago. As it is, you can build your own computer and put whatever OS you want on there, as that’s always been an option for people. But its not as cheap as paying Dell or HP or whoever to have a pre-built one. The retail cost of XP alone is designed specifically to discourage ‘do it yourself’ people. I’m glad I got it anyhow, as it allows me the ironic freedom of being able to install it to another computer legally (and using an activation bypass if M$ doesn’t feel they want me to do so) after my existing hardware in this computer craps out.
Flash is utter crap, I admit it. It seems each new version has just managed to be even slower and crappier then before. I remember years ago when Flash was still v6 or something and it was small, fast, and easy to use. That’s why everyone was using it. Of course when advertisers started using Flash for adverts, people got pissed, then they discovered the ‘FlashBlock’ addon for Firefox and life goes on.
PDF is another story. PDF is meant to be an *exact* copy of a document and that’s why they have it as an image. Nobody should ever suffer through having that shitware Adobe Reader on their computer. There’s many free and open-source implementations of PDF readers/editors available. I personally use ‘Foxit PDF Reader’ since they have an income stream and their program has worked better for me then other open-source offerings at the time. But development goes onward so I highly recommend doing a search for free/open-source PDF reader/editor. Try to have one that does both but is freeware or open-source. If not, you can always get a ‘portable’ version of the program that doesn’t install anything.
As for PDF printing, I don’t have experience with it but if some idiot sends you a text-only document as PDF, its fairly trivial now to convert it to ‘RTF’ (rich text format) which should preserve their formatting and such. Or just convert it to HTML and see if printing that way works well. If all else fails then ask the person to resend you the actual text document rather then making you use a PDF. Just say your Adobe Reader is crashing your computer 
and they’ll understand, lol.
