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HP Introduces A Bluetooth Printer
man_ls writes: "I found this on C|Net, it's an HP Printer that also supports Bluetooth. You can read about it here. Not that the Bluetooth will do anything except interfere with 802.11 wireless networks, but it's an interesting feature to have." Actually, Bluetooth shouldn't interfere with 802.11 except in confusing product marketing, right? Nice to see that at least one printer will actually hit the market with a short-range radio interface instead of wire (inconvenient) or IR (poor interoperability).
IR seems like a much better choice than Bluetooth in many applications because it is intrinsically more secure and doesn't suffer from RF interference. The latest IrDA standards are also a lot faster than Bluetooth. Visibility and propagation restrictions for IR are usually not all that serious in an office environment.
There are a few niche applications where Bluetooth may be better, but I'd like to see IrDA used much more widely. Too bad that IrDA has lost its buzz.
I don't have an ethernet printer at home, but I do use SSH tunnels there (to get my mail, and run VNC, and/or X).
The last place I worked had an open 802.11 network, but it was treated as "outside the firewall" by everything at work. They also have another open 802.11 network in another building that is inside the firewall, which is a bad idea.
I've had bad experiences trying to mix a Logitech Cordless Keyboard/Mouse (Freedom Pro? I believe was the moniker) with 802.11 Wireless LAN cards (D-Link PCI/PCMCIA cards).
That's interesting; we use the same Logitech cordless keyboard/mouse (it comes as a pair) but with Lucent (ORiNOCO, god I hate that name) wavelan cards. The cards are on separate floors of an office building (wood frame), about 150' apart I'd say. The "access point" is the company firewall which is in an encassed metal rack. We have absolutely no problems at all.
I'd be curious to try out other vendor's cards to see if there really is a difference between these expensive Lucent cards and the cheaper DLink and other cards or if I'm just lucky.
I agree, if all I/O devices had thier own address you could have a keyboard and monitor and control a machine half way around the world without you even having a computer locally! If monitors acted like x-clients for example, you could have your web browser up on screen, and at the same time have a video feed coming in and displayed on your TV all from the same computer. You could also run another application on a different monitor much like having dual screens now, but you wouldn't even need an extra video card and you could display to as many screens as you'd like! In the thin-client world you wouldn't even need a local machine either, all keyboards and screens would just connect to the network and the "mainframe" would do the rest (sounds alot like dumb terminals again, doesn't it?).
I think this would be a great new way of interfacing components if the security concerns could be worked out. Since the new business computing model seems to be heading back to dumb terminals maybe this is the ideal way to implement it? Bandwidth/latency issues aside you wouldn't even need to have the computers in the same building, just need a network connection.
With IPv6 on it's way (or so we hope) this could be an ideal way of computing. If security issues could be solved, are there any other pitfalls I'm missing? I think this would be a great system for interfacing componets!
you understand very little about the GPL, it does nothing to prevent forking, it is one of the freedoms that it gives people.
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.