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HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers
ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers; it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become 'a crucial part' of discussions. Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."
Looking at the picture of the printer I can imagine that if HP wanted to get back in to tablets they could just have a cheap printer with a detachable control unit...
Maybe HP already has printers with WebOS in the pipeline, a lot of them. Losing WebOS licenses at this point could be a major loss for their development group.
On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.
I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...
So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.
Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...
http://www.epson.jp/products/colorio/printer/me/
Printers with screens and keyboards and built in software to print photos, greeting cards, calendars, and quite a few other things. WebOS would be perfect for one of these and I'd bet that's exactly what they want to do with it.
If only HP had invented some sort of 'Printer Command Language' back in the 80s by which an embedded device might communicate with a great many of their printers(and a fair few 3rd party ones) with no platform-specific driver...
I remember when an inkjet driver fit on a fucking 3.5 floppy, had pretty much the same print quality, and didn't install a goddamn update service, system tray, and a "helper" app.
Yes, I am angry about this.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
You must work for Boeing.
We had a 'paper saving initiative' many years ago. The unit chief figured it was so important that rather than circulating one memo on the topic per group with a routing slip attached, he ordered one copy made for each employee (several hundred) in his organization.
Have gnu, will travel.
Buy ethernet printers rather than sharing USB printers and you won't have that problem. Buy stuff designed for how you want to use it.
This.
The cheaper printers are just that: cheap. They offload most of the rasterization onto the host PC, have no job control features and are generally awful. Ethernet-capable printers usually, but don't always, help, because printer makers are shovelling out some awful crap.
You can still get small print drivers for HP's modern printers. The problem is that those printers are expensive, but then again, so were the "Good ol' days" printers they replaced.
Here's a tip: check to see if the printer supports PJL (not just PCL) and/or PostScript (or a compatible derivative, like Kyocera's KPDL). If it supports PJL and/or PS, you can be guaranteed a) that the drivers will be small, b) that the printer will work pretty well, and c) that you'll pay for the privilege of A and B.
--srj/mmv