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The White House Finally Got Color Printers (gizmodo.com)
An anonymous reader quotes an article on Gizmodo: Everyone loves an upgrade -- even POTUS. The New York Times reports that the White House has recently undergone a technological transformation, though it may not sound too impressive to many of us: Its employees are now equipped with modern laptops, iPhones and even... color printers. [...] Employees have new computers with "fast, solid-state drives and modern processors," according to the newspaper, along with color printers. There's a new phone system and many staff now tote iPhones. The Wi-Fi has been upgraded, so it's now fast enough to live-stream video. And security has been increased too, with a new software system for managing visitors and a chip-based card system which is used by staffers instead of passwords.
Gotta watch those iPhones for sensitive material though...I hear that there's a company which will crack the encryption for the highest bidder.
#CantWin
instead of passwords. Sweet.
The new equipment better be made in the US and carefully examined by the folks like NSA afterwards. White House remains home to the most powerful man on the planet — both militarily and commercially.
It is the highest-value target for a very large number of people and even a printer can be used creatively by spies.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Hopefully it's not all off-the-shelf stuff that's potentially riddled with Chinese back-doors and leaks classified information like a sieve.
Everyone loves an upgrade, even pipsqueak.
I head that the Obama girls had color printing devices when they moved in back in 2009.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Finally, iPhones, now that the FBI has a way to hack into them it should be a piece of cake to find out what our white house is up to these days.
The irony of equipping government with the exact same hardware you are trying to weaken security for hasn't sunk into them yet, has it?
So now Obama can print the Disposition Matrix in COLOR!
Why in God's name does the White House have WiFi? If your work is important enough that you need to be updated on it, it's important enough that it needs to be over a secure pipe, even if it's not a classified network. WiFi is not secure. You might as well let people install packet sniffers in mirror ports on all the switch gear.
. . . . as there are plenty of examples of classified, air-gapped systems leaking data to unclassified systems. To the point that there are standard procedures for a "spill" of classified data onto networks at lower levels of classification.
My Gawd ! Don't they know that those can be cracked ?
the printers will only print in rainbows.
... super extra special, or do they insert yellow tracking dots like everyone else's?
The rest of the teknologee has similar problems these days: Firmware even containing entire OSes running with more privileges than the OS you see before you, everything calling home, and so on, and so forth. Me, paranoid? No, we know these things happen. I'm asking if the white house managed to get special treatment on this. Probably not, though. Can't wait to see them getting blind-sided by policies they instituted themselves, as happened with the printers at least.
by uploading the bait
Old analog tech sometimes has advantages. Why do you think the Navy still requires sailors to learn to navigate with a sextant?
Why are they printing stuff when they all have laptops and tablets?
From an old DAK Industries catalog.
I remember in House of Cards, the president wasn't allowed to use his game console. (Well, he could have it, but it wasn't about to be given any sort of network access.) But that was a TV show, and here's real life: where basically the same thing (iPhone) is allowed.
TV takes things too seriously. If real life, government is all "meh, whatever."
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The way the Clinton staffers did when they left?
We've been promised the paperless revolution for like 20 years now. But paper has been around for thousands of years and isn't going anywhere soon. For example, there is a huge amount of ceremony around the president signing legislation on paper. Even the pens he uses become mementos. Judging from my office, paper isn't going anywhere very soon.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
We've been promised the paperless revolution for like 20 years now. But paper has been around for thousands of years and isn't going anywhere soon.
I work in government IT. We're so paperless that I have to bring in my own pens and Post-It notes. We do get a paper calendar handed out at the beginning of each year.
I went to a meeting about going paperless. The first thing my boss did was go around and hand everyone a pamphlet about how we were going paperless.
While it's probably less printing than it was before there is still quite a lot of printing where I work, as in cases of printer paper and dozens of cartridges per year.
99% of the stuff that needs to be printed does not need color. Most likely the machines are leased and not owned. That means most likely payment per print. Color is more expensive that black and white.
That is why a lot of companies print default in black and more are using a code to print, so no unneeded prints are sitting useless at the printer.
So not having color printers is not really an issue.
That said, what might have been happened is that the lease was up and a new lease was signed. Newer printers (when looking at the same specs) will be cheaper than older ones and that way color could be cheaper than what they paid before.
However a black and white printer would still be cheaper than a color printer even if the new color one is cheaper than the old b/w one.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Actually, the paperless revolution was supposed to happen at least 30 years ago - the promise probably being made 40 years ago with the arrival of personal computers. (20 years ago was 1996).
The irony of the situation is that offices are consuming more paper than ever before - even more than before the promise of the paperless office.
Yes, we don't have inter office memos and such, but it's more than made up for by the fact people print out a lot of documentation and because it's often sent out electronically, instead of sharing one printed copy, everyone gets their own, so one document which may be displayed on a slide for everyone to read is suddenly printed 3-4 times.
Especially, if I have some documentation that I'll refer to more than a couple of times, I prefer to have a dead tree copy of it.
I often make notes and doodle in the margins of the dead tree copies, and when I need to remember where something was, I can "see" these doodles and notations in my head, and know what document it was in and where I put it....
I just can't track and as readily remember things like that on digital copies....to me, much harder to find things on a screen, especially with so many web pages of documentation buried on tons of little pages, rather than longer pages with more related info.
I guess it is something that varies between person to person....but I"ve always been this way. When I was in college and HS...during tests, I could close my eyes, and "see" in my minds eye my pages in my notebooks and text books where I'd written notes or doodles...and turn he pages in my head to get to where the answers were....sure did help.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"The paperless office is as about as realistic as the paperless toilet!" - Keith Davidson
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
We've been promised the paperless revolution for like 20 years now.
Ah, kids.
When I was in elementary school in the late 1960s, my teacher talked about how companies like Weyerhaeuser and Georgia Pacific were worried that - thanks to computers - they'd be driven out of business within the next decade or so.
#DeleteChrome
I work in government IT. We're so paperless that I have to bring in my own pens and Post-It notes. We do get a paper calendar handed out at the beginning of each year.
It must differ according to local policy.
I work for the DoD at a large west-coast military base. My office alone uses a full pallet of paper a year. I myself order several boxes of pens, and other assorted office products such as yellow legal pads, steno pads, bound log books, cases of post-its... We have a budget of around $15k a year for "office supplies"...
I'm sorry, but the concept of a "paperless office" is not practical in a great number of situations.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It must differ according to local policy.
Some positions require getting work done, other positions require pushing paperwork. :)
Some positions require getting work done, other positions require pushing paperwork. :)
Hey, it is a DoD job...
Thin Skinned response: Some positions require both, you insensitive clod...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
It wont be long before we automate @#$ wiping. We'll have machines that can get up there and do a better job than any human, and won't use paper. Ultimately, this will be detrimental to the economy due to the loss of all those @%$ wiping jobs.
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
the previous stopgap measure was temperamental and made strange sounds.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Really? your office doesn't use paper anymore? i would love to hear what industry that is in!
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Are you really trying to dispute the utility of stool and urine analysis to medical diagnosis?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
...a toy.
Paper mill
These are Obama appointees. What makes you think they will use the printers for government business? They need to plan weddings, print pictures of their grandchildren, look at yoga outfits, etc.
Seems to be the state of government IT. Why isn't she in jail?
When we buy a new printer or communications device, we have no need to think about that device in context with everything else we have. But in a high-security situation, it's probably easier to qualify whole integrating sets of upgraded technology at once than to go through the vetting process for each device in isolation.
I've been using bubblejet printers in 1995. Where were you?
The new equipment better be made in the US and carefully examined by the folks like NSA afterwards.
That's no help.
Modern processors generally have hardware-level "remote administration" back doors built in (and non-deconfigurable).
The chip vendors tout it as a feature.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Western culture isn't the only culture in the world. And in fact, we use some of the least efficient toilets in the least efficient manner. Get your head out of your ass and realize that not everything you were taught is the best way to do things.
You Obamabots and Hill people are very deceptive.
I dislike George W Bush rather intensely, but the honest truth is that when he was in office, Democrats were freaked-out and loudly complaining that the Bush administration was using government computers and e-mail for partisan political activities. They, rightly in my opinion, said that partisan political stuff belonged on personal systems or systems belonging to the party. As a result, the Bush admin and the GOP setup offsite servers and computers for POLITICAL activities and thus setup a hassle Democrats were grinning about: Every time somebody in the Bush White House had to deal with partisan stuff they had to waste time going to the other offices and use those systems and then return to the West Wing to get back to business. This was a big pain and the Democrats were enjoying the inconvenience they had imposed on the Bushies.
Now, with Bushies out of office and Hillary caught doing GOVERNMENT business on private servers to apparently dodge the Freedom of Information laws and Constitutional congressional oversight, Democrats are demanding that the Bush people did something evil when they gave-in to Democrat demands regarding NON-GOVERNMENT activity. It's a deceit designed to create a false equivalence in the minds of stupid or inattentive people.
Surely that's printers of color
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Somehow I'm not surprised that even the whitehouse is victim to the bureaucracy and slow speed of the GSA (or whomever administers theirs systems) and its IT contractors.
We just got "new" computers in my lab.
64bit Athlon's running at 1.5GHz, and a whopping 3GB of RAM.
It absolutely screams compared to what it replaced: a 1.2GHz Athlon 32bit that had only 2GB of RAM.
As to printers, we're still using some b/w HP laser workhorses that are ~20 years old.
Near as I can tell the maintenance has never been performed on them. They jam regularly, hang daily.
We might get replacements in the next year they tell us. But they said that 5 years ago too.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.