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Xerox-Microsoft Partner
tea-leaves writes "Xerox and Microsoft are partnering to put Windows NT in their print boxes and such. Story says the technology replaces "UNIX-compatible" software already in place. Xerox wants to compete with HP for the desktop printing market with integrated printer solutions that use Microsoft software for the interconnect. Check it out. " I feel like we're going to have to re-sanctify Palo Alto after this.
I can just see it now ... the black & white screen of death. Guess we had better expect more copier down time here at work! grrrr.
They made Lisp machines and invented Smalltalk.
R&D was too clueful to `develop Unix'. But they did not know how to sell their stuff.
"Nothing works like a Xerox."
:-)
First AT&T (MSAT&T?), the original "home" of Unix. Now Xerox, "home" of Ethernet
and the GUI.
AT&T I've abandoned. Xerox I now won't buy.
I was ready to order Xerox - I was actually coming up with the Purchase Order when I saw this messages.
I am NOT ordering any Xerox printer - I will be with HP because they have some way to print from Unix box.
your right. they also use gnu tools. for compiling. glad i left.
Back about five years ago, remember "Microsoft
At Work", which was some sort of networky
Win3.1 product which was to complement "Microsoft
At Home", the unnetworky version?
Parts of Xerox went all apeshit to build this
vaporware into their fax machines and some
copiers. Needless to say, Xerox ended up getting
reamed when the os never came out of MS.
Palo Alto may need resanctification, but probably
not as a result of this. Most of Xerox is in
Stamford Connecticut and Rochester NY. They're just
using PA because of whatever cachet it has left.
This story reveals a painful truth: Linux will always be at a disadvantage in certain markets, simply because there's no big company that controls the software. That kind of centralized operation is very attractive to some companies (and Xerox seems to be one of them) when they're striking deals like this.
No matter how bizarre it is to put NT into a copier , and no matter how much better Linux would be in this role, sometimes politics wins.
Yes, they do run Linux. (I used to work at Xerox.)
I work in Xerox and know that some of the mid-range printers (including the new ones dc230, 265 etc) runs LynxOS. I know not of any printer that run Linux - perhaps in the high-end range?
Not an AC (don't want to dig up the password), email micros@azstarnet.com, name: Harry McGregor
So have you read the file SiS.txt, tweaks for SiS video cards? I am using a generic SiS 6326 on my K6-III system (slackware 4.0 b1). I have it reading all of the ram, and running X in 800x600 at 24 bit color (would run 1024x768 but I am using this sytem in the living room, and can't read that res on my 17" monitor from more than 3 feet away). If you want help (ie parts of my XF86Config file), feel free to email me
Now you are figuring it out. The average Joe user doesn't care if it is Unix or Windows, they just care that it is easy to use, and it works.
Um, maybe because NT is better than Linux for this application.
Further, the "cost" of an operating system is not what you pay for the software. It is the cost of maintaining the system. Unix is very high cost to maintain since it requires expensive people.
How long since RMS will repeat himself with the story about closed-source vs open-source in a printer driver (and it's Xerox again) and blow a huge hole in the closed-source market -- again?
This ISN'T the consumer market being talked about. Xerox is built on reputation and service. They make good hardware and back it up with onsite service. Much like the previously mentioned Bell, they 'need it to just work' which leads to the Bell Labs design paradigm: ensure the service first and then service the end user.
Truely consumer ready technology simply require the hiring of an excessive number of techs. For what is left, Xerox onsite support should be more than adequate.
It would make more sense for Xerox to adopt VMS. They're gambling with their livelihood and reputation with such a move. They're far better off putting their own friendly face on what they've already developed for Unix than going to the trouble and expense of porting everything.
Think about that: what woulld really be more expensive? Would it be the port to NT, or the effort spent to make their Unix solution less intimidating.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
It sounds like Xerox was doing bad engineering all round on this system. Any consumer device needs to be able to take the sort of abuse a consumer will subject it to. This is my basis for claiming that Win9x isn't a consumer ready system.
A more sensible (for the given conditions) configuration for these Unix boxes should not have been such a great effort on the part of Xerox.
Actually, this is something that Redhat and the rest might want to consider.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Why NT? Whats the benfit? NT costs more (than Linux/*BSD) Linux/*BSD+Samba+Apache+Scripts..You have a box that can practically talk to everything...IP/IPX/Appletalk.. Just doesn't make any sense... Can someone please explain the business decision to me? NT will cost them more and overload under any real strain.... Please, someone explain this to me??????
Palin...
but we shall spread wisdom!
hany
i wonder, whether HP choose some UNIX as opposing step (MS cant make comaradeship with both Xerox and HP, can it?).
hany
i wonder WHEN people realize they are cheated and that money are being stolen from them!
hany
I'm willing to hazard a guess that the "UNIX-compatible" software they're talking about is WindRiver Systems' vxWorks, which would make sense. After all, in a copier or printer, you're going to want an RTOS there to handle things in a reasonable amount of time.
It's a shame they feel the need to move to an inherently non-RTOS. It reminds me of something I heard in a class a few weeks ago... The prof was talking about how M$ was coming out with a real-time NT, and when it hit the market, everyone would start using it since "there's nothing else out there." Too bad I wanted to pass the class.
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Well, I had a 1 in N shot. I guessed @ vxWorks since it's what I'm most familiar with. I've never worked w/ LynxOS, but it's still an RTOS in exactly the way NT isn't...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Didn't your mother teach you that?
:)
They're gonna be sorry still, mark my words. (I wonder if it takes a colour copier to bluescreen?
As Count Axel Oxenstierna wrote already in the 17th century in a letter, "You do not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is ruled". Little has changed.
-- LaTeX, The Best There Is
Let's see...I go to copy a bunch of stuff, and my Xerox machine BSODs on me. Oh yeah, silly me. I didn't use Microsoft(tm)-brand paper in the copier. It'll only crash-and-burn 50% of the time then. Hrm...wonder if it'll be possible to format the printer and install Linux?
My apologies. The point I was making was not that Kinko's employees are idiots. I meant to imply that dropping a *nix box in the midst of people who had largely come over from web presses less than five years earlier, and who you'd have no reason to expect would know the first thing about running a *nix server, is a pretty bad idea (from a "keep the customer happy with their new toy" point of view.)
Sure enough... it was a terrible idea. I was the only one who knew the first thing about it, and that was quite by coincidence.
Anyhow, apologies all the same.
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
I worked at a copy shop in a major midwestern university that shall go unnamed. We ran three Xerox Docutechs and some smaller machines.
We ended up buying a Sun/Xerox network box of some sort. It was brought in with a lot of fanfare. I was a courier at the time, but the school gave all employees accounts on the school computers, so I was learning my way around as an Ultrix user from a Lear/Seigler ADM3a+ and a 1200 baud dialup at night.
Everyone stood around while the techs installed the thing and brought it up. I had never, at that point, seen X in action before so I had no idea there was a *nix under the hood. It wasn't until one of the techs brought up a term and I saw some of the commands they were typing that I realized what it was.
The boss 'in charge' of the machine announced that we were going to take great pains to keep the machine in good shape, and in order to keep it like new, we'd be shutting it down promptly at five every night.
Needless to say, it began to accumulate stuff that never got shuffled out by whatever housekeeping it was supposed to be doing at night, and soon the hard drive was full of undeleted tmp files and aborted print runs.
Eager to prove myself, pre-larval as I was, I went to the PHB and pointed out that the machine was running some sort of Unix and we ought to leave it on, as God intended, or figure out how the housekeeping was supposed to be done and reset some times. She told me it was just like Windows (3.0 was the current version at the time) and we didn't need to do that. I went over her head and got permission to at least twiddle with it to keep the logs rotated and the /tmp files cleaned out. She promptly took all the documentation and locked it in her office, changed all the passwords, and had me rotated to the night shift.
The machine continued to crash right and left, and no one could get at it to fix things. The PHB kept insisting it was just a faulty product. It was eventually branded a failed experiment and taken away.
I've since thought it was a rotten idea to sell a *nix box to a bunch of glorified Kinko's employees and expect them to do anything other than what they did at my shop. The support was god-awful, and the training I was eventually sent to never went past 'this is the garbage can... this is how to click and drag.'
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
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mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
What my Sun sales rep, and one of the people who allegedly helped work on it told me, is that Xerox helped design the Sun E450 server because they couldn't get enough I/O throughput out of the Sun Ultra Sparc 2 machines to serve the big color printers. The E450 has a theoretical I/O bandwidth of around 2GB/s (or around that).
Personally, I'm guessing the network printers will have some sort SMB capabilities built in. The current line of network printers has Unix LP, NetWare, AppleTalk, and possibly whatever Windows uses (as well as a web server) built into it.
Disclaimer: I work for Xerox, but as a Unix SA in an area totally unrelated to product design. I don't know nothing official about this.
That is just the way Xerox is. They had a chance to own the entire personal computing market, but the ignorant freaks who run the company thought it would be a waste of time and money to venture into the "PC" world. Sounds a lot like the business decision by Western Union to turn down that stupid "Telephone" invention that crack Alexander Graham Bell invented. They said telegraph is the future, you won't ever need anything more.
The problem is that company execs go more for the Reader's Digest version of the world because it makes decision making easier. Ignore the people screaming below you and it will all go away. Their only real goal is to keep the stock value up.
The Open Source movement has lost some of its momentum with the latest mindcraft study. Not because of any true validity (not for me to decide as I haven't read all of the details), but because of its perceived validity to "Reader's Digest" company exec drones. The most important thing is to realize that no ONE solution is the best. Xerox has shot itself in the foot again by cutting off access to their printers to anyone but NT. Thank GOD we have other printing options. We just got the HP 8100 in our office and man do I love it. HP's got this platform independent concept called "Jet Direct" that can adapt to any platform as long as it uses any one of several common protocols (TCP/IP, IPX etc etc).
Please please please continue to build momentum for the open source movement! It is the only weapon we have against the "Pointy Haired" people!
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
Xerox is using uinix for print servers for it's copiers? I haven't seen *all* of their product line, but almost everything they use for high-end stuff runs Fiery-XJ (not unix) and OS/2. Besides, these boxes have been way expensive for Xerox to produce, and I cans ee why they would reduce the cost there... but they are (MS and Xerox) a match made in heaven. Fiery doesn't work that hot anyways... just go to IKON and buy the same model copier and get the sgi print server :)
Xerox Reps have admitted that the internals of the Docu-Centres run Linux. The Big guys (DP65 and up) run Solaris Stations.
My guess is that MS threatened to make the Xerox printers run poorly unless they switched to NT on the inside.
-- Keith Moore
This sig is the express property of someone.
A: "NT is easier to use."
B: "It's too $#&^* unreliable!"
A: "Not if you can find someone that knows how to run it."
Must be convenient to live in a world where you can have it both ways.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Didn't they help develop Unix? If they didn't wouldn't they want to stay away from NT?
"Windows 98 Second Edition works and players better than ever." -Microsoft's Home page on Win98SE.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
It seems like a lot of overkill to add NT support in a printer/scanner/fax. I mean NT is rather bloathed.
On the other hand it may have some advantages:
- ms exchange integration (it is a crappy mailprogram, I know that, but it would be interesting to have in a printerserver for companies that already use it)
- integration with other NT services, is difficult from UNIX/LINUX since most of it is propietary MS stuff
- NT comes with a lot of useful functionality (webserver, tcp/ip, database) for a server. Although most of it is available in some UNIX form it might be nice (again for integration purposes) to have this stuf in a NT flavor
Though I'm not a big fan of NT or any other MS products, they are widely used in companies and it would be nice for those companies to have printers/scanners/whatever that integrate with it.
Other platforms:Using NT they can also support Jini for offering support for non MS environments.
Stability: Xerox will probably not use a standard installation of NT (i.e. they will remove anything they don't need like GUI stuff, stupid games, notepad)
So maybe it's not such a stupid idea and there may be a market for it after all.
Greetings Jilles,
please don't flame but provide me with real arguments why this is a bad idea considering the current market positions of both xerox and MS.
Jilles
The Xerox copier/fax/print stations had PowerPC CPUs inside, large Hard drives and ran a modified Linux kernel with some apps on top.
Still, Xerox were responsible for the start of the FSF, GPL and GNU. (They refused RMS the source for their printer drivers causing him to consider the implications and safe guard against them).
Phill
Begin unsolicited advice
Don't buy a DocuColor unless you absolutely have to. They suck. The color isn't that good and they break CONSTANTLY, especially under heavy use. Get a Canon. The color's better, registration is just as good, and they don't break as often.
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
We currently use 2 DocuTech 6135s for the digital printing side of our printing/fulfillment business. They are both driven by Ultra SPARC boxes running Solaris, so setting up automated tasks with my Linux Internet server and workstation has been frighteningly easy. And they've been (for the most part) terrific machines.
I am worried now that if and when we get a DocuColor or other high-speed printer from Xerox, we will be forced to use shoddy Winblows software--just like we were when we updated the document assembly facet of the operation. (Get this: we bought our own PC ($3K) for their XDOD document assembly software/system instead of buying their Compaq box ($10K). Now, if there's a problem on that machine, the techs will 90% of the time blame it on "incompatible hardware" and refuse to support it. Also, it runs NT and when I wanted to add a CD-burner for backing up jobs I had to install the latest service pack (3). Well, when I asked Xerox if this might be an issue, they said that their software wasn't tested enough on SR3 and that if we ran into problems later, they might have us revert to SR1! Aaargh!)
What really bothers me is that we may eventually have to sell our souls and adopt more and more Windoze applications because either that is what our customers expect or because we can't find the apps we need on *nix. (As another aside, we just recently visited a software company in Connecticut that makes a pretty good warehouse/fulfillment system that is currently available on SCO or NT, but their next major release will be NT only. Our plan is to get the SCO version now (partly because we have a SCO box with plenty of room already), but what about the future? We could migrate to NT in a few years, but dammit, I want more options!)
I know I'm probably preaching to the choir, but I don't want to live in Bill's version of the world, but it seems like our options are narrowing, in spite of the open source/free software movement. I guess we're in an interim period where business-ready open source apps are still being developed.
[ insert your own witty .sig here ]
I wonder how long it will be before we see a Mindcruft study showing
how the new Xerox products are 5 times faster than HP's?
But this is just what every office needs... not only do their
computers crash once a day, now thier other office equipment does too!
The wonders of a homogenous office.
I wonder... is Xerox going to start telling people that thier stuff is
now easier to use? "You don't need a real technician any more, any
idiiot can administer your new printer."
Hmm.. I think that about sums up all of the MS slams.. (at least all
the ones I can think of..)
WRONG!!!! Lynx != Linux. Sorry, but I too got excited when I cracked the top on an old DCS35 and saw Lynx, and though hmmm. I work in Xerox support for these products. However, splash are building their colour rips (M series) running slackware linux. These puppies fly as colour servers and do drive Xerox colour copiers.
There aren't any techincal details in this pre-release press release. But it sounds like they will incorporate win-only drivers in Xerox's new network multi-machines that do copy/print/scan.
So if you have a large corporate environment, where there are all types of machines, from macintoshes to unixes to mainframes, you will have to go to a win box to use these new machines.
I have a feeling that Xerox is shooting themselves in the head again, probably the decision of a very myopic PHB veep. If I were to be presented with one of these by a Xerox sales slime, and I asked if I could control it from a variety of machines like Macs and Unixes, and the answer was NO, then there would be no sale.
I wonder what kind of an offer they made to the veep who agreed to this stupid decision. Probably typical microso~1 hi-pressure sales tactics which the DOJ would be interested in.
the AntiCypher
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I worked at Xerox for a while, some years back, and I remember when they made a similar deal with
Microsoft, that time it was for the license to
"Microsoft At Work", which was supposed to be some
sort of windows related embdedded OS for office devices.
Xerox paid Microsoft $1 million, and then proceeded to get the shaft when Microsoft pulled the plug on the whole thing a year later. Oh yes, as a consolation
prize, Xerox got the source code for the
discontinued project - a
a pile of buggy unfinished and poorly written code.
I wonder if Microsoft will do the same thing again this time.