It would make a difference for apps that use ndk(not that they'll magically become compatible, but if Intel scores some market share people will suck it up and update...) As for the rest, it's a mixture of mostly-normal linux supporting a Definitely-Not-A-JVM-and-Don't-You-Call-It-One...NDK makes it possible, but the applications are supposed to run in-vm unless necessary either way.
Microsoft's strategy in an alternate universe where large swaths of the Windows core are gpl2 or apache, every x86 whiteboxer has their own "Windows Distribution" and their primary leverage consists of the licensing requirements to ship Office out-of-box..
I bet fires caused by leaking gas or fluid lines, constrained by nothing but the opposition of the escaping material's inertia and the friction of the surrounding atmosphere, are pretty freaky looking though... Unlike on the ground, where the jet of flame eventually rises, if it's sufficiently low-density, or eventually falls on the ground and burns there, if it is a dense-ish liquid of some sort, you'd conceivably end up with a near-perfect expanding cone(preceded by an invisible-but-toxic-and-piping-hot zone of combustion products)...
(Please note, above linked project is actually pretty fucking cool: "In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.
This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done."
It is, however, the case that this might not be the fastest way to execute 6502 instructions...)
It would certainly be an impressive feat(and, if capable of being used on scene, sure would be handy for all those "He needs to be prepped and being worked on by the trauma surgeon 10 minutes ago or he'll die" ambulance calls...); but it would be of only modest use for the mortality problem...
While frozen, the organism is metabolically inactive(by design). Dead, albeit reversibly so. Simply being cryoed would be more or less identical to dying, save that they can wake you up at some future time. And, if they wake you up, you still have whatever issues you had when you went under. If you have sufficiently accommodating family and/or some clever flavor of legally immortal trust supervising your affairs, it might be a decent way of halting fatal diseases until other suckers have finished the clinical R&D and come up with something effective; but even in that best case it would actually be pretty weird:
Just imagine a situation where a serious accident, or the wrong diagnosis would mean going on ice for 20 years, before being revived and repaired. It wouldn't have quite the permanence of death; but it'd be weird if you, or people around you, could just 'get iced', starting a near-death process of absence and loss; and then pop back up in a decade or three with no time having passed for them. Somebody better than me could probably wring a neat sci-fi story out of it, a world where the risk of the separation and loss that accompanies death is still very real; but most 'deaths'(excluding things like explosions or intense fires and the like) are really just freeze periods of unknown duration.
How much would it fuck with your head to have your spouse or child 'die', and then show up again exactly as they were when they died, but with everybody else that much older, and having lived without them? It'd be weird...
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
Because they are sedentary, colony-living, and gradually form massive calcified structures, there are certain respects in which their role and macrostructure resembles that of plants(the two are enormously different biologically; but both are the major structural organism of their respective environments)...
It isn't exactly "tacked on". They've been called the "liberal arts" at least long enough that "liberal arts" is a more or less literal translation of the classical Latin, which (in matters not directly involved with the subtle art of killing those who resist and governing the rest) usually means that it was shamelessly cribbed from the Greeks.
There are arguments to be made about whether it is still necessary; but 'liberal' as in 'liberal arts' far predates any modern, or even early modern, political use of the term...
The one that jumps out at me is "Military Technologies". It does have the smell of a bullshit major(ie. "So, if you are interested in 'military technology', why don't I see 'BS Mechanical Engineering' and 'ROTC' on your application rather than 'Military Technology'?"); but it would seem to be a strong signal that the person pursuing it is interested in going into the military. Have recruitment conditions really picked up so much that almost 11% of people who completed at least a 2-year program in the area can't get recruited at all? If so, it sounds like there is something deeply wrong with the standards of the schools issuing such degrees...
Historically, students and 'intellectuals' have been perceived(sometimes accurately, sometimes with paranoia verging on hysteria) as menaces to the social and political establishment...
I'd be interested to know how much of this is purely about resource allocation and how much of it is about ensuring that absolutely as many people as possible are doing something practical, chasing the brass ring, and generally staying out of idle theorizing and similar such trouble...
Wasn't Palantir Technologies one of the slimy corprospook outfits(along with the notorious H.B. Gary Federal and Berico technologies) commissioned to do a little proposal for some dirty-tricks work against Wikileaks after Bank of America decided to lawyer up(with a little advice from the DOJ... How's that for a public defender?)
Oh yes, yes they were...
Fuck these guys and the horse they rode in on. Compared to a few pitiful fanatics who want to bomb everybody back to the 12th century, where they can feel at home, fine outfits like this are a much more serious threat to the aspects of our society worth saving.
I've certainly caught some phone drones who were either having a bad day, or were plain assholes; but overwhelmingly I find it hard to blame them, rather than the people behind them(who, unfortunately, I have no way of screaming obscenities at...)
Universally, their English is substantially better than my whatever-it-is-they-speak-there, and given that it is entirely unexpected in low-end phone support for the support guy to have nothing but the script he was given(ie. no access to the product to poke at, much less in the configuration I'm calling about) a fair amount of cluelessness is understandable.
Now, as for the people with actual decision-making power who decided that this flavor of tech support is good enough, may they be doomed to transcribe the entire library of babel, twice over, while a guy with an incomprehensible accent on the far end of a tin-cans-and-string VOIP link bellows it one character at a time in an ideosyncratic variant of the NATO phonetic alphabet...
One major issue, that makes $/GB a bit less relevant, is the huge number of corporate typing boxes and generic consumer desktop/laptop units moved.
Depending on the buyer, the exact 'floor size' that they absolutely won't go below varies(80 or 160GB seems pretty common); but the buyer's interest in more space than that is zero. They'll take it, if it's free; but they won't pay any extra.
This makes for a very large number of HDD sales where an HDD is absolutely required(can't ship the box without a boot drive); but there is no willingness to pay any premium for a larger size. Especially if any of the shortages are in things like heads, signal processing components, or mechanical assemblies(rather than in premium, high-density platters) this market will behave rather differently than the bulk storage HDD market...
This isn't going to help, of course; but the high end of HDDs was already being squeezed well before the $/GB numbers said that they should. The 15k RPMs have never been very exciting as a bulk storage option, especially now that you can throw dirt cheap SATA drives onto SAS controllers if you want and they get absolutely destroyed on IOPs/$ compared to SSDs. The SSDs in that class are still pretty pricey; but some of them can displace an entire shelf of 15k drives if IOPs are your primary concern...
On the plus side, it is asserted that "The secret to good photography is lots and lots of bad photography" and digital shooting has made lots and lots and lots of bad photography cost virtually nothing...
The trouble is that SLRs(while undoubtedly extremely capable) tend to suffer very heavily from 'the best camera is the camera you are carrying' syndrome.
By virtue of the more complex optical path, the modular lens options, and the various other bits and bobs that SLRs end up with, they get big enough that 'bringing the camera' becomes a decision, not an automatic thing.
With the fairly impressive capabilities of contemporary point-and-shoots(yes, admittedly, the capabilities of SLRs have enjoyed the same technological improvements, only more so because they have more space and a bigger budget), you really start to hit the wall of diminishing returns pretty quickly(It takes surprisingly few good megapixels to spit out a butter-smooth 8x10, and a 2560x1600 display is only a smidge over 4 megapixels, and those are $1,000+ Serious Screens).
There are some genuinely ghastly point and shoots out there, to be sure, and the weaknesses of the entire genre will start to bite if you need low light performance, run into situations where you need a somewhat atypical lens, or are really serious about your manual settings; but it isn't hard to get a ~$100 P&S that'll happy-snap just fine, or a 200-250 one that will have a nicer optics package, some of the more useful historically-SLR-only features not removed from the firmware(histograms, RAW, some manual options), and generally compete pretty well with the low end DSLR and shitty kit lens of the moment...
My understanding is that, by simultaneously encouraging potentially dangerous types to brush up on their secrecy skills, and by making a transparent mockery of Enlightenment Humanism's commitment to freedom of speech and expression, a censorship system clearly weakens both those interested in clandestine attacks on us, and those who argue that our civilization is immoral, corrupt, and decadent.
I'm assuming that it all makes perfect sense, if you squint hard enough...
Not directly: Just as bare-metal VM hosts run hypervisors, rather than Linux directly, bare-metal shelves run an embedded Stress Allocation Geometry engine, rather than an OS.
If you want to run linux, you need to provision your shelves with one or more "Physical Machines", according to the requirements of your operation. Just be sure to observe caution: If you don't load balance your shelves correctly, all the PMs on a given shelf can end up crashing simultaneously. Also, if you exceed the provisioning constraints embedded by the vendor in your shelves' SAG parameter tables, you risk permanent damage to the shelves and the possible crash of some PMs on the over-provisioned shelves.
Delivering Linux services with a shelf-based architecture can be complex and challenging; but it is possible. For home/home office purposes, IKEA has some great whitepapers.
Unfortunately, some publishers should Not be trusted with new media.
Let's just say that a kludgy Macromedia Director 5-based interface that won't run correctly without full control over various vital bits of the filesystem, a compatibility shim to keep Director Player 5 from freaking out on machines with more than 1GB of RAM, and an install of the 16-bit Quicktime plugin sucks the joy right out of interactive learning...
Honestly, while this might be innovative if you consider it from the perspective of 'ebooks', it sounds a hell of a lot more like early-90's AOL, with its subscriber-interaction features and assortment of proprietary content licenses available to customers, albeit delivered as a paywalled site on top of the WWW, rather than by dial-in alongside it...
There also seems to be a fair bit of 'the large print giveth, the small print and structure taketh away' going on. On the plus side, hurray, a publisher not trying to enforce some 180-day DRM timeout scheme using a horrid proprietary format and ghastly custom reader program! Wait... $49 gets me a 'lifetime' subscription; but the 'textbook' is arranged around a 'class', with a professor and other students, which is presumably going to last a relatively short period of time. Does 'lifetime' mean that I am allowed to log in and pick through the cobwebs for as long as I can remember my password? Does it break when the 'class' dissolves?
Really, this seems sufficiently unlike a textbook, and sufficiently similar to certain other offerings, that treating it by comparison to ebooks seems actively misleading... If you were forced to describe the service as "Like an ebook; but..." that ellipsis would be rather long. If, on the other hand, you said "Nature is charging $50 per person, per class, for their hosted competitor to Blackboard or Moodle; and is sweetening the deal by throwing in a whole bunch of premade content modules." you'd basically be done...
This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing; but it isn't a book.
That's the theory: there is actually a lot to recommend doing the rasterization on the host side(the CPU power is likely to be crazy cheap by comparison, the odds of getting software updates and fixes are probably much better, you could even pull neat stunts like re-using existing platform libraries and specialized hardware(for instance, if you can use OpenGL commands to control a GPU and draw a bitmap onto your screen, there wouldn't be any major architectural impediment to having an OpenGL-based, GPU-accelerated, printer output, just by reading from the framebuffer into the hypothetical bitmap interface... You could also use traditional postscript RIPs, like Ghostscript or commercial alternatives, or basically anything else capable of rendering a bitmap output of a requested size and bit depth.
It isn't that rasterization is easy, or a good candidate for a USB spec(neither is true); but that rasterization is a problem that all platforms already have to solve(if they want to have a monitor), and the fact that there are various solutions is only an issue if the driver has to support that fact(as with the ghastly GDI-based 'winprinters' of ages past, which were utterly useless because there was no separation to allow for input from any other drawing mechanism). So long as the process for reporting the bitmap you want, receiving the bitmap you request, and doing basic paper/feed/supply related housekeeping is standardized, the rest will be quite complex(and likely nonstandard, or only standard per-platform); but will only need a thin layer to interact with any printer supporting the interface side of things.
Slashdot Mirror
It would make a difference for apps that use ndk(not that they'll magically become compatible, but if Intel scores some market share people will suck it up and update...) As for the rest, it's a mixture of mostly-normal linux supporting a Definitely-Not-A-JVM-and-Don't-You-Call-It-One...NDK makes it possible, but the applications are supposed to run in-vm unless necessary either way.
Microsoft's strategy in an alternate universe where large swaths of the Windows core are gpl2 or apache, every x86 whiteboxer has their own "Windows Distribution" and their primary leverage consists of the licensing requirements to ship Office out-of-box..
I'm pretty sure that AT&T's response is simply a toddler's temper tantrum with a midlife crisis and an expensive suit.
I bet fires caused by leaking gas or fluid lines, constrained by nothing but the opposition of the escaping material's inertia and the friction of the surrounding atmosphere, are pretty freaky looking though... Unlike on the ground, where the jet of flame eventually rises, if it's sufficiently low-density, or eventually falls on the ground and burns there, if it is a dense-ish liquid of some sort, you'd conceivably end up with a near-perfect expanding cone(preceded by an invisible-but-toxic-and-piping-hot zone of combustion products)...
With the availability of GPS and/or accelerometers, and their exposure to the browser, on a number of contemporary platforms, I don't see why not...
Not to worry! Thanks to the power of javascript and web2.0, you can again await the day when we'll be able to push a 6502 into the realm of the megahertz!
(Please note, above linked project is actually pretty fucking cool: "In the summer of 2009, working from a single 6502, we exposed the silicon die, photographed its surface at high resolution and also photographed its substrate. Using these two highly detailed aligned photographs, we created vector polygon models of each of the chip's physical components - about 20,000 of them in total for the 6502. These components form circuits in a few simple ways according to how they contact each other, so by intersecting our polygons, we were able to create a complete digital model and transistor-level simulation of the chip.
This model is very accurate and can run classic 6502 programs, including Atari games. By rendering our polygons with colors corresponding to their 'high' or 'low' logic state, we can show, visually, exactly how the chip operates: how it reads data and instructions from memory, how its registers and internal busses operate, and how toggling a single input pin (the 'clock') on and off drives the entire chip to step through a program and get things done."
It is, however, the case that this might not be the fastest way to execute 6502 instructions...)
It would certainly be an impressive feat(and, if capable of being used on scene, sure would be handy for all those "He needs to be prepped and being worked on by the trauma surgeon 10 minutes ago or he'll die" ambulance calls...); but it would be of only modest use for the mortality problem...
While frozen, the organism is metabolically inactive(by design). Dead, albeit reversibly so. Simply being cryoed would be more or less identical to dying, save that they can wake you up at some future time. And, if they wake you up, you still have whatever issues you had when you went under. If you have sufficiently accommodating family and/or some clever flavor of legally immortal trust supervising your affairs, it might be a decent way of halting fatal diseases until other suckers have finished the clinical R&D and come up with something effective; but even in that best case it would actually be pretty weird:
Just imagine a situation where a serious accident, or the wrong diagnosis would mean going on ice for 20 years, before being revived and repaired. It wouldn't have quite the permanence of death; but it'd be weird if you, or people around you, could just 'get iced', starting a near-death process of absence and loss; and then pop back up in a decade or three with no time having passed for them. Somebody better than me could probably wring a neat sci-fi story out of it, a world where the risk of the separation and loss that accompanies death is still very real; but most 'deaths'(excluding things like explosions or intense fires and the like) are really just freeze periods of unknown duration.
How much would it fuck with your head to have your spouse or child 'die', and then show up again exactly as they were when they died, but with everybody else that much older, and having lived without them? It'd be weird...
I'm no expert; but they are definitely animals. They can reproduce sexually(since they don't move around much once mature, the do a coordinated mass gamete release and let the water do the mixing). Some can also reproduce by budding or if divided.
Because they are sedentary, colony-living, and gradually form massive calcified structures, there are certain respects in which their role and macrostructure resembles that of plants(the two are enormously different biologically; but both are the major structural organism of their respective environments)...
Roomba...
It isn't exactly "tacked on". They've been called the "liberal arts" at least long enough that "liberal arts" is a more or less literal translation of the classical Latin, which (in matters not directly involved with the subtle art of killing those who resist and governing the rest) usually means that it was shamelessly cribbed from the Greeks.
There are arguments to be made about whether it is still necessary; but 'liberal' as in 'liberal arts' far predates any modern, or even early modern, political use of the term...
The one that jumps out at me is "Military Technologies". It does have the smell of a bullshit major(ie. "So, if you are interested in 'military technology', why don't I see 'BS Mechanical Engineering' and 'ROTC' on your application rather than 'Military Technology'?"); but it would seem to be a strong signal that the person pursuing it is interested in going into the military. Have recruitment conditions really picked up so much that almost 11% of people who completed at least a 2-year program in the area can't get recruited at all? If so, it sounds like there is something deeply wrong with the standards of the schools issuing such degrees...
Historically, students and 'intellectuals' have been perceived(sometimes accurately, sometimes with paranoia verging on hysteria) as menaces to the social and political establishment...
I'd be interested to know how much of this is purely about resource allocation and how much of it is about ensuring that absolutely as many people as possible are doing something practical, chasing the brass ring, and generally staying out of idle theorizing and similar such trouble...
Wasn't Palantir Technologies one of the slimy corprospook outfits(along with the notorious H.B. Gary Federal and Berico technologies) commissioned to do a little proposal for some dirty-tricks work against Wikileaks after Bank of America decided to lawyer up(with a little advice from the DOJ... How's that for a public defender?)
Oh yes, yes they were...
Fuck these guys and the horse they rode in on. Compared to a few pitiful fanatics who want to bomb everybody back to the 12th century, where they can feel at home, fine outfits like this are a much more serious threat to the aspects of our society worth saving.
I've certainly caught some phone drones who were either having a bad day, or were plain assholes; but overwhelmingly I find it hard to blame them, rather than the people behind them(who, unfortunately, I have no way of screaming obscenities at...)
Universally, their English is substantially better than my whatever-it-is-they-speak-there, and given that it is entirely unexpected in low-end phone support for the support guy to have nothing but the script he was given(ie. no access to the product to poke at, much less in the configuration I'm calling about) a fair amount of cluelessness is understandable.
Now, as for the people with actual decision-making power who decided that this flavor of tech support is good enough, may they be doomed to transcribe the entire library of babel, twice over, while a guy with an incomprehensible accent on the far end of a tin-cans-and-string VOIP link bellows it one character at a time in an ideosyncratic variant of the NATO phonetic alphabet...
One major issue, that makes $/GB a bit less relevant, is the huge number of corporate typing boxes and generic consumer desktop/laptop units moved.
Depending on the buyer, the exact 'floor size' that they absolutely won't go below varies(80 or 160GB seems pretty common); but the buyer's interest in more space than that is zero. They'll take it, if it's free; but they won't pay any extra.
This makes for a very large number of HDD sales where an HDD is absolutely required(can't ship the box without a boot drive); but there is no willingness to pay any premium for a larger size. Especially if any of the shortages are in things like heads, signal processing components, or mechanical assemblies(rather than in premium, high-density platters) this market will behave rather differently than the bulk storage HDD market...
This isn't going to help, of course; but the high end of HDDs was already being squeezed well before the $/GB numbers said that they should. The 15k RPMs have never been very exciting as a bulk storage option, especially now that you can throw dirt cheap SATA drives onto SAS controllers if you want and they get absolutely destroyed on IOPs/$ compared to SSDs. The SSDs in that class are still pretty pricey; but some of them can displace an entire shelf of 15k drives if IOPs are your primary concern...
On the plus side, it is asserted that "The secret to good photography is lots and lots of bad photography" and digital shooting has made lots and lots and lots of bad photography cost virtually nothing...
The trouble is that SLRs(while undoubtedly extremely capable) tend to suffer very heavily from 'the best camera is the camera you are carrying' syndrome.
By virtue of the more complex optical path, the modular lens options, and the various other bits and bobs that SLRs end up with, they get big enough that 'bringing the camera' becomes a decision, not an automatic thing.
With the fairly impressive capabilities of contemporary point-and-shoots(yes, admittedly, the capabilities of SLRs have enjoyed the same technological improvements, only more so because they have more space and a bigger budget), you really start to hit the wall of diminishing returns pretty quickly(It takes surprisingly few good megapixels to spit out a butter-smooth 8x10, and a 2560x1600 display is only a smidge over 4 megapixels, and those are $1,000+ Serious Screens).
There are some genuinely ghastly point and shoots out there, to be sure, and the weaknesses of the entire genre will start to bite if you need low light performance, run into situations where you need a somewhat atypical lens, or are really serious about your manual settings; but it isn't hard to get a ~$100 P&S that'll happy-snap just fine, or a 200-250 one that will have a nicer optics package, some of the more useful historically-SLR-only features not removed from the firmware(histograms, RAW, some manual options), and generally compete pretty well with the low end DSLR and shitty kit lens of the moment...
My understanding is that, by simultaneously encouraging potentially dangerous types to brush up on their secrecy skills, and by making a transparent mockery of Enlightenment Humanism's commitment to freedom of speech and expression, a censorship system clearly weakens both those interested in clandestine attacks on us, and those who argue that our civilization is immoral, corrupt, and decadent.
I'm assuming that it all makes perfect sense, if you squint hard enough...
I've heard that the Content Policy of the United States Constitution also fails to expressly ban terrorist content...
Those 'founding fathers' must have been a bunch of rag-heads or something.
Not directly: Just as bare-metal VM hosts run hypervisors, rather than Linux directly, bare-metal shelves run an embedded Stress Allocation Geometry engine, rather than an OS.
If you want to run linux, you need to provision your shelves with one or more "Physical Machines", according to the requirements of your operation. Just be sure to observe caution: If you don't load balance your shelves correctly, all the PMs on a given shelf can end up crashing simultaneously. Also, if you exceed the provisioning constraints embedded by the vendor in your shelves' SAG parameter tables, you risk permanent damage to the shelves and the possible crash of some PMs on the over-provisioned shelves.
Delivering Linux services with a shelf-based architecture can be complex and challenging; but it is possible. For home/home office purposes, IKEA has some great whitepapers.
Depends on the environment. They eeevolve if the students are using netbooks.
Unfortunately, some publishers should Not be trusted with new media.
Let's just say that a kludgy Macromedia Director 5-based interface that won't run correctly without full control over various vital bits of the filesystem, a compatibility shim to keep Director Player 5 from freaking out on machines with more than 1GB of RAM, and an install of the 16-bit Quicktime plugin sucks the joy right out of interactive learning...
Honestly, while this might be innovative if you consider it from the perspective of 'ebooks', it sounds a hell of a lot more like early-90's AOL, with its subscriber-interaction features and assortment of proprietary content licenses available to customers, albeit delivered as a paywalled site on top of the WWW, rather than by dial-in alongside it...
There also seems to be a fair bit of 'the large print giveth, the small print and structure taketh away' going on. On the plus side, hurray, a publisher not trying to enforce some 180-day DRM timeout scheme using a horrid proprietary format and ghastly custom reader program! Wait... $49 gets me a 'lifetime' subscription; but the 'textbook' is arranged around a 'class', with a professor and other students, which is presumably going to last a relatively short period of time. Does 'lifetime' mean that I am allowed to log in and pick through the cobwebs for as long as I can remember my password? Does it break when the 'class' dissolves?
Really, this seems sufficiently unlike a textbook, and sufficiently similar to certain other offerings, that treating it by comparison to ebooks seems actively misleading... If you were forced to describe the service as "Like an ebook; but..." that ellipsis would be rather long. If, on the other hand, you said "Nature is charging $50 per person, per class, for their hosted competitor to Blackboard or Moodle; and is sweetening the deal by throwing in a whole bunch of premade content modules." you'd basically be done...
This isn't, necessarily, a bad thing; but it isn't a book.
That's the theory: there is actually a lot to recommend doing the rasterization on the host side(the CPU power is likely to be crazy cheap by comparison, the odds of getting software updates and fixes are probably much better, you could even pull neat stunts like re-using existing platform libraries and specialized hardware(for instance, if you can use OpenGL commands to control a GPU and draw a bitmap onto your screen, there wouldn't be any major architectural impediment to having an OpenGL-based, GPU-accelerated, printer output, just by reading from the framebuffer into the hypothetical bitmap interface... You could also use traditional postscript RIPs, like Ghostscript or commercial alternatives, or basically anything else capable of rendering a bitmap output of a requested size and bit depth.
It isn't that rasterization is easy, or a good candidate for a USB spec(neither is true); but that rasterization is a problem that all platforms already have to solve(if they want to have a monitor), and the fact that there are various solutions is only an issue if the driver has to support that fact(as with the ghastly GDI-based 'winprinters' of ages past, which were utterly useless because there was no separation to allow for input from any other drawing mechanism). So long as the process for reporting the bitmap you want, receiving the bitmap you request, and doing basic paper/feed/supply related housekeeping is standardized, the rest will be quite complex(and likely nonstandard, or only standard per-platform); but will only need a thin layer to interact with any printer supporting the interface side of things.