The main problem I think is that color lasers are generally multipass systems. The paper goes around and around in a circle, 4 times, once for each primary toner.
I think I remember seeing some extremely expensive singlepass color laser systems, but basically you are paying for 4 complete printers. IIRC they were way out of our price range.
Since the distribution of the executable or object code is made through physical means, and not "by offering access to copy", then that clause doesn't apply at all to this situation.
Under some circumstances they can dock a big percentage of your pay for the rest of your life.
Seriously. I know a guy that was accused of a hacking type crime by a large company, he will be paying off that $2 million for the rest of his life most likely.
The music and entertainment industry is so hogtied by unions that it's slowly killing them. Anyone who thinks the RIAA is a cartel, but also supports unions is the true hypocrite.
Because those of us who said to go after individual infringers had a larger motive in mind.
We wanted the public to become mobilized to do something about these cartels. That's exactly what's happening. Every suit the RIAA files is another nail in their coffin.
It's similar to the opponents of the death peanalty lobbying to keep the electric chair. It has to be shown what the enemy's true nature is, for anyone to join your side.
The RIAA is revealing their true nature. We are winning.
Yeah, but that's still a violation of the GPL. You can't count on someone else to distribute the code for you. If you distribute the binary commercially, you have to distribute the source, or make it available from you for three years. Not from someone else.
What sort of volume (labels/minute) do you need? In what sort of environment will these be printed and applied (office, assembly line, etc.)? How permanent does the image have to be? How small and finicky is the barcode? How much of an issue is the cost of the label itself and the printer consumables? Do you need automated print-and-apply?
The volume isn't particularly high, maybe a thousand per day per printer. They would be applied in an assembly line kind of environment. The image would need to stand up to moderate abuse of shipping. The barcode isn't a big deal. The consumable cost is a pretty large concern. Automated application isn't something we'd want right off, but we might want to keep our options open.
We thought about the avery solution, but the conclusion is that it almost has to be rollfed in some way. Since we are a flexo/litho printer, we can easily produce our own roll stock, so we'd like to not have to buy special roll stock just for this, when we have the equipment to make our own.
It would be nice if there were a color laser printer that could accept rollfed media, but I haven't found one yet.
Enscript and Imagemagick run on every platform that matters. Besides, you are talking about data formats. Enscript is going to make postscript, pretty platform independant.
That's the thing, the image is about as dynamic as it can get. It needs to be generated in real time from EPS (DCS2 actually) files that reside on a central Linux file server.
I don't want to put low res versions of the images into a database either, I just want them dynamically generated on the spot. We dynamically generate JPGs from them for the web site, so it's not too slow to do on the fly.
You can see why any Windows solution is highly crippled in this area. I'd basically have to write something from scratch, in Linux I can use a 25 line shell script (a little wgetting from the web server that already knows how to make the images, and some enscript or something out to lpr).
A little of both. We already had a windows based system printing black and white barcodes and text information, we kept that. We ditched the project of printing color labels with pictures of the product on it, and buying color label printers. Some company out there lost up to $30,000+ in sales, plus ongoing consumables, because they didn't like open standards, and all wanted to play the lock-in game.
What they do instead, and had been doing, is taking an actual label from inside the box and cutting it, and gluing it to the outside of the box. Our product is, ironically, labels, we are a litho/flexo label printing company. It's more labor intensive, but as to whether it's more costly than the options we had hardware/software dev wise, I doubt it.
What we wanted to do is use color thermal or rollfed inkjet to print a picture of the product on the carton label with the barcode.
Every rollfed color printer we looked at had fatal flaws. Most used a proprietary language for programming. "But we have Windows print driver!!" Big fucking deal, didn't help us, there's no windows software that can do what we needed anyway. Why are open standards to damn hard to understand? We'd have probably bought your hardware if you hadn't decided to be assholes.
Only one supported a standard language, PCL/XL, and that was the color rollfed inkjet. Which unfortunately used proprietary HP ink cartridges that cost $199 a piece. That's for each color, so $800 to change all ink cartridges. They were only like 350ml IIRC.
Anyway, our plan was to use enscript, along with imagemagick, and some other piece to create the barcode (like pbmupc maybe), and then compose them all into an image with shell scripts, and print them the normal way.
Unfortunately, we gave up on the project when we realized that no one makes suitable hardware.
So that's the politically correct word for spam these days?
A lot of the complaints for spam I get at work are things that people signed up for and didn't know it meant they would be getting ads every other day. A lot of it is local clear channel radio stations, if you want to be a "preferred listener" and be elegible for contests you have to get on their spam lists.
That said, I have little reason to believe you are a real spammer. I've noticed that real companies lately generally do respect it if you unclick their checkboxes.
This is a different story from a couple years ago when it was common practice to add new types of promotions that were automatically turned on, even if you opted-out.
I wonder what goes through their heads? "Well only 200 people clicked the spam-me button, so we'll add a new checkbox in their existing account that is selected by default, that effectively means spam-me!"
Well, there's unemployment insurance for one, that's generally paid based on the number of employees and the wages they make.
I don't think benefits are required to be paid at all in the US. Most employers do offer benefits to be competitive though.
There are some other laws that don't apply unless you have more than X number of employees, generally it is in a company's best interest to minimize the number of employees.
Actually, if you want to eliminate a 40 hour week, then reduce the unit costs.
It's almost always going to be cheaper for a company to have one person getting paid $60,000 than two people getting paid $30,000, that only work half as much. If we can somehow make it just as cheap or cheaper to hire the two working less, then it would help.
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform?
It's already happened. Did you miss that whole industrial revolution thing?
never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hasn't it? I think you need to brush up on your history.
Everyone always says "It's different this time", but in the end, it always turns out to be the same old thing, only a slightly different incarnation. The monster corporations will eventually collapse, or break up, or become irrelevant, or maybe learn to play nice.
The economy is a resiliant ecosystem. Forces work to balance it.
Why should they waste resources on a lickable desktop environment that will never be used? Do you think all these machines will have monitors or something?
PIC, or AVR generally is where you should start. There's really no way around working in either Assembly or C if you want to do anything serious with it.
To go to a more powerful CPU gets you into all the stuff you don't want to get into, like critical and complex board layouts.
There's BASIC compilers, but you aren't going to get very far before you run into some serious limitations if you want to do anything complex.
Good luck on the JRE thing, something like that is way too slow and bloated to run on a hobbiest CPU. I think sun made a chip that executed bytecode, but I don't think they make them anymore.
If I had to put up with all that shit for some image viewer, I'm sure I'd find a different image viewer. As he said, there are already hundreds of perfectly good ones, and dozens in open source.
And then you have to adjust for secret patches from MS, and things that get pushed off to service packs.
Linux generally pushes patches out for even the most trivial local-only potential exploits.
There was a patch a while back for Red Hat that changed the login behavior, because you could tell if an account existed based on the delay when you entered an invalid password.
The irony is that IT did change the world. If it weren't for the development and success of the Internet, it wouldn't be possible to outsource IT jobs.:)
It's definitely not as bad as it used to be. Go look on hotjobs and such. There's lots of good jobs out there now. The unrealistic requirements are lessening. I'm seeing a lot more "degree, or equivalent experience", which is very refreshing, I'm sick of people overvaluing a degree.
Good grades and internships don't mean that it isn't someone who is like the latter person you describe.
Even my recent personal experience, my company is looking to potentially hire another IT person for a temp position over the winter. None of my network of friends is unemployed anymore. I posted it in my journal, and got no replies. If the market is so bad, why am I not innundated with resumes?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't find any.
The main problem I think is that color lasers are generally multipass systems. The paper goes around and around in a circle, 4 times, once for each primary toner.
I think I remember seeing some extremely expensive singlepass color laser systems, but basically you are paying for 4 complete printers. IIRC they were way out of our price range.
Since the distribution of the executable or object code is made through physical means, and not "by offering access to copy", then that clause doesn't apply at all to this situation.
Under some circumstances they can dock a big percentage of your pay for the rest of your life.
Seriously. I know a guy that was accused of a hacking type crime by a large company, he will be paying off that $2 million for the rest of his life most likely.
Sorry, unions prevent that.
The music and entertainment industry is so hogtied by unions that it's slowly killing them. Anyone who thinks the RIAA is a cartel, but also supports unions is the true hypocrite.
Because those of us who said to go after individual infringers had a larger motive in mind.
We wanted the public to become mobilized to do something about these cartels. That's exactly what's happening. Every suit the RIAA files is another nail in their coffin.
It's similar to the opponents of the death peanalty lobbying to keep the electric chair. It has to be shown what the enemy's true nature is, for anyone to join your side.
The RIAA is revealing their true nature. We are winning.
Yeah, but that's still a violation of the GPL. You can't count on someone else to distribute the code for you. If you distribute the binary commercially, you have to distribute the source, or make it available from you for three years. Not from someone else.
Yes, it does matter.
What sort of volume (labels/minute) do you need? In what sort of environment will these be printed and applied (office, assembly line, etc.)? How permanent does the image have to be? How small and finicky is the barcode? How much of an issue is the cost of the label itself and the printer consumables? Do you need automated print-and-apply?
The volume isn't particularly high, maybe a thousand per day per printer. They would be applied in an assembly line kind of environment. The image would need to stand up to moderate abuse of shipping. The barcode isn't a big deal. The consumable cost is a pretty large concern. Automated application isn't something we'd want right off, but we might want to keep our options open.
We thought about the avery solution, but the conclusion is that it almost has to be rollfed in some way. Since we are a flexo/litho printer, we can easily produce our own roll stock, so we'd like to not have to buy special roll stock just for this, when we have the equipment to make our own.
It would be nice if there were a color laser printer that could accept rollfed media, but I haven't found one yet.
That's like saying because someone shot at you and missed, you were never in danger.
It wasn't all hype. Inaction would have been costly.
Enscript and Imagemagick run on every platform that matters. Besides, you are talking about data formats. Enscript is going to make postscript, pretty platform independant.
That's the thing, the image is about as dynamic as it can get. It needs to be generated in real time from EPS (DCS2 actually) files that reside on a central Linux file server.
I don't want to put low res versions of the images into a database either, I just want them dynamically generated on the spot. We dynamically generate JPGs from them for the web site, so it's not too slow to do on the fly.
You can see why any Windows solution is highly crippled in this area. I'd basically have to write something from scratch, in Linux I can use a 25 line shell script (a little wgetting from the web server that already knows how to make the images, and some enscript or something out to lpr).
A little of both. We already had a windows based system printing black and white barcodes and text information, we kept that. We ditched the project of printing color labels with pictures of the product on it, and buying color label printers. Some company out there lost up to $30,000+ in sales, plus ongoing consumables, because they didn't like open standards, and all wanted to play the lock-in game.
What they do instead, and had been doing, is taking an actual label from inside the box and cutting it, and gluing it to the outside of the box. Our product is, ironically, labels, we are a litho/flexo label printing company. It's more labor intensive, but as to whether it's more costly than the options we had hardware/software dev wise, I doubt it.
We looked for something like this a while back.
What we wanted to do is use color thermal or rollfed inkjet to print a picture of the product on the carton label with the barcode.
Every rollfed color printer we looked at had fatal flaws. Most used a proprietary language for programming. "But we have Windows print driver!!" Big fucking deal, didn't help us, there's no windows software that can do what we needed anyway. Why are open standards to damn hard to understand? We'd have probably bought your hardware if you hadn't decided to be assholes.
Only one supported a standard language, PCL/XL, and that was the color rollfed inkjet. Which unfortunately used proprietary HP ink cartridges that cost $199 a piece. That's for each color, so $800 to change all ink cartridges. They were only like 350ml IIRC.
Anyway, our plan was to use enscript, along with imagemagick, and some other piece to create the barcode (like pbmupc maybe), and then compose them all into an image with shell scripts, and print them the normal way.
Unfortunately, we gave up on the project when we realized that no one makes suitable hardware.
You seem pretty defensive, considering I said I had no reason to believe you were a true spammer.
third party promotions
So that's the politically correct word for spam these days?
A lot of the complaints for spam I get at work are things that people signed up for and didn't know it meant they would be getting ads every other day. A lot of it is local clear channel radio stations, if you want to be a "preferred listener" and be elegible for contests you have to get on their spam lists.
That said, I have little reason to believe you are a real spammer. I've noticed that real companies lately generally do respect it if you unclick their checkboxes.
This is a different story from a couple years ago when it was common practice to add new types of promotions that were automatically turned on, even if you opted-out.
I wonder what goes through their heads? "Well only 200 people clicked the spam-me button, so we'll add a new checkbox in their existing account that is selected by default, that effectively means spam-me!"
Well, there's unemployment insurance for one, that's generally paid based on the number of employees and the wages they make.
I don't think benefits are required to be paid at all in the US. Most employers do offer benefits to be competitive though.
There are some other laws that don't apply unless you have more than X number of employees, generally it is in a company's best interest to minimize the number of employees.
Actually, if you want to eliminate a 40 hour week, then reduce the unit costs.
It's almost always going to be cheaper for a company to have one person getting paid $60,000 than two people getting paid $30,000, that only work half as much. If we can somehow make it just as cheap or cheaper to hire the two working less, then it would help.
What happens when the only jobs are those that you need serious skill and training to perform?
It's already happened. Did you miss that whole industrial revolution thing?
never before has the economy dealt with gargantuan bodies like AOL-Time-Warner.
Hasn't it? I think you need to brush up on your history.
Everyone always says "It's different this time", but in the end, it always turns out to be the same old thing, only a slightly different incarnation. The monster corporations will eventually collapse, or break up, or become irrelevant, or maybe learn to play nice.
The economy is a resiliant ecosystem. Forces work to balance it.
Why?
Why should they waste resources on a lickable desktop environment that will never be used? Do you think all these machines will have monitors or something?
PIC, or AVR generally is where you should start. There's really no way around working in either Assembly or C if you want to do anything serious with it.
To go to a more powerful CPU gets you into all the stuff you don't want to get into, like critical and complex board layouts.
There's BASIC compilers, but you aren't going to get very far before you run into some serious limitations if you want to do anything complex.
Good luck on the JRE thing, something like that is way too slow and bloated to run on a hobbiest CPU. I think sun made a chip that executed bytecode, but I don't think they make them anymore.
If I had to put up with all that shit for some image viewer, I'm sure I'd find a different image viewer. As he said, there are already hundreds of perfectly good ones, and dozens in open source.
That's not very effective, unless they have DNS firewalled to the net in general, which is pretty lame.
And then you have to adjust for secret patches from MS, and things that get pushed off to service packs.
Linux generally pushes patches out for even the most trivial local-only potential exploits.
There was a patch a while back for Red Hat that changed the login behavior, because you could tell if an account existed based on the delay when you entered an invalid password.
The truancy laws were actually what I had in mind when I wrote the "few slim exceptions" part.
The irony is that IT did change the world. If it weren't for the development and success of the Internet, it wouldn't be possible to outsource IT jobs. :)
It's definitely not as bad as it used to be. Go look on hotjobs and such. There's lots of good jobs out there now. The unrealistic requirements are lessening. I'm seeing a lot more "degree, or equivalent experience", which is very refreshing, I'm sick of people overvaluing a degree.
Good grades and internships don't mean that it isn't someone who is like the latter person you describe.
Even my recent personal experience, my company is looking to potentially hire another IT person for a temp position over the winter. None of my network of friends is unemployed anymore. I posted it in my journal, and got no replies. If the market is so bad, why am I not innundated with resumes?