Totally OT, but I did feel I had to respond to this one...
From the linked page: Highway speed of up to 100km/h (62m/h)
Since the company appears to be Australian (based on the +61 phone number and supporting text), I think it's fairly clear they quote a top speed of 100km/h and just converted that for their American customers.
Whether the quoted top speed truly is that or is greater I won't speculate, but if it is greater, I can be pretty sure that the "62m/h" isn't put in as an obfuscation.
Working in the technical area, not sales/marketing, I really don't know about prices, sales and so on. Also I'd imagine it varies from country to country and possibly even branch to branch (to say nothing of dealers and other distribution chains).
One thing I can say that it is indeed a slick little box - and I don't even work with that model (I work with the business equipment - not the "printing solutions" products)
Important for businesses or home users though? Most businesses of any reasonable size will have "big" printers (Multifunctional copier devices generally) rather than toy printers. Since the article is about business desktop Linux use, I'd say it shouldn't be such a concern from that angle.
If you are thinking about home use, see another of my posts in this thread regarding my personal recommendation for a really nice home printer that works perfectly under Linux.
$20k devices and higher? Yep, definitely no problem. You don't need to go that high that.
Again, somewhat of a shameless plug perhaps, but the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2450 is a great little printer for use under Linux and while more than $99 should be easily sub $1000.
I'm not too familiar with "Best Buy", but looking at their website, they do appear to have a lot of crud. I see a couple of PCL printers and maybe some PostScript ones too though, so even at Best Buy you can get something that'll work nicely.
APOP... Authenticated SMTP... POP Before SMTP (okay, that's a hack, but still)...
All of the above on plain old POP and SMTP. That's without going a layer or two down to things like IPSec or sideways to something like PGP to ensure the data itself is safe as it flies across the network.
Go away from POP/SMTP to the likes of IMAP and even more possibilities open up.
I'd say we've got email security... it's just not particularly good yet from a "security specialist" viewpoint - good enough for most "business" customers though.
Purely to show my brother he should switch to Linux, I ran Doom 3 on my Linux box under WINE and it ran slightly better than my Windows box.
The hardware was radically different, including a MUCH nicer graphics card in the Linux box, so it wasn't a fair comparison from that perspective and I'm not going to say "it was faster cos it was Linux" or anything like that - but what it did show nicely is that WINE can handle the likes of Doom 3 no problem at all given the hardware to do so.
Working as a "specialist" in printing and printing technologies (see my post history for details), I can't help but wholeheartedly agree.
I've not found anything easier for IPP, LPR or Raw (Socket/9100) printing than a simple CUPS install with a nice frontend as provided by EITHER KDE or Gnome. It even auto-searches the network for port9100 - something Windows is yet to do.
Drivers for "toy" printers can be a pain, but even without vendor support (which I'll plug that we have) any PostScript device is a breeze and PCL devices are only marginally more complicated.
A few months ago I tried to gauge our end user Linux adoption by the number of support enquiries I was asked to assist with (assuming our technicians/first level support couldn't handle Linux) and thought that perhaps there's not so much out there. Then I find out that there's a LOT more than I originally assumed and it just never makes it to me as an enquiry since it "just works". Enquiries about other systems (Windows, MacOS and AS/400 especially) aren't uncommon (especially Windows broken excuse for printer sharing in relation to permissions and device settings causing MANY headaches)
That's just my take on it from an inside perspective of one of the supposed "key areas for improvement". Maybe these users just aren't savvy enough on printing in general, and it's not the OS that's the problem at all (it'd be interesting to give them a Windows environment and check out what printing issues they have...)
My cat disembowelled a dog once. She was pretty much a normal housecat. Found in the wild at a young age, but grew up to a normal sized tabby with a bit of a vicious streak.
Not entirely sure what kind of dog it was, but it wasn't small. Some kind of retriever or similar.
The dog was on the front lawn, taking a dump. Fishface (for that was the cat's name, and I kid you not), ran outside and swiped it across the nose with her claw. The dog of course was taken by surprise and stood up on three legs while pawing at it's nose with the other. Fishface ran underneath the dog and swiped it through the gut. The dog staggered a bit and fell over dead with various internal mushy things (I can only assume intestines from the look of them) beginning to sag out of the largest of the scratch wounds.
So, depending on one's definition of "disembowel", I'd say that qualifies...
(and no, no-one put my cat down for it - we had to explain it to the neighbours, but fortunately they didn't seek legal action and Fishface died of old age a few years later)
You have a very interesting point and it really made me stop and think for a bit. In the end, I have to disagree with it though.
The primary reason is one of the ones that would fall in to your (quite accurate) category of "rarely discussed in the context of the space program".
People don't know what they want. If no-one ever asks for LCD technology, they won't get it. No business is going to waste their money creating something that no-one wants. It's likely they would evaluate it, decide it's too expensive and the quality is terrible, so they never make it. The only reason it became something "people want" is that it was available. And it was available because of the space race.
It's possible that the money might have been spent on an unknown "X" that is far better than LCD technology. But it's also possible it could have been squandered and nothing beneficial coming out of it at all.
Hindsight is 20/20 (according to proverb), so looking back you can say "yes, it cost more than we got out of it", but how often do you look back and say "that period that we DIDN'T do something, look how much money we wasted"? Pretty much never since you just don't think of those times.
We as individuals and as a species should take the time to think of those points in history (thankfully few, but the "dark ages" are a striking case) and come to the conclusion that it's always better to act than to not act. If we don't do SOMETHING, there's a potential for waste. If we do something, it may be more than we bargained for, but at least there'll be SOME gain.
To go back to the candy bar scenario: I steal $100 from you and buy you a candy bar. You're unhappy with this situation (quite rightly I'd say!). But that's only because you WERE going to do something else with that money. Would you prefer to die having eaten that candy bar or be buried with your $100? And to anticipate an answer: No, I'm not giving you the option of leaving it to your children/friends/family/whatever - you either get a candy bar or nothing. I would hope any sane person chooses the former.
Despite the fact that I disagree with you, thankyou very much for the second most interesting thing I've had to think about all week (the most interesting being a potential move within my company to a far more interesting position... woohoo!)
My PC has replaced my TV (MythTV, fairly nice box and a projector).... and my fridge does order my groceries when I'm running low (LG Internet Refrigerator)...
Don't live in the US, so can't comment on the Spanish thing. And my phone is nowhere near the power of my laptop. But 2 out of 4 is a good start!
Okay getting sick of the guessing game... if they complain, then they complain... Yes, it's Konica Minolta.
Konica Minolta Business Technologies that is, not Konica Minolta Printing Solutions (formerly QMS)
KMBT makes things like the 8020, 8031, CF2002, CF3102, C350, C450, C500 etc, whereas KMPS makes things like the Magicolor series. We share a bit of tech and will share a lot more in the future, but for older machines, they're not really related.
Couldn't you lose the "feature" where the printer damages itself?
The printer doesn't actually damage itself, just renders itself unusable until it is reset. It's purely software, not hardware. (I can't speak for other manufacturers, but that's the way ours work anyway)
And what about false positives, people trying to use that "feature" to break a copy shop's printer, etc?
Fortunately, we haven't really come across that yet, but if it ever does start happening, it is going to cause a bit of chaos - you're not wrong there...
Anyone know the secret codes to unbreak the printers.
1. That explains why the yellow toner gets used so fast.
Actually, I'd be utterly shocked if you ever even noticed the amount of yellow toner it's using. If you only ever printed black and white documents with an average 5% coverage or so, you'd go through thousands of black toner cartridges before you used up even one yellow one.
The primary cause of going through lots of yellow toner is that yellow gets used in a LOT of colours that people commonly print (think CMYK mixes, not RGB)
2. It's really nice that your products continue to work after (not) printing controlled documents. Our printer conked out when some yahoo decided to make a copy of a money order for his records by scanning it & printing it out.
Conked out as in stopped working? Yikes! Our machines will print the black square, call an error and then continue to work fine unless you do another 5 attempts at the EXACT same document... (at which point it will lock up and require someone that knows how to get in to service mode (ie, a technician) to fix it)
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever
So...what's the point of having the microdots?
Just in case we are ever asked? Don't ask me, I work for the company in a technical role, but don't design these things (yet - I'm gunning for an R&D job now, which means moving to Japan, getting paid lots of money and eating good Japanese food!)
I work for a large printer/copier manufacturer in the technical services area (IT related) and can confirm we've been doing this for MANY years in our colour products.
We refer to the technology as "micro dots". Each dot can uniquely identify the device by it's serial number (which is not only printed on a label but also hardcoded in to the machine).
I also happen to live in Australia, where it'd be a cold day in hell before we told anyone who didn't have a court order the serial number of a printer that produced a page or who we sold it to.
The dots are MUCH smaller than 1mm as suggested here, however I can confirm that yellow toner is used. If you have a good magnifying glass (at least 8 times) and a sharp eye you can spot them, but it's really not easy.
Additionally, our machines all have anti-counterfeit technology anyway. If you try to print or copy a banknote from any major world currency, all you'll get is a black square and possibly an error code being displayed on the panel.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now).
I've deliberately avoided mentioning my employers name in this post. I'm pretty sure I haven't broken any confidentiality agreements with this post (all I'm doing is confirming, not supplying new info) but you can't be too careful. Suffice to say, I don't think it matters which major manufacturer, I'd bet my bottom dollar we all do it.
The whole concept of not being able to multitask is something I could never understand. I routinely use two keyboards at once, and am in fact doing so right now.
With one keyboard, I'm typing this (right hand) and with the other am replying to an email (left hand).
I do have to keep switching (round robin) my focus on the two screens, but am concentrating on the text of both at the same time and doing so without a great deal of effort. I've always found however that people (even other geeks) tend to stare at me in disbelief when I do things like this, so maybe I am just a bit different somehow.
True multitasking really isn't impossible for people as some other posters have suggested, but I do agree that combining one "thinking" task (eg programming) with one "non-thinking" task (eg listening to music) is not true multitasking. I'd say however that what I do with two keyboards most certainly is.
All that in mind, I do find my writing style tends to get a bit muddled and incoherent if I try to hold a conversation at the same time as typing two different things at once - three trains of thought seems to be my absolute limit (and can wear me out very quickly too).
Slashdot Mirror
Totally OT, but I did feel I had to respond to this one...
From the linked page:
Highway speed of up to 100km/h (62m/h)
Since the company appears to be Australian (based on the +61 phone number and supporting text), I think it's fairly clear they quote a top speed of 100km/h and just converted that for their American customers.
Whether the quoted top speed truly is that or is greater I won't speculate, but if it is greater, I can be pretty sure that the "62m/h" isn't put in as an obfuscation.
Working in the technical area, not sales/marketing, I really don't know about prices, sales and so on. Also I'd imagine it varies from country to country and possibly even branch to branch (to say nothing of dealers and other distribution chains).
One thing I can say that it is indeed a slick little box - and I don't even work with that model (I work with the business equipment - not the "printing solutions" products)
Important for businesses or home users though? Most businesses of any reasonable size will have "big" printers (Multifunctional copier devices generally) rather than toy printers. Since the article is about business desktop Linux use, I'd say it shouldn't be such a concern from that angle.
If you are thinking about home use, see another of my posts in this thread regarding my personal recommendation for a really nice home printer that works perfectly under Linux.
$20k devices and higher? Yep, definitely no problem. You don't need to go that high that.
Again, somewhat of a shameless plug perhaps, but the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2450 is a great little printer for use under Linux and while more than $99 should be easily sub $1000.
I'm not too familiar with "Best Buy", but looking at their website, they do appear to have a lot of crud. I see a couple of PCL printers and maybe some PostScript ones too though, so even at Best Buy you can get something that'll work nicely.
APOP... Authenticated SMTP... POP Before SMTP (okay, that's a hack, but still)...
All of the above on plain old POP and SMTP. That's without going a layer or two down to things like IPSec or sideways to something like PGP to ensure the data itself is safe as it flies across the network.
Go away from POP/SMTP to the likes of IMAP and even more possibilities open up.
I'd say we've got email security... it's just not particularly good yet from a "security specialist" viewpoint - good enough for most "business" customers though.
Purely to show my brother he should switch to Linux, I ran Doom 3 on my Linux box under WINE and it ran slightly better than my Windows box.
The hardware was radically different, including a MUCH nicer graphics card in the Linux box, so it wasn't a fair comparison from that perspective and I'm not going to say "it was faster cos it was Linux" or anything like that - but what it did show nicely is that WINE can handle the likes of Doom 3 no problem at all given the hardware to do so.
Working as a "specialist" in printing and printing technologies (see my post history for details), I can't help but wholeheartedly agree.
I've not found anything easier for IPP, LPR or Raw (Socket/9100) printing than a simple CUPS install with a nice frontend as provided by EITHER KDE or Gnome. It even auto-searches the network for port9100 - something Windows is yet to do.
Drivers for "toy" printers can be a pain, but even without vendor support (which I'll plug that we have) any PostScript device is a breeze and PCL devices are only marginally more complicated.
A few months ago I tried to gauge our end user Linux adoption by the number of support enquiries I was asked to assist with (assuming our technicians/first level support couldn't handle Linux) and thought that perhaps there's not so much out there. Then I find out that there's a LOT more than I originally assumed and it just never makes it to me as an enquiry since it "just works". Enquiries about other systems (Windows, MacOS and AS/400 especially) aren't uncommon (especially Windows broken excuse for printer sharing in relation to permissions and device settings causing MANY headaches)
That's just my take on it from an inside perspective of one of the supposed "key areas for improvement". Maybe these users just aren't savvy enough on printing in general, and it's not the OS that's the problem at all (it'd be interesting to give them a Windows environment and check out what printing issues they have...)
My cat disembowelled a dog once. She was pretty much a normal housecat. Found in the wild at a young age, but grew up to a normal sized tabby with a bit of a vicious streak.
Not entirely sure what kind of dog it was, but it wasn't small. Some kind of retriever or similar.
The dog was on the front lawn, taking a dump. Fishface (for that was the cat's name, and I kid you not), ran outside and swiped it across the nose with her claw. The dog of course was taken by surprise and stood up on three legs while pawing at it's nose with the other. Fishface ran underneath the dog and swiped it through the gut. The dog staggered a bit and fell over dead with various internal mushy things (I can only assume intestines from the look of them) beginning to sag out of the largest of the scratch wounds.
So, depending on one's definition of "disembowel", I'd say that qualifies...
(and no, no-one put my cat down for it - we had to explain it to the neighbours, but fortunately they didn't seek legal action and Fishface died of old age a few years later)
Actually no... my position reduces a bit differently. Perhaps I wasn't quite clear.
My position reduces to:
We did the space program and got something out of it.
If we hadn't done the space program we MIGHT not have got something out of it.
100% chance of something is better than 100% chance of something.
You have a very interesting point and it really made me stop and think for a bit. In the end, I have to disagree with it though.
The primary reason is one of the ones that would fall in to your (quite accurate) category of "rarely discussed in the context of the space program".
People don't know what they want. If no-one ever asks for LCD technology, they won't get it. No business is going to waste their money creating something that no-one wants. It's likely they would evaluate it, decide it's too expensive and the quality is terrible, so they never make it. The only reason it became something "people want" is that it was available. And it was available because of the space race.
It's possible that the money might have been spent on an unknown "X" that is far better than LCD technology. But it's also possible it could have been squandered and nothing beneficial coming out of it at all.
Hindsight is 20/20 (according to proverb), so looking back you can say "yes, it cost more than we got out of it", but how often do you look back and say "that period that we DIDN'T do something, look how much money we wasted"? Pretty much never since you just don't think of those times.
We as individuals and as a species should take the time to think of those points in history (thankfully few, but the "dark ages" are a striking case) and come to the conclusion that it's always better to act than to not act. If we don't do SOMETHING, there's a potential for waste. If we do something, it may be more than we bargained for, but at least there'll be SOME gain.
To go back to the candy bar scenario: I steal $100 from you and buy you a candy bar. You're unhappy with this situation (quite rightly I'd say!). But that's only because you WERE going to do something else with that money. Would you prefer to die having eaten that candy bar or be buried with your $100? And to anticipate an answer: No, I'm not giving you the option of leaving it to your children/friends/family/whatever - you either get a candy bar or nothing. I would hope any sane person chooses the former.
Despite the fact that I disagree with you, thankyou very much for the second most interesting thing I've had to think about all week (the most interesting being a potential move within my company to a far more interesting position... woohoo!)
My PC has replaced my TV (MythTV, fairly nice box and a projector).... and my fridge does order my groceries when I'm running low (LG Internet Refrigerator)...
Don't live in the US, so can't comment on the Spanish thing. And my phone is nowhere near the power of my laptop. But 2 out of 4 is a good start!
Roll on IPv6!
Okay getting sick of the guessing game... if they complain, then they complain... Yes, it's Konica Minolta.
Konica Minolta Business Technologies that is, not Konica Minolta Printing Solutions (formerly QMS)
KMBT makes things like the 8020, 8031, CF2002, CF3102, C350, C450, C500 etc, whereas KMPS makes things like the Magicolor series. We share a bit of tech and will share a lot more in the future, but for older machines, they're not really related.
Couldn't you lose the "feature" where the printer damages itself?
The printer doesn't actually damage itself, just renders itself unusable until it is reset. It's purely software, not hardware. (I can't speak for other manufacturers, but that's the way ours work anyway)
And what about false positives, people trying to use that "feature" to break a copy shop's printer, etc?
Fortunately, we haven't really come across that yet, but if it ever does start happening, it is going to cause a bit of chaos - you're not wrong there...
Anyone know the secret codes to unbreak the printers.
Yes, but telling you would get me sacked...
Post them here.
Sorry!
Oh, and I DEFINITELY don't work for HP or Lexmark! (although HP are rebadging some of our equipment these days...)
1. That explains why the yellow toner gets used so fast.
Actually, I'd be utterly shocked if you ever even noticed the amount of yellow toner it's using. If you only ever printed black and white documents with an average 5% coverage or so, you'd go through thousands of black toner cartridges before you used up even one yellow one.
The primary cause of going through lots of yellow toner is that yellow gets used in a LOT of colours that people commonly print (think CMYK mixes, not RGB)
2. It's really nice that your products continue to work after (not) printing controlled documents. Our printer conked out when some yahoo decided to make a copy of a money order for his records by scanning it & printing it out.
Conked out as in stopped working? Yikes! Our machines will print the black square, call an error and then continue to work fine unless you do another 5 attempts at the EXACT same document... (at which point it will lock up and require someone that knows how to get in to service mode (ie, a technician) to fix it)
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever
So...what's the point of having the microdots?
Just in case we are ever asked? Don't ask me, I work for the company in a technical role, but don't design these things (yet - I'm gunning for an R&D job now, which means moving to Japan, getting paid lots of money and eating good Japanese food!)
No, I don't work for Ricoh, Xerox, Canon, Toshiba, Panasonic or Oce...
Any more guesses?
I work for a large printer/copier manufacturer in the technical services area (IT related) and can confirm we've been doing this for MANY years in our colour products.
We refer to the technology as "micro dots". Each dot can uniquely identify the device by it's serial number (which is not only printed on a label but also hardcoded in to the machine).
I also happen to live in Australia, where it'd be a cold day in hell before we told anyone who didn't have a court order the serial number of a printer that produced a page or who we sold it to.
The dots are MUCH smaller than 1mm as suggested here, however I can confirm that yellow toner is used. If you have a good magnifying glass (at least 8 times) and a sharp eye you can spot them, but it's really not easy.
Additionally, our machines all have anti-counterfeit technology anyway. If you try to print or copy a banknote from any major world currency, all you'll get is a black square and possibly an error code being displayed on the panel.
In the entire time I've worked for this company, we've never once had to do a micro dot check for the police/government/whatever - I'd know because there's only about 3 or 4 of us in the company that have the knowhow to do it and they all work in my department. (no, the govt doesn't know how to do it themselves and even if they did, they'd still need to ask us where that serial number is now).
I've deliberately avoided mentioning my employers name in this post. I'm pretty sure I haven't broken any confidentiality agreements with this post (all I'm doing is confirming, not supplying new info) but you can't be too careful. Suffice to say, I don't think it matters which major manufacturer, I'd bet my bottom dollar we all do it.
The whole concept of not being able to multitask is something I could never understand. I routinely use two keyboards at once, and am in fact doing so right now.
With one keyboard, I'm typing this (right hand) and with the other am replying to an email (left hand).
I do have to keep switching (round robin) my focus on the two screens, but am concentrating on the text of both at the same time and doing so without a great deal of effort. I've always found however that people (even other geeks) tend to stare at me in disbelief when I do things like this, so maybe I am just a bit different somehow.
True multitasking really isn't impossible for people as some other posters have suggested, but I do agree that combining one "thinking" task (eg programming) with one "non-thinking" task (eg listening to music) is not true multitasking. I'd say however that what I do with two keyboards most certainly is.
All that in mind, I do find my writing style tends to get a bit muddled and incoherent if I try to hold a conversation at the same time as typing two different things at once - three trains of thought seems to be my absolute limit (and can wear me out very quickly too).