Showing posts with label printers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label printers. Show all posts

26 June 2009

Next, Linux Revolutionises...Printers

Here's a new printer from HP:


Last June 22, HP announced its new all-in-one printer, the Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web. Aside from cramming a fax machine, copier, scanner, and a printer into one device, run of the mill technology by today's standards, this new printer can actually print straight from the Web using on-device applications fashioned specifically for this purpose.

As the headline to that story makes clear, that's a Linux-based printer: indeed, it's pretty much unthinkable that these innovative approaches could use anything else. Linux's small footprint, speed, customisability and low cost make it ideal - uniquely so. Where would we be without it?

25 February 2009

Open Sourcing America's Operating System

Carl Malamud is one of the leaders in the fight for access to public data, specifically that in the US:

For over 20 years, I have been publishing government information on the Internet. In 2008, Public.Resource.Org published over 32.4 million pages of primary legal materials, as well as thousands of hours of video and thousands of photographs. In the 1990s, I fought to place the databases of the United States on the Internet. In the 1980s, I fought to make the standards that govern our global Internet open standards available to all. Should I be honored to be nominated and confirmed, I would continue to work to preserve and extend our public domain, and would place special attention to our relationship with our customers, especially the United States Congress.

Now, in a campaign dubbed "Yes We Scan", he would like to take on the role of "Public Printer of the United States". Here's one of his key goals: making America's operating system open source:

The Federal Register system of publications represents many of the official publications of the executive branch. A large stream of other documents come from the legislative branch and judiciary, forming a collection of primary legal materials that make up “America’s Operating System,” the rules that govern our society. A goal of the new administration should be to make America’s Operating System open source, guaranteeing that a complete and current archive of all primary legal materials in the United States are freely available on the Internet. This goal is partly about democracy, allowing citizens to see the rules that govern our society, but America’s Operating System is also about innovation, guaranteeing that any scholar or entrepreneur can download our legal materials and develop new and more effective ways of presenting, practicing, communicating, and learning about the law.

How can they not give him the job?

19 November 2008

End of a (Dead Tree) Era

Ziff Davis, the tech/gaming media company that recently exited Chapter 11 bankruptcy, is now taking the brave but inevitable step of closing down the print version of PCMag to focus its energy on its growing PCMag online network of sites, led by flagship PCmag.com. The magazine, which was started in 1982, has a storied history, but its print base eroded over the years as its core brand of journalism—news you can use while shopping for computers—moved online. It cut back from bi-weekly to monthly earlier this year. PCMag, which literally invented the idea of comparative hardware and software reviews, at one time during the 80s averaged about 400 pages an issue, with some issues breaking the 500- and even 600-page marks, according to this Wikipedia history.

Indeed, as I well remember when I was Editor and Publisher of the first UK edition of PC Magazine at the beginning of the 1990s - before Ziff Davis spent enormous sums themselves trying to launch it here. I still remember the annual printers issue - which ran to hundreds of pages, filled with the most boring computer journalism known to mankind - with a kind of dread....

07 December 2007

What Next: Copyright Tax on Potato Stamps?

Printer manufacturer Hewlett-Packard has announced that the German Supreme Court ruled in a hearing that the firm will not have to pay a flat fee to German copyright collective VG Wort to cover copyrights.

And I should damn well hope so: why should people have to pay a copyright tax to print out their own documents - which, surprisingly, is what most people do most of the time. If a printer, why not on pens? Pencils? Potato stamps? - They can all be used to commit heinous acts of copyright infringement that would doubtless bring civilisation as we know it to its knees....