rant of the day

[Sean]

I can easily see 448 meg of ram in a printer for high resolution CMYK
process printing and a large harddrive. Don't they have  a 133mhz risc
processor in them too?

On unix the HP is pretty easy to set up because you just need to set up
the tcp/ip and your off to the races. You do want to make sure you have
the correct colour profiles installed of course for colour correctness,
and you need to match that up with the monitor. 

I _thought_ the HP8550N had an external scsi port on it you could connect
external drives for fonts and images, but I could be wrong, I know the old
Apple ones do (oem'd from HP). I think they also have a port for
connecting directly to the printer via scsi. 







On 21 Aug 2000, Ben Pfaff wrote:

> So I go in to install the brand-new HP 8550N.  After about an
> hour of reading manuals, carefully lining up arrows, and shoving,
> I get the drum cartridge, black toner cartridge, cyan toner
> cartridge, magenta toner cartridge, and yellow toner cartridge
> installed.  And it only made nasty grinding noises once.  So far,
> so good.
> 
> Now it's time to install the RAM.  Yowza: this nutty department
> actually bought 64 MB x 6 DIMMs for the thing.  Along with the 64
> MB that it comes with, that's a total of 448 MB of RAM.  WTF is a
> *printer* going to use 448 MB of RAM for?  Anyway, that goes fine
> too.
> 
> Then I come to the stack of hard drives.  Yes, *stack*: there are
> three hard drives on the table ready to be installed.  What's
> more, the thing has a built-in 3 GB HDD.
> 
> This is particularly interesting given that each hard drive needs
> an EIO slot, and the printer has only two EIO slots, one of which
> is already occupied by a 10baseT/100baseTX module.  "Fsckwits," I
> mutter under my breath, and proceed to install it.
> 
> I plug the monstrous beast of a printer back into the wall and
> turn it on.  It cycles the now-familiar messages across its tiny
> display:
> 
> 	******************
> 	*********** *
> 	***********-*
> 
> (Apparently the authors of HP 8550 firmware like to cast I Ching
> runes on their printer.  Good for them, I guess.)
> 
> 	BOOTING...
> 
> ...grind grind grind...
> 
> 	TOO MANY STORAGE DEVICES - REMOVE EITHER FLASH OR DISK
> 
> WTF?  *That's* a new one.  I grovel through the manual (which is
> carefully designed to be as useless and obtuse as possible, as
> are all Hewlett-Packard manuals).  Ah, here we are: "The printer
> cannot accept more than one hard disk.  Remove either of the
> installed hard disks."[1]
> 
> Oh, and did I mention that over the summer a number of the
> SGI machines either have apparently fscked themselves up
> completely or developed repeatable "soft ECC errors" in the RAM
> that I installed last spring?
> 
> And, of course, there's the fact that the HP manuals don't even
> *mention* how to use the printer over a network in a UNIX
> environment, but go on at great length on how to use it
> from... <drum roll> *OS/2*, of all operating systems.  I'm sure
> that both of the OS/2 users on the planet are very happy with
> this smart, strategic choice.
> 
> I'm sure that everything would be even more fscked up were it not
> for the fact that half of the machines in the room are pushed
> back six feet from the wall and disconnected from power, network,
> and the rest of their umbilicals.  This was done at the beginning
> of the summer allegedly for sweeping the carpet under the
> windows, but they apparently never got put back.  
> 
> At least *that* part of the operation is Somebody Else's Problem:
> rearranging furniture is not part of my job.  Actually, there's a
> note on one of the tables from the professor in charge of the lab
> asking Engineering Services not to move back the table with the
> printer because it is going to be replaced, but I find it hard to
> believe that rearranging furniture is part of Engineering
> Service's job either.
> 
> Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
> 
> [1] Paraphrased.
> 
> -- 
> "To prepare for the writing of Software, 
>  the writer must first become one with it, 
>  sometimes two."
> --W. C. Carlson
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