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> There is nothing "evil" about removing smarts from a printer to reduce > cost. Provided of course... that the protocol is open. It's a real > pitty because the HP 72x and other PPA printers are really nice (and cheap) > color units. Oh well... I'm sure a few people out there might have varied opinions on this one. While it's definitely a Good Thing if the protocol is open for development under linux, I am hardly a fan. Companies in general are doing this to save 20 bucks on parts and instead leave your cpu picking up the pace with emulation, and I consider that to be a most evil practice. PCMCIA cards work in much the same manner, and while I wouldn't trade the 3com card on my P100 Mandrake laptop for anything, it's still disappointing trying to get a decent LAN download and having to watch my cpu sucking away on the card (although yes, it is nicely supported, and yes, they're made for convenience and there's no room for real components). While the case of PCMCIA cards can't be helped, things such as winprinters and winmodems (even if the latter did have code for linux) are a disappointment. Sure, with more recent CPUs you won't notice a real drain but I suppose it's more the principle of the thing (although you'll still get that second or two freeze when connecting up a winmodem even on a PIII-600 under win98), or you could be running an older box, as mentioned. In conclusion: bleh. Brian Conway dogbert at clue4all.net Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. -- Henry Spencer - Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with "subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).
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