4 ms·

It depends, of course, on the users. Some of them are angels, some of them are... not very smart regarding technology. ;-) Also, some are just plain mean, at le

by krylon 11y ago

It depends, of course, on the users. Some of them are angels, some of them are... not very smart regarding technology. ;-) Also, some are just plain mean, at least if they are having a bad day. At any rate, I much prefer dealing with users to dealing with printers. Printers are evil. I remember the time one of our engineers wanted to print a PDF file, and the result looked superficially the way it was supposed to, except every single letter was incremented by one (so "ABC" became "BCD")... Or the time two printers were configured with the same IP address - due to ARP caching lifetime, every couple of seconds, clients would switch which printer they would send pages to, so print jobs ended up literally being all over the place. ;-)

stephengillie 11y ago
Printers are the first robots that were mass-produced. It's the first robotics experience most companies get. And we've been buying their learning experiences, because that's been the state of the art of robotic printing.
- krylon 11y ago
  Interestingly, the hardware side has not given me that much trouble. There were cases of busted drums in laser printers, but compared to the software issues I have seen, the "robot" part usually works remarkably well. There's a saying about dogs, that one should not be scared of the dogs, but - if at all - of the owners. I guess that kind of applies to printers, too. ;-)
  - scott_karana 11y ago
    We have a laser printer at work, with an upwards-facing laser (eg, under the drum). Because of gravity, toner eventually falls onto the laser lens, and causes low-quality prints. Thus, it has a manually runnable "self-clean" procedure, in which an internal squeegee runs over the lens, cleaning it. For a bit. If they had made the laser downwards-shooting, it would have avoided this problem altogether. The printer company's service technician, who showed us the self-clean, tells me that this would make the packaging larger, however. The printer is a gargantuan office printer. (Kyocera TaskALFA 5550ci) I don't think packaging size for merely the laser should have been a concern... tl;dr printer hardware can definitely suck
    - krylon 11y ago
      That is good to know, most of our printers are Kyocera TaskALFA printers, too. They are rather large, indeed. But like I said, hardware-wise, they haven't given me much trouble (except for a power supply with very slight fault, causing it to make kind of chirping noise every once in a while - it drove our accountants crazy - our field service guy tried replacing the hard drive, the heater, and some other thing (I forget which one), before finding the faulty part). Also, trying to print on paper that is just ever so slightly wet can be... interesting, if one happens to need to print out some one hundred pages. sigh A couple of years back, when I was still working as a programmer, I was once given the task to write code controlling a specialized printer, the kind used in factories for printing bar codes on things. The printer used a continuous stream of ink that normally went into a tube feeding it back to the ink tank. The ink contained tiny iron particles and went through a magnet that could direct it to the position it should land. When powering off the printer, the software controlling it had to make sure to first send the command to move the ink-catching tube right up to the nozzle before shutting down the pump, or else the printer would ... kind of soil itself. ;-) Of course, the first time I tried to actually print something with that printer, I forgot to shut down the printer properly, and it soiled itself in a big way. Specifically, the stream of ink went through a teeny-tiny hole in a small diamond platelet; when I shut down the printer impromperly, ink stuck to that platelet and dried up, so that tiny little hole was no longer perfectly circular. As a result, whenever I tried to print something, the machine would soil itself some more. After talking to the manufacturer's customer support repeatedly (in their defence, they were friendly, helpful and competent), a support technician told me to remove the platelet from the printer and put it in a bath of MEK (industrial-strength solvent) over the weekend to dissolve the dried remnants of ink (after I had cleaned that platelet manually several times). The solvent was fairly volatile and highly flammable, so I put it in a small jar, dropped the platelet in the jar and screwed the top on as tightly as I could. When I came back on Monday, the platelet was indeed clean and gave me no trouble whatsoever after that. The plastic coating covering the inside of the jar's top, however, had "molten" almost completely.
  - mentat 11y ago
    Robots are clearly a combination of hardware and software. Curious why you make this distinction.
    - stephengillie 11y ago
      Few things aren't a combination of hardware and software. But few other devices actually push other objects around and modify them.
- andrewflnr 11y ago
  This is an insightful perspective, and surprisingly actually makes me feel better about printers. Thanks.
teddyh 11y ago
I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is opaque. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and you can’t look inside them and find out why. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. Free software, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system/printer has found some new way to confound you. I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.

by krylon 11y ago

stephengillie 11y ago

Printers are the first robots that were mass-produced. It's the first robotics experience most companies get. And we've been buying their learning experiences, because that's been the state of the art of robotic printing.

krylon 11y ago
Interestingly, the hardware side has not given me that much trouble. There were cases of busted drums in laser printers, but compared to the software issues I have seen, the "robot" part usually works remarkably well. There's a saying about dogs, that one should not be scared of the dogs, but - if at all - of the owners. I guess that kind of applies to printers, too. ;-)
- scott_karana 11y ago
  We have a laser printer at work, with an upwards-facing laser (eg, under the drum). Because of gravity, toner eventually falls onto the laser lens, and causes low-quality prints. Thus, it has a manually runnable "self-clean" procedure, in which an internal squeegee runs over the lens, cleaning it. For a bit. If they had made the laser downwards-shooting, it would have avoided this problem altogether. The printer company's service technician, who showed us the self-clean, tells me that this would make the packaging larger, however. The printer is a gargantuan office printer. (Kyocera TaskALFA 5550ci) I don't think packaging size for merely the laser should have been a concern... tl;dr printer hardware can definitely suck
  - krylon 11y ago
    That is good to know, most of our printers are Kyocera TaskALFA printers, too. They are rather large, indeed. But like I said, hardware-wise, they haven't given me much trouble (except for a power supply with very slight fault, causing it to make kind of chirping noise every once in a while - it drove our accountants crazy - our field service guy tried replacing the hard drive, the heater, and some other thing (I forget which one), before finding the faulty part). Also, trying to print on paper that is just ever so slightly wet can be... interesting, if one happens to need to print out some one hundred pages. sigh A couple of years back, when I was still working as a programmer, I was once given the task to write code controlling a specialized printer, the kind used in factories for printing bar codes on things. The printer used a continuous stream of ink that normally went into a tube feeding it back to the ink tank. The ink contained tiny iron particles and went through a magnet that could direct it to the position it should land. When powering off the printer, the software controlling it had to make sure to first send the command to move the ink-catching tube right up to the nozzle before shutting down the pump, or else the printer would ... kind of soil itself. ;-) Of course, the first time I tried to actually print something with that printer, I forgot to shut down the printer properly, and it soiled itself in a big way. Specifically, the stream of ink went through a teeny-tiny hole in a small diamond platelet; when I shut down the printer impromperly, ink stuck to that platelet and dried up, so that tiny little hole was no longer perfectly circular. As a result, whenever I tried to print something, the machine would soil itself some more. After talking to the manufacturer's customer support repeatedly (in their defence, they were friendly, helpful and competent), a support technician told me to remove the platelet from the printer and put it in a bath of MEK (industrial-strength solvent) over the weekend to dissolve the dried remnants of ink (after I had cleaned that platelet manually several times). The solvent was fairly volatile and highly flammable, so I put it in a small jar, dropped the platelet in the jar and screwed the top on as tightly as I could. When I came back on Monday, the platelet was indeed clean and gave me no trouble whatsoever after that. The plastic coating covering the inside of the jar's top, however, had "molten" almost completely.
- mentat 11y ago
  Robots are clearly a combination of hardware and software. Curious why you make this distinction.
  - stephengillie 11y ago
    Few things aren't a combination of hardware and software. But few other devices actually push other objects around and modify them.
andrewflnr 11y ago
This is an insightful perspective, and surprisingly actually makes me feel better about printers. Thanks.

teddyh 11y ago

I agree about your description about printers, but I wouldn’t call them “evil”. I’m trying to think of the best word to describe them… haunted? bizarre? chaotic? random? mysterious? No wait, I know; the perfect word is opaque. They do weird stuff and you don’t know why, and you can’t look inside them and find out why. Hmm, now that I’ve come to this conclusion, the answer seems to be the same obvious one that we already have for the similar problem of opaque software and operating systems. Free software, so you can actually look inside and debug the things when your system/printer has found some new way to confound you. I seem to recall that the original story about how Richard Stallman was inspired to create the concept of free software was that he was stymied by proprietary software in a printer, so this would simply bring the concept back to its roots, so to speak.