I wish printing was harder. I have piles of slides filling my desk. Slides on paper, printed by someone else, pages that have been barely read once, their information is already outdated and the contents could have been collectively read from a white screen in the meetings.
Using Linux since 1995 forced me into paperless thinking, because printing used to be hard. And these days, with all those smartphone, tablet, laptop, ereader etc. screen it should be virtually unnecessary in office environments. But still people just keep on printing everything.
I hope there is some terrible fault in CUPS that makes people to think, that trying to print this is not worth the trouble</semisarcasm>
Funny that I have the exactly opposite feeling. I want to print more, but I don't, because CUPS is a kludge, and I don't feel like using Windows at work for the sole purpose of somewhat sane printer handling.
Now to answer why and what I would want to print more? Surprisingly, I mostly want to print code. The reason is that computers suck for reading and thinking, and in my specific case, I can't focus on thinking hard in front of a computer screen (it's too easy to turn on HN).
When I'm stuck with a hard refactor to do, I like to print out all relevant files, take coloured pens and highlighters and keep drawing and annotating code until everything is clear in my hand. Paper is simply superior in annotating capabilities and high-level view (i.e. spread 20 pages in front of you to see everything). I haven't found any tool yet that would make doing this on computer even comparable.
I once asked a very known HN user, who prints out all relevant code every afternoon as a method of planning work for the next day, whether he worries about the amount of paper he uses. The answer I got: "Paper is cheap. Focus is golden."
As for ecology side of printing, I used to worry much more about it before. But at some point I realized that I didn't do any math, and from what I can tell, "paperless world" seems to be much more damaging to environment than cutting down trees for paper, and as long as we recycle, paper ain't that bad. But still, I didn't do the math.
We use printer accounting to get around this. Everything is billed to the relevant departments at an extortionate rate per sheet. The department has to pay the print bill out of their budget.
Printing has nearly stopped to the point that some departments have resigned their printers entirely.
It's interesting that this is a problem. I would guess that it's mostly to do with the problem of interaction and eye strain associated with on-screen information.
I can interact with most things on a monitor, but math is one of the things that I still need paper or a whiteboard for.
I have friends that can't stare at a screen for 16 hours a day like I can, and I assume that's the other problem.
Either way, I hate it when somebody comes by and has my email to them printed out and ready to "discuss" and the discussion is just yes or no.
To that end, I started insisting people only print things one-sided if they are going to give me something printed. It seems counterintuitive, everybody says "print double-sided to save paper". But the way I see it, that's wasting the WHOLE page, whereas single-sided wastes only half of the page, and I can write notes on the other side.
But yeah, it used to be so bad that I had to write a LOT of notes to keep up with it. Now, I just don't bother with offices at all. Nobody can print anything at me.
I know exactly what you're talking about. I have to deal with a lot of the "I have to print email to read it!" mentality at work. We started to track the printing and discovered that a building of approximately 1300 users was printing 100000 pages a month. The worst part is that every user has at least two devices (computer and phone, sometimes tablet) and access to the full Google Apps.
>> CUPS 2.0 has greater security around its scheduler, various OS X specific improvements, systemd support, support for TLS certificate validation and policy enforcement, updates to all Linux man pages, dropped OpenSSL in favor of GNU TLS, dropped support for AIX / HP-UX / OSF/1 architectures, and various other changes.
In just one linux print server, we've got exactly 1110 printers installed (HP, Brother, Ricoh, Argox, Epson, Samsung and LexMark), all working without hassles.
"Dropped "dark wake" support on OS X, which was preventing portables from going to sleep when there was a stuck job. We now use a variation of the CUPS 1.4 sleep support to do a cleaner sleep (<rdar://problem/14323704>)"
It does seem to be somewhat OSX focussed - although dropping OpenSSL in favour of GNUTLS is going to be interesting, as currently I don't believe there's any sanctioned OSX build of GNUTLS.
I wonder why there doesn't seem to be any implementation for AirPrint/ePrint in Linux. Seems like a good lightweight alternative to CUPS for wireless systems/devices.
I wish that the CUPS filter language would be made out of something like lua or javascript rather than binary (C) right now.
But I have less than zero hope of that ever happening - both OSX and Linux use CUPS as their printing framework. There is no way, Apple (which basically owns CUPS) will allow Linux to get easy leverage on the superb printer driver ecosystem of the Mac.
Before anybody else comments - printers do work on Linux. But not all features work.
It's been a while, but I thought that CUPS filters were just executables with an input stream and an output stream, so you could write them in whatever you wanted?
printer are bloatware.
Old men recipe: new corporate printer tends to have a lpd daemon running accepting postscript (60%).
Use rlpr and send your file directly bypassing the spooler.
nmap on ldp port my help.
I have no comment about CUPS, but I will say that I find this site to be pleasant on the eyes, even if it is just bootstrap. I feel like half the reason people don't want to use Debian or GNU stuff or other free software is because the sites themselves are fugly remnants of the mid-nineties and leave much to be desired from a usability standpoint.
How hard would it be to simply wrap their boring html and drop it into a bog standard bootstrap? Like, a day?
Funnily enough that page design is actually bugged on my WinXP/FF31.0. - the floating menubar part covers the top line of content. Looks like a screen-size problem (I'm on a 1024px laptop) that fixes with either smaller font-size or added padding to .breadcrumb.
My point I guess is that web design is often harder than it looks. OSS projects with limited resources are better using Github or Sourceforge or similar, IMO, rather than trying to keep on top of web page design decisions to cater for ever changing UAs.
[+] [-] jzzskijj|11 years ago|reply
Using Linux since 1995 forced me into paperless thinking, because printing used to be hard. And these days, with all those smartphone, tablet, laptop, ereader etc. screen it should be virtually unnecessary in office environments. But still people just keep on printing everything.
I hope there is some terrible fault in CUPS that makes people to think, that trying to print this is not worth the trouble</semisarcasm>
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|11 years ago|reply
Now to answer why and what I would want to print more? Surprisingly, I mostly want to print code. The reason is that computers suck for reading and thinking, and in my specific case, I can't focus on thinking hard in front of a computer screen (it's too easy to turn on HN).
When I'm stuck with a hard refactor to do, I like to print out all relevant files, take coloured pens and highlighters and keep drawing and annotating code until everything is clear in my hand. Paper is simply superior in annotating capabilities and high-level view (i.e. spread 20 pages in front of you to see everything). I haven't found any tool yet that would make doing this on computer even comparable.
I once asked a very known HN user, who prints out all relevant code every afternoon as a method of planning work for the next day, whether he worries about the amount of paper he uses. The answer I got: "Paper is cheap. Focus is golden."
As for ecology side of printing, I used to worry much more about it before. But at some point I realized that I didn't do any math, and from what I can tell, "paperless world" seems to be much more damaging to environment than cutting down trees for paper, and as long as we recycle, paper ain't that bad. But still, I didn't do the math.
[+] [-] sudowhodoido|11 years ago|reply
Printing has nearly stopped to the point that some departments have resigned their printers entirely.
[+] [-] ClashTheBunny|11 years ago|reply
I can interact with most things on a monitor, but math is one of the things that I still need paper or a whiteboard for.
I have friends that can't stare at a screen for 16 hours a day like I can, and I assume that's the other problem.
Either way, I hate it when somebody comes by and has my email to them printed out and ready to "discuss" and the discussion is just yes or no.
[+] [-] moron4hire|11 years ago|reply
But yeah, it used to be so bad that I had to write a LOT of notes to keep up with it. Now, I just don't bother with offices at all. Nobody can print anything at me.
[+] [-] nnnnni|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thejosh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maninalift|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomkwok|11 years ago|reply
>> CUPS 2.0 has greater security around its scheduler, various OS X specific improvements, systemd support, support for TLS certificate validation and policy enforcement, updates to all Linux man pages, dropped OpenSSL in favor of GNU TLS, dropped support for AIX / HP-UX / OSF/1 architectures, and various other changes.
[+] [-] turrini|11 years ago|reply
In just one linux print server, we've got exactly 1110 printers installed (HP, Brother, Ricoh, Argox, Epson, Samsung and LexMark), all working without hassles.
We're a warehouse/retailing company.
[+] [-] rcarmo|11 years ago|reply
At last.
[+] [-] 0x0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jfindley|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ClashTheBunny|11 years ago|reply
cupsctl WebInterface=yes
and go to
http://localhost:631
[+] [-] atmosx|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aloha|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jychang|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbverschoor|11 years ago|reply
CUPS 2.0.0 CUPS is the standards-based, open source printing system developed by Apple Inc. for OS X® and other UNIX®-like operating systems.
[+] [-] regularfry|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristianp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naner|11 years ago|reply
Also, I am curious: is CUPS still used in OSX?
[+] [-] TkTech|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandGorgon|11 years ago|reply
But I have less than zero hope of that ever happening - both OSX and Linux use CUPS as their printing framework. There is no way, Apple (which basically owns CUPS) will allow Linux to get easy leverage on the superb printer driver ecosystem of the Mac.
Before anybody else comments - printers do work on Linux. But not all features work.
[+] [-] rkangel|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julie1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cbsmith|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangayle|11 years ago|reply
How hard would it be to simply wrap their boring html and drop it into a bog standard bootstrap? Like, a day?
[+] [-] S4M|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbhjpbhj|11 years ago|reply
My point I guess is that web design is often harder than it looks. OSS projects with limited resources are better using Github or Sourceforge or similar, IMO, rather than trying to keep on top of web page design decisions to cater for ever changing UAs.