Comment by sj4nz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sj4nz | Hacker News Reader

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Paper is fantastic for auditing and archival. You can't sanitize your dirty deeds if you can't prevent your sins from appearing on the souls of dead trees locked in their fire-proof chambers. Until we start using content-hashing for everything you cannot trust the "permanence" of bits because you cannot detect their tampering. Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.

Most of the lack of innovation in printers (and scanners) comes from the problem that, once you've bought their hardware, there is no incentive to make the software that ships-by-default with it great. The innovation isn't the hardware, the innovation is waiting, stuck between the hardware and the operating system (e.g. why does my Brother mysteriously screw up my right margins on Windows?) and stuck between the application and the user. The operating-system printing dialogs are way too complicated for mere users and the printer-manufacturer's printing-dialogs are mostly rebranded operating-system printing dialogs. Users just want their bits to burn onto their paper, appropriately and reliably.

You know, it might not be such a bad idea to make a printer-bot ala a RepRap that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter. The ink might be "cheaper" that way and it would be kind of fun to watch 8 of them on your wall draw your documents concurrently.

> make a printer-bot ... that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter.

http://shop.evilmadscientist.com/productsmenu/846

Mine is on order

That's amazing!

> You know, it might not be such a bad idea to make a printer-bot ala a RepRap that allowed you to put any writing instrument you wanted into the cross-hairs and slowly draw out your documents like a plotter. The ink might be "cheaper" that way and it would be kind of fun to watch 8 of them on your wall draw your documents concurrently.

This is a neat idea -- for bonus points you could have it understand MetaFont, which is designed around an idealized pen.

I kind of did that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27pN25DA5TU

>Faxing is 90% dead as far as I can tell. I've got a fax machine, I think the last time I plugged it in was 2008.

Depends on the industry. I would say probably 80% of the clients I work with still rely on faxing as a regular part of doing business. Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.

>Is it the ideal way of sending documents? Probably not, but I've also never heard of anyone who had to call in technical support to clear off malware or reformat their fax machine. It just works.

It's amazing just how much society is being held back by the Windows operating system.

Are your clients on physical fax machines or an internet-based fax service? I use fax for business but I use Phaxio, and I think more than half the people I exchange faxes with are also using a fax service. This has the comical result of my producing a PDF file then paying someone to modulate it into noises that someone else will demodulate back into a PDF to deliver to the recipient. It's like e-mail if the intermediary servers lossily recompressed the attachments.

The clients I work with tend to still use physical fax machines to send/receive financing details to small banks and credit unions. The banks themselves probably use some sort of internet service, or at least I hope they do.

>Until we start using content-hashing for everything you cannot trust the...

You are pointing to technological problems that are best addressed by direct innovation on those problems vs via workarounds that rely on outmoded technology.

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