CUPS 2.0
cups.org
cups.org
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>
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.
Printing has nearly stopped to the point that some departments have resigned their printers entirely.
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.
I can't agree more. I tried several ways to get a better overview of projects I work on, but ultimately it's all very klutzy and awkward. When you have 30 (or more) files with cross references and you need to get a global understanding of the whole architecture, working with code can be very hard. Even with visual tools like UML diagram or similar IDE features, even when ctrl+clicking offered by various editors to jump to definitions and jump around code, even with ctags and multiple buffers open in vim. I tried working with 4 screens but my eyes have to move all over the place to keep following, I can't easily re-organize my files next to each other to keep relevant portions of code close together (regardless of logical modularity in my implementation).
Paper is really the best we have at the moment, maybe a more modern environment in the future will solve this (I recall LightTable promising something similar where you could move around small blocks of functions, during their Kickstarter, however that was never delivered unfortunately), but for the moment we are stuck with paper.
If you look at a reverse engineering tool like IDA Pro, despite working with lower level code, you get powerful understanding tools, excellent cross referencing and diagram generation tools, graph views of code so you can see every decision made without having to read them all out and now even stuff like "proximity" view, which gives a nice way to understand calling structures.
In the sense of good use of resources, printing 30 pages of mostly irrelevant slides for a meeting is not.
I do think, that not printing the page you really don't need makes some difference. Even if it is recycled, it is better not to cut down those trees in the first place.
If they are irrelevant, yes.
But then again, printouts have their place in presentations as well. I recall Edward Tufte advocating for using handouts - i.e. if your talk features things like graphs, diagrams and data, it's a good idea to collect them into a document that you would then print and distribute throughout the audience. People can then look at the graphs in high resolution and also take notes.
Inspired by this, the last time I did a lecture on fixed timestamps in videogames I took all graphs, diagrams and source code fragments, put them on a single A4 page and printed a copy for each of 60+ people present. From what I could tell afterwards, this was really useful - people could consult examples in their own pace and there were zero complaints about source being unreadable for people in back seats. So the next time I'll be doing a lecture, I'll likely design and print handouts too.
Of course all of this applies to educational presentations, not to marketing ones. There's no point to waste paper on the latter, they're all about invoking emotions anyway.
Not that you were looking for my approval, but this is 100% good use of paper in my books. Extra points for putting them nicely together in compact form, that all the relevant information can be seen with a single glimpse :)
Yup. Usability + the fact that I really do hate waste.
Yeah. This is a topic for a completely separate thread, but I have to say this: I FUCKING HATE printers. From jamming hardware, through broken driver issues to all the shenanigans printer companies do (especially with inkjets).
I imagine that a lot of people also find "quick, weak jokes" to make for boring reading.
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.
>> 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.
We're a warehouse/retailing company.
At last.
Look at the footer on cups.org:
CUPS, the CUPS logo, and OS X are trademarks of Apple Inc.
cupsctl WebInterface=yes
and go to
I never want to see another OKI ML520 again.
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.
Also, I am curious: is CUPS still used in OSX?
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.
I wish there was some way to make portable/obfuscated filter drivers, so that vendors could ship them and be usable on all CUPS platforms.
How hard would it be to simply wrap their boring html and drop it into a bog standard bootstrap? Like, a day?
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.