nice printer

On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:00:50 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Last time I 'listed' a program was on a Brother portable thermal printer in the early eighties. Why would anyone want to print source code, while you can have it in a text file and editor? And did not dot-matrix belong to the dinosaurs? This is the age of the Kindle (or whatever e-paper thing), but then I want my sources so I can assemble them and compile them: Notebook. If your customer wants a printed listing tell him to well you know. Needs eductation.

2010 is the year, trees are holy!

Well, that would be a disaster. Thermal paper doesn't usually last very long.

But it is surprising you bring up thermal paper as an "early

80's" technology.

It's still in wide use -- Costco in the US, for example, uses the damned stuff for their receipts -- after having used dot matrix in their earlier years. (Something I complain to them about, almost every year, hoping they will go back.) Dot matrix in that case worked well and produced receipts that lasted quite some time.

Perhaps because one might take it somewhere there isn't a computer (or where a computer wouldn't be appropriate -- if you leave a paper listing in the car, no one will care to break into the car to take it; they might, for a laptop.)

Multi-part forms copy both computer output as well as hand written notes and signatures, exactly as performed. Though that's not what John was talking about.

But they have their place. As in the store receipts mentioned above.

And the trees are being saved by sucking energy while reading?

Electricity is one of our most expensively made and precious forms of energy.

Besides, paper has long term storage benefits and doesn't require maintaining old equipment. For example, had you had this conversation back in the DECtape days, you might have argued about storing the listings on DECtape. To read those tapes today (and I have some source code that is currently inaccessable to me that is sitting on DECtape), I'd have had to maintain that equipment over time. On paper, it's just a matter of going to the shelf or box and it requires hands and eyes, which humans hopefully will retain as a feature for some time yet to come.

How all this compares, I don't know, as it takes a well crafted audit to know which end is up. It is not a slam-dunk to suggest that a high-tech laptop and who-knows-how-much supplied energy is, in balance, any better than printed paper when considering the reading of listings.

I use paper, sometimes; but not always.

Jon

How so you tolerate the noise ??

don

It's not bad at all, and I keep my printers (one at work, one at home) in closets.

John

file and editor?

For the same reason I print schematics: so I can check, correct, tweak, comment, debug, beautify, and review the design before I ever execute it. I find this much easier to do on paper, specifically in bed with a nice bound listing, water, and an adequate supply of dark chocolate.

I spend about 95% of my time designing and well under 5% live debugging. How about you?

John

On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 11:51:43 -0800) it happened Jon Kirwan wrote in :

Wel I dunno when i twas invented, my Brotehr printer was stolen, I still have a roll of original thermal paper and soem cassettes with ink tape for it... It heated the ink on the tape, and pressed that against the paper I remember now. So both the lint and the paper are thermal i tseesm. I just dug up that paper, it says thermal paper on it so..

Yes, I did receipts with it too:-) Auto erasue after some sunshine.

If you leave *anything* in your car in Amsterdam it will be stolen. Hundred percent predictable. Once I worked in a service department, and we had a video recorder that the guy had problems repairing. Somebody said: 'Put it in the window, maybe it will be stolen.' And sure enough, next day it was gone, new one from insurence I think. His technical problem was solved. Poor buglar, no picture for him :-)

Well one needs to learn how to discard old stuff.

Sure, and we make CO2 doing it, trees like that :-)

No, oil comes out of the ground for free, there is just a lot of price fixing going on.

It burns, it cannot stand water, is susceptable to fungus, takes too much space, is heavy, kills trees, expensive relative to FLASH or other modern media.

Now you are dreaming. I'd recommend FLASH :-)

Ahhhh old school. I'm with you on that one !

On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 12:16:57 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

file and editor?

I had tree bars of white chocolate yesterday.

I dunno, I never debug anything, just add features. How can you debug on paper? I have forgotten how to use a debugger. Most errors I make are typos, and the assembler of compiler screams at me then. Then there are real errors, so you test software, see what not works, fix it. Have you seen my latest PIC 18 programmer? Have a look at the code (C):

Maybe you will learn C:-)

the

file and editor?

Yes, that's the way most programmers work:

1. Type a lot of stuff on a screen, fast. Don't comment, because that will slow you down, and comments are always wrong anyhow.
2. Assemble or compile. If any errors are reported, goto (1.) Warnings are OK to ignore.
3. Run it for a while and see if it seems to work. If it crashes or you notice anything wrong, run it again a few times. If the problem is persistant, go to (1.)
4. Ship it and wait for the customers to find the bugs. When they do, ignore most of them ("that will be fixed in the next release") or, if they refuse to pay for your crap until it actually works, goto (1)

If you don't have customers, it's OK to work this way, as I do sometimes for things I'll just use myself, and can fix in minutes. But if you're shipping to somebody who counts on your stuff to run megabuck instruments, or manage pipelines, or test jet engines, or that can result in million-unit recalls, it doesn't work very well.

A necessary phase of debugging code is to read it.

John

now.

I just hate thermal paper for most uses. It is really, really bad stuff.

You bastard! :P Doing that to others, with intention for erasure, should be a criminal offense. Or, at least, worth a good horse-whipping.

Well, there you go. You can leave the paper in the car. But if you used a laptop, you are forced to haul it with you even if you don't want to use it.

hehe. Out here, I leave everything unlocked and open. I don't leave a key in the car, but there is no need to lock it. Yet.

Oh, well.

Sadly, our tax laws require certain periods of retention for certain things and purposes. And there are other things that require even longer retention (medical records for the disabled, being one such.) Discarding isn't a panacea for every situation, you know.

Oh, I see.

Yes, it essentially does come for free.

And I could provide a litany of difficulties for the "laptop solution" and problems it doesn't well solve, either. My point was merely that your point wasn't a "slam-dunk."

Ah, so I should have used flash when it didn't even exist? Now that would indeed be a noteworthy trick. This was _before_ even a 1kx1 DRAM chip existed, you know?

Jon

JL > Epson LQ-2090. This is a wide-carriage, tractor-feed, 500 cps dot JL > matrix. Great for big program listings. Under $500.

$ 578.00 list price for the printer from Epson. Isn't the problem going to be buying the silky fabric ribbons which have a shelf life and dry out if stored longer?

8 million characters at 48 dots/character (LQ-2090) $ 26.99 list price

Nowhere in their spec sheet for the ribbons does it mention ribbon shelf life.

Wouldn't wide format ink jets work for your purposes? Or are you just stuck on the wide tractor feed paper, continuous, with the perforations tieing each page to the next?

How much is a box of wide fan fold tractor feed paper now'days? Green bar $67.29

Epson WorkForce 1100 Wide-format Printer

Regular price: $199.99 rebate puts it down to 129 right now

Wide-format color printer / Up to 30ppm black/17 color / Up to

13"x19" / Laser quality text / Less power than a laser printer

Spec sheet:

Ink page for Workmate 1100:

Uses 2 black cartridges at one time, $38

On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:30:05 -0800) it happened Jon Kirwan wrote in :

You are dreaming, living in the past. Today I recommend FLASH, as it has the simplest interface and needs no complicated things like lasers or what not, to read it. My data is stored on FLASH (electrical), on disk (magnetic), and on DVD (optical), in 3 different locations. At LEAST. And 2 continents.

So how is your paper ?

On a sunny day (Sat, 20 Feb 2010 13:24:37 -0800) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

the

file and editor?

You arrogance about programming is well know,. You did not download or look at the code I pointed to. Asshole. You could actually learn from my code, but you rather wallow in your own incompetence.

No, you are forgetting the context.

complicated things like lasers

But I was talking about a situation I lived through and can, today, look back upon for lessons.

Paper's ability to store is measured in centuries. One of the problems facing libraries right now is that digitizing the books doesn't solve this issue. Even the better quality DVDs, written with best practices stored in environments designed for storing them, don't last nearly as long.

Plus, it doesn't force us to use tools to make use of them.

Don't imagine you are pushing me into a corner. I'm not saying that other methods aren't good, too. I'm just taking the very reasoned position, against your crazy-minded one of extremism, that there remains purposes for paper despite technology. That fact is manifest and my position sound. Yours is untenable.

Great. And back in the day when I used DECtape, there was no flash available, the magtapes were written at 800 and 1600 bpi, and cds were nothing more than someone's dream or scifi story let alone writable ones or dvds. However, my listings from them survive very nicely in a box or in a collection of bound books. Once in a while, I find use for them, too.

The paper listings are being a lot more useful than the code stored on DECtape.

Jon

the

file and editor?

then.

I'm paranoid and careful about programming, not arrogant.

incompetence.

Incompetence? I seldom spend more than a week or two on an embedded instrument's code, and I usually ship bug-free code first try. What should I learn from you? To not check my work before I ship it?

John

They are shipped sealed in cellophane, and oil-based inks don't dry very fast, and I use a fairly constant stream of them. Figure 3K lines or so for an embedded program listing, 100K non-space characters, so I'll get 80 listings per ribbon. Not bad at all. I go through about one box of 11x14 fanfold paper per embedded software project.

We have an HP wide-carriage/fanfold inkjet, but it's slower (by maybe

4:1) and the draft-mode printing is a bit faint for my taste. I'd love a fanfold laser printer, or even an old 1200 LPM drum/chain printer, but neither is very practical.

I don't know what we pay. I like plain white. The cost is trivial compared to an engineer's time.

John

I like the continuous paper as well.

You are either a Druid, or an idiot. Trees are temporary.

--
Greed is the root of all eBay.

Does it have a chip that counts pages and at preset unadvertised value lock out printer usage until $$$ "service" at "authorized" site resets it (BTW, Epson will NOT tell you or admit this). High volume use of Epson printers that have that chip will suddenly stop - even if that is only a few months of use..it is page count!