On The Net - Computing News

with Chris Goh

Printers Part 3

...following on from Printers Part 2 and Printers Part 1

Long gone are the days where a good HP printer would last you more than five years with nothing more than a change of toner - although I've seen old laser jet 3s last more than seven years with no sign of quality degradation for printing general office documents.

While today's printers show marked increases in quality and speed, the reliability seems to have been sacrificed. I suspect it's because the price competition is intense, so they have to cut corners somewhere, as well as the demand for light and easily movable printers.

In general, laser printers will run at around a quarter of the cost per page than an inkjet. The text quality is almost always better on a laser, but image quality will vary, with high quality ink and photo paper on inkjets outgunning their laser counterparts unless you want to pay of $5,000-plus. That said, many were impressed by two new colour laser printers that came on to the Australian market in the last 12 months for under $2,000. The debut of the Minolta MagiColor 2300W and the Oki C5100 revealed a new generation of low-cost laser printers. And the quality is amazing.

Epson, Canon and HP fought back, but these two certainly outclassed the market. The Minolta is a little bit cheaper without the networking function and the Oki offers outstanding quality, speed and low cost of maintenance. The other thing to note is that glossy laser printer paper is a lot cheaper than similar inkjet paper, allowing the lasers to produce even better results.

Black and white lasers are also very cheap, with Minolta's PagePro 1200W coming at $299 retail, an extraordinary price considering that similar quality competitors cost $500 or more.

For business, the majority stick with HP because the printer functions in a number of networking environments and if you ask the vendor, it comes with an onsite warranty, which is a major drawcard for anyone who worries about their equipment. The HP Colour 1500L has a standard 1-year onsite warranty, so if you run into trouble, help is on the way.

Next week, MFD's (Multi Function Devices): Printers, Scanners, Copiers and Fax machines in one.

HotNews

After another embarrassing flaw in a Microsoft program (this seems to happens so often, I'm not sure it's even news now...), Microsoft now plans to release a new patch every month to help system administrators keep up with problems.

If you've seen Dave Letterman's 'George Bush moments', you'll know the one where the President is talking about the intelligence service and says 'the left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing' - using the wrong hands to illustrate it. The hands are having a hard time with news that some 23 million government documents have been classified - up 400% on a decade ago - so no-one knows what's going on. A classic Monty Python moment came when a think tank was asked by emergency services to find solutions to deal with chemical weapon threats, then couldn't access the report they commissioned because the Defence Department classified it. It's the sort of paranoia every terrorist dreams of.

A new world record has been set using the new Internet 2 IPV6. It was able to transfer data the size of a full length DVD movie over 7,000km in 7 seconds. They were able to sustain that speed for more than half an hour transferring 1.1 terabytes of data. That's around 20,000 times faster than your average broadband connection.

Sharp has released a new laptop that can display things in 3D without special goggles, potentially offering a new way of interfacing with a PC. NEC says it will release a similar 3D version later this year.

A scientist who discovered that by holding down the shift key on your PC can bypass the copyright protection on music CDs has been threatened with legal action under America's infamous Millennium Act. I'd suggest the Copyright Control designer should also be charged with basic stupidity.

If you're looking for a unique job and love Lego, then head for California where a 'LegoMaster' is required to spend the working day building new and exciting things from Lego. For the interview, you'll have 45 minutes and 2,000 Lego blocks to impress the panel that you're right for the job.

Get ready for the next evolution in processors with the CS301 from ClearSpeed. If the promises hold true, within five years desktop PCs will have floating point processor speeds that would put them in the top 500 supercomputers of today with a speed of 25 Gigaflops. The CS301 is designed to work in parallel with existing processors from Intel and AMD - grabbing the attention of the IBM and Apple camps. Its 64 way parallel processing will allow you to slot a number of processors in a line. Its release price is around $18,000, but considering that it's only 1.5 times more than the first Pentium processor, consumers should be optimistic it will come down quickly.

And at that price, institutions that could never afford multi-million dollar SuperComputers can now grab a couple of them.

Hotsites

www.amiannoying.com

This site pokes fun at public figures in an evolution from a similar site, amihotornot. It tells stories about public figures and their 'resume' and you the public get to rank whether they're annoying or not.

www.motherinlawstories.com

If any mothers-in-law are reading this column, please take this listing with a grain of salt. Of course it contains some familiar jokes and some great stories that hopefully mothers-in-law will also enjoy.

www.truthorfiction.com

I stumbled across this site and found it great for just referencing hoaxes and viruses on the web. Its content range is much larger, exploring urban myths and classifying stories and legends as either true or false. If you want to find out if the truth is out there, bookmark this site.