gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (12/23/89)
I don't see people trying to interface to their pocket calculator "because it's wasting cycles!" I don't see people trying to interface to their TI speak & spell "because it's wasting cycles!" I don't see people trying to interface to their stereo receiver "because it's wasting cycles!" I don't see people trying to interface to their car, even though the latest GM products contain a decent multiprocessor with ~11 CPUs, "because it's wasting cycles!" I don't see people trying to interface to their microwave ovens, to their stoves, or to a myriad of other dumb home appliances, "because they're wasting cycles!" I don't see people trying to run LISP on their epson home printer, "because it's wasting cycles!" So hands off with that laserprinter, ok? Ok!
woody@rpp386.cactus.org (Woodrow Baker) (12/25/89)
In article <99500005@p.cs.uiuc.edu>, gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > > I don't see people trying to interface to their pocket calculator > "because it's wasting cycles!" > > I don't see people trying to interface to their TI speak & spell > "because it's wasting cycles!" > > I don't see people trying to interface to their stereo receiver > "because it's wasting cycles!" > > I don't see people trying to interface to their car, even though the > latest GM products contain a decent multiprocessor with ~11 CPUs, > "because it's wasting cycles!" > > I don't see people trying to interface to their microwave ovens, to > their stoves, or to a myriad of other dumb home appliances, > "because they're wasting cycles!" > > I don't see people trying to run LISP on their epson home printer, > "because it's wasting cycles!" > > So hands off with that laserprinter, ok? Ok! So, none of these have an interface designed to be used with a computer or terminal. It happens that you GM car is capable of some mighty neat things, and there IS a fellow who is selling a software package that connects the PC to the car, and lets you do COMPLETE diagnostics on the car. You can alter the roms for the main control computer, and increase your horsepower, and you can even change the smog readings to fool inspectors. Unfortunatly, being that this is an embedded controler, there is no user accesable language, . Your arguement here is tenuous at best. While you have a Laser connected to a computer, or terminal that is doing work some of the time, most of the time you have a perfectly fine general purpose computer just sitting on your desk, doing nothing. The silly sucker draws 6 amps of current, so why not use it. It costs you nothing, except (shudder) getting your hands dirty with a little NON-CONFORMING code perhaps. Now, I my car had an RS-232 port that I could plug into, and offload some work to it, why not. It would be an entertaining conversation topic at the least. There are also people interfacing to TI and HP calculators. Cheers Woody
gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu (12/29/89)
Re: Postscript printers that image the page using several bands If the printer doesn't have a hard disk, I can't see how this is possible. Most laserprinters cannot halt halfway through printing a page, since the paper would burn up. Therefore, the paper runs through the printer continuously. To free up the band buffer, it must be printed. But then the next band must already be imaged because printing is now in progress. Since a band can be extremely complex, even a clever band-buffering scheme might fail if the page is very complex. Am I missing something? Are there postscript printers that only store a portion of the page at any time? Low-end Xerox Interpress laser printers use banding, and will screw up complicated graphics (especially scaled bitmaps) because of this phenomena. I know of no workaround.
larry@csccat.UUCP (Larry Spence) (12/29/89)
In article <99500009@p.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@p.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > >Re: Postscript printers that image the page using several bands > >To free up the band buffer, it must be printed. But then the next >band must already be imaged because printing is now in progress. >Since a band can be extremely complex, even a clever band-buffering >scheme might fail if the page is very complex. > >Low-end Xerox Interpress laser printers use banding, and will screw up >complicated graphics (especially scaled bitmaps) because of this >phenomena. I know of no workaround. Same goes for the Genicom 300 dpi printers that use their proprietary ACE PDL (similar to PostScript). They're blazingly fast, but there seems to be some sort of intersections-per-scanline limit. When you hit the limit, it just repeats the previous scanline over and over until the complexity drops back below the limit. The visual effect is that your text/graphics get "stretched" vertically in the offending area. Actually, this happened in their beta units, so maybe they've fixed it, but I think it's inherent in their rasterizing method. I also read somewhere that Adobe considered this sort of scheme and even implemented it as "SubScript" (I'm not kidding). They decided the lack of guaranteed results was too high a price to pay for the speed. -- Larry Spence larry@csccat ...{texbell,texsun,attctc}!csccat!larry