Our old Postscript laser printer dates back to the mid-1990’s. At the time it was top of the range, very fast, 600dpi A3 with ethernet, photo-quality, blah blah blah. A reliable work horse that is still up to most things we feed it and that’s including media such as tracing paper, transparencies, card and envelopes. Although 16 page per minute speed is pedestrian by modern standards it’s fine for our needs of printing individual pages full of graphics rather than long print runs of the same sheet – although that is well within its capabilities.

So it came as a shock to find we can’t get hold of toners for it anymore. There are so-called “compatible cartridges” but experience showed us that they aren’t as good as the real thing, their toner granules always seem to be coarser. Luckily we found a toner cartridge on eBay which was purchased on the spot and that should keep us in print for another year or so. Then, it’s compatibles or nothing. More frustrating is to see the healthy market in the US for such cartridges where they cost about a quarter of UK-sourced ones, not even taking into account the pound to dollar relationship.

In the same vein, we still earn a bit from scanning. In the past it was a huge money-spinner but the arrival of digital cameras largely killed it off except for old photos and transparencies and the occasional large-format dupe transparency from one the national museums or galleries. Over the years scanners got better quality and cheaper in price so that now, a two hundred quid scanner has better image resolution than the ones I paid well over a grand for in the past. There is still one area we need a scanner for and that’s digitising plans and prints. The scanner doesn’t need to be colour, or offer superb Dmax, or ultra high resolution, just a large flat bed, bigger than A4. Firewire preferred but USB would do.

With these two equipment needs in mind, we went shopping. First the laser printer. My, how they have come up in the world: a full-colour, A4 laser printer with Postscript emulation and networking for a few hundred. Unbelievable, and something to think about when our inkjet printer wears out. Look for an A3 printer and the prices start in rarified heights and continue ever upwards. Even black and white A3 printers cost over a grand, not much different from the price we paid for our existing one. We have had large-format inkjets in the past but they are slow, frustrating to use and clogged heads from lack of throughput has meant throwing them away because repair is more than replacement.

The same thing with scanners. Incredible high-quality A4 scanners cost, similarly, a few hundred but look at A3 sized ones and the pounds run into four digits before the decimal point. Often their specifications are lower than the A4 ones, too.

Surely there is nothing more than a bigger piece of glass and a second CCD inside to take into account the large scan bed? And the laser printer only has a bigger drum and modified laser imager, with a larger paper hopper to take A3. So why are they massively more expensive?

Answers on a postcard, though thinking about it the Post Office have just change postal rates to take into account different sizes so maybe it’s cheaper to send answers on the back of the stamp itself, to keep costs down.

There is always a silence when I am asked for my passport. Usually it’s for security purposes to establish identity, along with a request for a utility bill, which is paid paperlessly on-line so non-existant, equally non-existant is a DSS benefit/pension book. No matter that I have a pocket full of credit cards, driving licence, library ticket, RAC membership, blah, blah, blah. They are never counted as being good enough even though they give access to my total liquid wealth.

The reply I give is never expected – I don’t have a passport, never needed one and cannot see any point in spending the best part of £100 in getting one. After living all my life in holiday resorts, what am I going to do on holiday? The beach is at the end of the road, as are shops, historical buildings, art galleries and all the bars, theatres and clubs I need. The surrounding county supplies the greenery, forests, vineyards and open countryside, plus I’m self-employed, work from home and pretty chilled -out all the time.

By the same token, I have been a “computing professional” for over 20 years and have never used a Windows computer. When I started out Windows 1 and 2 were, well… complete rubbish. CPM and GEM, the Mac-like graphical operating system, were leagues in front. Then a move to Mac proper kept me ahead of Windows-using contemporaries for 10 years until Windows 98 made the operating system look at least a little interesting. So much so, it ran in an emulator on my computer for a while. That is the total extent to my Windows experience and from what I observe at a distance Microsoft seems to go out of its way to make life difficult for their customers. Plus there is nothing I need to run on Windows I can’t run on my Macs.

That is, until last weekend when Microsoft changed how Local Live operates. Until then, I have been using it’s excellent birds-eye views to look at potential new property to buy. Where Google Earth gives a reasonable over-head view of the land, albeit from a high altitude, it’s coverage of the areas I’ve been searching has been patchy. There must be a permanent bank of cloud hovering between the satellite and the south coast of England. Whereas Local Live was able to zoom in close to houses, almost to the point of seeing fish in the garden pond and washing on the line. Ideal for house-hunting, it became the home page of one of my web browsers.

So it came as a shock to find Local Live no longer works, not just in one browser but seemingly, all Mac browsers. This is including Opera, Netscape and derivatives and even Internet Explorer. Most just show two search fields and at best produce a map but only if both fields are completed. So entering, for example, Birds-Eye View and a postcode, gets a list of all the frozen food retailers and a tiny, useless, location map. Finally, I discovered that there should be some toolbar showing. Firefox, with some persuasion, was able to display this but all Local Live produces now are black screens with pushpins where the aerial view used to be.

The same thing has happened with iView Media Pro. It used to be a British, Mac-only media browser and cataloguing tool. Microsoft bought it, made it cross-platform and ruined it in the process so that it crashes all the time, corrupts catalogues, makes poor thumbnails and is generally less usable than the two versions preceding it.

Sounds a bit like Vista.

Vista will make the Net slow and gooey. So says Paul Mockapetris, who invented the Internet’s Domain Name System, in an interview with CNet. According to Mockapetris, Vista’s adoption of IPv6 will double DNS traffic leading to brownouts and shutdowns because DNS servers are already running close to capacity.

This is because the current IPv4 protocol used to stream data packets, was designed primarily for ethernet. It doesn’t guarantee delivery or prevent duplication of data and it is only able to address a little over 4 billion unique addresses. It may sound a lot but is soon whittled down because many are reserved: 18 million for private networks, 1 million for multicasting and so on. Then there are the huge numbers of computers, cell phones and devices all needing their own individual address. Basically, IPv4 has run out of numbers so IPv6 has been devised.

NAT, network address translation, has helped to keep IPv4 running. In the early days of Broadband in the UK, BT supplied every ADSL set-up with 5 unique IP addresses, actually 7 because the first and last were reserved. Nowadays, DHCP, the dynamic host configuration protocol, is more usually supplied with at most 1 static IP address for the DHCP router which allocates a private IP address for each device on it’s internal network, sending data to the correct one using NAT.

This is all very good until computers need end to end connections to run web or FTP servers, or use UDP to send small datagrams to each other. As any on-line gamer can tell, it was often better in the old days when games were played modem to modem rather than across Internet links, with varying ping times.

IPv6 increases the number of addresses to a total that literally words cannot describe, except to say that everyone alive in the world today could have 50 octillion each. The problem is that most DNS servers aren’t using IPv6 even though the US government has specified they must by 2008. Mockapetris thinks that when Vista is introduced the DNS servers will be hit by double the amount of traffic as Vista first checks which protocol to use before putting through its request in the correct format.

Not all industry pundits agree with this, saying that while traffic will be higher, it isn’t going to crash the ‘Net. Microsoft’s view is that Vista will only query DNS servers twice when necessary. If the server isn’t capable of IPv6 it won’t respond.

However, for those of us who run modern operating systems (hum hum) that have been capable of IPv6 for some years this has not necessarily been so. Until fairly recently, when more servers became IPv6 capable, DNS look-ups could cause a big slow down in connectivity as Mac OS X first questioned the server for IPV6 before dropping back to IPv4 once the IPv6 request times out. It also explains mysterious dropped connections from a server that cannot support IPv6 when PHP or other server-side applications only know how to deal with IPv4 addresses. Turning off IPv6 was often the cure for network slowdowns. We even ran our own DNS server in-house for a while. Not as difficult as you would think, or not under OS X anyway.

As Vista is due any day now, err… early next year…whenever. We won’t have long to wait to see if Mockapetris is right.

Dr. Eric Schmidt, the man behind Google’s amazing rise to fame, has just taken on a new job. He joins the board of a company that includes five Chief Exec’s of some of the world’s major companies. You can bet they don’t spend much time discussing the annual Christmas party.

The members of this board have an incredible track record. First is Bill Campbell, chairman of Intuit and whose previous roles have included being vice president of ad. agency J. Walter Thompson, president of pen-based computing GO Corporation and president of software publishers Claris. Millard Drexler, currently CEO of clothiers J Crew, used to be president of The Gap. Whilst Arthur Levinson’s day job is running biotechnologists Genentech where he used to be vice president of Research.

The two most financially minded members are firstly Fred Anderson, ex-vice president and chief finance officer, who spends his time running private equity firm Elevations as well as helping out at eBay and Homestore. Second is Jerry York, listed in the 100 most influencial finaciers in the world, who fills in his idle moments running Harwinton Capital. Finally comes Al Gore who once served as vice president of the world…err…America. Only the big cheese himself, Steve Jobs. doesn’t list a previous role as being president although he does have a nice part time job on the board of the Walt Disney Company.

The company in question, Apple, has also been turning in some pretty amazing profits, making them all multi-millions to add to their existing piles. Unlike their some-time competitor Dell, where things have not been going so well lately. Apple’s shares are worth around $60 each and the company has a huge wad of cash in the bank including a fair chunk of my pocket money over the years. Poor Michael Dell is feeling the pinch. People aren’t buying his goodies like the used to, his MP3 player flopped, his laptops burst into flame and his main operating system supplier keeps failing to deliver on the next one.

Some soothe sayers have been promising the tie-up between Google and Apple will become more than just a permanent link to Google in Apple’s proprietary web browser, Safari. Maybe so, but more interestingly, others are saying it’s time for Apple to allow Dell to licence their family jewel, Mac OS X. Michael Dell has even said that he would love to do so. It’s likely that printer makers HP have also looked sideways at Mac OS X. For both, their own Unix and Linux offerings don’t make up much of a money spinner. Unlike IBM where their OS2 was usurped by its developer so they have more invested in Unix systems. IBM also did some work with Apple and Motorola on a joint operating system about 15 years ago, and Mac OS X is Unix underneath its glitz. ITWeek even have a rumour that Apple and Unix-based Sun will link up.

The problem is that Apple have been down this path before and licensed the then current Mac OS to other computer manufacturers, only to realise that they made computers cheaper than Apple and so stole hardware sales.
This time things may be a little different. The latest Mac Pro desktops are, surprisingly, cheaper than equivalent Dells. HP make some attractive high-end work stations with equally unattractive price tags. Maybe Apple would be able to defend its own sales while building market share of its operating system. Even Microsoft has started to talk about computers as pieces of design rather than beige boxes.

When the iPod arrived, many laughed at its design, scoffed at its price and said it would flop. No-one would want it. How wrong they were. It’s doubtful that many iPod users have actually translated into Apple computer sales but people have started to look at the design of computers and are realising that, unfortunately, it sometimes pays to hand over a few extra notes to get something a little more aesthetic, robust and not slung together at the cheapest price. The bonus of it “just works” and being able to run their old Windows software could be the clincher. Even my brother-in-law who used my Mac OS X the other day said it was “Nice”, which for his addiction to Windows, is an enormous tribute.

Whatever happens, Apple is obviously a different company than before, more of a solutions supplier than strictly a computer company. Its fingers dangle in completely different flavours of pie stretching from iTunes and iPod to some of the most desirable laptops and work stations. Plus they can now run just about every operating system in the world. Finally, Steve Jobs has been down this path before when he made NeXT run on just about any CPU rather than his own Cubes… Mac OS X is, in reality, NeXT just in a different wrapper.