multi-multi-multi function office machines
Currently in a waiting room and CNN is on. There was just a commercial for a Sharp deep freezer sized copier/scanner/printer/sink. The business person googled for a restaurant to take a client to on the built in touch screen then presses a button to print a full-color map to the restaurant. What business person would go to the copy building (a room is not big enough) to google a restaurant?
Sorry check back later for pics, Steve Jobs says I don’t need copy & paste as I’m sending this from the wordpress app on my iPhone.
Update:
One note of clearification, as crazy as the feature set on these machines is, I still wouldn’t mind having one to use whenever I wanted, imagine what you could do with it! The commercial I saw is available in flash form at
http://www.sharpusa.com/files/workwithoutlimits.swf.
August 29th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
We have a few Xerox Docutech 6115s at work. They’re probably six years old now, but it’s basically a big printer connected to a Sun Solaris box. It uses a centronics like connector, but larger. The Xerox people thought it was okay for these to be connected to the Internet, so you could move jobs between machines. But a nearby school had theirs broken into and students grabbed exam images from the tmp and spool directories. They had nfs and all this other crap open. When I disabled unnecessary services, the Xerox software stopped working and the service guy had to come out and reinstall it. :) So they are on private networks now. I think the newer ones run Windows XP now.
We’ve been looking at a few competitors to Xerox and they all seem to have external controllers for their production equipment. These aren’t small machines though. They can continuously run all day long at 115 pages per minute. I haven’t seen any small office multi function device with Windows running yet. I think some of the Lanier/Ricoh people run some form of bsd on their embedded devices.
http://www.xerox.com/digital-printing/printers/print-on-demand/docutech-6115/spec-enus.html