lasers are awesome, basically the same tech as old school photostat, they work on the principle of electrostatic induction of ionisation of a surface that then pulls toner particles to it, and then a heater that melts the toner dust so it is stuck to the paper... the original tech just used lenses and an ultraviolet light and the drump that the image-and-dust stick to, and all that laser printers changed was using a laser to paint that image like a CRT but slow

inkjets are incredibly complex technology in comparison, needlessly

the older i get the clearer it becomes that the reason why there is Lindy is because once something is efficient and simple enough you don't need to fundamentally change it

the exponential complexity of the "better" technologies annihilates all of the benefits because of the increased instability of its underpinnings

unix is an example of this... those dudes built a thing that has stood the test of time to the point where the majority of computers now use it as their base layer, STILL

even if a lot of dumbasses have tried to change some layers we stil can rely on cp, mount, rm, netcat, and the rest

i would really like to see a linux distro that strips it right back to bare essentials and then makes the other shit more modular and simple to pop in and pop out

the whole basis of the /usr/local directory tree has been forgotten, there should be dozens of them, this would solve so many problems for layering... you can almost say that what apple did with the application bundling system was basically tantamount to making a folder for each user installed system wide app in /usr/

inkjets are arguably the dumbest printers that could exist: a motor to move the paper, a motor to move the print heads, the ink itself, print heads that just spray ink droplets, and some sponge to hold waste ink for cleaning

it’s all the extra bloat on top

and the software that means that the printer either clogs after no use, or it keeps dumping shitloads of ink every day as “maintenance”

you can dump a ml or two of ink through the heads every few days and it’ll never clog or accumulate air while powered

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yeah, it's a really bad design

they should be reserved for the use of making high quality art prints or used in production manufacturing for stuff

3d printers are based on the similar designs, and they are also genetically related to plotters, which are great for automatically drawing plans and maps

they are not an efficient way of depositing an indelible image on paper, they are robots