Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> I respect that. For the sake of community knowledge, I'll also tell you
> what I do as an alternative:
...
> One morning, I walked in, and Ms. Arun was very vexed, because she said that printing was not working anywhere around the firm. Notably, she said there had been a power outage right at the beginning of the business day.
...
> I politely asked 'Why aren't people printing directly to the executive
> LaserJet?' -- and, predictably, heard 'How do you do that?'


Rick Moen <rick@???> wrote:

> Quoting Alessandro Selli (alessandroselli@???):
>
>> "Go to 'Settings', 'Network' and 'Search the local network', when you
>> see the icon with the printer double click on it and accept the download
>> of the driver and install it if you don't have it".
>>
>> This is the answer I get 99% of the times when I ask.
>
> Yeah, well, if I got that, I'd pretend to be really grateful, say 'Thank
> you _so_ very much!', and then go quietly figure out the real answer for myself.

IMO you've demonstrated why such things as DNS-SD and mDNS are a good idea. You and I have the skills to go and find the printer's IP address, but we are not typical users who cannot do that. In much the same way, you (I assume) and I are happy to edit text files etc to configure our systems, but we are not typical users who cannot do that.

So it comes down to a) try to kill the chatty discovery protocols and perpetuate the "geeks vs users" divide, or b) allow them and allow people to use technology for themselves. Don't forget that it's not all that long ago when people who owned cars employed a driver to operate it for them - now we are (mostly) all our own drivers now.



Didier Kryn <kryn@???> wrote:

> I don't want to waste time figuring out printer properties and maintaining a printer list on my laptop. There are already too many reasons to waste time.

Exactly. Computers are supposed to do stuff for us, not have us do stuff for them.

I was already using computers when the Mac came along (yes I know there were earlier examples, but it was really the Mac that made it out of the lab and onto people's desks), and I recall many complaints from software developers that it was hard to write programs for it. Back then, software was written on the basis of making the user do much of the hard work ...
Where I used to work at the time, their standard word processor was Display Write from IBM. With this, you entered edit mode to work on your document but could not print from there. To print, you had to save the document and go into a different menu. From the developer's PoV it made things easy - the user can only do things that are allowed in the mode they are in.
Then the Mac came along, now the user could just choose to print any time they liked. So the developer had to write their program to deal with user events *when the user wants to do them* rather than when the program allows. This made the developer's life harder - but now the computer did more and the user did less - ie the computer was doing more of the work instead of the user.

Lots of overhead, more code, more memory required, etc, etc. But easier for the user. Sound familiar ?

As an aside, I had to take the MIS people to task over document standards - which were all written on the basis that a word processor is just a glorified typewriter with fixed pitch fonts (eg "the left margin with be 12 spaces").