The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade
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After 17 years of using Epson model 800 inkjet printers, the ISS is getting new HP printers specially modified to work in zero gravity.
Astronauts use them to print out critical mission information, emergency evacuation procedures and, sometimes, photos from home. According to NASA, they print roughly 1,000 pages a month
1000 pages a month? That's a lot of paper.
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@el_heffe said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
That's a lot of paper.
Two reams.
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They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
They are part of the US Government. They have to print things out to show that they are conforming to the Paperwork Reduction Act.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
I think "critical mission information and emergency procedures" are quite necessary to have in print if you think about it.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
Displays consume power continuously. Paper requires power only once.
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@rhywden so they need eInk displays
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@jaloopa said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden so they need eInk displays
Are there any good colour eink displays?
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@el_heffe said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
HP printers
Great, now they have to hire an extra sysadmin just to maintain the drivers.
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For any government that kind of paper work means one extra secretary. And an extra cleaning lady to empty the waste bin. So that's 3 extra people, better add one FTE to the HR department as well but now we have 4 extra people ... so we need at least a department head and since our department can't exist in a void we'll be needing a manger as well. Better make that a committee then so that 3 politically appointed directors can shift the blame around.
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@anonymous234 said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
HP printers
Ooh, good eye. Hope they have a lot of "genuine HP ink cartridges" on hand for whenever the printer decides to no longer recognize the existing one.
Yes, I have an HP printer, why do you ask? And yes, I now regret ever buying it.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
They have a 7-day mail retention policy?
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@luhmann said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
And an extra cleaning lady to empty the waste bin.
This is in space though, they can just throw it out the window.
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@hungrier said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
throw it out the window.
don't forget to close it afterwards
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@rhywden said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
Displays consume power continuously. Paper requires power only once.
And ISS is one of the few places in the world where they don't have to worry about electricity bills or carbon footprint.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
Displays consume power continuously. Paper requires power only once.
And ISS is one of the few places in the world where they don't have to worry about electricity bills or carbon footprint.
Yeah. And pigs can fly, too. First of all, generating electricity is strictly limited to what their solar cells can produce. Secondly, any power consumption comes with heat generation which then has to be dumped into space by radiators.
If anything these guys have to worry even more than anyone down here about such issues... as such, I would be rather loathe to add an additional headache into the equation when the existing solution works just fine.
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@rhywden ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
Also. Are they running on 99% energy capacity already that those few screens make such a difference? Not to mention energy spent on printing.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
Displays consume power continuously. Paper requires power only once.
And ISS is one of the few places in the world where they don't have to worry about electricity bills or carbon footprint.
< >
The ISS is not in the world
</>
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
Because people and equipment generate a lot of heat, and vacuum means there's no cooling via conduction or convection; only radiation. And when they're in direct sunlight there's radiation heating them too.
Cooling spacecraft and space suits is a much more pressing issue than keeping them warm
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@jaloopa said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
Displays consume power continuously. Paper requires power only once.
And ISS is one of the few places in the world where they don't have to worry about electricity bills or carbon footprint.
< >
The ISS is not in the world
</>Define "world".
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Define "world".
Don't see any definitions there that would include things orbiting the world
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
Because vacuum isn't "cold." It's empty, which means that conventional notions of ambient temperature become meaningless. The standard cooling technique of dumping heat into your environment only works when your environment is full of matter. Without that, what you end up with is, in fact, almost a perfect insulator. The only way to dump heat is by radiating it away as blackbody radiation, which is far less efficient a cooling mechanism than environmental cooling.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
Also. Are they running on 99% energy capacity already that those few screens make such a difference? Not to mention energy spent on printing.
Vacuum is a perfect isolator for warmth. It's the reason why all Thermos bottles are evacuated inside.
The only way to get rid of heat inside a vaccuum is through radiative processes. The other heat transfer processes (convection, conduction, advection) don't work.
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@dcon said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
They're one of the most technologically advanced organizations in the world. Why print out anything?
They have a 7-day mail retention policy?
Unless things have changed, they literally ship Outlook PST files for email.
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IIRC, the transfer rate of radiative heat transfer is proportional to the ΔT4. It's really efficient when the thing you're trying to cool is, say 1000K. Not so much when it's 300K. (Space is effectively about 4K, close enough to 0 that it can be ignored for most purposes, and just consider the temperature of the radiating body.) Plus, you have a big blob of 5000K gas radiating heat at the thing you want to cool.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@rhywden ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
It comes down to what heat is, and how it moves around.
For our purposes, heat is the "average" random motion of particles in a body. More heat means there's more energy and more random motion.
Getting rid of this heat means passing the random motion along to other bodies. But there are few bodies to pass heat onto in a vacuum. So while the vacuum is really cold, it's also not really receptive to being warmed up.
Compare this to the situation of a Russian astronaut stuck outside the ISS with an air leak. He would freeze pretty quickly, because the vacuum would suck out the actual air molecules from his suit, and pull the molecules' heat along with them.
So the station can be cooled quickly if you eject matter. But it's slow if you can't eject matter. (They don't want to eject matter for various reasons)
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@el_heffe said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
1000 pages a month? That's a lot of paper.
That's two reams. That's not a lot. You've obviously never worked with printers. I worked at a shop that had a high-speed printer that could go through two reams in less than 5 minutes.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
Because, regardless of temperature, vacuum is a really good heat insulator. That's why your coffee thermos has the air evacuated.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
ELI5: why it's hard to cool a station if it's surrounded by super cold vacuum?
I was going to answer this (wrote a reply and everything), and then saw the ten other replies. I think it should be clear enough by now.
Let's hope the drivers don't crash the system.
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@kian said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Let's hope the drivers don't crash the system.
It seems that the Chinese installed the HP drivers recently on their space station:
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(Insert obligatory PC LOAD LETTER joke/link here)
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@slavdude They're going to use the Canadarm to destroy the old printer.
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@blakeyrat said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@el_heffe said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
1000 pages a month? That's a lot of paper.
That's two reams. That's not a lot. You've obviously never worked with printers. I worked at a shop that had a high-speed printer that could go through two reams in less than 5 minutes.
Yes, in a normal office, two reams is nothing. The average office probably throws away two reams a day from misprints and paper jams.
But, in a small area, with very limited space, that isn't easily accessible because it's up in space orbiting the earth, where disposing of trash is much more difficult -- printing 1000 sheets a month seems insane.
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@weng said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Unless things have changed, they literally ship Outlook PST files for email.
I doubt they can open Outlook PST files on Debian
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@timebandit reminds me of a story. At my last workplace, I've had quite a few Linux fanatics. One of them didn't even have Windows VM, so they didn't have the newest MS Office. Unfortunately, their OpenOffice or whatever he was using back then didn't work 100% correctly with .docx - in particular there was that one file that contained entire specification of the feature we were working on, all in pictures of UML diagrams, and it simply wasn't showing up for him. Thankfully I know lots of useless facts, and so I came up with a workaround in form of using 7-Zip.
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@timebandit said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@weng said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Unless things have changed, they literally ship Outlook PST files for email.
I doubt they can open Outlook PST files on Debian
https://blog.robseder.com/2015/08/29/working-with-a-pst-file-in-linux/
Seems simple enough to suck out all the messages into standard files.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
OpenOffice or whatever he was using back then didn't work 100% correctly with .docx
It still doesn't. At least .xlsx doesn't; I haven't tried .docx recently.
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@adynathos said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@kian said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Let's hope the drivers don't crash the system.
It seems that the Chinese installed the HP drivers recently on their space station:
Error: lp0 on fire
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@hardwaregeek said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
I haven't tried .docx recently.
That's a lot easier to do a decent job of. Word processors have reasonably well understood underlying models that sit well with XML serializations.
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@hardwaregeek said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
OpenOffice or whatever he was using back then didn't work 100% correctly with .docx
It still doesn't. At least .xlsx doesn't; I haven't tried .docx recently.
For xlsx I've not encountered problems in recent times in LibreOffice. I use both Excel and LibreOffice Calc on a daily basis (mostly Calc - because it's much better at coping with import and export of delimited text files).
Although it's a hackneyed thing to suggest: If you find compatibility problems then file a bug. My experience with LibreOffice has been that bugs of that sort are taken seriously and fixed - provided that you can provided a good reproducible example. (I was favourably surprised by the positive response to an obscure and not very significant file incompatibility that I reported)
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@gąska That was because the Office .foox formats include 'technologies' which are under patent protection. If LibreOffice is doing better at supporting them now, and haven't been sued yet, then I can only assume that either a) someone in the development group ponied up for the license, and Microsoft decided to sign off on the license rather than being petty over it, or b) Microsoft realized that having everyone use their file formats was worth more to them than everyone using their software was, especially for software that they were now providing a limited-use web-fronted SaaS version of free (with subscriptions for more complete versions), and so they loosened the restrictions. I CBA to check though.
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@scholrlea Alternative explanations: LibreOffice's programmers kinda suck, Office Open XML is a ridiculously complex and shitty format, MS Office produces bizarre (if not outright broken) output.
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@anonymous234 said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@scholrlea Alternative explanations: LibreOffice's programmers kinda suck, Office Open XML is a ridiculously complex and shitty format, MS Office produces bizarre (if not outright broken) output.
While all of those do apply, none of those change the 'covered by patent' part. That is, you know, a fact. And a well known one. It's not in dispute.
I recall the debate over whether or not this was unfair of MS, and whether Sun (who were still running the StarOffice project at the time, IIRC) should find a way to license it that wouldn't screw up their own FOSS licensing, or just infringe on the patent anyway and dare Ballmer to go to court. It was... well, you can imagine what a shitshow that was even if you weren't there. A lot of mostly-smart people saying extremely stupid things.
In fact, if I am not mistaken, this was the dispute that led to the OpenOffice fork in the first place; my recollection is that Sun chose to license the formats, and increased the support fee for the 'Pro' version of StarOffice, but at the same time set up OpenOffice as a no-strings-attached branch for those who were concerned about FOSS licenses. Eventually, the OOo group went their own way and Sun dropped StarOffice entirely.
So, while those other aspects might be part of the reason, the main reason was the licensing.
Come to think of it, I expect that the patents in question have expired, or will soon. If they have expired already (they were mostly ones filed in the late 1990s, I think, even if they weren't applied to the formats until 2003), then that would explain why LibreOffice can support the formats now (assuming they do). Whether such support is any good is another matter entirely.
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@japonicus said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
If you find compatibility problems then file a bug.
Um, I
may bedefinitely was misremembering; it's been a few months. I remember that Excel couldn't open a file written by OpenOffice. But it wasn't a .xlsx; my version will neither open nor save .xlsx. It must have been that Excel couldn't read a .ods that had something out of the ordinary in it. Or something like that, but it wasn't .xlsx. My bad.
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@gąska said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Define "world".
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@scholrlea It's an open standard, ISO/IEC 29500 or ECMA 376. Microsoft includes that in their Open Specification Promise. So yeah, it's their fault for being a shitty tool.
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@pie_flavor said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
Open Specification Promise
This is how out of the loop I am on this. As I said in another thread earlier today, Word has never been high on my list of priorities; I really need to pay more attention to these things. I recalled that it was patented, but either never heard about or forgot about the agreement not sue over them, which according to Wicked-Pedo happened about three years after the stuff with StarOffice which I mentioned. That was in 2006, which means I am more than a decade late to the party IRT this.
I think I need to step out of my time pod (INB4 @blakeyrat). As for shitty tools... do you mean Microsoft, or the LibreOffice folx, or both? I expect both, but clearly I lack the background to make a call on it myself.
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@scholrlea LibreOffice specifically. It's an open, well-documented format; if they claim to be quality software and they claim to support it, then they should fucking support it. I am not aware of Microsoft Word being a shitty tool, but I would believe it if given evidence.
You might be confusing it with .doc and family, which are closed binary formats.
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@pie_flavor said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@scholrlea It's an open standard, ISO/IEC 29500 or ECMA 376. Microsoft includes that in their Open Specification Promise. So yeah, it's their fault for being a shitty tool.
It's an 'open standard', but my understanding is that it's a very poorly designed one, particularly if you have to support all the backward-compatible crud that got bundled into it. It's questionable whether even MS Office implements the format correctly.
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@pie_flavor said in The International Space Station is finally getting a printer upgrade:
@scholrlea It's an open standard, ISO/IEC 29500 or ECMA 376. Microsoft includes that in their Open Specification Promise. So yeah, it's their fault for being a shitty tool.
I can't find the link off the top of my head, but I remember reading about how while they've published a standard, the actual details of the standard involve a shitton of hacky XML and CDATA that make it, for all intents and porpoises, docx compatibility impossible to implement perfectly. IIRC the standard is also thousands of pages long because it includes its own standards for things like dates, whereas ODT is much shorter because it references existing ISO standards for those sorts of things.
edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open_XML#Technical
it looks like even the ISO gave up on reviewing it:
About four-fifths of the proposed changes to a draft standard for the OOXML document format were waved through, undiscussed, at the conclusion of a weeklong meeting in Geneva.
...
"I see no particular rationale for why we were limited in time. I don't know how you can deal with 6,000 pages with 3,500 comments in a week."and also:
Google has also identified some key technical issues with OOXML that the company considers important. The company criticizes OOXML's use of Windows-specific binary blobs for printer configuration data and suggests adoption of the Adobe PPD instead.
Another issue that concerns Google is the format's dependence on browser-specific features for HTML conversin, like Internet Explorer's VML.