At 2004-05-26 12:54, Declan Moriarty wrote:
>May I summarize your testimonial, Jaap?
>
>You don't print much; You don't care much; You don't pay much; You are
>very good to your family; You know how to wrap old junk pcs as
>presents:). The real issue you have is how print-ready the device is 
>when you take it out of hibernation.

Yes!

;-)

>Lucky you. Think of us poor sods doing copy Invoices,

I send all my invoices via email. This is allowed although
the EU has imposed stricter rules, which became effective
januari first 2004. I phoned my local tax service about
it and unofficialy they admitted that it may have been
overdone a little. (You need to send digitally signed
invoices now).

>Monthly Statements,

In principle you could keep internal company documents
within the computer.

Why do you print them? For the inland revenue service?
I have never been checked since I started my company in
1997. If I should be audited, why not just show them
my CD-R's with spreadsheets? Or I could print them
especially for the audit.

>Business letters,

Emails.

>Flyers, Labels, Agreements,

Isn't it much cheaper to have flyers printed
professionaly?

Labels are an exception of course, but there
are special label printers that can also
cost-efficiently print a single label.

There is no reason why agreements have to be
printed. Just send them back and forth via emails
a couple of times and none of the parties can
deny their existence anymore. Digital signatures
aren't even needed.

I very much believe in the internet and (still) in
the paperless office! But sometimes it indeed takes
a bit of convincing the other party.

Some people for example still think that a fax has
some sort of legal preference over email (which it
indeed had in the beginning) but those days are
long gone. Already since about 1999 I receive and
send faxes from my PC. Currently they are even
automatically converted to email-attachments by my
local telecom-provider and emailed to me as they
arrive.

Faxes are just bit-images and I can manipulate the
outgoing and incoming faxes as much as I want.

>and trying to satisfy the artistic tastes of our minors
>in homework and class projects, guitar tabs, etc. etc.

You should educate them so they (and their teachers)
learn to appreciate the beauty of the internet. Why
not put the results of a class project on the WWW?

And why are guitars still needed? Every computer has
a an excellent audio card (with an inbuilt Yamaha
synthesizer that would have set you back several
$1000 years ago) that can produce excellent guitar
and other sounds and you don't even have to play
yourself anymore, just feed it a MIDI-file. Most
classical works are available for free from the WWW.

Every child having to learn to play an instrument
(I had to learn to play the flute and the piano)
is a misconception of the previous century. Teach
them to play the computer instead!

>When I was doing a project I printed a 230 page data sheet!

That is indeed very expensive using an inkjet printer!

Why not put a PC at the spot you need the datasheet
and use the PDF version? Most datasheets are only
used a couple of times and are no longer needed after
that. This may have made sense in the era of
mass-printed paper dataheets when computers were
still primitive, but does it still apply?

Just do the maths: Most printers cost at least $0.10
per printed page, so your datasheet cost at least
$23. Was that really worth it?

In general: Most printed pages are read only one time
so in which cases does a cost of at least $0.10 makes
sense?

Greetings,
Jaap

-- 
Author: Jaap van Ganswijk
  INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Fat City Hosting, San Diego, California -- http://www.fatcity.com
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