Xiaofan Chen wrote: > On Jan 30, 2008 12:13 PM, Forrest W Christian wrote: > >> It's really sad when the drivers take many many many many many times the >> space that an entire word processing (heck even a good desktop >> publishing) app used to take, INCLUDING the printer drivers for dozens >> of different printers. >> >> > > On the other hand, harddisk/RAMs becomes much bigger and cheaper now. > And processor becomes faster and faster as well. So the software will become > bigger and bigger. I think that is how the IT related companies are > earning money. > > Actually I see similar trend in the embedded application as well. Your average > cell phone now mostly have a fast processor and the firmware is getting bigger > and bigger (buggier as well). > > And tasks used to be handled by 8051s are now handled by (potentially cheaper) > ARM7 or even ARM9. > > > Xiaofan > I think the question at hand is what does a print driver do now that needs 160MB worth of driver that they didn't do 10 years ago. Printers put ink on paper, that task hasn't changed that much in 10 years. Credit to samsung and lanier on this front, they have network printer drivers that are in the 3-6mb range. Although the open source samsung driver is ~600KB last time i checked (and in many cases has more features than the 10mb closed source one for linux);-> -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist