Hanging out with printer engineers
I'm spending this week at the
Ricoh
Developers Conference. They have Java VMs in their big printers
that enable developers to build applications into the printers.
They are often specialized workflow management apps. If you were at
JavaOne, you saw a simple (but valuable) one: print a document from
your laptop, it goes to a master spool server, then walk over to
any printer, stick in your badge, and out comes your document. When
everything is on the network, the possibilities for end-to-end
synergies are endless [Yuck: on re-reading that sentence, it's
pretty clear that I've been spending too much time with
marketoids].
