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Google’s Net Neutrality Blunder
Since its inception, Google has enjoyed the "good guys" reputation in the computing community and beyond. Google has been the inspirational force behind dozens of "good" movements online and off. Products like Gmail, Google Apps, and more have not only pushed the boundaries of free software, they have forced other players, namely Microsoft to step up their game. Microsoft’s new Office web apps might still be years away (if ever) without the push provided by Google’s offerings.
Google has been a helpful force in other areas as well. It’s Chrome browser started a JavaScript speed war within the browser community without which advanced cloud based computing offerings (like web apps) would not be possible. The Android operating system has provided a much needed boost to the mobile phone community, allowing users to get advanced, forward thinking features, without having to sell out all control to whatever Apple decides is "right" for your phone.
In the non-computing world, Google has put its weight and money behind "good" causes and projects like wind energy and more.
Unfortunately, it is beginning to seem like the company does not have the vision to see beyond the latest "fun" technology cooked up by its programmers in their vaunted 20 percent time. The latest debacle comes courtesy of its so-called net neutrality proposal that it cooked up with Verizon. Google finds itself in the unfamiliar position of having to defend not only one of its offerings, but its motivation as well. Whenever a company, any company, must expend as much energy as Google has on defending a non-product idea, it’s a safe bet that it is backing the wrong horse.
In this case, Google is increasingly parsing out the language in its net neutrality proposal. It claims that detractors are getting it all wrong and what it really means is good for everyone, if only you read it their way. Unfortunately, it is just this ambiguity that is the problem. Assuming that one counts on Google being completely benevolent now and in the future (a big assumption), there is nothing to stop others from taking the company’s proposal and reading it exactly as the naysayers say it will be read. What is to stop AT&T, Comcast, or some new telecom company from using "good guy Google’s" words against them, and us?
In a misguided effort to make themselves a key player in the net neutrality debate, Google has put its name on something that has shaken lose some of the hard earned goodwill the company has built up over the years. In the future, this net neutrality proposal will be regarded as a mistake in business strategy by company management. Just how big of a mistake, will depend upon how quickly (if ever) Google realizes it and changes course. If that happens quickly, then this chapter will be regarded as a rare stumble by the Internet giant. If, however, Google insists on pushing a bad position for too long, this moment could very well become known as the beginning of the end.
Will Google recognize the overwhelming, and near universal, backlash against its net neutrality proposal in time, ala Facebook? Or, will Google be unable to see past its own vision of greatness in time to salvage its reputation?
Unsupported Personality Error HP LaserJet 1012 Windows 7
We are going to call this inverted post style. This article started out down below where the heading HP LaserJet 1012 Printer Driver for Windows 7 Failure, but after writing all of that, I realized that I had taken too long to get to the point. That’s fine, because this is my brain storming, brain dumping, brain overloading, website and I needed to do a little of all three in order to be able to write the meat of this post. So, if you want it to completely make sense go to the heading and read to the end and then come back to the next paragraph. If you just want to know what is going on, just keep reading normally.
Using a different HP printer driver to fix the flawed business strategy of not supporting Windows 7 on popular, recently discontinued printers, has been tougher than it should be. As it turns out, there are two major reasons for this, as I recently found out about on a open-source forum dedicated to Linux printing.
The HP LaserJet 1012 printer worked pretty good for most people, but it was falsely advertised as supporting PCL5. Instead, the HP LaserJet 1012 printer actually supports some HP-bastardized version of PCL5. When the 1012 receives PCL5 print jobs it understands most of the commands it receives. Therefore, it is able to handle print jobs correctly that come from another PCL5 printer driver, like the HP LaserJet 3055 print driver for Windows 7.
Unfortunately, this unprofessional, hacked version of PCL 5 does not understand all of the PCL 5 commands it gets, so it just throws those into an error state. Eventually, all of the discarded commands fill up the printer’s buffers and it begins to generate visible error messages in the form of a printout that says only, “Unsupported Personality: PCL”.
Turning the printer off and back on resets clears the buffers out, and the LaserJet 1012 works on Windows 7 again until there is another buffer overrun.
Unfortunately, since it is the printer’s buffers and not the computer’s printing buffers that are overflowing, occasionally restarting the spooler service or other printer services does NOT fix the error of the LaserJet 1012 eventually crapping out with a PCL unsupported error message.
A permanent fix for the HP LaserJet 1012 Windows 7 printer driver issue would then require using a printer driver that has a similarly misused version of PCL5. Unfortunately, HP was never very forthcoming about the fact that its little laser printer didn’t really support PCL5 like it said it did in the first place, so obviously, they are not too forthcoming about which other HP printers supported on Windows 7 use pretend PCL5 either — if there are any.
So, I continue to search for a usable work-around for using my HP LaserJet on Windows 7 until either
- a) I buy a new NON-HP printer to replace it. (HP is officially dead to me.)
- b) I find a driver and Windows 7 printer settings combination that works.
If you would like to help out, please let me know in the comments or an email or a direct message to Best Hubris on Twitter if you come across information about which other HP printers use bogus PCL5 instruction sets, as well as any suggestions you might have for which (if any) Windows 7 settings or printer configuration options might help mitigate the issue of poorly implemented PCL5 command processing leading to errors inside the printer.
HP LaserJet 1012 Printer Driver Windows 7 Failure
My HP LaserJet 1012 printer has been giving me an error message on Windows 7 ever since the release candidate first came out. I got over it at first figuring that it would be fixed in the final release of Windows 7, but unfortunately, that is not what happened. Instead, HP will not support Windows 7 on lots of printers it sold in the years leading up to the release of Windows 7 despite having supported many of them on Windows Vista, and the great similarity between Vista drivers and Windows 7 drivers.
The HP LaserJet printer line is a popular line of decent quality laser printers used in homes and small businesses. In fact, I used to heartily recommend HP printers to anyone who asked, and plenty who did not, whenever the topic came up. The reason for this recommendation is that in all my years supporting computers and networks the one brand of printer that never had any consistent trouble or “unique” trouble (I’m looking at you Brother and your scored fusers from paper jams).
Not only that, but HP printers are well known within the computer industry for lasting a long time. I can’t count the number of times I walked into someone’s cubical and saw some dinosaur HP LaserJet 4 chugging away on some 40 page report. (The original HP 4 laser printer was rated at eight pages per minute and got a lot closer to five pages per minute if you were printing anything other than a very simple page of text.) It was with deep disappointment and eventual distain that I heard HP would not support the HP LaserJet 1012 on Windows 7 operating system. The printer had been discontinued just four years before Widows 7 was released, and was a very popular seller thanks to quality printouts and low price. It all adds up to tens of thousands or more HP LaserJet printer owners left hanging high and dry without printer drivers.
The worst part about all of this is that it takes a college intern a couple of days to turn out a basic printer driver. Of course, that is the problem. The LaserJet series came with bloated multi-function driver / software bundles that nobody really wanted, and that very few people used. However, HP would find it even tougher to justify not upgrading the whole driver bundle than to just abandon the printer altogether.
If you got to this post by clicking on another on this site, then you know that I have found a functioning work-around for printing on Windows 7 with an HP LaserJet 1012 by using an HP LaserJet 3055 PCL5 driver.
However, that is a very imperfect fix because eventually the printer buffers fill up on the 1012 and it starts printing
Unsupported Personality: PCL
error messages as a single line on a blank page of paper. This is particularly inconvenient, because other than the error message on the print out page, there is no other error message. In fact, on the computer that prints there is no error message at all. Unless you are sitting next to the printer and monitoring what comes out of it, you can end up with a dozen error messages printed out and have no idea that it is all failing. In addition to the wasted paper, this is a big problem for those times when you are printing out 15 different lists or a dozen webpages one at a time. It is not always easy to find them again. After all, if you printed them, you probably weren’t planning on having to get back there electronically.
Good Software Development Ideas Google Chrome
Sometimes a good idea is so obvious you can’t help but wonder why no one had bothered doing it before.
Webmonkey reports that Google Chrome has released a new beta version of the Chrome browser that runs ALONGSIDE of the regular full-release version of the Google Chrome browser. The idea is that instead of having to commit to either the beta channel or the dev channel of Chrome as your one and only Chrome browser installed on your system, you could choose to have both a bleeding edge installation of Chrome with all of the latest features and functionality, while at the same time having a completely stable version of the browser installed as well.
This is such a great idea, it is a wonder that all beta software is not offered in this manner.
It wasn’t that long ago that beta software was something that was carefully controlled and offered only to specific partners who installed it in a testing environment. In this case, the only one model of software installation made perfect sense. Ever since Microsoft used mass beta and pre-release distribution and testing to go from releasing the embarrassing and widely hated Windows Vista to the almost complaint free Windows 7, software developers have been increasingly realizing the power of wide beta testing to virtually eliminate bugs and other issues before release. In this model the side-by-side beta version of software makes much more sense.
The developers of the Chrome Browser will no doubt see much wider adoption of its developer-level browser with the new Canary version that allows users to run both the "real" version of the browser and the new leading edge developer beta version at the same time. That broader usage will in turn allow bugs to be discovered and fixed more quickly and that will in turn allow Google to release updates to its Chrome browser faster than its rivals.
Like I said, some business strategy ideas are just so good, you wonder why they haven’t been used before.
Download Faster Any File Sharing Site Rapidshare Hotfile DepositFiles with JDownloader
While we do not condone piracy or copyright infringement in any form, the truth is that there are a lot of very useful files, programs, ebooks, white papers, research reports and more on the Internet’s numerous file sharing website services out there.
These days, there is less concern about sharing or hosting files on your own online profile or via one of the big free services like Live Spaces, Dropbox, and so on. However, there are still times where it would be better if particular files were not associated so closely with your name (competitor information, for example). And, even with generous online storage limits and high bandwidth traffic limits capable of handling most legitimate sharing purposes, there are still occasions where hosting on a dedicated file sharing service is better.
There are literally hundreds of online file sharing services, but some of the most popular are Rapidshare, Hotfiles, Depositfiles, and Fileshare. These file sharing websites offer anonymous free file hosting storage and sharing with varying features. You can require a password to access files or just allow anyone who gets the URL to be able to download the file.
Free Online File Host Services
Unlike social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, or specific purpose file sharing services like Flickr and Photobucket, the file sharing websites like Rapidshare and Depositfiles allow users to share any type of file. They also allow bigger files to be uploaded and most importantly do not require files to be associated with the user wishing to host the files online.
Therefore, a user could host all manner of controversial, topical, or large files and documents with little fear of repercussions or harassment.
For a researcher, access to exactly this type of books, research reports, notes, and white papers is very important. Rather than waiting days (or weeks) for an interlibrary loan of a doctoral dissertation written by a Harvard PhD candidate or just as long for one of the numerous law journals or other publications produced at colleges and universities around the country, an electronic version can often be found online with some diligent searching, or even with the help of a friendly librarian or fellow researchers.
Take a break Citibank rewards catalog 2010 review.
The catch to this utopia of free file hosting and unlimited bandwidth downloading for free is that it is not really free at all. Rather, each file hosting service permits anonymous users to download a small amount of material at a time. Some services go so far as to restrict free downloads to just one file per day or some equally low amount of megabytes in a 24 hour period. To get around this restriction, the file host offers a premium membership for a monthly fee or annual fee.
File Sharing Collaboration Strategy for Business
In theory, paying for access to unlimited files shared online would be a good business strategy. However, there are simply too many of these file sharing services out there, and it seems that every uploader has their favorite. To buy memberships to all of them would be absurd. Even a collection of premium memberships to Rapidshare and a handful of other major players could cost hundreds of dollars per month, not to mention the administrative burden of managing all of the premium accounts, usernames and passwords.
It is a situation crying out for a type of co-op where researchers, freelance writers, students, and others could each purchase a premium membership to one of the file sharing services and then share access between members of the cooperative. Of course, that requires either the insecure sharing of passwords and usernames while hoping for the best, or waiting on the person with the right membership to find download and then either re-upload or otherwise distribute the files needed to the original requester. Some sort of online service could manage the process for individual coops, but would need to be low profile to avoid being banned or blocked by the sharing services.
In the meantime, there is a very elegant solution allowing users to download for free from any file host like RapidShare, DepositFiles, HotFiles, and more. It is an open-source program called JDownloader. JDownloader works by handling all of the waiting, logging in, and downloading of files on the file hosts. If a captcha must be entered, JDownloader displays an unobtrusive pop-up box at the necessary time and the user can quickly enter the required Captcha without having to monitor a timer or countdown manually.
Furthermore, the software will wait on the user’s behalf for the next free time to open up, whether that is one hour or 24 hours and then automatically start downloading the requested files. It is not an instant process by any means, but online research requests can be queued up and then retrieved over a few hour or overnight if necessary.
JDownloader monitors the clipboard for URLs and then automatically adds them to its download queue to be reviewed by the user before the downloads are started. Downloading a dozen links off of a website requires simply right-clicking and choosing Copy URL for each link. No real waiting is required, because by the time the user can copy a new URL to the clipboard, JDownloader has already added it to the list of file downloads.
If you need to get a handful of books or files off of multiple file sharing websites, give JDownloader a try. It might just be the solution you are looking for… at least until I figure out that co-op thing… or someone beats me to it 
A final break if you need one for small business owners using section 179 deduction on taxes.
Free file sharing storage downloading is complete.
More small business strategies await you.
