🚀 go-pugleaf

What if someone installed a laser printer, and people actually used
it?

Obviously, there's going to be better planning next time a printer is
installed :).

Lets see, offhand, some choices are:

- Find money to run the printer.
- Give users a quota, perhaps a daily quota.
- Restrict the type of usage allowed.
- Encourage students to use X based previewers.
- Tutor them in efficient usage of resources.
- Make them pay for their own use.

Why not ask students what they think would be a good idea? After all,
they're your customers.

Sean
-- 
** Sean Casey  <sean@s.ms.uky.edu>

In article <1991Jun12.123238.17236@ms.uky.edu> sean@ms.uky.edu (Sean Casey) writes:
>What if someone installed a laser printer, and people actually used
>it?
>
>- Find money to run the printer.
>- Give users a quota, perhaps a daily quota.
>- Restrict the type of usage allowed.
>- Encourage students to use X based previewers.
>- Tutor them in efficient usage of resources.
>- Make them pay for their own use.
>
We have instituted a policy of allowing nothing but three-hole punched
paper that is supplied by the department.  Since no one is going to want
that stuff too often except for homework assignments, it should work
out.  Also, we allow printing on a separate machine and printer with
whatever paper you want for 10 cents a page.  (We don't supply THAT
paper).

That works out for the most part.
-- 
Joshua R. Poulson                          [Joshua.R.Poulson@cyber.Widener.EDU]
"I speak only for myself, okay?"           [poulson@cs.Widener.EDU]
"It is better to play the game and lose than it is to argue about the
instructions." (Me, 1991)

carterp@deakin.OZ.AU (Phil Carter) writes:
>    We have a number of laser printers, HP DeskJets, etc about the
>campus which use single sheet paper. We are finding that students
>are using an enormous amount of paper and ink (the DeskJet ink
>costs more than the paper) and that 99% of students' printout
>finishes in the garbage bin. We want to cut down on the wastage

What kind of terminals do you have?  Looking at a program or a large paper
on a 24x80 is vastly inferior to being able to spread out a stack of paper
and look at 5 or 6 sheets at once.  Large-screen graphics terminals almost
make that possible.

The next question would be why are the expensive printers the only ones
available?  It would make more sense to have several high-speed line printers
that use cheap paper; if the turnaround faster than a laser printer (not hard
to do) people will naturally prefer it unless they have a compelling reason
for quality output.

You can possibly reduce the paper costs by using recycled paper and by
recycling the used printer paper (I don't know offhand what the market for
recycled paper is like in Australia, though).  That doesn't help the problem
of the cost of DeskJet ink, but hey, you bought a one-time cheap printer with
high operating costs...

If you just simply want to stop students from printing things, the answer
is really simple:  don't give them computer accounts.  That way, they don't
use up expensive electricity, either.

In article <1429@sol.deakin.OZ.AU> Phil Carter writes:
> We are finding that students are using an enormous amount of paper and ink...

In <KIRAVUO.91Jun13212300@vipunen.hut.fi> Timo Kiravuo writes:

> ... [they] can't think any farther than their own nose. Like
> those that print ten copies of a single document instead of using
> a copying machine, since copying costs but printing does not. 

They're being given the wrong signals by the price structure.  If
you want them to think of printing as more expensive than copying,
then _make_ it more expensive!

> The best way may be to educate users. And have them watch their
> peers. 

I don't think so.  You can't educate people that the world is one
way, when all _immediate_ evidence tells them that it patently is
not.  (People seem to have this peculiar tendency to believe the
real world in prefercnce to what people tell them :-)

> We have not yet installed print limits, but it could be done.
> In the comp. sci. lab they had a limit at one time, but I don't
> think that it is in use anymore. And it gets more difficult since
> the systems are more and more distributed.

Yes, implementation of such things is pretty tricky.  (If you're
interested in a _real_ solution to such problems, contact me.)

> One way to limit printing is to get slow lasers instead of fast
> ones.

> One idea is that each printer would be given a weekly amount of
> paper and ink, but that would only mean a big rush to print in
> monday. No use. But instead you could announce in December that
> this years budget for printing is used up, and there shall be no
> printing until you can get an extra budget. What I am aming at is
> to make the users feel that printing is a limited resource that
> they have to care about. None of that idiotic 'there is plenty
> more where that came from' culture.

Not _so_ idiotic, just selfish.  If the paper and ink just keep
appearing, then why think any differently?  Announcements from on
high that there is no more paper or ink will be met with skepticism
and disbelief: "why, a ream of 500 sheets only costs $8 in the
shops, and ink can't be all that expensive!  What's their game?"

I'll agree that this sort of attitude displays a remarkable
short-sightedness and lack of concern for others, but people commonly
behave this way in a large crowd of strangers, especially when they
think nobody is watching.  I believe that people typically don't
have qualms about being selfish when the ones they are depriving
are anonymous: part of a great unknown herd.

If you want a large crowd of users to behave responsibly, then you
have to give them a system in which each individual or clique must
pay for their own usage.  In such an environment they will quickly
form economical and responsible habits.  There's nothing quite like
learning by experience.

If your community of users is quite small, however, then appealing
to their social conscience should work.  (By small, I mean that
everyone is acquainted with almost everyone else.)

--
Andrew Bettison - Softway Pty Ltd

Phone	+61-2-698-2322	  Internet	andrewb@softway.sw.oz.au 
Fax	+61-2-699-9174	  UUCP		uunet!softway.sw.oz.au!andrewb

There was a discussion here at Rutgers a while back on how to prevent
non-comp sci students from using computer science equipment.  Currently
the unattended Macintosh labs have dot matrix printers which are 
inadequate for the needs.  To install laser printers in an unattended lab
would mean that non-comp-sci students would use them as word processing
stations and comp sci students would have to wait.

Some of the solutions were: use bright orange paper and black toner or
white paper and colored toner (assuming this would discourage people
who want to print a thesis or other paper, while the comp sci professors
would know about the procedure and accept it), or hack the Mac Laserwriter
driver to print "DCS STUDENT PRINTOUT" faintly underneath the regular
printing (this would be overridden by people with unhacked laserwriter
drivers on their system disks).

While this might not cut down on excessive student use of resources,
it would certainly make sure that only the right students use the
equipment that is provided for a particular use.

>In article <1429@sol.deakin.OZ.AU> Phil Carter writes:
>> We are finding that students are using an enormous amount of paper and
ink...
>In <KIRAVUO.91Jun13212300@vipunen.hut.fi> Timo Kiravuo writes:
>> ... [they] can't think any farther than their own nose. Like
>> those that print ten copies of a single document instead of using
>> a copying machine, since copying costs but printing does not. 

But it should be noteed that printing on a laser printer can be a lot cheaper
than copying on a photocopier. There is a lot of folklore about printing costs
-- and it sometimes distorts resource consumption almost as much as bad pricing
structures do. 

Impression cost on a Xerox 4050 running at typical volume is a little over
.02/impression; a desktop photocopier is about .07/impression. So making copies
on the 4050 rather than a desktop photocopier *saves* money. Ok, make the laser
printer smaller and the photocopier bigger and soon the comparison is reversed
-- better to make those ten copies on a Kodak 300 Ektaprint or Xerox 5200 than
an Apple Laserwriter NT. But in the grey area of the middle it is harder to
say: should you make copies on a HP IIISi or QMS workgroup printer or carry
them to the office Canon NP5(???)?  

This takes only cost into account and ignores revenue and labor. Add those
things in and things become even more complicated. For instance, I don't like
to see some professional staff person (professor, programmer, engineer,
scientist, manager, etc) walking a master from the laser printer to a
photocopier across the street to do 5 copies of a short document.  That doesn't
pay. Sure consumable supplies for cartridge based marking engines are expensive
(that, by the way, is where the cost is) but people are much more expensive.
And I *never* want to see staff walking a master printed on a mid+ volume laser
printer with independent consumables to a photocopier, any photocopier. That's
just throwing money away. 

oops, I forgot. These are students. Well, maybe that changes it. And they are
digging into their pockets in front of some machines and not others. I dunno. I
like Douglas Houweling's attitude in a computing planning report he wrote when
he was Vice-Provost for Computing and Planning at Carnegie-Mellon:
"Carnegie-Mellon University...places very heavy demands on the time of its
students and faculty ... CMU is very conscious of the need to make efficient
use of student time..." John McCredie, ed. *Campus Computing Strategies, 1983. 

Anyway, wherever possible lets encourage rational pricing schemes that really
reflect costs and encourage productivity and discourage 'islands of automation'
(printing a master on one marking engine and then hand carrying it to another
-- yuck).

I heard that at Penn State, they changed the laser printers so that
they need to recieve verification before they print - this comes in
the form of a card-reader which reads their venda-card and charges
them $1 a page for printouts from the laser printers.  Sounds workable
to me - though I've not too much information about it.



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In article <IcLyeuu00j5uE1oo0c@andrew.cmu.edu>, jb3o+@andrew.cmu.edu (Jon Allen Boone) writes:
> 
> I heard that at Penn State, they changed the laser printers so that
> they need to recieve verification before they print - this comes in
> the form of a card-reader which reads their venda-card and charges
> them $1 a page for printouts from the laser printers.  Sounds workable
> to me - though I've not too much information about it.
> 


	Sounds workable, yes.  But it also sounds rediculously expensive.
Does one sheet of laser printing really cost that much?  Here at the 
University of Utah undergrads have quotas, and so long as we are under quota, 
no charges are incurred.  Should we need more than our quota of paper, we can
buy more, but it most certainly isn't a dollar a page.  I think a quarter
is more reasonable.  

Michael Moore
(University of Utah)

<=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=>
"News Flash: Penn State Riot"

  '....many casualties as students held hostage several University 
   administrators, demanding a 75% decrease in laser printing costs...'
<=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=><=--=>

In article <Jun.19.14.27.43.1991.26118@aramis.rutgers.edu>, pirmann@aramis.rutgers.edu (David Pirmann) writes:
> There was a discussion here at Rutgers a while back on how to prevent
> non-comp sci students from using computer science equipment.  Currently
> the unattended Macintosh labs have dot matrix printers which are 
> inadequate for the needs.  To install laser printers in an unattended lab
> would mean that non-comp-sci students would use them as word processing
> stations and comp sci students would have to wait.
>... 

	There are devices that hook up to laser printers that allow them to
work like photocopiers.  The student puts in a "copy card" --which is also used
in campus copy machines, that deducts $0.0x cents for each page (currently 8
cents, I believe, making it 1-2 higher than photocopying).

	The laser is then hooked up to one Mac.  The students can do their work
anywhere, but must bring it to that machine to print out.  The imagewriters are
still free.

	This was done because of excessive abuse (resumes, ads, maps, etc.
being printed).

	If you want more info, you can contact the Mac person directly at

vsmith@wsu.bitnet
or
vsmith@desire.wright.edu

Brett
=============================OFFICIAL=DISCLAIMER================================
The opinions and views expressed here are strictly my own and do not 
necessarily reflect the official position of either the U.S. Air Force 
or its contractors.
=====================DO=NOT=REMOVE=TAG=UNDER=PENALTY=OF=LAW===:)================
    

I'm intrigued by this copy-card, venda-card, whatever-you-like-to-call-it
card reader for laser printers. 

Does anyone have any info on vendors or prices for these devices?
(perhaps someone from Penn State, where they seem to be in use?)

Mail or post at your discretion.

Thanks,

-- 
Eric Bushnell
Univ of Washington Civil Engineering
etb@u.washington.edu