HP's Strange Obsession With WebOS For Printers

ryzvonusef writes "VentureBeat's (typically unnamed) sources identifies Intel and Qualcomm as being involved in talks for acquiring the Palm asset portfolio. However, citing sources intimate with HP's negotiations, it reports that the company wants to be able to license webOS back for use in printers; it wants it so much, in fact, that the issue has become 'a crucial part' of discussions. Maybe there's something about webOS and printers that HP knows and the rest of the world doesn't."

Well...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

On the bright side, absolutely anything would be better than the utter shit that passes for firmware in their present models.

I had the delightful experience just the other day of encountering an HP wireless laser printer(a comparatively low-volume one; but a full 'Hi, I'm a networked device on the network' sort of thing) that would simply hang and drop off the network until power-cycled if you attempted to print to it using the HP 'Universal' print driver...

So, not only was this thing such a piece of shit that it wasn't compatible with HP's own, supposedly, 'universal' driver(PCL motherfucker, do you speak it?); but HP's own UPD could be used as an attack toolkit for a DOS that could only be recovered by a hard power cycle.

Now, if HP actually believes that there is some kind of "People who want a non-ipad with a shittastic inkjet attached, for reasons unknown to normal humans" market, I'd be delighted to sell them a bridge. If their doomed effort to build WebOS printers at least means that their network-attached printers will be running a linux kernel that doesn't fall over and die at the first sign of malformed network input, I'll be a lot happier...

Re:THERE BE GOLD IN THEM THAR INK CARTS !!

[SJHillman]

Ink is not toner. Toner is reasonably priced compared to inkjet cartridges, which is why there's only silver in toner cartridges. And I saw this with my hands covered in toner after spending the past hour digging through a HP LaserJet looking for a damned stuck sensor.

Someday I'm gonna weasel my way into the boardroom

[james_van]

and take over a company. Not out of greed or a need for power, but to prove a point - that I can run a company at least as well as an "executive". Day after day we hear about absolutely moronic decisions like this being made, and we listen to suits blither on and on about vision and direction (while it's glaringly obvious that they are completely out of touch with reality) and I really, honestly believe that I could walk in and at the very least not do any worse than them. Maybe it's cause I've spent my whole life at the bottom with the rest of the unwashed masses and I still (so naively) believe that a company who listens to its customers (and good common sense) can be more successful that a company who caters to its shareholders whims, maybe I'm just an idiot. But someday, mark my words, I'm gonna weasel my way into a CEO spot and I'm gonna try my damnedest to do something smart! And then I'm gonna get promptly fired and go back to my cubicle and write PHP.