I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in the BU computer lab. It’s not that I don’t have my own computer; I have two. It’s not that I don’t have high speed internet access; I have DSL at home and a wireless network in the law school. Why am I wasting my time down here then? The BU lab has something extraordinary: the ability to print.
The printing is done through a couple centralized printers. This makes a lot of sense. Sharing is almost always more efficient that doing something on your own. Some examples: (1) You get a bigger apartment for the same amount of money when you share; (2) food is cheaper when you share (bulk costs); (3) transportation is more efficient when you share (car vs light-rail); etc. Consequently, the printing in the computer seems pretty inexpensive, though I can’t figure out what it is actually costing. Plus I get laser quality, which is good when it’s raining out (doesn’t smear) like it is today.
The system could be better though. You can print from any of the terminals in the computer lab (and there are a lot of terminals), but you can’t seem to print remotely. I think it’d be really cool if you just print from home and pick up the documents on your way to school. I brought my laptop yesterday to see if I could print directly from it, plugging it into the network. This didn’t work. Today I figured out that instead of emailing my files onto ever-so-slow hotmail account, I could just FTP them and download them at the terminal. This saves some time. There are a lot of barriers to printing from another network though. I think I might have figured out a way to do it, but it’s going to take a lot of steps and may not prove faster than just coming down here (after all, you have to come down anyway to pick up the printing – the goal is to avoid the wait while your documents print, this can take hours if there is a long print queue).
Why not make a system that would allow BU students to print from home? It could probably be developed for less than the cost of one row of computers in the computer lab, as many of which are probably being used exclusively for printing anyway.