The True Cost
The price tag on any given printer really tells only half the story. Many times the cheapest printer for sale isn't necessarily the cheapest printer to own. And what's the most affordable printer for you in particular? Depending on how many pages you print and how much it costs to print each page, a high-priced printer with expensive cartridges could be a lot cheaper to own in the long run than a less-expensive printer with low-cost cartridges.
Coming up with that long-run cost for comparison isn't always easy.
Before you can calculate the real cost of a printer, you need to know the cost per page. To get it, you need two numbers for each cartridge: the yield (how many pages the cartridge can print) and the price. But until recently, there's been no good way to find out the yield.
Printer manufacturers will tell you the yield they've found and, usually, the estimated cost per page. But printing different images, manipulating driver settings, or changing how you determine that a cartridge has reached the end of its life can all alter the yield you come up with. Without knowing if different manufacturers' tests are comparable, you have to take the claims with a proverbial grain of salt.
So the next time your shopping for a printer. Take the time to do the math. Just because the price tag looks good, doesnt mean your bank account will.
Finally an Affordable Cloud Service for Your Small Business
Well you have heard all about Cloud computing this past year as well as hearing it from us. With so many different options and pricing this solution has been mind boggling to say the least.
The beginning of the month Microsoft finally released its version to the Professional and SMB markets of Office 365.
Now you have access to Emails, documents, calendars, contacts and more, anywhere, any time, on any device.
It uses all the familiar tools we all have come to love such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, Word, Access and more. It offers the security and reliability you need to run your business.
Simplify your scheduling; collaborate on documents and calendars, with no need to have a server or dedicated IT staff on premises.
This is the solution that we have all been waiting for! Take the worry out of your IT.
We have implemented this solution in its Beta version to a few clients who cant love it enough.
The cost savings and the Microsoft guarantee of a 99.9% uptime tightly integrates cloud based services and on premise workloads to enable the users to maximize your current technology.
You can add on this solution at your own pace and needs, to get the full benefit of cloud computing that works for your business.
Kotori is a certified Microsoft Partner; ask us how to take the future of your business to the Cloud today.
July 4th Recipes
While you enjoy your Fourth of July, try one of these recipes:
What You Need
1-1/2 cups boiling water, divided
1 pkg. (3 oz.) JELL-O Berry Blue Flavor Gelatin
1 cup ice cubes, divided
1 HONEY MAID Graham Pie Crust (6 oz.)
1 pkg. (3 oz.) JELL-O Strawberry Flavor Gelatin, or any red flavor
1 cup thawed COOL WHIP Whipped Topping
Make It
ADD 3/4 cup boiling water to blue gelatin mix; stir 2 min. until completely dissolved. Add 1/2 cup ice cubes; stir until melted. Pour into crust; refrigerate 5 to 10 min. or until set but not firm.
MEANWHILE, repeat to dissolve red gelatin mix in separate bowl; stir in remaining ice cubes. Cool 5 min. or until slightly thickened.
SPREAD COOL WHIP over blue gelatin layer; cover with red gelatin. Refrigerate 2 hours or until set.
Another wonderful 4th of July dessert perfect for any family get together are Uncle Sam Ice Cream Cones.
This dessert requires cake cones, white frosting, red and blue decorating gels, red and blue M&Ms and a canister of ready made whipped cream. You will also need a scoop of vanilla ice cream for each dessert.
Simply drop a scoop of ice cream on each plate and return to the freezer to harden. Next, construct an Uncle Sam hat out of a cake cone.
Use frosting and gels to decorate the cones with stripes and stars so that they resemble a patriotic top hat. Star tips work great with the white frosting to create star buttons and decorations around the base of the cone.
When the hat is complete, remove the ice cream scoop or Uncle Sam's Head from the freezer. Top the head quickly and add red and blue M&Ms for the face and nose. Add a whipped cream beard using the ready whip and serve Uncle Sam immediately.
Amazon Cloud VS Google Music VS iCloud
Amazon Cloud Player
Lets look at the first cloud music solution brought to us by Amazon. Cloud Player works hand in hand with Cloud Drive, the web-based storage platform created to deal with its cloud offering. With the service offering a browser based user interface, any internet connected PC or Mac will be compatible. At present Android seems to be the only mobile device platform supported by Amazon, although other platforms could be added shortly. The service provides customers with 5GB of storage space to get started, but users who make a purchase at the Amazon US MP3 store during 2011 will automatically be given a 20GB upgrade for a single year. Not bad. Perhaps this deal is some kind of incentive to sway consumers away from Apples iTunes and over to Amazons MP3 store. Im not sure that it will work like Amazon hopes, but its certainly a nice offer.
Also, Amazon has claimed that it will keep all your stored music online for a lifetime, which where we come from means until youre dead. Again, this is a nice feature unless you plan on leaving your cloud storage to a relative, that is.
Unlike Apples determination to sign the big four record labels, Amazon released the service without obtaining any sort of legal deal with them. One stunned music executive was quoted saying that many in the industry questioned the services legality. The anonymous executive said: "I've never seen a company of their size make an announcement, launch a service and simultaneously say they're trying to get licenses," said the executive.
Unlike iClouds offering, there are no additional costs to upload your music sourced from elsewhere. Amazon simply charges if you need to expand on your cloud drives free capacity. The service will also allow you to re-download your MP3/ACC files to 8 devices.
Music Beta by Google
Just like Amazon, the current beta seems to have no legal backup from copyright holders. Launched at the Google I/O conference, the service hasnt really set the world talking. With Adobe Flash powering the Android-centric platform at present, iOS devices go unsupported. It also seems, however, that Android devices are also the only method of re-downloading your content. In terms of storage, Google approaches capacity by the number of songs instead of storage space. With the ability to upload 20,000 songs theres plenty of room to hide your embarrassing guilty pleasures. Just like Amazon, both MP3 and ACC files can be uploaded, with the lesser used WMA and FLAC formats also supported too. Unlike its rivals, users cant purchase music via the system as Google has no music store to compete with iTunes or the Amazon MP3 Store, which could be a bad thing for the search giant depending on how you look at it.
iCloud and iTunes Match
The major difference between the iCloud service and its opponents is the lack of browser support. Apple once again has kept the walled garden gate shut by requiring users to be running iTunes (yeseven the Windows version) or an iOS device.
The idea behind iCloud and iTunes Match clearly leaves out streaming from the agenda, your music must be fully downloaded to play. This process is made much easier by the automatic syncing between the iCloud and your devices.
A big advantage Apple has over its rivals is that iTunes Match will literally match your non-iTunes music and download a high quality 256 kbps AAC version of the songs. Once again the iCloud service is free (replacing the paid-for MobileMe) with iTunes Match setting you back a yearly fee of $25.
By matching your files up with the limited 5GB, iCloud will then use an already in the cloud file (from the iTunes server) to push this to up to 10 of your iOS devices. This saves the hassle and time of large amounts of data being uploaded to the iCloud servers via end-users limited internet connection.
Conclusion
Without knowing Googles future pricing plan it is hard to tell which one of these services I will use in the future but for right now I will stick with Music Beta by Google. I am doing this mostly because of the massive storage space allowed. I have around 4,000+ songs. Googles offering allows me to upload 16,000 more songs. I uploaded all of my music to Amazons Cloud Player and have only 3 GB of space left. I cannot test out Apples offering because I do not have an iOS device. But Apples lack of streaming or being able to play my music in a web browser is a major buzz kill on the product for me.
But as the saying goes, to each his (or her) own. Let us know if you try any of these out and which one you like the most.
Are We Green Yet?
Well we hope not to see $5.00 a gallon, but it looks inevitable. Sure it would be nice to drive a small gas sipper, but most people cant fit their families in any of these. Workers still need big trucks and vans, public transportation prices rise because of gas, your commercial workers need to charge more to the consumer for travel time. What are we doing about our future? Is electric the answer? Not likely. Not enough power and the recycling issue for the old batteries would be a nightmare. Our country relies too much on the Middle East for their oil, in Canada their now extracting oil from soil in the Northern part of Alberta, this would be good to cut the Middle East out, however to process for extracting the buy product is extremely expensive. So instead of looking to the Government and oil companies for a solution, (which is not in their best interest) lets find out what the Automotive industries are going to do, they are the ones manufacturing these necessary liabilities. Air Products. Inc, in a joint venture with Toyota opened the first ever pipeline feed hydrogen fueling station in California. Is this the future of transportation? A resounded YES is the answer! GM as well as Honda has been manufacturing and testing these H vehicles since early 1999. It is amazing what they are doing. Honda issued the first public H vehicle on the market this year, the Honda FCX Clarity. A very sporting looking ride, it looks like any new Accord thats on the road today. The best part of all this is ZERO emissions! The cars only emit water vapor. Pure H2O. I dont want to just limit all the kudos to GM and Honda. Toyota, Mercedes and others for the past few years have been researching this alternative as well. And it was Toyota that did open the first public station. Will we see more stations around the country? We can only hope that our future will be environmentally safe as well as affordable to us, the consumers.