I think printers are a nice example of "Tragedy of the Anticommons" [1] or maybe a fine example of enshittification [2] where all printer producers are equally bad and therefore continue to be bad because of lack of competition.
Also, try to start a new printer brand today that is user-friendly, and you'll be blown out of the water by patent trolls. And if you do manage to live, your shareholders will force you to squeeze more juice out of your loyal customers.
It’s not because of a lack of competition but because of a lack of better patent laws. It is today near impossible to create a new printer without hitting any of the thousands patents (mines) that HP (and others) have. HP is not breaking any antitrust laws since technically they are not abusing their power against the market and against competitors ~directly~, so they do not break antitrust law. But they do it through abusing patents laws. Technically they are doing everything the law says…
HP hold the guns and if you dare compete good luck not infringing any of their patents and get sued. They love the cash cow it creates, the security their parents provides against competition and antitrust laws, and the lack of innovation and having to spend more money on R&D is fine for them.
If you sue them for breaking antitrust law they will show you how they don’t and how you are free to create your own printer company. But in reality again good luck not hitting any of their patents.
Patent laws are quite broken and will be for a long time. We need to change them.
Patents only last 20 years. Laser printers have been around for way longer than that. What's preventing someone from making printers with 2000s technology?
My guess is: the possibility of some of those patents having been refreshed through incremental modification, combined with the unwillingness to assert that you aren't infringing on any of the newer patents, should one of the major players disagree with you.
I don't get why people still advise the use of this junk. Are they really that ignorant of normal peoples use cases?
The processors and memory capacity on these things are so antiquated that unless you are printing text in a font that is onboard the printer you are waiting forever for it to "process" the document and then fail because it ran out of ram to be able to fit the page to draw it on to the drum.
Once you get the document processed and into ram, you are then waiting even longer because these printers actually have slow print speed.
All so you can save on some cheap toner and have some sort of perceived "reliability".
Its like those people who tell everyone to just use Linux. Yeah use it...if your time is worth nothing.
Have you ever used a LJ-III? Clearly not. It was probably the finest printer of its type made since the beginning of microcomputers.
You actually missed the point, it was its reliability I was talking about (if you'd ever seen one then my comment would have been self-evident). And I wasn't advising others to use one.
It was built like a tank, nothing breaks and it takes a lot of bashing. I purchased it over 30 years ago and it still works because it was built in the days when engineers ran HP and not fucking accountants.
"Once you get the document processed and into ram, you are then waiting even longer because these printers actually have slow print speed."
This is the clincher fact. Nothing like that happens, it works damn fast—no RAM delay and no waiting to print. (If I want more than 300dpi I just change to another printer.)
>Have you ever used a LJ-III? Clearly not. It was probably the finest printer of its type made since the beginning of microcomputers.
I have owned a LJ-IIp, Laserjet 5p, and currently have a Laserjet 4050tn(with less than 5,000 sheets on the engine) in the corner serving as a paperweight.
If I had known prices would explode post COVID I wouldn't have sent the others to recycling where they belong.
>You actually missed the point, it was its reliability I was talking about (if you'd ever seen one then my comment would have been self-evident). And I wasn't advising others to use one.
I did not miss the point but you seemed to have missed mine so let me reword it: Giving up everything else for "reliability" is not ideal because you just have a reliable printer that makes you miserable.
>It was built like a tank, nothing breaks and it takes a lot of bashing. I purchased it over 30 years ago and it still works because it was built in the days when engineers ran HP and not fucking accountants.
It was built during the days where they had text mode only and if you were lucky your printer could process some fonts on board. It sounds like thats all you print anyway. If you print a PDF of any meaningful complexity you'll be in a world of hurt real quick. I know from experience. All of a sudden all the reliability in the world means nothing because I can't get the contents of the darn file on to a piece of paper.
>This is the clincher fact. Nothing like that happens, it works damn fast—no RAM delay and no waiting to print. (If I want more than 300dpi I just change to another printer.)
The new printer printed three pages in the time it took the old one to print one! Don't even try to print a pdf or anything with graphics on it.
In addition to the engine just being faster, the speed is limited by the CPU in the printer that decodes the file and the speed by which it receives it: both of which are slower on the old printer. That is if you don't run out of RAM and then the printer errors out.
You have rose colored glasses on. This is like those crazy cat people who continue to justify their love for an animal that is scratching them and destroying their stuff all the time.
The top comment in that link is literally advocating for what I am advocating for. Forget the 30 year old junk and buy a modern business class laser printer...and you are set for most use cases.
My brother Laser printer still works great after 5 years or more, I think MacOS got a lot worse at printing to it though in the last major version... I have to remove the printer, reboot and re-add it most times. Or I just print from my phone which always works.
Also a satisfied Brother laser printer user. I have the unit blocked in my router so it can't surreptitiously update its firmware and start doing this.
I always buy the Brother toner cartridges because they're the best quality, reasonably priced, and I want to support the business model of the only(?) decent printer manufacturer left.
All of this said, if I found out the printer was locking out third-party toner cartridges, I'd stop at nothing to defeat the lock, and would only use knockoff toner from then on.
It's an honor system through and through, I hope somebody in charge takes note.
>I have the unit blocked in my router so it can't surreptitiously update its firmware and start doing this.
Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you do this without blocking wifi printing? Are you just stopping network egress from the printers IP address?
Edit - by wifi printing I mean on the same network, in house.
> >I have the unit blocked in my router so it can't surreptitiously update its firmware and start doing this.
> Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you do this without blocking wifi printing? Are you just stopping network egress from the printers IP address?
> Edit - by wifi printing I mean on the same network, in house.
I can guess that their routing table only allows routing from/to the printer's IP in the local network (wired or wireless). Any packet to/from outside world for the printer is dropped.
I've experienced this. My $500 MFC is a brick unless I go out and purchase a genuine Brother toner, despite having spent several hundred dollars on a stash of generics. At some point they just stopped working.
And just to be clear: they didn't just disable the printer; I can't even use the scanner on top unless I go and buy the Brother toners.
Screw Brother. I'm tired of reading that they're "the one good brand" out there. They are very not.
> Screw Brother. I'm tired of reading that they're "the one good brand" out there. They are very not.
OK but is there any other alternative? Wife's SME: two Brother printers (these are with official support for everything although I did have to modify a few settings here or there when they moved office and their router IP changed for example). Home number one: Brother printer. Home number two: Brother printer.
It's really pathetic if they started preventing other toners from working but they're still fine machines.
What would I replace our four Brother laser printers with?
Basically I read your post and Brother "won": I'll just make sure to buy official Brother toners. Which sucks.
Canon, I guess? The Canon MF4150 that I bought some 15 years ago is still humming along well, and doesn't mind using third-party toners. No idea how they are now though.
I upgraded my Mac and it resulted in my brother mfc losing the ability to scan from the mac. It seems brother did not port the driver to the new OS. Accordingly, they are dirt and I will not buy from them again.
Yes, and as with HP, the secret appears to be, buy used.
I too have an old Brother that I keep around. Some years back I bought an HP on eBay that was at least 5 years old at the time — it was a model that the 3rd party toner companies had figured out how to hack.
In fact, that is generally my suggestion: to determine which used printer to shop for, find the ink/toner cartridges that are in abundance and see which models they work with.
I suppose software support is the only danger of this (although it has not bitten me yet). But I believe there are perhaps open-source or 3rd party solutions here?
Mine has a dodgy power connection somehow, and will refuse to turn on most of the time (depending on star alignment and where it was plugged in). Maybe if I could remove the power cable, I could check if that's the issue.
Okay, I guess anything's removable if you try hard enough.
I have a very small and simple Samsung laser printer I think I bought it 9 years ago. It's been amazing for the odd printout I do every year. No dry ink, fast and no frills connecting it to any OS through USB.
I should use my arduino one to make some sort of printer server.
I have an HP 1200 laserjet (b&w) that's 24 years old. The biggest problem is the parallel port interface but it's still the family printer. Not sure what we'll do when it dies...
I also have a straightforward Samsung laser from about 2016 or so. It is the only laser printer I know about that has the capability, and specific settings, to print on a range of paper weights, including heavier stock. It has been dead reliable but, a few years ago, the toner cartridges became hard to get and tripled in price from about $36 to over $100. Third party cartridges that I tried don’t work nearly as well or last nearly as long as the Samsung toner. I stopped using it and it now sits in a closet.
I just recently wanted to print a 250 pages pdf "book" that we did for my grandma with her recipes. we wanted to print all pages in color but oh my god, printing services were EXTREMELY expensive at around $0.70 usd per page!! It would have costed more than $150 to print the whole thing.
Then I looked at self printing. Buying an inkjet and 1 set of ink carts was like $130. Even if I borrowed the printer, the ink was VERY expensive.
It is 2023... printing pages should be extremely cheap both in color and b&w. Why hasn't there been innovation in that front?
There has, but it's mainly targeted towards workarounds for the walled gardens.
For $100 on AliExpress you'll find ink by the liter instead of milliliter, syringes or custom cartridges to refill the printer, and "chip reset" tools, if applicable.
It sucks that you need to do that, but with a bit of research in advance you can get a cheap printer and escape the razorblade model.
I have a printer I like but my experience is that the minute I print something the ink cartridge announces it’s low. It’ll run for a long time, but it’s like having a neighbor who’s fire alarm is going off at all times. It sours the ownership experience, even if I buy and keep a bucketful of spare ink cartridges handy.
There has been innovation. Epson marketed new inkjets that take liquid ink which is quite cheap. Something like $10 per bottle which can last for thousands of pages. Perhaps you should check them out. The line-up is called "ink tank". Other manufacturers have followed suit with similar products.
Third party companies were producing retrofit continuous ink systems years before the printer manufacturers introduced introduced ink tank printers.
With ink tank printers, you pay extra to escape the "razor and blades" pricing model. Probably worth it if you print sufficient volume using an inkjet.
I don't know if you checked it out, but there are a lot of specific book printing services like Kindle Direct Publishing where they will print your book for a lot less than that. The quoted base price for a large trim premium (larger than 6.12inx9in) color print book is $1 + $0.08 per page.
To me it's not lack of competition, probably the opposite, with a loss-of-value effect. People don't value printers anymore so if <brand> sells a 50 bucks printer.. they won't buy HP 200 bucks printer.. now HP doesn't pay their R&D anymore and start producing cheap models with more bloatware and tries to make money on ink.
It was surprising how complex cheap printers are compared to prosumer models where things are like lego. Nicely modularized, few pluggable blocks, clean and simple where as entry level ones use the same old design with tons of parts, screws and plastic clipping..
Patents for essential printer technologies should be well expired by now, patent terms not to exceed 20 years by international convention, if I'm not mistaken.
You can't benefit from the latest but the inkjets and lasers of 20 years ago were pretty good and had more or less assumed their modern form already.
My suspicion is more that it is a difficult market make decent margins in. The effort to lock in consumers to name-brand consumables, even by Brother these days, seems to belie that problem. Maybe there are other hurdles like sweetheart deals with chem manufacturers as well, I don't know.
Incumbents don't need to win any suits against you, just drag them out long enough to bankrupt you. You're probably right that you could build a nice printer with unpatented tech, but you'll end up in front of a judge in the eastern district of Texas anyway, possibly for years.
Untrue, clear-cut cases with plain facts like a patent being expired are dismissed with prejudice straight off the bat. Judges can be unreasonable but not to that degree, even in shitty districts.
I can't find a single example of this happening. Perhaps it has given someone some trouble but it would be exceedingly rare. It's hard to imagine anyone trying, the law explicitly forbids it.
There is intense competition. The printers themselves are remarkably cheap. I remember selling a colour QMS printer in the nineties for £25,000. You could get the same quality now for £50.
The problem is that competition to provide a cheap printer has driven away all the profits so of course the manufacturers start looking elsewhere.
Which Brother printer do you recommend? Several years ago (I'd guess 10?) I bought one (also a laser) because of comments like yours, and I was very disappointed. The print quality was considerably poorer than the Samsung it was replacing, and it died after just a couple of years.
I paid hundreds of dollars to smash a car flat with a big yellow excavator one time. [1] It was very worth it. Let me tell you the secret to smashing a car with an excavator: Command the bucket to hang above the car by a few feet, then suddenly drop it down into the car. This way, gravity will help the hydraulics to drag the mass of the bucket downwards through the car and you'll get a much more powerful strike and reduce wear on the hydraulics.
I like the concept, and I guess kids would like it since I know kids like garbage trucks and fire trucks and stuff. I just never would have expected someone to actually build it.
I hate printers, especially HP, Epson and Canon, smashing them gives me great joy and relief.
These mongrel devices cause me untold problems, waste my money, never print when I'm in a hurry, have nobbled ink cartridges that go belly-up with lots of remaining ink, have no manual override when printing stops for no apparent reason, or the slightest problem stops the print spooler, etc. etc. — ad nauseam!
My way of dealing with these evil-intented contraptions is to chuck them out of a second-story window so they land on concrete. That softens them up for further bashing with a sledgehammer or axe.
I always feel wonderful afterwards.
What we need is a printer-smashing Olympics to find and finely hone the best methods! It would have different classes and categories—for example, 'Smash with forklifts', 'Destroy with .50 Browning Machine Gun', 'Drop from helicopter', and so on.
Of course, there should be a special HP category aimed at finding the fastest and most inventive method of removing these evil devices from the planet.
Crowd-sourcing would provide the prize money and the winners and best entries would have a special YouTube channel or TV series. Printer companies should be shamed out of existence and shareholders and investors in these companies should be publicly exposed and made a mockery of—like we once did when we chucked society's most egregious offenders in the stocks.
Eventually, with enough effort we could bring these bastard printer companies to heel.
I was working for a small IT company in 1999 when Office Space came out, and remember vividly when that scene came on. We were so hyped up! Printers were our nemesis, and this really captured the emotions we all had around them.
Every other part of the tech industry has improved dramatically. I complain about modern stuff quite a bit, but I do not have to restart my computer multiple times per day and most stuff usually works. Printers? Modern printers seem to work about half the time, they’re slow to start printing, sometimes they don’t work at all, and ink has gotten more expensive over time. Old impact printers STILL WORK without error every time you ask them to. Most prints are text, so what the heck?
Search quality, in particular, has taken a huge hit over the past ten years.
...It's absolutely insane to me that the exact search operator (" ") no longer works. Google automatically assumes that it always knows what I'm looking for better than I do.
This is why I tend to split the difference and go with a SOHO printer, that is a step up from consumer-grade but doesn't break the bank. Currently it's an HP M1536dnf, which had great amazing Linux support, and still going strong after almost 12 years: no maintenance, and only a light surface dusting once in a while.
Unfortunately, the end is in sight for this device: my Chromebook doesn't support scanning on it. I've already permanently mothballed its POTS FAX feature, because I disconnected my landline. So when my Windows 10 machine dies, I won't have any scanning capability. Do I still need that flatbed/ADF scanning when I can just use my smartphone camera? Hmm.
I have been using black and white Brother MFC printers since mid 2000s and I have never had an issue other than replacing toner and drum units, which I buy from Staples.
Laser printers still have shitty drivers that decide to not find printers when they're in a mood, or to change your default printer to the networked printer on the other side of the planet because it's the first one alphabetically.
Office Space is from 1999, so people under 35 had little chance to watch it when it came out. It is a classic for those in the know, but not like Big Lebowski in the sense that everyone is talking about.
To our young people in IT: Watch "Office Space"! It is still hilarious and you may find it easier to recognize some more or less subtle repferences (for example to red staplers, tps reports etc.). Also, it features some solid rap songs by Scarface, Geto Boys etc..
I named the old LaserJet 4050 that sits in the corner of my home office PC_LOAD_LETTER. The thing is, since it seldom gets used I have a tendency to get irrationally angry for the briefest moment when I see that infamous string appear on my screen before remembering that's just the name of the dependable old tank. Maybe I should change its name but I sort of find it funny (the name and and the flash of rage).
They had 2 unused spaces, total of 16 characters. There's nothing perfect that would fit, like "TRAY ADD LETTER PAPER" is too long. But, they could have scrolled something like that left to right.
"NO LETTER PAPER" is the best of your suggestions.
The "LETTER" part was meaningful, because it meant the "LETTER" size, as opposed to some other size. "PC LOAD LEGAL", for example, is another message it displays.
Technically PC is meaningful as well, as distinct from the side-feed tray, say. It's just a dreadful acronym because, in an office IT context, no one thinks "ah, that's the paper carrier".
Probably they could have just omitted it entirely and let the use work out which paper source was empty. After all, since not everyone knew what the message many at all, that's what they did anyway!
Reminds of the time some fraternity brothers parked a compact Ford on Ho Plaza sold sledgehammer whacks for $1, I said "I always wanted to bash a Ford with a sledgehammer."
For me printing is a "special interest" and I try to never "get mad" at printers but always "get even" in that I don't complain about the results I get but I figure out how to get better results.
For instance lately I found the color management system of the printer and Photoshop was screwing up my red-cyan stereograms so I developed a CMS specifically for stereograms and I am now applying the same method to high color gamut displays.
Almost all the photos I put on social media are pictures of my cards with photos and other images on them
The cards look great. Ontology reminds me of someone who wrote an "ontology for League of Legends," but I cannot find it.
The use case was being able to analyze game balance through it, which seems to be a killer application for that. But I didn't get to note how ontology relates to calculations.
Previously I thought ontology was just about categories or hierarchies. Manning's Knowledge Graphs Applied mentions ontologies:
The way I see it, ontology is a big deal in application programming. That is, if you have a correct model for the application ___domain the code almost writes itself. (In fact, I think "no code" or "low code" systems should be ontology driven... There are numerous simple models of business situations that are general and better than the models that people come up with their own.)
I am currently working on redoing my web presence, I really need a Python-based SSG which is good for technical and scientific content.
If somebody wrote a book about a civilisation that managed to put a foot on the moon and create an artifical intellegence that can write code but still struggles with printing you could easily categorise it as a comedy.
Um...yes, WP, there are some environmental and regulatory issues with smashing computer printers. But to put it politely - your article comes across as "neurodivergent legalism".
Perhaps you should write an article about the brands/models of printers which inspire the least loathing in the people who have to use them? That could both be useful to people "neurotypical enough" to want a non-crappy printer, and (eventually) help to reduce the anger, waste, and environmental infractions which you're writing about.
> But to put it politely - your article comes across as "neurodivergent legalism". [...] That could both be useful to people "neurotypical enough" to want a non-crappy printer,
I think the attempt at politeness here made an oops.
Are you suggesting that it is printers causing loathing that is behind the young men's table-flipping angst?
I don't think it's the printer company policies at play, I am pretty sure a CRT monitor would be a more than adequate substitute in the "smash rooms" (if you could even find those any longer).
I'm wondering how these smash room businesses address the liability for injuries?
Not only hazards of batteries. I used a sledgehammer and related tools as a kid, without lasting injury, but I wonder whether some adult city office worker suddenly swinging a sledgehammer one day, without prior conditioning, has a significant risk of quickly pulling/tearing something.
And on something like a plastic printer especially, I suspect you'd get "chaotic" behavior unfamiliar to many as they strike it, which initially seems innocuous, and could lead to shrapnel injury when it's suddenly not.
The liability risk makes this choice of example customer funny...
> Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room,
Online, I've heard local apartment landlords say they don't want law school students as tenants, because they think the law student will be very assertive about their rights, and even actually want to go to court just for the experience. :) (Besides being illegal housing discrimination, it's not fair, since I've known a poorer law student in town who quietly endured an awful below-market apartment, but it remains.)
Do these smash room businesses have a really good waiver that would not only stand up in court, but keep it from getting very expensive merely going to court? Do they have insurance against customer injuries? Do they go out of business the first time there's a major injury? Will an LLC or other corp. shield personal assets?
> Online, I've heard local apartment landlords say they don't want law school students as tenants, because they think the law student will be very assertive about their rights, and even actually want to go to court just for the experience. :) (Besides being illegal housing discrimination[…]
A bit OT, but wanted to note it's not illegal in the US to discriminate against prospective tenants because of employment or lack of employment as long as that discrimination is not related to membership in a protected class (gender, race, religion, disability, medical condition, etc,). [0]
Ethics aside, I'm not sure it's actually illegal in the US. Discrimination is only banned for protected classes, and I don't think those include field of study or work.
Nationally[1], the classes are race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Some states have additional protected classes[2], but I don't think they include this.
Usually (in USA) all customers are presented an acknowledgement/waiver at the door that spells out all the risks involved in the activity. Typically, to be permitted into the activity area you have to sign this document stating that you acknowledge the risks, and knowingly waive (discard) your right to sue the operator if you hurt yourself.
These are mostly foolproof in transferring liability to the customer but they're sometimes phrased to imply you can't sue the operator if anything at all bad happens, which is usually not true - it's usually not possible to waive gross negligence. The particulars of what can and can't be waived vary state by state, in the USA.
And yes, they usually carry insurance against such things, which is typically priced according to the strength of the waiver and lack of negligence on-site.
Injuries at such waiver-gated locations are usually not business-ending or Top Golf never would have taken off the way it did... but at Top Golf scale you can be sure they have retained really good lawyers.
Does that mean if someone gets injured and they try to file a lawsuit, the clerk laughs in their face, and tells them to go away, before the defendant incurs any costs at all?
Does it mean that the judge dismisses the case after only five figures of initial legal costs by defendant?
Does it mean probably a settlement? (And maybe the settlement is smaller because the victim did sign something?)
Does the victim signing something hardly matter, because they can show some other legal principle was in play (e.g., something involving negligence or recklessness, or some other law violated)?
Does insurance cover it, and if so, what happens to rates or the policy continuing to exist?
There's so many variables in play that it's difficult to speak universally on it. Every case is unique, there is relevant case law, different state laws, etc. Everything you said is a possibility - I would say off the cuff that it generally hinges on the scale of negligence and harm - consider these the X and Y axes of a graph where the Z axis is whether the clerk laughs at you, whether a judge dismisses it pre-trial, whether it goes to trial, if a settlement can be negotiated. Die or lose a limb? Stakes go up for sure.
Sometimes insurance will pay all the legal/settlement costs, sometimes they won't, sometimes a business will have to negotiate to avoid a rate hike (we did x, y, and z to avoid this liability and minimize the settlement) and sometimes the insurance policy does vanish.
> Typically, to be permitted into the activity area you have to sign this document stating that you acknowledge the risks, and knowingly waive (discard) your right to sue the operator if you hurt yourself.
Sometimes without being given the opportunity to read the document, too! I've literally had these waivers put on computer screens with timers on them that would time out before you could read it, assuming a reasonable reading speed.
I really wish someone could standardize such a document, like how the GPL is. "Oh, the Public Death Waiver v2? I'm quite familiar with that." easy signature Of course, this will never happen, as what would put bread on lawyers' barren tables, otherwise?
I've been to one of these, but the key thing that motivates people to swing the sledgehammer is that it's their printer. They've come to loathe that particular piece of junk with every fiber of their being.
It's funny that rms started the whole Free Software movement and the GNU project because he was pissed with lousy printer drivers. Somehow, all that multi-decade effort didn't improve the printer drivers' quality in any significant way... and in retrospect it kinda feels strange that he thought it somehow would. Huh.
I developed an ancestor of YOShInOn, my smart RSS reader, to process large numbers of job applications. The first time I tried this I got a job in two weeks, the second time took a little longer.
If I hadn't gotten a job when I did. I would have given myself a job removing scam job listings from "America's Job Bank."
> The California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s website says that while rage rooms themselves aren’t illegal, smashing up “e-waste” including printers is. It will investigate any rage rooms that smash e-waste and offer a button for visitors to report new rage rooms in their area as an environmental concern.
That's funny, California! I'd be curious to see what exactly is illegal about smashing trash, in particular e-waste. Presumably there is something toxic, but I'm skeptical. at the very least the toxic parts could be subtracted from the smash, but that depends on California's perception of toxic. We all know California has a very progressive view of what is toxic, so I'd assume that's an expansive topic.
Ultimately I would argue this conduct is covered by freedom of speech, but that depends. IF the event is documented with photography, video, or even has any kind of spectator audience... then it's clearly a form of exhibition, and speech.
But even actors performing probably have to obey OSHA regulations, and so it goes...
There are examples of course of the first superceding laws (constitution do be like that don't it), e.g. laws forbidding nudity. Not sure how far it can be taken but I hope not as far as that, I agree.
My local PC shop has a hard-drive destroyer for people who are concerned about data retention. It's basically a shaped anvil plus a punch with a massive lever (four feet long) that gives you enough mechanical advantage to break open the drive's metal case. Great fun to use, although probably not as satisfying as destroying a printer.
I have done this. The printers were actually the least satisfying things to smash, as they’re surprisingly study! It took a lot of whacking and prying to get the thing open.
The ceramics, such shattered into dozens of pieces, were by far the most fun!
Patents were designed to protect a fledgling economy and its participants from the megalithic economic powerhouses of England and Europe.
Our economy was just starting out, and we had no way to compete with established businesses.
Now that patents and copyrights don't protect individuals, but instead protect multinational corporations and investor profits, they should be removed.
Only human beings should be granted either patents or copyrights. Corporate entities should be required to fight-it-out in the marketplace with no protections in place.
You and I pay for the protections. I don't want to protect multinational corporations. Do you?
It is completely unbelievable how bad printers are. I have an "enthusiast" 3D printer and somehow that thing is far more usable and user friendly than what you can buy in a store today.
Nothing in the world stops printer companies to produce a printer which you can connect via USB and which will print the the desired document through a system dialog, but somehow they are incapable of even that.
I wonder what Rene Girard and Mimetic Theory would have to say about this. Of course, printers user experience and user interface design are terrible. But can they be made effective scapegoats for the collective frustrations of poorly designed tech?
Guessing it's whatever the smash rooms find easily available at the local thrift stores. Perhaps HPs get tossed out the most though for reasons you mention.
"Printers bad hurr durr" is like a face tattoo saying "I'm a moron." There are absolutely great printers available for $100-200 that will print without complaint from any device without any driver installation. You're either too ignorant to find them or too stupid to care.
Printers have vastly improved though. My last printer jam must be at least five years ago while in the 90s and 2000s it was much more dreadful (especially when you are seen as “the technical one” in the office).
Other than being unbelievably slow and of extremely low quality, sure. It so bad and slow that you really have to consider it a different class of product.
Additionally, any ink ribbon printer (or typewriter) will suffer from dry ribbons in occasional service.
Really there's nothing wrong with laser printers. If you want a trouble-free model you need to spend maybe $50 more than the absolute lowest price you can find. If you think about what they do, it's sort of incredible.
I still see dot matrix printers around, usually in auto workshops where they’re printing through multi-ply copy paper and covered with decades of grease.
This right here is a sign of the times: Why shouldn't we expect hardware to last 15+ years? Why shouldn't we expect reasonably priced replacement parts? "Relying on things to break" is an insidious business model.
Yeah, things tend to break much sooner when they're made of moving parts made of flimsy plastic.
We've been conditioned to expect shoddy products sold at a high margin, with few viable options.
inb4 "ackshually printers are sold at a loss" - yeah, not really when you consider that you're actually being locked into high margin [1] ink cartridges.
Printers definitely are super annoying, and I don't want to discount the catharsis as a factor in why this would be satisfying, but one point I don't see made yet is that independent of their ability to induce frustration, they're just full of "crunchy" bits that would give really nice feedback to being smashed. I think smashing things that are too soft would be unsatisfying, but obviously if something is too hard it would be potentially too difficult to smash effectively; printers seem like they'd be right in the sweet spot of just-hard-enough-to-smash, and the presence of all of the small moving parts provides some nice low-hanging fruit in the early stages before you fully break through the outer shell. Some comments here also talk about smashing cars, and I think they're similarly "crunchy" in a way that would be super satisfying.
tl;dr it's not just that printers are awful, but that they're crunchy
Back in 2012, this was the topic of a very popular German comedy (Stenkelfeld Computerwutcenter), acted out in the style of a mock interview:
Mr Pötter:
Well, Mr Öldrup, are things a little better now? Otherwise, take a couple of printers and then off to the shooting range.
Reporter:
In Stenkelfeld, you don't have to succumb to troubles with modern computer technology anymore. After a total crash or file loss, PC users were only able to weep, pray in silence or use the good old gas oven ... but the newly established rage center in Annex 2 of the Jürgen Koppelin Training Center offers frustrated computer users the opportunity to appropriately express their desperation. Next to me is institute director Friedhelm Pötter. Mr Pötter, just a quick question, what solutions do you offer?
Mr Pötter:
Well, uh, in the large field of word processing, we offer in our hammer chamber the opportunity here to take revenge on the device itself. We use a few decommissioned computers and monitors here, on which one can express one's displeasure. Right?
Reporter:
And this is being used right now in front of our eyes...
Mr Pötter:
Yes, here at the 20-kilo hammer, that's the well-known writer Ludwig Ölldrup, uh, who spent four years working on the computer to write his historical homeland novel "Das Große Buchboelken in der Rössnitzer Senke". Finally he wanted to print out the whole thing and now the system tells him "Fatal exception error in drive C:. Path and file name unknown. All saved data will be lost." So he was off straight away to the canal bridge with a calf rope, but luckily we were able to catch him just in time. And now he's given his rage some breathing room, right Mr Ölldrup?
Reporter:
In addition to all sorts of bite-proof table edges for inconsistencies with Windows 95, a soundproof padded cell for the hapless Macintosh user, and a set of heavy baseball bats for various printer problems, I see a soaked life-size doll with burn marks and strangulation marks...
Mr Pötter:
Well, this is a faithful recreation of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, available to be hanged, drowned, or burned. Yesterday, Mr. Öllrich from the Wittmann architects' office tampered with it. After completing all the calculations and drawings for the new district hospital with the MS Statik Pro 5.0 software, the computer accused him of a general protection violation of the graphics card. Afterwards, only small yellow balls could be seen on the monitor. And the message to contact the manufacturer with this problem. And that's what Mr. Öllrich did, as you can see here. Right?
Reporter:
Yes. Finally let's take a look at the shooting range - a sprawling 50m facility that is getting very busy. Mr Pötter, what is that all about?
Mr Pötter:
Yes, this one is popular. Here we enable targeted retaliatory measures for disappointments with hardware and peripheral devices - or their compatibility.
Also, try to start a new printer brand today that is user-friendly, and you'll be blown out of the water by patent trolls. And if you do manage to live, your shareholders will force you to squeeze more juice out of your loyal customers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36678914
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245
P.s.: I should also mention that my Brother Laser printer has been functioning just fine for quite a few years new.