the damned printer

A couple of days ago somebody asked me if I could print something for them.

I said that I have not printed anything in two and a half years. And even then, I copied my document to a thumb drive, fired up an old laptop and used the old laptop to print.

And that laptop which has the drivers for the printer, needed to inform me of all sorts of things about the printer, plus show me an advertisement that the manufacturer also sells other crap.

Printing makes me angry. The advertising. The work involved in getting it to do the simplest thing. The reporting of how it needs more ink even though only a few pages have ever been printed since the last batch of ink. And about half the time something, somewhere, doesn't work and it takes 20 minutes to try and solve it.

So, I just don't print.

I thought this little video has a lot of accuracty to it:

Too true!

Save a tree, kill a printer!

Most of the printer problems started on inkjets, when the color laser printers came out.

Printer manufacturers were required to print an identifier in every print, in the bottom right corner? , supposedly in light yellow, so not visible.
Try looking with a UV LED

This was to protect against counterfeit money.

Seemed to really screw up the drivers, having to insert this from eeprom, for every print.

Just a little history for ya...

I read a couple of years ago (when gasoline first jumped to $3) that printer ink actually costs about $9,000 per gallon, conveniently packaged in cartridges that are designed to show "Need ink" when there is still plenty left.

People have actually come up with software patches that bypass this error, allowing at least 1,000 more printed pages, after the error message. They could give away the printers, and still make big bucks if they could sell us enough ink.

John Polk wrote:They could give away the printers, and still make big bucks if they could sell us enough ink.

That is what they do already.

At one time I had a hacked inkjet that had suction tubes installed in the cartridges that pulled ink directly from refill bottles. It was AWESOME as long as you always used it. The problem was we didn't use it for a couple months and it plugged solid :(