why should I make room for you to break the law (go over 65)?
Because the law says your supposed to, at least in California. (My ex-wife and brother-in-law are CHP officers, so yes, I'm quite certain of that.)
When signs say "slower traffic keep right" they mean slower than the speed limit.
Wrong! It means exactly what it says. Whether I want to go 66mph or 90mph, you are required by law to get out of my way in any area that has those signs, and can be cited for failing to do so.
At that point, you either change lanes without signaling
If you're talking about th Los Angeles area, that's because people will commonly move to block you from changing lanes if you give them warning by signaling. I'm not saying it's a great thing to do, but as you get closer to LA it becomes almost a necessary practice if you want to not end up on the wrong freeway.
or, if you can't pass, sit on their ass and flick your high beams on and off in their rear view mirror
That would be a very commonly accepted way of asking someone to move over so you can pass. It's considered more polite than honking. You know, maybe you should actually learn the rules of the road before you go around trying to lecture the rest of us on them?
Turbans are worn by Sikhs. This is a completely different religion to Islam which is alleged to harbour these terrorists.
Different, yes, but not completely different. Sikhism is a combination of Islam and Hindu ideas. I don't know of any incidents of Sikh terrorism, but there are definitely a strong militaristic aspect to their teachings (which is why they're supposed to carry a dagger and wear a steel bracelet at all times).
many engineers get the math fine, but completely forget how it applies to the whole.
I blame physics professors on this one. I started off my college career with an electronic technician program. I worked in the field a few years and did pretty well. Then I decided to go for an engineering degree, and got stalled in the electromagnetism part of the physics series.
As far as I could tell, there was no connection to the stuff I knew and understood in electronics and the math I was learning in that class, and the professor made no attempt to bridge the gap. I could do the labs easily thanks to my prior knowledge, but they made no sense in the context of the course material. I dropped out and went back years later, and got lucky in getting a professor who focused mainly on concepts and showing how the math logically follows from it.
Anyway, my point is that these engineers didn't forget how how it applies to the whole; they never learned it in the first place.
My specific point is that suicide in the face of dishonor is a Chinese tradition. My more general point is that a significant amount of what you seem to consider to be distinctively Japanese is in fact derivative, and most of that was derived from China. The Japanese have long been masters of borrowing good ideas from other cultures, a fact that is largely responsible for their modern success.
I don't know of any Chinese samurai either, but I do know of the Korean hwa rang, who were quite similar in many ways to samurai and predated them by a couple of centuries.
As for using suicide as a cover for murder in China, that's unlikely. Wealth and political power go hand in hand in China, and the powerful can get away with just about anything. Why go to the trouble of making it look like suicide when you can just have him disappeared? That kind of effort is only worthwhile in countries that operate under the rule of law.
If you believe any statistics that come out of China, you are a fool. The Chinese government lies constantly, about everything.
A high suicide rate would make it look like things might be less than perfect in the People's Republic, which would cause the high party officials to lose face, and so many suicides are not recorded as suicides.
I don't see how that illustrates a problem with OLPC. They showed what could be done, and that there was a demand in a marketspace that no one else had even considered, and that, in fact, OLPC wasn't even aiming for. if anything, OLPC's failure was in not leveraging that opportunity as a springboard for their stated goals. However, OLPC had no desire to compete in the consumer market, so it's kind of silly to say that their "competition" took over that market.
And by the way, OLPC did not "contribute greatly to the success" of the netbook, they invented the netbook. There was no such thing as a netbook before the XO, and they pretty much gave away all the details on how to build one.
China being split apart by western powers was fairly recent and fairly brief, and I don't think the Western powers controlled enough of China to have a serious effect on the culture. The Communists did, however, and the Cultural Revolution did a pretty good job of forcing cultural change. Japan may have been more isolationist, but MacArthur didn't mess around when dictating Japan's new economic and political structure, and I think it's arguable which country has experienced the more drastic social changes post-WWII.
That being said, the fact is that tons of Chinese school children commit suicide by jumping off tall buildings every year. The specifics may differ, but China most certainly has a tradition of suicide as a response to significant loss of face.
"Honor" for "Asians"? Which, of the many Asian cultures, are you talking about?
All of them.
The Japanese tend to be more serious about such things, but the Chinese aren't that far behind on that count.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that Japanese and Chinese culture are totally distinct. China was the dominant culture (by far) in the region for millenia. Think about how much of western culture is based on Roman concepts. The Roman empire only lasted about 500 years. The Chinese empire lasted over 2000 years. Added to that, the Japanese have long been masters of integrating foreign concepts into their own culture. the result is that many of the concepts we think of as quintessentially Japanese actually originated in China. Examples include haiku and zen buddhism.
If Japan, then sure, to some extent this is the case. It was more so in years past, but hey, things change.
In China, I'm not so sure.
Seppuku is more ritualized than anything I'm aware of in Chinese culture, but it could just be one of the many things that got lost in the craziness of the 20th century. Regardless, the basic idea is there, and according to my Chinese friends tons Chinese schoolchildren kill themselves every year because they are unable to hack it in the incredibly competitive Chinese school system (yet another thing the Japanese borrowed from them). The method of choice, by the way, is jumping off a tall building. The Chinese reaction to such is not particularly sympathetic, they typically write it off as the person being weak or having some sort of mental problem.
Based on my experience, kelnos is correct. The Chinese concept of "honor" and "saving face" is a bit less personal than the Japanese version. This guys reasoning for killing himself probably had more to do with damage to the company's reputation than with his own personal honor. Personal relationships are extremely important in Chinese culture, and his failure could have reflected badly on all of his coworkers.
I bring up the significant possibility that Sun Danyong's death might not have been suicide at all
Unlikely, I think. The rich in China are very powerful, and can generally get away with just about anything they want. If he was killed, I doubt they would bother trying to make it look like suicide. It's much more likely he would just disappear.
but even if it were, I strongly suspect that it was motivated less by ideas of honor than it was by ideas of being completely and royally screwed -- i.e., desperation, not clearing one's name so much as escaping a terrible situation.
This is certainly possible. He may have felt suicide was a better option than being disappeared, and frankly I'm not sure I could argue the point.
That's definitely true. my daughter definitely prefers a "real" laptop, despite the fact that the XO-1 actually does far more that's of interest to her.
From a functional perspective, the XO and Sugar are really well designed for their purpose. I have no difficulty imagining that they would be successful in an environment where "real" PCs aren't ubiquitous. The physical package is rugged and well designed for the ways children tend to do things. The Sugar interface is very discoverable, albeit hard to get used to if you're familiar with more standard interfaces.
In the first world, you're right: my daughter wants a laptop just like mine. She's constantly trying to steal my netbook, which in all honesty is less functional than her XO. She just wants something that's exactly like what her parents use. If her parents didn't have computers though, as mine didn't, I'm willing to bet she'd be as happy with her XO as I was with my Speak'n'Spell (which I wore out).
The XO-1 was something of a cross between an e-book reader and a netbook
I have to disagree. The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way (I own one, and I'm quite happy with it). IMO the only reason it gets a comparison to an ebook reader is because they had to figure out a way to make the screen readable outside. Frankly, I wish I could say that either my laptop or my netbook were usable outside, that would be really nice.
The first to dive off the pier- usually misses the deeps, hits his head on a rock and drowns.
Well yeah, they're unhappy for the same reason a lot of XO-1 buyers are unhappy: they had no understanding of what it was they were buying.
I'm quite happy with my netbook (HP mini still running HP's distro), but when my non-computer-geek friends use it, they question my sanity for buying it. The difference is, I'm not expecting it to be a real computer. I already have one of those sitting on my desk hooked up to a 26" monitor, plus a real laptop for when I need to do some real computing on the go.
The netbook is light and small, so I don't mind carrying it around everywhere I go. I can get on the net, run openoffice, do a bit of coding in vi... basically, it does most of the things I need a computer for when I'm on the go. I'm not going to try and squeeze MATLAB onto it, but if I ever get around to setting up remote access on my desktop that should be taken care of as well.
In short, the key to being happy with your purchase is to know what you're buying, and don't expect it to be more than that.
As RedK pointed out, they were not able to make enough to satisfy the give 1 get 1 orders they had.
The other basic fact that you seem to be unaware of is that there was no such thing as a netbook before OLPC. There was so much demand for the XO in the first world that the OEMs were practically forced to come up with competing products. It was not so much a case of the OLPC inching up to netbook pricing territory, but rather the netbook vendors trying to get down to OLPC pricing territory.
BTW, I do own both an XO and an HP mini. IMO, the XO is far superior for the job it was designed to do. Sugar does some weird things (I don't think I care much for the journal metaphor), but it is very functional once you get used to it, and that doesn't take long. I can't think of anything I can do on my netbook that can't do on the XO, but I can think of some things I can do on the XO that I can't do on the netbook.
I did buy one, and it is a pretty cool toy. I'm hesitant to give my daughter (age 9) my old laptop, but the XO is quite tough. It really is well designed for a child to use. Now, if I could just get my child to bring it back from her mom's house...
There is no junta, and this was not a coup. The Honduran Army was doing its job, as described in the Honduran Constitution, under the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court, which was also doing its job as described in the Honduran Constitution.
In other words, this was a functional system of checks and balances working the way it was designed to. We Americans should be taking notes.
The PalmOS calendar was also superior to anything I've seen on any of the smart phones I've looked at. It boggles the mind that we could have gone so far backwards on such a basic core feature.
Well, they do have the Diablo milieu, but I don't see much opportunity for innovation there.
Diablo is not significantly different from Warcraft as a basis for an MMO. I could see them pulling from it to create expansions to WoW, say based in a new world (ala Outland) that for the players to defend from the Burning Legion. it would be way to much work to create a whole new game off Diablo I think, with little payoff.
I would definitely be interested in World of Starcraft though.
Ever wondered why the patches and class balance and new content have been coming slower and slower?
Perhaps because the code base has matured and most of the issues have been ironed out at this point?
Or maybe they finally realized that most of the "class balance issues" are really just someone who doesn't know how to play their class whining about getting their ass handed to them by someone with some skill?
As for new content, there seems to be more of it, coming faster, than ever before.
6. Watching an instructor struggle through a problem is a great way for students to learn; they get to see mistakes in action and, through a critical eye, learn by correcting the instructor. With an answer guide, the instructor copies the (assumed correct) answer from his edition.
Amen! This is the primary reason I don't take online classes. even if the professor doesn't struggle through the problem, I learn far more by seeing first hand the thought process behind the solution than I do by looking at a solution that's already been written out.
The teachers editions I've seen only gave answers, not solutions (these have all been math books, I can't speak for other subjects). Solution manuals also generally skip steps, making them generally useful only to people who already understand the problem in a general sense, but are just stuck on that particular one.
In my 8 years of tutoring college level math and physics, I can't count the number of times I've been asked to explain the solution given in the solution manual.
I have taken classes using an open source textbook, and frankly the problems you're concerned with simply weren't an issue. Those classes were the 2nd and 3rd parts of the standard engineering physics series, using the book Simple Nature. To my knowledge there is no teacher's edition. There is an online tool to check your answers on about 2/3 of the problems; the rest are conceptual, so it's not really feasible to automate those. It doesn't give you the answer, just tells you if you're right or wrong, and sometimes gives you hints (like if you have an order of magnitude error). The author was my instructor, but I see no reason why they wouldn't be used similarly by the other instructors who have adopted them.
Note that I took the first part (Mechanics) at a different school, using a standard textbook. IMO, Simple Nature is far superior if you're goal is to actually learn and understand physics. It isn't chock-full of nifty engineering style diagrams like most Physics textbooks though, so I imaging there is a certain class of instructor that it won't appeal to.
I recently had another class where the text book was distributed free in PDF form (a lower division math class: Strategies of Proof). The book did not include the exercises, homework problems were posted on blackboard by the professor in.doc. As far as I know the instructor wrote them herself, though I can't say how much she may have borrowed from previous semesters.
It's not that big of a deal for someone who knows enough about the subject to change a constant or two in an existing problem, and that can easily be enough to completely throw off a beginner.
My experience has been pretty much the same. Scanners are even worse actually, but they're made by the same companies for the most part. HP has been very good in my experience though; good enough that I've pretty much decided I'll be sticking with HP printers for the foreseeable future.
Slashdot Mirror
All signatures on legal documents should be signed in cursive.
Says who?
I don't use cursive. Therefore, any signature on any document that is in cursive is not my signature.
why should I make room for you to break the law (go over 65)?
Because the law says your supposed to, at least in California. (My ex-wife and brother-in-law are CHP officers, so yes, I'm quite certain of that.)
When signs say "slower traffic keep right" they mean slower than the speed limit.
Wrong! It means exactly what it says. Whether I want to go 66mph or 90mph, you are required by law to get out of my way in any area that has those signs, and can be cited for failing to do so.
At that point, you either change lanes without signaling
If you're talking about th Los Angeles area, that's because people will commonly move to block you from changing lanes if you give them warning by signaling. I'm not saying it's a great thing to do, but as you get closer to LA it becomes almost a necessary practice if you want to not end up on the wrong freeway.
or, if you can't pass, sit on their ass and flick your high beams on and off in their rear view mirror
That would be a very commonly accepted way of asking someone to move over so you can pass. It's considered more polite than honking. You know, maybe you should actually learn the rules of the road before you go around trying to lecture the rest of us on them?
Turbans are worn by Sikhs. This is a completely different religion to Islam which is alleged to harbour these terrorists.
Different, yes, but not completely different. Sikhism is a combination of Islam and Hindu ideas. I don't know of any incidents of Sikh terrorism, but there are definitely a strong militaristic aspect to their teachings (which is why they're supposed to carry a dagger and wear a steel bracelet at all times).
many engineers get the math fine, but completely forget how it applies to the whole.
I blame physics professors on this one. I started off my college career with an electronic technician program. I worked in the field a few years and did pretty well. Then I decided to go for an engineering degree, and got stalled in the electromagnetism part of the physics series.
As far as I could tell, there was no connection to the stuff I knew and understood in electronics and the math I was learning in that class, and the professor made no attempt to bridge the gap. I could do the labs easily thanks to my prior knowledge, but they made no sense in the context of the course material. I dropped out and went back years later, and got lucky in getting a professor who focused mainly on concepts and showing how the math logically follows from it.
Anyway, my point is that these engineers didn't forget how how it applies to the whole; they never learned it in the first place.
Both.
My specific point is that suicide in the face of dishonor is a Chinese tradition. My more general point is that a significant amount of what you seem to consider to be distinctively Japanese is in fact derivative, and most of that was derived from China. The Japanese have long been masters of borrowing good ideas from other cultures, a fact that is largely responsible for their modern success.
I don't know of any Chinese samurai either, but I do know of the Korean hwa rang, who were quite similar in many ways to samurai and predated them by a couple of centuries.
As for using suicide as a cover for murder in China, that's unlikely. Wealth and political power go hand in hand in China, and the powerful can get away with just about anything. Why go to the trouble of making it look like suicide when you can just have him disappeared? That kind of effort is only worthwhile in countries that operate under the rule of law.
If you believe any statistics that come out of China, you are a fool. The Chinese government lies constantly, about everything.
A high suicide rate would make it look like things might be less than perfect in the People's Republic, which would cause the high party officials to lose face, and so many suicides are not recorded as suicides.
I don't see how that illustrates a problem with OLPC. They showed what could be done, and that there was a demand in a marketspace that no one else had even considered, and that, in fact, OLPC wasn't even aiming for. if anything, OLPC's failure was in not leveraging that opportunity as a springboard for their stated goals. However, OLPC had no desire to compete in the consumer market, so it's kind of silly to say that their "competition" took over that market.
And by the way, OLPC did not "contribute greatly to the success" of the netbook, they invented the netbook. There was no such thing as a netbook before the XO, and they pretty much gave away all the details on how to build one.
China being split apart by western powers was fairly recent and fairly brief, and I don't think the Western powers controlled enough of China to have a serious effect on the culture. The Communists did, however, and the Cultural Revolution did a pretty good job of forcing cultural change. Japan may have been more isolationist, but MacArthur didn't mess around when dictating Japan's new economic and political structure, and I think it's arguable which country has experienced the more drastic social changes post-WWII.
That being said, the fact is that tons of Chinese school children commit suicide by jumping off tall buildings every year. The specifics may differ, but China most certainly has a tradition of suicide as a response to significant loss of face.
"Honor" for "Asians"? Which, of the many Asian cultures, are you talking about?
All of them.
The Japanese tend to be more serious about such things, but the Chinese aren't that far behind on that count.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that Japanese and Chinese culture are totally distinct. China was the dominant culture (by far) in the region for millenia. Think about how much of western culture is based on Roman concepts. The Roman empire only lasted about 500 years. The Chinese empire lasted over 2000 years. Added to that, the Japanese have long been masters of integrating foreign concepts into their own culture. the result is that many of the concepts we think of as quintessentially Japanese actually originated in China. Examples include haiku and zen buddhism.
If Japan, then sure, to some extent this is the case. It was more so in years past, but hey, things change.
In China, I'm not so sure.
Seppuku is more ritualized than anything I'm aware of in Chinese culture, but it could just be one of the many things that got lost in the craziness of the 20th century. Regardless, the basic idea is there, and according to my Chinese friends tons Chinese schoolchildren kill themselves every year because they are unable to hack it in the incredibly competitive Chinese school system (yet another thing the Japanese borrowed from them). The method of choice, by the way, is jumping off a tall building. The Chinese reaction to such is not particularly sympathetic, they typically write it off as the person being weak or having some sort of mental problem.
Based on my experience, kelnos is correct. The Chinese concept of "honor" and "saving face" is a bit less personal than the Japanese version. This guys reasoning for killing himself probably had more to do with damage to the company's reputation than with his own personal honor. Personal relationships are extremely important in Chinese culture, and his failure could have reflected badly on all of his coworkers.
I bring up the significant possibility that Sun Danyong's death might not have been suicide at all
Unlikely, I think. The rich in China are very powerful, and can generally get away with just about anything they want. If he was killed, I doubt they would bother trying to make it look like suicide. It's much more likely he would just disappear.
but even if it were, I strongly suspect that it was motivated less by ideas of honor than it was by ideas of being completely and royally screwed -- i.e., desperation, not clearing one's name so much as escaping a terrible situation.
This is certainly possible. He may have felt suicide was a better option than being disappeared, and frankly I'm not sure I could argue the point.
A very large amount of Japanese culture actually comes from China.
That's definitely true. my daughter definitely prefers a "real" laptop, despite the fact that the XO-1 actually does far more that's of interest to her.
From a functional perspective, the XO and Sugar are really well designed for their purpose. I have no difficulty imagining that they would be successful in an environment where "real" PCs aren't ubiquitous. The physical package is rugged and well designed for the ways children tend to do things. The Sugar interface is very discoverable, albeit hard to get used to if you're familiar with more standard interfaces.
In the first world, you're right: my daughter wants a laptop just like mine. She's constantly trying to steal my netbook, which in all honesty is less functional than her XO. She just wants something that's exactly like what her parents use. If her parents didn't have computers though, as mine didn't, I'm willing to bet she'd be as happy with her XO as I was with my Speak'n'Spell (which I wore out).
The XO-1 was something of a cross between an e-book reader and a netbook
I have to disagree. The XO-1 is a cross between a computer and a fisher price toy, and I mean that in the best possible way (I own one, and I'm quite happy with it). IMO the only reason it gets a comparison to an ebook reader is because they had to figure out a way to make the screen readable outside. Frankly, I wish I could say that either my laptop or my netbook were usable outside, that would be really nice.
The first to dive off the pier-
usually misses the deeps, hits his head on a rock and drowns.
Sad, but true...
The netbook may still lack a clearly defined market: Many netbook buyers aren't happy [June 21]
Well yeah, they're unhappy for the same reason a lot of XO-1 buyers are unhappy: they had no understanding of what it was they were buying.
I'm quite happy with my netbook (HP mini still running HP's distro), but when my non-computer-geek friends use it, they question my sanity for buying it. The difference is, I'm not expecting it to be a real computer. I already have one of those sitting on my desk hooked up to a 26" monitor, plus a real laptop for when I need to do some real computing on the go.
The netbook is light and small, so I don't mind carrying it around everywhere I go. I can get on the net, run openoffice, do a bit of coding in vi... basically, it does most of the things I need a computer for when I'm on the go. I'm not going to try and squeeze MATLAB onto it, but if I ever get around to setting up remote access on my desktop that should be taken care of as well.
In short, the key to being happy with your purchase is to know what you're buying, and don't expect it to be more than that.
As RedK pointed out, they were not able to make enough to satisfy the give 1 get 1 orders they had.
The other basic fact that you seem to be unaware of is that there was no such thing as a netbook before OLPC. There was so much demand for the XO in the first world that the OEMs were practically forced to come up with competing products. It was not so much a case of the OLPC inching up to netbook pricing territory, but rather the netbook vendors trying to get down to OLPC pricing territory.
BTW, I do own both an XO and an HP mini. IMO, the XO is far superior for the job it was designed to do. Sugar does some weird things (I don't think I care much for the journal metaphor), but it is very functional once you get used to it, and that doesn't take long. I can't think of anything I can do on my netbook that can't do on the XO, but I can think of some things I can do on the XO that I can't do on the netbook.
I did buy one, and it is a pretty cool toy. I'm hesitant to give my daughter (age 9) my old laptop, but the XO is quite tough. It really is well designed for a child to use. Now, if I could just get my child to bring it back from her mom's house...
"On his own" except for a large backing from the populace.
Really? And what exactly do you base this assessment on? The election results shown on these computers?
There is no junta, and this was not a coup. The Honduran Army was doing its job, as described in the Honduran Constitution, under the orders of the Honduran Supreme Court, which was also doing its job as described in the Honduran Constitution.
In other words, this was a functional system of checks and balances working the way it was designed to. We Americans should be taking notes.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of US Postal Services...
The PalmOS calendar was also superior to anything I've seen on any of the smart phones I've looked at. It boggles the mind that we could have gone so far backwards on such a basic core feature.
Well, they do have the Diablo milieu, but I don't see much opportunity for innovation there.
Diablo is not significantly different from Warcraft as a basis for an MMO. I could see them pulling from it to create expansions to WoW, say based in a new world (ala Outland) that for the players to defend from the Burning Legion. it would be way to much work to create a whole new game off Diablo I think, with little payoff.
I would definitely be interested in World of Starcraft though.
Ever wondered why the patches and class balance and new content have been coming slower and slower?
Perhaps because the code base has matured and most of the issues have been ironed out at this point?
Or maybe they finally realized that most of the "class balance issues" are really just someone who doesn't know how to play their class whining about getting their ass handed to them by someone with some skill?
As for new content, there seems to be more of it, coming faster, than ever before.
6. Watching an instructor struggle through a problem is a great way for students to learn; they get to see mistakes in action and, through a critical eye, learn by correcting the instructor. With an answer guide, the instructor copies the (assumed correct) answer from his edition.
Amen! This is the primary reason I don't take online classes. even if the professor doesn't struggle through the problem, I learn far more by seeing first hand the thought process behind the solution than I do by looking at a solution that's already been written out.
The teachers editions I've seen only gave answers, not solutions (these have all been math books, I can't speak for other subjects). Solution manuals also generally skip steps, making them generally useful only to people who already understand the problem in a general sense, but are just stuck on that particular one.
In my 8 years of tutoring college level math and physics, I can't count the number of times I've been asked to explain the solution given in the solution manual.
I have taken classes using an open source textbook, and frankly the problems you're concerned with simply weren't an issue. Those classes were the 2nd and 3rd parts of the standard engineering physics series, using the book Simple Nature. To my knowledge there is no teacher's edition. There is an online tool to check your answers on about 2/3 of the problems; the rest are conceptual, so it's not really feasible to automate those. It doesn't give you the answer, just tells you if you're right or wrong, and sometimes gives you hints (like if you have an order of magnitude error). The author was my instructor, but I see no reason why they wouldn't be used similarly by the other instructors who have adopted them.
Note that I took the first part (Mechanics) at a different school, using a standard textbook. IMO, Simple Nature is far superior if you're goal is to actually learn and understand physics. It isn't chock-full of nifty engineering style diagrams like most Physics textbooks though, so I imaging there is a certain class of instructor that it won't appeal to.
I recently had another class where the text book was distributed free in PDF form (a lower division math class: Strategies of Proof). The book did not include the exercises, homework problems were posted on blackboard by the professor in .doc. As far as I know the instructor wrote them herself, though I can't say how much she may have borrowed from previous semesters.
It's not that big of a deal for someone who knows enough about the subject to change a constant or two in an existing problem, and that can easily be enough to completely throw off a beginner.
I can't speak for where you are, but all publicly funded colleges and universities in California are unionized.
My experience has been pretty much the same. Scanners are even worse actually, but they're made by the same companies for the most part. HP has been very good in my experience though; good enough that I've pretty much decided I'll be sticking with HP printers for the foreseeable future.