Exactly. Never bother with Microsoft software until Service Pack 2. Maybe experiencing a lot of pain will earn you a higher place in heaven, but you would have to die to take advantage of that.
Slashdot editors should have listened in Physics class. This is the fourth
time in 3 years, if I count correctly, that Slashdot editors have been fooled
by the SAME scam.
Planck's constant is so small that interactions between electromagnetic
waves and molecules cannot be chemically specific. The 2,000 MHz radiation
from cell phones is felt as heat, a very, very small amount of heat, almost
certainly not measurable.
Anyone may have theories. Someone could say, for example, that pigs
have started flying and they have been eating the bees. The only real science,
however, is based on what is already known through experimentation. That
requires an understanding of what is known.
When Slashdotters think that a story is fraudulent, they don't say it is fraud, they just make lots of jokes. If the first 50 comments are mostly jokes, then you know the story must have some fake element.
It could happen to you: If you spend your time playing video games instead of learning about the world, you too can be so ignorant that you fall for every foolish, easily disproved theory.
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death. It doesn't matter what the customer wants;
Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, wants more money, and will drag
everyone through his neurosis.
Microsoft's business model is to do what hardware manufacturers want.
Hardware manufacturers want operating systems that can't run on old computers,
so customers will be forced to buy new computers. Sometimes it has seemed to
me that Microsoft is not really primarily a software company, but primarily an
abuse company that accomplishes abuse through software.
Windows XP was not really stable until Service Pack 2 was released.
Before that, Windows XP was full of grief for administrators. Service Pack 2
contained something like 330 documented fixes, if I remember correctly, and I
verified that there were fixes that were not documented. Now Microsoft wants
people to go through that again??? With a Service Pack 0 release?
Someone said that Microsoft's motto is "The whole world is our beta
test site." The entire reason people wanted to migrate away from Windows 98 is
that it has an unstable file system, and artificial limits to system
resources. Otherwise, many companies would have wanted to stay with their old
systems, because employees often run a very limited set of software packages.
Managers in a company that has a virtual monopoly, like Microsoft, may
think that the way to make more money is never to release a good product, so
that customers will always want more.
Eventually, I think, more and more companies and universities and
governments will decide they don't like expensive, stupid, forced upgrade
cycles, and will migrate to a managed distribution of Linux like Ubuntu.
The problem with Linux and BSD has always been that developers don't
like to document what they have developed. Sometimes user-friendly GUIs and
documentation can be 80% of the work, and that work isn't done very well by
people who "just want to program".
Linux distributions need a manager like Mark Shuttleworth of
Ubuntu. Developers don't like to manage their own work, as Mark said he has
discovered. The Linux kernel has a manager, Linus Torvalds, and the rest of
Linux needs a manager, also.
I have several times offered to help document open source software,
but my offer has always been refused. Apparently there is a strong attachment
to doing things the old way. Apparently there is a feeling that someone who
writes the documentation will get too much credit, even though I did not
expect to have my name on what I wrote.
Changing to any new operating system tends to be expensive
because of the re-training required. Good top management could help design
methods of easing that transition by coordinating the details that tend to be
forgotten when no one is really in charge.
This is a phenomenon I have seen numerous times. Someone acts like he is very knowledgeable, but says erroneous things. Was he paid to make a pro-Microsoft comment, or is he just arrogant?
The registry vastly decreased the value of the operating system. Microsoft corrupted its own product to try to prevent easy piracy. I don't think that strategy worked, but the corruption remains. In the end, the world will reject an OS that puts all configuration in one file, because that is too fragile, and difficult when a program needs to be moved.
It is possible to move Windows XP to a new computer merely by re-loading Windows XP from the CD. Programs like Acronis TrueImage Universal Restore even allow restoring a backup to a machine with a different HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
Any kind of outsourcing is a horrible idea. Look at the web sites of
any online bank. They are stupid, stupid, and purposely stupid. After people
in India learn how to write good banking software, magically some company
owned by an Indian will have the best banking software.
There is only one reason for outsourcing. Non-technical managers want
the technical responsibility as far away from themselves as possible. It is
dishonesty only.
Walk down any street in India and ask yourself: Why are people in
India so poor? They are poor because their culture is extremely
self-defeating. No matter how well an Indian who is first- or
second-generation educated is trained technically, he is still guided mostly
by his culture.
The claimed cost savings are not there. They simply are not there. The
"cost savings" come from situations like this:
1) It is cheaper to hire Indians for a sloppy, poorly defined project than it
is to hire people in the U.S. for a sloppy, poorly defined project, and the
result is the same.
2) Many top managers today are like kings. They have complete control, can be
as destructive as they want to their company and to other people, and are very
ignorant. So when it comes time for a technical improvement that will be a lot
of work, and require a lot of responsibility and decision-making, moving the
entire project 10,000 miles away seems attractive. The distance offers lots of
excuses, and it just doesn't matter to the king how much money is wasted. The
"cost savings" are what the king says they are.
We are going through a time in which most managers of
technically-oriented companies know nothing about technical issues, and don't
want to know anything.
Business magazines are part of the fraud. They assign writers who
don't have any technical knowledge and give them 1/10th the time necessary to
do a good job. The writer's only desire is not to seem too stupid, so he or
she looks at other articles and imitates their ignorant imaginings.
Only one kind of manager can manage technical efforts: Someone who is
extremely knowledgeable technically and is, at the same time, an excellent
manager, and has a strong, insightful relationship with his group. Such people are rare.
In future decades, people will laugh at the efforts of today.
Remember, Time-Warner bought AOL and immediately lost 88 Billion dollars.
Remember the press conference when the "mouth of the south" Ted Turner said
the deal was "better than sex"? Everyone at that press conference was a
multi-millionaire who simply didn't care, and everyone at that press
conference was so ignorant, there is no word in the dictionary that expresses
the full profundity of their ignorance. You have to call them "iggerunt".
I made a mistake below when I said that radio transmissions are at the "microwatt" level. I meant microvolt. Microvolts times microamps equals picowatts.
The U.S. Patent Office during the Bush administration has been starved for funds. The issuance of a patent means little, because those who want corruption want frivolous patents. A patent, even if eventually ruled invalid, can intimidate competitors.
Notice that Powercast LLC is in the same small town as the "inventors".
Perhaps the patent is for something that really does transmit power. However, the laws of physics prevent the use that is advertised, in my opinion.
The Sonicare toothbrush uses induction, not electromagnetic transmission. The little plastic tower on which you set the toothbrush is the primary of a transformer. The secondary of the transformer is in the toothbrush. The primary and secondary must be very close to allow the transfer of power (or the frequency must be high).
Neither induction or electromagnetic transmission allow the transfer of power over significant distance around people, because of the possibility that humans could be in the way.
Normal radio waves involve only microwatts of power, too little to power most electronic devices, which require milliwatts or watts.
Agreed. If the FCC allowed the company to transmit 1 Watt, which I doubt, then
the power would immediately spread throughout the room and beyond. There is no
way to keep the power focused unless both the sending and receiving antenna is
close to the size of one wavelength, at least, an unacceptable size. And it
would certainly not be acceptable to focus the power, because of concerns
about health. (At 900 MHz, the wavelength is 33.4 centimeters, about 1 foot. If you don't live in the U.S., you may need to know that
the FCC is the U.S. government agency that regulates electromagnetic transmissions.)
Question: If this is an April Fools joke, it is the most
elaborate one I've seen. Is it a joke or is it fraud? I can't imagine Philips
allowing the company name to be used to advertise an April Fools
joke.
It's a tragedy when otherwise intelligent people play video games instead of learning about
the world around them.
A lot of Slashdot readers didn't listen in Physics class.
Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.
on
Firefox 3.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
I think you missed an overall point that the original commenter had in
mentioning one particular shortcoming of interest to him. Firefox development is haphazard. There is
insufficient overall guidance of the process. Because there is insufficient
guidance, Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.
For example, see this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs. In my
attempts to report bugs in Firefox, Firefox developers have used every one of those
excuses, some of them many times. If you look within Slashdot stories about Firefox,
you will find many comments about Firefox developers abusing those who report
bugs.
In comments like those posted here, people often talk about some
shortcoming in Firefox that occurs to them at the time they are writing the
comment, and fail to make the overall point, that there are a lot of issues
receiving little or no attention, not just the one they mention.
The head of the Mozilla Foundation is Winifred Mitchell Baker, a woman who is very uncomfortable socially, like
many people with technical knowledge. However, she has NO technical knowledge.
She is a perfect example of the fact that someone with no technical knowledge
cannot guide a technical company.
In the beginning, Winifred got the job because no one thought there
was money in free software, and the effort to improve the Mozilla browser was
very small. But then Google started paying for Google Search to be to the
right of the address bar in Firefox. Now Mozilla Foundation makes millions of
dollars, and Winifred can afford to hire people to do public relations to
cover her incompetence.
The linked information about Mozilla Foundation income is from someone on the board of directors
of the Mozilla Corporation, who says in the linked blog that the nickname of the
Mozilla Foundation is MoFo. It appears that the lack of social ability is more widespread than
just affecting the president. Or maybe he is socially aware, and the
association is intentional.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use. What people call
the memory hogging bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still
present in Firefox version 2.0.0.3, even though the bug was reported more than 4
years ago.
If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and
put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the
laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the
CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop.
I could write more, but I have to unload all my Firefox windows and
tabs before I am finished working with them, because now that I opened more windows
and tabs to do research to find links for this comment, Firefox is
using as much about 40% of my CPU as reported by Windows Task Manager, and I
don't like the way it slows my computer. (This is not a dramatization, it is
an actual fact; I just started my laptop from standby to begin working this
morning at about 7 AM Brazil time, where I happen to be at the moment.)
I am also putting this
comment on my web site, so that I can make corrections if I find that
there is some error.
This is just another chapter in an old story. The top management of Circuit City doesn't know what they are doing, so the company has trouble making money, but it is only the employees who suffer.
-- Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does
violence just cause more violence?
LOL. HP was in the calculator business? Maybe with all the amazing failures at HP people will someday say, "HP was in the computer business?" Could the company stay in business if it couldn't make money with tricks like expensive ink and abuse of customers that lack technical knowledge?
My experiences in the last few years with HP have been so terrible there is not enough room to document them all. When Carly Fiorina destroys a company, it stays destroyed. Like many technically oriented companies, HP has mostly incompetent people on the board of directors, who mostly have little technical knowledge.
-- U.S. government violence encourages other violence.
Many people in the U.S. are too poor to afford a computer or a monthly charge for internet access. Part of the problem is all of the money that was once partly theirs is being spent to kill other people.
Companies claim it is possible. I was asking for the experiences of people who had actually done it. Note that both sets of instructions say you can just press a button for 5 seconds, and the Canon printers won't check for ink. It appears that, by being less abusive than other printer companies, Canon is slowly taking over the market (until the Memjet printers discussed in the Slashdot article are released):
KDawson is a Slashdot editor who doesn't know much about writing, apparently:
"If it's for real, the technology would be disruptive at half the speed and
twice the price" should be "... the technology would be disruptive if it
were half the speed and twice the price."
There's no mention that the ink of the new printer is said to be 1/5
the price.
Our extensive experience with refilling Canon ink cartridges of
the the previous series of Canon printers is below, it is rewritten from a comment posted
in October of 2004.
We don't have any information about refilling the cartridges in
Canon's Pixma series of printers, the most recent series. If you have
information please provide it.
Old series of Canon printers: 26 refills, $17. Color printing is a serious hassle. After having
many problems, we spent a lot of time researching it. We bought a Canon S820
and a Canon S520, and we have had good luck refilling the cartridges using a
kit from IMS,
which we bought at a Costco store. The refill kit is NOT available on the
Costco web site. Each kit allows something like 26 refills, and the kits cost
$17 at the Costco store. The second time you do a refill, it is extremely
easy. We inspected photos and font characters under a magnifying glass and
were not able to see a difference between the hugely expensive Canon ink and
the refill ink. There has been no difference in fading.
The S820 has 6 separate cartridges. It is very slow, but photos are
much nicer. The S520 has 4 cartridges. It's faster, and good for printing
labels, for example. We have had no problems with print heads, which are
separate from the tanks. Both use the same refill kit, which comes with 6 ink
colors.
Buy low. Then buy low again. Our experience is that it is far
better to pay $50 for a printer, and replace it often with a new $50 printer,
than to pay a lot and buy a "good one". The technology is changing so fast
that the $50 printer of a few months from now will be better than the $400
printer sold now.
HP: Ugh. In the past we have bought several HP color printers,
and been badly burned. HP is expensive, and we have encountered many quirks.
(Our experience has been that Carly Fiorino, former CEO of HP, destroyed the company,
and it has stayed destroyed. we see a lot of HP printer software
seriously failing, right out of the box. Can someone with little technical
experience lead a technically oriented company? It's like a horse that can do
math. It appears to be possible, until you realize that it is just a series of
tricks.)
Canon: Canon is an extremely adversarial company, in our
experience, but less adversarial than the other printer manufacturers, at
present.
Canon does product churning, and apparently deliberate product confusion.
Before, all the companies sold 6 tank printers as "photo printers". Now Canon
is selling 4 or 5 tank printers as photo printers. The Canon USA web site has liberal use of web developer resume-building technologies
like Flash and Javascript that tend to defeat use of Mozilla's tabs, and
provide for menu choice surprises. There are extremely long URIs which are
difficult to email.
The Canon i860 is not related to the S820. Note that the web page says,
"... it provides true 4 color photo printing...". One day a few months
ago, the InkJet printer companies switched from "true 6 color photo printing"
to the present "true 4 color photo printing". I don't know their motivation,
but the 6 color printers print MUCH nicer photos, in our experience, with much
better shadow detail. Tech company marketing departments take extreme
advantage of any ignorance they find in customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. I got 18,500 in two months until the rate of spam went down again.
Exactly. Never bother with Microsoft software until Service Pack 2. Maybe experiencing a lot of pain will earn you a higher place in heaven, but you would have to die to take advantage of that.
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death.
--
Remarkable Occurrences Involving the Bush Family
einhverfr wrote the parent message. You could have read about the license change in his Slashdot journal post a week ago: LedgerSMB 1.2 released, SQL-Ledger changes licenses.
If you are interested in this subject, I suggest you make einhverfr your friend on Slashdot. Then you will receive notice of all his journal entries.
einhverfr makes a very good case that you should use LedgerSMB, not SQL-Ledger.
--
Remarkable Occurrences Involving the Bush Family
Slashdot editors should have listened in Physics class. This is the fourth time in 3 years, if I count correctly, that Slashdot editors have been fooled by the SAME scam.
See my previous comment, posted January 13, 2005: Distinguish between real science and junk science.
Planck's constant is so small that interactions between electromagnetic waves and molecules cannot be chemically specific. The 2,000 MHz radiation from cell phones is felt as heat, a very, very small amount of heat, almost certainly not measurable.
Anyone may have theories. Someone could say, for example, that pigs have started flying and they have been eating the bees. The only real science, however, is based on what is already known through experimentation. That requires an understanding of what is known.
When Slashdotters think that a story is fraudulent, they don't say it is fraud, they just make lots of jokes. If the first 50 comments are mostly jokes, then you know the story must have some fake element.
It could happen to you: If you spend your time playing video games instead of learning about the world, you too can be so ignorant that you fall for every foolish, easily disproved theory.
--
Remarkable Occurrences Involving the Bush Family
Bill Gates is software's Dr. Death. It doesn't matter what the customer wants; Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, wants more money, and will drag everyone through his neurosis.
Microsoft's business model is to do what hardware manufacturers want. Hardware manufacturers want operating systems that can't run on old computers, so customers will be forced to buy new computers. Sometimes it has seemed to me that Microsoft is not really primarily a software company, but primarily an abuse company that accomplishes abuse through software.
Windows XP was not really stable until Service Pack 2 was released. Before that, Windows XP was full of grief for administrators. Service Pack 2 contained something like 330 documented fixes, if I remember correctly, and I verified that there were fixes that were not documented. Now Microsoft wants people to go through that again??? With a Service Pack 0 release?
Someone said that Microsoft's motto is "The whole world is our beta test site." The entire reason people wanted to migrate away from Windows 98 is that it has an unstable file system, and artificial limits to system resources. Otherwise, many companies would have wanted to stay with their old systems, because employees often run a very limited set of software packages.
Managers in a company that has a virtual monopoly, like Microsoft, may think that the way to make more money is never to release a good product, so that customers will always want more.
Eventually, I think, more and more companies and universities and governments will decide they don't like expensive, stupid, forced upgrade cycles, and will migrate to a managed distribution of Linux like Ubuntu.
The problem with Linux and BSD has always been that developers don't like to document what they have developed. Sometimes user-friendly GUIs and documentation can be 80% of the work, and that work isn't done very well by people who "just want to program".
Linux distributions need a manager like Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu. Developers don't like to manage their own work, as Mark said he has discovered. The Linux kernel has a manager, Linus Torvalds, and the rest of Linux needs a manager, also.
I have several times offered to help document open source software, but my offer has always been refused. Apparently there is a strong attachment to doing things the old way. Apparently there is a feeling that someone who writes the documentation will get too much credit, even though I did not expect to have my name on what I wrote.
Changing to any new operating system tends to be expensive because of the re-training required. Good top management could help design methods of easing that transition by coordinating the details that tend to be forgotten when no one is really in charge.
This is a phenomenon I have seen numerous times. Someone acts like he is very knowledgeable, but says erroneous things. Was he paid to make a pro-Microsoft comment, or is he just arrogant?
The registry vastly decreased the value of the operating system. Microsoft corrupted its own product to try to prevent easy piracy. I don't think that strategy worked, but the corruption remains. In the end, the world will reject an OS that puts all configuration in one file, because that is too fragile, and difficult when a program needs to be moved.
It is possible to move Windows XP to a new computer merely by re-loading Windows XP from the CD. Programs like Acronis TrueImage Universal Restore even allow restoring a backup to a machine with a different HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).
--
Remarkable Occurrences Involving the Bush Family
Free help for problems with dual monitors with nVidia video adapters on laptops: LaptopVideo2Go.com. Help for other nVidia driver problems, too.
"Outsourcing R&D is a horrible idea."
Any kind of outsourcing is a horrible idea. Look at the web sites of any online bank. They are stupid, stupid, and purposely stupid. After people in India learn how to write good banking software, magically some company owned by an Indian will have the best banking software.
There is only one reason for outsourcing. Non-technical managers want the technical responsibility as far away from themselves as possible. It is dishonesty only.
Walk down any street in India and ask yourself: Why are people in India so poor? They are poor because their culture is extremely self-defeating. No matter how well an Indian who is first- or second-generation educated is trained technically, he is still guided mostly by his culture.
The claimed cost savings are not there. They simply are not there. The "cost savings" come from situations like this:
1) It is cheaper to hire Indians for a sloppy, poorly defined project than it is to hire people in the U.S. for a sloppy, poorly defined project, and the result is the same.
2) Many top managers today are like kings. They have complete control, can be as destructive as they want to their company and to other people, and are very ignorant. So when it comes time for a technical improvement that will be a lot of work, and require a lot of responsibility and decision-making, moving the entire project 10,000 miles away seems attractive. The distance offers lots of excuses, and it just doesn't matter to the king how much money is wasted. The "cost savings" are what the king says they are.
We are going through a time in which most managers of technically-oriented companies know nothing about technical issues, and don't want to know anything.
Business magazines are part of the fraud. They assign writers who don't have any technical knowledge and give them 1/10th the time necessary to do a good job. The writer's only desire is not to seem too stupid, so he or she looks at other articles and imitates their ignorant imaginings.
Only one kind of manager can manage technical efforts: Someone who is extremely knowledgeable technically and is, at the same time, an excellent manager, and has a strong, insightful relationship with his group. Such people are rare.
In future decades, people will laugh at the efforts of today. Remember, Time-Warner bought AOL and immediately lost 88 Billion dollars. Remember the press conference when the "mouth of the south" Ted Turner said the deal was "better than sex"? Everyone at that press conference was a multi-millionaire who simply didn't care, and everyone at that press conference was so ignorant, there is no word in the dictionary that expresses the full profundity of their ignorance. You have to call them "iggerunt".
No, Tesla was mentally ill later in his life, in a way that you would agree was mental illness.
I made a mistake below when I said that radio transmissions are at the "microwatt" level. I meant microvolt. Microvolts times microamps equals picowatts.
Don't forget that Tesla was mentally ill.
The U.S. Patent Office during the Bush administration has been starved for funds. The issuance of a patent means little, because those who want corruption want frivolous patents. A patent, even if eventually ruled invalid, can intimidate competitors.
Notice that Powercast LLC is in the same small town as the "inventors".
Perhaps the patent is for something that really does transmit power. However, the laws of physics prevent the use that is advertised, in my opinion.
The Sonicare toothbrush uses induction, not electromagnetic transmission. The little plastic tower on which you set the toothbrush is the primary of a transformer. The secondary of the transformer is in the toothbrush. The primary and secondary must be very close to allow the transfer of power (or the frequency must be high).
Neither induction or electromagnetic transmission allow the transfer of power over significant distance around people, because of the possibility that humans could be in the way.
Normal radio waves involve only microwatts of power, too little to power most electronic devices, which require milliwatts or watts.
Agreed. If the FCC allowed the company to transmit 1 Watt, which I doubt, then the power would immediately spread throughout the room and beyond. There is no way to keep the power focused unless both the sending and receiving antenna is close to the size of one wavelength, at least, an unacceptable size. And it would certainly not be acceptable to focus the power, because of concerns about health. (At 900 MHz, the wavelength is 33.4 centimeters, about 1 foot. If you don't live in the U.S., you may need to know that the FCC is the U.S. government agency that regulates electromagnetic transmissions.)
Question: If this is an April Fools joke, it is the most elaborate one I've seen. Is it a joke or is it fraud? I can't imagine Philips allowing the company name to be used to advertise an April Fools joke.
It's a tragedy when otherwise intelligent people play video games instead of learning about the world around them.
A lot of Slashdot readers didn't listen in Physics class.
I think you missed an overall point that the original commenter had in mentioning one particular shortcoming of interest to him. Firefox development is haphazard. There is insufficient overall guidance of the process. Because there is insufficient guidance, Firefox development sometimes resembles playing.
. What people call
the memory hogging bug is actually also a CPU hogging bug, and it is still
present in Firefox version 2.0.0.3, even though the bug was reported more than 4
years ago.
For example, see this Slashdot comment: Mozilla Foundation Top 20 Excuses for Not Fixing Firefox Bugs. In my attempts to report bugs in Firefox, Firefox developers have used every one of those excuses, some of them many times. If you look within Slashdot stories about Firefox, you will find many comments about Firefox developers abusing those who report bugs.
In comments like those posted here, people often talk about some shortcoming in Firefox that occurs to them at the time they are writing the comment, and fail to make the overall point, that there are a lot of issues receiving little or no attention, not just the one they mention.
The head of the Mozilla Foundation is Winifred Mitchell Baker, a woman who is very uncomfortable socially, like many people with technical knowledge. However, she has NO technical knowledge. She is a perfect example of the fact that someone with no technical knowledge cannot guide a technical company.
In the beginning, Winifred got the job because no one thought there was money in free software, and the effort to improve the Mozilla browser was very small. But then Google started paying for Google Search to be to the right of the address bar in Firefox. Now Mozilla Foundation makes millions of dollars, and Winifred can afford to hire people to do public relations to cover her incompetence.
The linked information about Mozilla Foundation income is from someone on the board of directors of the Mozilla Corporation, who says in the linked blog that the nickname of the Mozilla Foundation is MoFo. It appears that the lack of social ability is more widespread than just affecting the president. Or maybe he is socially aware, and the association is intentional.
Firefox is the most unstable program in common use
If you open a lot of windows and tabs in Firefox on a laptop, and put the laptop in and out of standby, you will eventually notice that the laptop fan is running all the time, even when there is no activity. That's the CPU bug, and it can potentially shorten the life of your laptop.
I could write more, but I have to unload all my Firefox windows and tabs before I am finished working with them, because now that I opened more windows and tabs to do research to find links for this comment, Firefox is using as much about 40% of my CPU as reported by Windows Task Manager, and I don't like the way it slows my computer. (This is not a dramatization, it is an actual fact; I just started my laptop from standby to begin working this morning at about 7 AM Brazil time, where I happen to be at the moment.)
I am also putting this comment on my web site, so that I can make corrections if I find that there is some error.
"Not that crappy old Circuit City..."
This is just another chapter in an old story. The top management of Circuit City doesn't know what they are doing, so the company has trouble making money, but it is only the employees who suffer.
--
Is U.S. government violence a good in the world, or does violence just cause more violence?
I'll let other people tell the story. Customers are not the only people unhappy with HP. Employees are miserable, too: 14 Hewlett-Packard Company Secrets From A Former Employee.
LOL. HP was in the calculator business? Maybe with all the amazing failures at HP people will someday say, "HP was in the computer business?" Could the company stay in business if it couldn't make money with tricks like expensive ink and abuse of customers that lack technical knowledge?
My experiences in the last few years with HP have been so terrible there is not enough room to document them all. When Carly Fiorina destroys a company, it stays destroyed. Like many technically oriented companies, HP has mostly incompetent people on the board of directors, who mostly have little technical knowledge.
--
U.S. government violence encourages other violence.
Many people in the U.S. are too poor to afford a computer or a monthly charge for internet access. Part of the problem is all of the money that was once partly theirs is being spent to kill other people.
-
Here is my summary of U.S. government corruption. Where's yours?
Companies claim it is possible. I was asking for the experiences of people who had actually done it. Note that both sets of instructions say you can just press a button for 5 seconds, and the Canon printers won't check for ink. It appears that, by being less abusive than other printer companies, Canon is slowly taking over the market (until the Memjet printers discussed in the Slashdot article are released):
l s-canon-PGI-5,CLI-8BK.asp
l -instructions.htm
Canon ink cartridge refill kits for the latest series of printers:
http://www.inksupply.com/cankits.cfm
http://www.atlanticinkjet.com/ink-cartridge-refil
Refill instructions
More refill instructions:
http://www.bsprintcartridges.com/canon-pgi5-refil
Yes, on Reddit and Digg.
KDawson is a Slashdot editor who doesn't know much about writing, apparently: "If it's for real, the technology would be disruptive at half the speed and twice the price" should be "... the technology would be disruptive if it were half the speed and twice the price."
There's no mention that the ink of the new printer is said to be 1/5 the price.
Our extensive experience with refilling Canon ink cartridges of the the previous series of Canon printers is below, it is rewritten from a comment posted in October of 2004.
We don't have any information about refilling the cartridges in Canon's Pixma series of printers, the most recent series. If you have information please provide it.
Old series of Canon printers: 26 refills, $17. Color printing is a serious hassle. After having many problems, we spent a lot of time researching it. We bought a Canon S820 and a Canon S520, and we have had good luck refilling the cartridges using a kit from IMS, which we bought at a Costco store. The refill kit is NOT available on the Costco web site. Each kit allows something like 26 refills, and the kits cost $17 at the Costco store. The second time you do a refill, it is extremely easy. We inspected photos and font characters under a magnifying glass and were not able to see a difference between the hugely expensive Canon ink and the refill ink. There has been no difference in fading.
The S820 has 6 separate cartridges. It is very slow, but photos are much nicer. The S520 has 4 cartridges. It's faster, and good for printing labels, for example. We have had no problems with print heads, which are separate from the tanks. Both use the same refill kit, which comes with 6 ink colors.
Buy low. Then buy low again. Our experience is that it is far better to pay $50 for a printer, and replace it often with a new $50 printer, than to pay a lot and buy a "good one". The technology is changing so fast that the $50 printer of a few months from now will be better than the $400 printer sold now.
HP: Ugh. In the past we have bought several HP color printers, and been badly burned. HP is expensive, and we have encountered many quirks. (Our experience has been that Carly Fiorino, former CEO of HP, destroyed the company, and it has stayed destroyed. we see a lot of HP printer software seriously failing, right out of the box. Can someone with little technical experience lead a technically oriented company? It's like a horse that can do math. It appears to be possible, until you realize that it is just a series of tricks.)
Canon: Canon is an extremely adversarial company, in our experience, but less adversarial than the other printer manufacturers, at present.
Canon does product churning, and apparently deliberate product confusion. Before, all the companies sold 6 tank printers as "photo printers". Now Canon is selling 4 or 5 tank printers as photo printers. The Canon USA web site has liberal use of web developer resume-building technologies like Flash and Javascript that tend to defeat use of Mozilla's tabs, and provide for menu choice surprises. There are extremely long URIs which are difficult to email.
The Canon i860 is not related to the S820. Note that the web page says, "... it provides true 4 color photo printing...". One day a few months ago, the InkJet printer companies switched from "true 6 color photo printing" to the present "true 4 color photo printing". I don't know their motivation, but the 6 color printers print MUCH nicer photos, in our experience, with much better shadow detail. Tech company marketing departments take extreme advantage of any ignorance they find in customers.
Testing in the store:
Have experience with the Harbor Project xBase compiler?