You're right to say that many people bought printers knowing they could refill the cartridges, but it has always been a gray market, and HP (others too, I guess) have always tried to make it hard to refill. If they could have chipped the things from the start, they would have.
Of course HP sell ink. But what is wrong with this? Did I miss something here, suddenly we're in a planned economy where suppliers can only sell products that are part of the grand 5-year plan?
It's like people bitching about Microsoft raising their license fees and (gosh) requiring people to register their software. "The bastards! What? How can it be legal? I thought everything was free? That was the point of the Internet, wasn't it? Does this mean I'm going to have to get a job?"
This whole printer/ink discussion is twisted and not a little hypocritical, because it is entirely driven by what people want: cheap upfront-costs and damn the long-term bills. HP and Lexmark are exploiting this, yes, but that's their right.
Everyone buying an ink jet printer in the last four or five years has had the choice between expensive printers with cheap cartridges and cheap printers with expensive ones. Why, then, are the very cheapest printers the most popular? And where is the flood of cheap Taiwanese printers?
Anyone buying a $29.95 printer is accepting a contract that includes "... and you will buy our ink at our prices." Unlike selling expensive car parts, if you don't like the expensive ink, you can just throw away the printer.
Again, this just seems fair business. Granted, disabling cartridges after 4.5 years (gosh) seems a bit brutal. But hardly newsworthy. Let me see... my unused mobile phone minutes get killed each month. My unused gigabytes of transfer capacity get timed-out. If I don't watch my rented DVD one day, I have to return it anyhow. None of these things are particularly fair, but just as the consumer has the right of choice, the supplier has the right of deciding what product to make and how to sell it.
To some extent, people who complain about suppliers are just trying to excuse their own poor judgement in choosing those suppliers in the first place. "Oh, my Yugo broke down again, damn car."
Instead of complaining about HP ink prices, promote those suppliers who make refillable printers.
To sell a "good printer" at a profit would mean charging something like 2-3 times the "normal" price. Uhm, you might sell a few if you market them for their exclusivity. Or maybe to people who can't read price tags. Good luck.
HP, Lexmark, et al. spend enormous amounts on research making what are, finally, very good printers that run on what is practically just dirty water.
One way or another, the consumer has to pay for the real cost of the printer, which includes the cost of R&D. There are two ways: upfront, or indirect. Now, you can ask consumers: would you rather pay $499 for the printer and get ink for free, or would you rather pay $99 for the printer and pay for expensive ink? The market chose the second option some years back, which is partly why HP took so much of the inkjet printer market from its competitors.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
Look at it another way: paying for the consumables gives consumers much more freedom. If they don't like the printer, they chuck it. If you buy a more expensive laser printer that runs on cheap toner, you'll save money, but only if you run the beast for three years.
This is not a printer market problem. Do you buy regular lightbulbs or 'ecological long life' ones? Do you pay for your train and bus each time you get on, or do you buy a season ticket? Do you rent an appartment or pay a mortgage?
This really is a matter of the free market. If printer R&D costs were negligible, we would have already seen an invasion of cheap printers along with cheap ink. Look at what happened to scanners. There is no ripoff here, only people unhappy with the bargains they made.
This story keeps coming back to Slashdot, and every time it's "the poor consumer being ripped off by those bastard printer manufacturers." Does no-one actually bother to analyze the economics here?
And after all this time, there's not a single asshat that comes up with a decent solution? Do you seriously think the chance of being sued for not warning in time is higher than the chance of being sued for denial of service today? If all the asshats on/. can't figure out a workable solution to the/. effect, I'm truly disappointed.
I'm not surprised this thread comes up every time, if asshats keep dissing the topic as junk.
Offtopic? WTF, thirty seconds of my best/. suggestion for weeks, cunningly disguised as humour, and totally relevant given the many 'Oh my goodness, the/. effect has struck again' posts, and the best I get is a lousy 'Offtopic'. Dang.
"Warning: your site 'http://some.sit' has been featured in a Slashdot article scheduled to be published in 3.5 minutes... This is just enough time to replace your heavy graphics with text and move to panic mode. Alternatively, time to boil a soft-cooked egg before your web site collapses. We hope you have a lovely day."
On my laptop 1400x1050 LCD, antialiasing Vera gives me an almost instant headache. It is quite impressive. The fonts are nice, but I'm forced to use them with anti-aliasing off. (Would this be a double negative?)
It can be shown that people do like free communication and value it highly: look at any telecoms technology that has succeeded and you will find bottom-up pull rather than industry or government-driven push. I'm not disagreeing that the US government and certain others appear to treat the individual's desire for freedom as a threat, and like repressive regimes everywhere they use the straw man argument to justify their tactics, but in the long term I think the ball has rolled too far for it to be caught again. The next decade will not demonstrate so much how we lost our freedoms as how we frustrated bug business and big government's natural but ultimate unhealthy desire to stifle them.
The very fact - unprecedented in history - that we are discussing this subject openly on a global 24-hour basis demonstrates my point. Yes, one day a US federal or state government will ban/., but that will only serve to hasten the day that all attempts to regulate social communications bite the dust.
The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The Super-DCMA is an act of luddite monopolists who have failed to see that their world has changed.
The best laid plans gang aft awry. There has been no lock built that could not be broken.
Obviously: insert any CD or DVD to play, and it gets automagically ripped and compressed, so that you can play it again as you like.
But the really evil part is when the box gets online and shares. I'm trying to think of legit uses for such a thing but I can't.:-)
I got a Surfpad when these were going cheap, it is pretty much exactly what you describe: the price came down from around $2500 to $600 and you can still find them second-hand.
To be accurate, my comment was based on responses I've seen from many people - on and off/. - to Lindows, not Lycoris. A definite elitist sense that populism OS somehow devalues Linux. Now, I'm a Linux user since early Slackware days, but this lack of empathy with the bulk of PC users, who simply want something that will install by itself, put the most important icons large and friendly on the desktop, not show a single message unless something is actually wrong, automatically configure its network, allow them to update software easily,... it's a problem in itself.
I was not trolling. Most of the criticism of Lindows (again, just taking an example I know) was along the lines that it does not make its source code available, that it runs as root, and that it looks too much like WindowsXP. Nothing about 'does it actually work, if you give it to a naive user'. Nothing about 'my mother has tried it and found the icons too confusing'.
The standard of constructive criticism is that it leads the discussion in a positive direction. My point is that too much of the discussion around Linux consumer distributions is patronising and irrelevant and act as a barrier in itself.
... is the attitude of Linux purists whenever a company releases something designed for the masses. Face it: any product that will be acceptable to the hundreds of millions of desktop Windows users is going to *have* to be dumbed down, commercial, and over-prettified. Something like Lindows.
My pending patent application ("A SYSTEM FOR FUTURE INVENTIONS", US Pat. Reg. 2221-222633-003) covers this. Invent anything, at all, in the future and I'll sue your pants off.
Luckily I've not had to enforce my patent yet, since every invention since 1998 (including patented ones but excluding mine) are ideas blatantly stolen from prehistoric (pre-1996) times.
By Microsoft as a way of getting Win2003 Server onto lots of systems that would otherwise run Linux. "Oh, dear, we've lost our key!" One has to wonder why a product like this even needs a master key. Surely system-builders and so-on can use product activation like anyone else: even if they can use the same key multiple times, nothing says they cannot activate it on-line.
Oh those damn pirates, now we will have to crack down even harder on all those people still using bootleg copies of Office 97!!!
In recent news...
Scientists have announced that they have successfully created a legacy-free lifeform. Says Dr. F. Stein, "No longer do we have to be encumbered by a basic design that is 3.5 billion years old! With the latest developments in DNA design we have broken the ancestral stranglehold." When asked for more details, Dr Stein continued: "Our most challenging task was to get away from the old-fashioned and frankly inefficient bilateral quadrepedal model (OF/FIBQM) and move to a new design. I call it: the four-legged chicken. Drumsticks for all the family!"
Or, use two cameras at either side of the screen and provide the viewer with a stereo image of you looking at the center of the screen. Could work... what you'd want is a mouse pointer of two eyes (o.o) that you move over the face of the person you're talking to so that the computer can shift the stereo image as needed.
Do you believe the evolution of our technologies (such as the Internet) are more under control of restrictive commercial interests today than in the past, or has this always been a feature of technological change?
Re:XML is a primary innovation
on
Why XML Doesn't Suck
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It's a good question. We spent a *long* time working with structured data formats like S-exprs between 1991-1997, and although these do support the basic technique of abstracting your way up the expression ladder, XML adds a few small but highly significant things. Some of these are intangible: general acceptance as a standard. Some of them are more concrete: solid support for non-USA languages. Some of them are incidental: wide availability of parsers in any language. Some of them are subtle: essential simplicity.
There is something about lowering the barrier to a point where virtuous feedback becomes not only possible with effort, but easier than anything else. I think this is what XML does to abstraction, more than S-exprs, SGML or any of the many other formal/semi-formal structured data languages that existed before.
In the last five years, XML has - for instance - completely revolutionized the way my company writes software. We use code generators that mungle XML definitions into templates (imagine PHP controlling the generation not of HTML but of C or... PHP, and using XML to specify the abstract model in question).
We don't need schemas, stylesheets, xpaths,... just simple XML. And yet we can write very rich code in XML instead of in native code. Today we're producing about 25 lines of final code for 1 line of XML, and we're pushing this up all the time. My current project generates workflow engines from XML definitions, building a 10k workflow application from a single 500-line XML file.
My point is that XML is not just a handy way to store data. It is a meta language, able to formally define any concept, no matter how abstract. This is an incredible but subtle thing. The power comes not from XML technology itself, which is really very, very simple once you ignore the W3C fluff. The power comes from the freedom that XML technology gives you, namely the ability to abstract your problem to as high a level as your mind can take it, and to solve it at that level.
This is difficult, and takes time, but as the XML space settles down it will become clear that this is the real value of the technology.
The 'con' arguments all appear to be related to people trying to use XML in the wrong place, for the wrong thing, or to replace existing abstractions that work perfectly well.
By scheduling a 9.x release skipping their 8.1 and 8.2 updates?
Does anyone else find this interesting/amusing, seeing as Mandrake is largely a tuned repackaging of RedHat.
Describes a business model for creating money by (1) registering obfusticated patents (herein described as the "STEP 1"), (2) consolidating opportunity horizons for collateral interest parties (described herein as "???"), and (3) collecting scalable revenues from the aforesaid collateral interest parties (described herein as "STEP 1 - PROFIT!").
Once this patent is registered, any attempt to register a new spurious patent will be impossible.
Re:It is a v_e_r_y complex message to get across..
on
CIOs Looking At OSS
·
· Score: 1
Actually, businesses are used to not paying when they can. It's just a matter of perception. We've been trained to consider software expensive, but at the same time we've been conditioned to associate anything to do with the Internet to be cheap. Another example: the falling prices of computer hardware. Your company exec understand this.
So, try this argument: "software prices have actually been falling dramatically during the last 10 years, along with every other mass-produced aspect of business computing. It's only certain companies that through their monopolistic position have managed to keep prices artificially high. For everyone else, software has become a commodity and very often, one that is free. Your business can choose: pay the monopolist or look for cheaper alternatives. Would you stick with a power company that charged 2000% more than alternatives? Or pay $10 for a pencil? Or $100,000 for a computer? So why $500 for a Office license?
The global economic recession creates a huge advantage for OSS.
Slashdot Mirror
You just have to treat any wireless network segment as insecure and pass any traffic from it through your firewall as you would for internet traffic.
Of course HP sell ink. But what is wrong with this? Did I miss something here, suddenly we're in a planned economy where suppliers can only sell products that are part of the grand 5-year plan?
It's like people bitching about Microsoft raising their license fees and (gosh) requiring people to register their software. "The bastards! What? How can it be legal? I thought everything was free? That was the point of the Internet, wasn't it? Does this mean I'm going to have to get a job?"
This whole printer/ink discussion is twisted and not a little hypocritical, because it is entirely driven by what people want: cheap upfront-costs and damn the long-term bills. HP and Lexmark are exploiting this, yes, but that's their right.
Anyone buying a $29.95 printer is accepting a contract that includes "... and you will buy our ink at our prices." Unlike selling expensive car parts, if you don't like the expensive ink, you can just throw away the printer.
Again, this just seems fair business. Granted, disabling cartridges after 4.5 years (gosh) seems a bit brutal. But hardly newsworthy. Let me see... my unused mobile phone minutes get killed each month. My unused gigabytes of transfer capacity get timed-out. If I don't watch my rented DVD one day, I have to return it anyhow. None of these things are particularly fair, but just as the consumer has the right of choice, the supplier has the right of deciding what product to make and how to sell it.
To some extent, people who complain about suppliers are just trying to excuse their own poor judgement in choosing those suppliers in the first place. "Oh, my Yugo broke down again, damn car."
Instead of complaining about HP ink prices, promote those suppliers who make refillable printers.
There are no clone Mach III blades most probably because the blade or its pivoting attachment is patented.
To sell a "good printer" at a profit would mean charging something like 2-3 times the "normal" price. Uhm, you might sell a few if you market them for their exclusivity. Or maybe to people who can't read price tags. Good luck.
One way or another, the consumer has to pay for the real cost of the printer, which includes the cost of R&D. There are two ways: upfront, or indirect. Now, you can ask consumers: would you rather pay $499 for the printer and get ink for free, or would you rather pay $99 for the printer and pay for expensive ink? The market chose the second option some years back, which is partly why HP took so much of the inkjet printer market from its competitors.
Now, having established that consumers prefer (and have chosen) to pay for the ink, HP is entitled to protect its ink sales. This just seems logical.
Look at it another way: paying for the consumables gives consumers much more freedom. If they don't like the printer, they chuck it. If you buy a more expensive laser printer that runs on cheap toner, you'll save money, but only if you run the beast for three years.
This is not a printer market problem. Do you buy regular lightbulbs or 'ecological long life' ones? Do you pay for your train and bus each time you get on, or do you buy a season ticket? Do you rent an appartment or pay a mortgage?
This really is a matter of the free market. If printer R&D costs were negligible, we would have already seen an invasion of cheap printers along with cheap ink. Look at what happened to scanners. There is no ripoff here, only people unhappy with the bargains they made.
This story keeps coming back to Slashdot, and every time it's "the poor consumer being ripped off by those bastard printer manufacturers." Does no-one actually bother to analyze the economics here?
I'm not surprised this thread comes up every time, if asshats keep dissing the topic as junk.
Offtopic? WTF, thirty seconds of my best /. suggestion for weeks, cunningly disguised as humour, and totally relevant given the many 'Oh my goodness, the /. effect has struck again' posts, and the best I get is a lousy 'Offtopic'. Dang.
"Warning: your site 'http://some.sit' has been featured in a Slashdot article scheduled to be published in 3.5 minutes... This is just enough time to replace your heavy graphics with text and move to panic mode. Alternatively, time to boil a soft-cooked egg before your web site collapses. We hope you have a lovely day."
On my laptop 1400x1050 LCD, antialiasing Vera gives me an almost instant headache. It is quite impressive. The fonts are nice, but I'm forced to use them with anti-aliasing off. (Would this be a double negative?)
It can be shown that people do like free communication and value it highly: look at any telecoms technology that has succeeded and you will find bottom-up pull rather than industry or government-driven push. I'm not disagreeing that the US government and certain others appear to treat the individual's desire for freedom as a threat, and like repressive regimes everywhere they use the straw man argument to justify their tactics, but in the long term I think the ball has rolled too far for it to be caught again. The next decade will not demonstrate so much how we lost our freedoms as how we frustrated bug business and big government's natural but ultimate unhealthy desire to stifle them. /., but that will only serve to hasten the day that all attempts to regulate social communications bite the dust.
The very fact - unprecedented in history - that we are discussing this subject openly on a global 24-hour basis demonstrates my point. Yes, one day a US federal or state government will ban
The genie is well and truly out of the bottle. The Super-DCMA is an act of luddite monopolists who have failed to see that their world has changed.
The best laid plans gang aft awry. There has been no lock built that could not be broken.
Obviously: insert any CD or DVD to play, and it gets automagically ripped and compressed, so that you can play it again as you like. :-)
But the really evil part is when the box gets online and shares. I'm trying to think of legit uses for such a thing but I can't.
I got a Surfpad when these were going cheap, it is pretty much exactly what you describe: the price came down from around $2500 to $600 and you can still find them second-hand.
To be accurate, my comment was based on responses I've seen from many people - on and off /. - to Lindows, not Lycoris. A definite elitist sense that populism OS somehow devalues Linux. Now, I'm a Linux user since early Slackware days, but this lack of empathy with the bulk of PC users, who simply want something that will install by itself, put the most important icons large and friendly on the desktop, not show a single message unless something is actually wrong, automatically configure its network, allow them to update software easily,... it's a problem in itself.
I was not trolling. Most of the criticism of Lindows (again, just taking an example I know) was along the lines that it does not make its source code available, that it runs as root, and that it looks too much like WindowsXP. Nothing about 'does it actually work, if you give it to a naive user'. Nothing about 'my mother has tried it and found the icons too confusing'.
The standard of constructive criticism is that it leads the discussion in a positive direction. My point is that too much of the discussion around Linux consumer distributions is patronising and irrelevant and act as a barrier in itself.
... is the attitude of Linux purists whenever a company releases something designed for the masses. Face it: any product that will be acceptable to the hundreds of millions of desktop Windows users is going to *have* to be dumbed down, commercial, and over-prettified. Something like Lindows.
Luckily I've not had to enforce my patent yet, since every invention since 1998 (including patented ones but excluding mine) are ideas blatantly stolen from prehistoric (pre-1996) times.
By Microsoft as a way of getting Win2003 Server onto lots of systems that would otherwise run Linux. "Oh, dear, we've lost our key!" One has to wonder why a product like this even needs a master key. Surely system-builders and so-on can use product activation like anyone else: even if they can use the same key multiple times, nothing says they cannot activate it on-line.
Oh those damn pirates, now we will have to crack down even harder on all those people still using bootleg copies of Office 97!!!
In recent news...
Scientists have announced that they have successfully created a legacy-free lifeform. Says Dr. F. Stein, "No longer do we have to be encumbered by a basic design that is 3.5 billion years old! With the latest developments in DNA design we have broken the ancestral stranglehold." When asked for more details, Dr Stein continued: "Our most challenging task was to get away from the old-fashioned and frankly inefficient bilateral quadrepedal model (OF/FIBQM) and move to a new design. I call it: the four-legged chicken. Drumsticks for all the family!"
Or, use two cameras at either side of the screen and provide the viewer with a stereo image of you looking at the center of the screen. Could work... what you'd want is a mouse pointer of two eyes (o.o) that you move over the face of the person you're talking to so that the computer can shift the stereo image as needed.
Do you believe the evolution of our technologies (such as the Internet) are more under control of restrictive commercial interests today than in the past, or has this always been a feature of technological change?
It's a good question. We spent a *long* time working with structured data formats like S-exprs between 1991-1997, and although these do support the basic technique of abstracting your way up the expression ladder, XML adds a few small but highly significant things. Some of these are intangible: general acceptance as a standard. Some of them are more concrete: solid support for non-USA languages. Some of them are incidental: wide availability of parsers in any language. Some of them are subtle: essential simplicity.
There is something about lowering the barrier to a point where virtuous feedback becomes not only possible with effort, but easier than anything else. I think this is what XML does to abstraction, more than S-exprs, SGML or any of the many other formal/semi-formal structured data languages that existed before.
In the last five years, XML has - for instance - completely revolutionized the way my company writes software. We use code generators that mungle XML definitions into templates (imagine PHP controlling the generation not of HTML but of C or... PHP, and using XML to specify the abstract model in question).
We don't need schemas, stylesheets, xpaths,... just simple XML. And yet we can write very rich code in XML instead of in native code. Today we're producing about 25 lines of final code for 1 line of XML, and we're pushing this up all the time. My current project generates workflow engines from XML definitions, building a 10k workflow application from a single 500-line XML file.
My point is that XML is not just a handy way to store data. It is a meta language, able to formally define any concept, no matter how abstract. This is an incredible but subtle thing. The power comes not from XML technology itself, which is really very, very simple once you ignore the W3C fluff. The power comes from the freedom that XML technology gives you, namely the ability to abstract your problem to as high a level as your mind can take it, and to solve it at that level.
This is difficult, and takes time, but as the XML space settles down it will become clear that this is the real value of the technology.
The 'con' arguments all appear to be related to people trying to use XML in the wrong place, for the wrong thing, or to replace existing abstractions that work perfectly well.
By scheduling a 9.x release skipping their 8.1 and 8.2 updates?
Does anyone else find this interesting/amusing, seeing as Mandrake is largely a tuned repackaging of RedHat.
Describes a business model for creating money by (1) registering obfusticated patents (herein described as the "STEP 1"), (2) consolidating opportunity horizons for collateral interest parties (described herein as "???"), and (3) collecting scalable revenues from the aforesaid collateral interest parties (described herein as "STEP 1 - PROFIT!").
Once this patent is registered, any attempt to register a new spurious patent will be impossible.
Actually, businesses are used to not paying when they can. It's just a matter of perception. We've been trained to consider software expensive, but at the same time we've been conditioned to associate anything to do with the Internet to be cheap. Another example: the falling prices of computer hardware. Your company exec understand this.
So, try this argument: "software prices have actually been falling dramatically during the last 10 years, along with every other mass-produced aspect of business computing. It's only certain companies that through their monopolistic position have managed to keep prices artificially high. For everyone else, software has become a commodity and very often, one that is free. Your business can choose: pay the monopolist or look for cheaper alternatives. Would you stick with a power company that charged 2000% more than alternatives? Or pay $10 for a pencil? Or $100,000 for a computer? So why $500 for a Office license?
The global economic recession creates a huge advantage for OSS.