Yeah.... I was born in '71 and I never did see Mr. Wizard (either the original or the 2nd. series). I only became aware of it when my friend's little brother started talking about watching it on Nick....
What I *do* remember, however, was the science-related PBS series "3-2-1 Contact", which also had a magazine I subscribed to for a while. It wasn't quite Mr. Wizard, but I learned a lot of good stuff from that show too.
I gave this a try for most of the afternoon, yesterday, on my XP box at work.
For a very first attempt releasing the browser for Windows, it's ok, in my opinion. You have to start somewhere... But right now, no - it's not exactly going to win a lot of users over from Firefox or even IE.
The ability to drag a tab out to form a new window is pretty slick, but of questionable usefulness most of the time. Faster rendering and launching of Java applets is always a plus, but just like Ars concluded, it's not important relative to stability and compatibility.
I was able to crash Safari on several occasions just by doing things like hitting the "back" button a couple times after submitting a form on a page and getting dialog boxes popping up asking if I was sure I wanted to re-submit it. I haven't tried it yet myself, but I've also read that it has some bugs with printing multiple pages to a printer if you tell it to start anywhere but on page 1.
I didn't think Safari's text rendering looked quite as "crisp" or easy to read as Firefox or IE does in Windows either. (On a Mac, it looks fine to me, by comparison.)
All in all though, I don't see why anyone would think this release is a "bad" thing? It's free, for starters - and it allows a hard-core Safari-using Mac owner to feel very comfortable if he/she has to browse on a Windows box on occasion. It surely needs testers to keep reporting bugs in it, so it can be improved. But by the time it gets to a release version and out of beta, I think it has potential to be at least another solid, free browser choice for Windows -- if not really a "superior" one.
I think the "surprise" of this announcement for some of us was that it seemed to squash earlier rumors that Apple might just buy rights to Parallels or vmware and incorporate it as part of Leopard.
I heard some earlier talk about how Apple convinced Microsoft to adhere to some GUI design standards that they suggested, and people pointed out that it seemed really odd for Microsoft to adapt to Apple's suggestions, unless there was a bigger plan in the works (like Apple developing their own virtualization for XP/Vista inside OS X). Perhaps this was for the sake of better Quicktime integration or something, instead?
It now appears Apple is happy to let 3rd. parties handle running Windows inside OS X - and I agree that there's not much wrong with that. (Early adopters of Parallels would feel rather cheated having to pay twice for the same product, if it was bundled in as part of Leopard.)
The last few times one of my co-workers asked me to find a "good deal" on a "nice Windows laptop" for them, it was more of a chore than I expected.
For example, visit one of your local retailers like Office Depot, OfficeMax, Best Buy, or Circuit City, and try to determine exactly which video chipset and how much video RAM a given notebook contains. Toshiba will sometimes offer a clue, only by the fact they've stuck a little square "ATI" sticker in the corner of the machine -- but the published "specs" on the store shelf won't even list it. Other times, I'll see things like "Intel 3D video!" - but no explanation that this usually means integrated video that shares system RAM with video RAM. The average user knows nothing about any of this....
And again, try to find out what speed of hard drive is included. They'll gladly tell you it has an 80GB or a 40GB drive or whatever, but not if they're short-changing you with some SLOW 4200RPM model....
The PC notebook makers seemed to conclude that hiding some of the facts is the best marketing tool... Brag about CPU speed, but bury it in fine print that it's a Celeron class CPU. Most of your model line hasn't been updated yet to use the new wireless N standards? Don't mention it at all then. Just announce they have "built-in wi-fi!". Even more savvy users won't always remember to check ALL of these items until after the sale...
By contrast, when I order a new Apple notebook on their web site, each specific detail is listed, and can be customized in many cases. If the competition was sold identically, I think people would have a clearer sense of what they're getting for their dollar.
Maybe your "typical" Slashdot poster isn't really so typical after all?
I'm a single parent with a full-time job, PLUS running my own business on the side as a second job. Free-time isn't a concept I'm too familiar with anymore. But guess what? I'm still here, reading Slashdot pretty regularly. Why? Because I like to stay informed about computer and tech. related issues, and it's interesting viewing story summaries, reading articles of interest they link to, AND getting a sample of reader feedback and additional discussion. Much more "interactive", plus ability to view topics selectively, than I'd ever get sitting down watching TV.
I installed "censor-ware" type software where I work, full-time, so I'm pretty familiar with what it can and can't do. (Using a Linux proxy here, with Dansguardian - which is generally considered "superior" to these $50-70/year commercial Windows blocking products. But I've installed CyberSitter and a few others along those lines for customers at my 2nd. job too.)
I still maintain that the "Slashdot majority" is right, if they're saying these site censoring packages are NOT the real answer. They can be used as an additional tool in an effort to keep your kid/teen from surfing where you don't want them surfing. But at the end of the day, computer and unrestricted net access is all over the place. Things your "Cybersitter" package block can be viewed from a PC at a public library, or a friend's laptop brought to a local restaurant that has free wi-fi. If you lock things down tightly at home, it just drives a curious kid to try harder to locate the content elsewhere -- because nothing generates interest like denying them access to it.
If you have a small child (like I do), I'd think the best solution is to give them their own computer, and set it up so it can't access ANYTHING on the net except specifically allowed sites. My kid cares little about anything on the web other than a handful of sites like nickjr.com and pbskids.org anyway....
For older kids or teens, you can think of it like you might think of their access to porn magazines. Adding content filters is akin to making household rules saying "I won't let you order a subscription to Playboy that is delivered to our home." But don't think for a minute you just prevented their eyes from ever seeing one of those magazines.
I used to have a high-quality Epson flatbed scanner (ES-600C I believe it was?), purchased for over $800 in the late 90's. When Microsoft released Windows 2000, it was deemed "no longer supported" by both Epson and Microsoft, because it used a parallel port, and they didn't feel like developing an updated driver for it. My only solution? Purchase a whole new scanner, and relegate this one to the junk pile.
I also had an expensive Diamond Stealth 3D video card at one time, which was never supported with working drivers in Windows 2000 or XP. XP would "auto detect" the card, but selected an unusable driver each time -- and an exhaustive search for an alternate driver turned up nothing but frustrated users who had to junk the card, or save it for old Windows '95/'98 machines.
These things happen all the time in the computer industry, unfortunately. In the case of the rev. 1 B&W G3, a class action suit was probably in order - just like people did with Toshiba a few years back, when they discovered they used a defective floppy controller chip in almost ALL of their laptops, which could cause incorrect data to be written to diskettes when the system was heavily loaded.
But one such situation doesn't make me say "Never buy an Apple product!" -- just as Toshiba's big floppy controller screw-up doesn't make me necessarily avoid all their products today.
Why do the "authorized" publishers of the guitar tab feel they *must* shut down the other sites before they can be successful with a new venture, publishing them online themselves?
For starters, a lot of tab out there is really poor. Very inaccurate, or only partial tabs - made by some kid who wanted to share the fact that he "finally figured out the guitar chords for the first chorus" or what-not. If I can choose between one of these "unofficial" tab collection sites, or a real, "authorized" one that's still free to use (ad-supported), guess which one I'll pick?
But pissing off all the practicing/budding musicians who are currently trying to learn using whatever they can get, from sites like guitartabs.com, doesn't make any sense. "Hey, come use us now! We're the ones that forced legal shutdowns of all the sites you knew and loved before, so you KNOW we're a friendly, helpful bunch!"
The "spotlight" feature in OS X is supposed to be able to search metadata of many filetypes. Is it possible it will be enhanced (or can already?) search this info inside the music that's cataloged in iTunes?
If so, this seems like it could be beneficial if, say, you received a number of songs from a friend (ok, let's assume this is done "legally" for the moment), and you wanted to search for all of those just by searching on your friend's name.
I'm not trying to defend Apple here. I think any additional info of this sort that's tacked on to your files should at least be disclosed, with an option given to strip it back off of the files if you wish. But Apple has always been a company that enjoys (and seems to profit from) keeping little secrets about their products. OS X has loads of "undocumented features", and most of their apps have similar hidden "extras" built into them. I can easily see them incorporating this not because of any intention of actually gathering up your personal data or assisting in "copyright enforcement" -- but more because it would make another powerful "ability" of their search tool that the public didn't expect it was capable of.
Heck, even iTunes can work with multiple song libraries by holding down the "option" key when it first boots. Does it ever tell you that's an option when you run it? Nope!
I've been a KnoppMyth user for quite a while now, and I've been through several major upgrades as they've been released. I love the distro, overall.
I consider myself an "on again, off again" occasional Linux user. In the past, I've gone in "phases" of trying to run Linux as my primary OS on one PC or another, but I've generally settled on using an Apple Mac Pro as my primary PC these days, with a Windows XP based PC as a secondary "gaming computer". So basically, I can "get around" in most Linux distros, but I'm by no means "proficient" in writing shell scripts or coding in perl/PHP/what have you.
All of that being said, if I had to try to pin down my biggest frustration with KnoppMyth, it would probably be the "devil in the details". It's quite easy to get it installed and more or less "working", but even in the latest release, it always felt "rough around the edges". Each time I've installed one, I've had to spend hours pouring over your message forums to manually patch/fix one little detail after another, to address problems I ran into.
That's really what scares off many of my friends from trying KnoppMyth themselves. With something like Windows Media Center, they can not only get it installed easily, but it either works or it doesn't work, based on what hardware they're putting it on. They don't get all the little "surprises" over time that KnoppMyth has.
Just off the top of my head, for example, I had to:
1. Hunt down and manually apply a patch to the script that grabs movie info from the imdb, because the latest KnoppMyth, out of the box, wasn't auto-getting cover artwork or descriptions of any movies I tried to add info for. 2. Make some changes to a startup script to address a syntax error that could prevent the back-end from properly restarting. (Wasn't "critical", but looked like a good idea to patch, to avoid having to reboot the whole box in some circumstances to get it going again after the back-end was stopped.) 3. Edit a script so one of the serial ports would be "freed up" to use, if needed, because the default setup was effectively "locking" it from use. 4. Struggle and struggle to get the mythgame configuration in some sort of usable/workable state for running mame and a NES emulator. (This is one area where I've felt like KnoppMyth has "dropped the ball" to an extent. There seems to be a lot of "You'll have to figure it out yourself, since I don't really use that part of the software anyway." attitude on the forums. At one time, I did a lot of experimentation myself with recompiling source with various options enabled or disabled, and had some success. But some of this work seemed to be rendered "outdated" with newer releases of xmame and Myth too. I'd really like to see a KnoppMyth release with a sample game or two properly configured for xmame and a sample, if possible, for something like zsnes.)
A little time invested in filters goes a long way.
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Is Email 'Bankrupt'?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The vast majority of people I encounter who complain about "email overload" are the ones still receiving everything into one huge "Inbox" folder initially. Then in most cases, they're manually sorting things out as they read them, placing them in manually created sub-folders.
If they'd take a couple hours out of their busy day, just once, to create some sensible automatic filtering rules in their email client, I suspect it would pay off for most of them pretty quickly.
The truth is, most people receive regular emails from specific addresses, so these could be sorted just by a basic "if mail is from xxx@yyy.com, then..." rule. If you regularly do online purchasing with certain vendors, you can automatically dump their emails into a "Web order related" folder, for example.
Exactly... And I don't think it's still the case, but for quite a long time, MasterCard was actually listed as a *non profit corporation*! As a non-profit, they practically HAD to find large write-offs, to attempt to prove they weren't generating profit. I'm sure fraud losses were a big component of that whole business model for them.
I see plenty of valid comments and guesses as to why people aren't switching to Linux. But above all else, I think it's really about the software. The lion's share of software available today is written for the Windows operating system. Most people using a computer today are using it pretty much like an appliance. They have a specific set of tasks in mind to do with it, plus expect the flexibility to run out to any local store to buy a new piece of software to load and run, at-will, on it.
What products are almost universally requested by "typical computer users"? Microsoft Office (at least Word and Excel, and increasingly, even Outlook for email), Quicken and TurboTax, a random sampling of games (anything from Half Life 2 to Civilization 4 to The Sims 2 or even Deer Hunter), and probably some kind of greeting card maker and/or photo editing package to use with their color inkjet printer. Oh, and quite often, they want "Internet Explorer" too, because they plan on using some college or business web site that says it requires IE.
These people have generally already learned enough Windows basics to understand how to click the START button, go to "Programs" and find their program to run, how to do some basic locating of their saved documents, how to print from all their programs, and so forth. If Linux could guarantee, tomorrow, that it would run 100% of Windows software just as well as Windows does (EG. Stick the CD in the drive and let it auto-run the installer package to load the app.), you'd see MUCH more adoption of Linux over time. (People would figure, hey - I save well over $100 by ditching Windows? Ok... I'll go for that.) But right now, the idea of having to hunt down less common/familiar alternatives for many of the programs they need, PLUS the idea of re-learning some things about how to get around in the OS means they see NO good reason to change.
I'm not advocating total isolationism.... (That would entail refraining from importing or exporting ANY goods, in the strict sense of the word.)
You have to draw the line someplace, though - because ultimately, yes. Everything is indirectly related to everything else in some manner. That doesn't always give a country a good excuse to interfere with another country's affairs though. (Well, maybe it does, if you're an advocate of the "New World Order" concept.. with all of us ending up under some sort of "world government". But I'm FAR from accepting THAT as a good idea.)
I tried to visit the link and it gave me a generic "site has been suspended" type message.
But anyway, I agree. A site like this may not make government happy, but who cares? If it deals in collecting and distributing data that's in the public domain already, all it REALLY does is serves as a "wake up" call to government, that they need to be more careful about keeping the covers on their "undercover" employees.
As a parent myself, I'm not really sure I agree with your conclusion.
Before I had a kid, I *used* to think most "bad behavior" was directly the result of "poor parenting". (Hey, it's easy to point fingers and blame the adult, since we all know kids just learn from what they see around them, right?)
But now that I'm in the middle of the situation myself, and most of my friends are now parents too, I'm seeing it's much more complicated.
For one thing, I see MUCH more pressure for kids to "grow up" and act like "little adults" than there used to be. (Heck, my kid's preschool already sent home a notice a couple weeks ago that they intended to let the kids watch a PG rated movie, because they already read the book it was based on and thought the kids would enjoy it.) I'm not necessarily opposed to that either, but I note the sharp contrast to my own upbringing in the 70's - where my parents tried to make sure ANY movie I watched was G rated until I was at least 8 or 9.
Before we moved, my kid's first preschool experience was a public school offering an "early childhood center". That school was sending 4 year olds down to the principals' office as punishment for hitting another kid with a toy or what-have-you! No differentiation between punishments/consequences for behavior of a preschooler or an 8th. grader!
I tend to try to parent in a "laid back/relaxed" manner. That's just my personality, plus the way my own father generally did things (and I grew up admiring that quality in him). Unfortunately, my kid is pretty wild and active, and has been officially diagnosed as being ADHD (seemingly like every other kid these days!). I'm constantly hinted to that I should be "more firmly setting boundaries" and so forth. But I've watched her school try all sorts of things for month after month in an attempt to "modify her behavior", and generally fail miserably at it. They're the ones "strongly recommending" I look into medication for her as a "supplement" to the behavior modification work at this point....
She's been on Adderall XR for several weeks now, and I've seen absolutely no improvement in her behavior. Before that, we tried Tenex for about a month. It initially seemed promising (though she complained a bit of being tired during the middle of the day), but its positive effects seemed to vanish completely after about 2 weeks.
But to look at your statements, my kid is a complete contradiction. She's acting more like what you say results from your "scenario 2", despite claims that I parent closer to your "scenario 1".
I think reality probably is, she's going to just have to "work through" a lot of this on her own. She knows what she's "supposed" to do in most situations, but she's stubborn, and wants badly to take more "control" of her own world. So she willingly breaks some of the "rules and boundaries" that are set for her, no matter how severe the consequences are - because it's simply worth it to her right now. (For example, you can tell you not to stand on the chair because she could easily fall and get hurt. Well, she'll fall and get hurt, cry a while - and 2 hours later, she's back up on that same chair, telling you "It's ok! I won't get hurt THIS time!" She might even fall a second and a third time, but she's back up on that chair - just to prove to herself she can do it without getting hurt at least SOME of the time.")
I tend to agree about tariffs being a viable option to help "level the playing field". But "Americans are, on the whole, too lazy to bother with the well being of overseas workers"??
I fail to see how "laziness" has ANYTHING to do with the discussion. It doesn't seem to me like it's America's responsibility to ensure the well being of overseas workers that don't work for our own companies. America seems like it is always called upon/expected to step in whenever there's a global issue. (Anything from cries for food or monetary assistance when a nation encounters a large disaster, to sending in troops to assist in matters which don't directly affect us.) Then, we're just as often criticized for "meddling" where we "don't belong".
The only aspect of this we should directly be concerned with in America is the financial one. (EG. Does importing from nations that refuse to uphold standards of living comparable to ours hurt OUR economy in the long-run? If yes, then we need to take actions that help fix it.) Otherwise, for all I care, China, with their poor stance on human rights and environmental issues, can wallow in their own pollution and filth.
That's just what I was thinking. I imagine.016% of their sampled users were people using some PC other than their own, who had some motivation to see the machine get screwed up or "break down" in some manner.
That or it may have even been people who were wise to the whole thing... thinking "Yeah, right.... This must be some kind of joke or really funny ad campaign. Let me see what it REALLY does when I click here."
Intel should have realized, from how U.S. govt. treated Microsoft and others, that they weren't in NEED of someone like AMD to cut deeply into their sales for a while with truly competitive products.
I'd say your scenario would hold much more merit if govt. had already broken up Microsoft into separate divisions or something....
The fact is, AMD has occasionally built a very comparable, yet cheaper alternative to Intel's offerings. (Remember the success of AMD's response to Intel's 486DX CPUs?) Whenever they pull this off, they do quite well, UNTIL Intel ups the ante with another huge R&D effort, and produces something "next gen" that AMD has to counter.
I don't think Intel is afraid of AMD "taking over the marketplace" in processors.... but I don't think they'd be wise to ignore them as irrelevant either (or only existing as a "straw man" for the sake of legal arguments). They certainly proved themselves much more of a competitor than, say, Cyrix.
The "hire/fire at will" concept is a sound one. But that doesn't mean the systems we have in place are all "unjust" either. Unemployment wages come out of an employee's paycheck anyway! When they file for unemployment, there are restrictions on how long they can collect it, and how long they must have worked continuously before they qualify for it in the first place. That's to ensure they've paid enough in to the system to warrant taking it back out.
If you, as an employer, are "discouraged with the threat of having to pay someone unemployment pay because they do a shitty job", maybe you should have done a better job screening your candidate BEFORE hiring them? With so many avenues of investigation available to today's employers (criminal background checks, driving history checks, financial checks, copies of college transcripts, Internet searches, etc.), it's hard for me to feel sorry for employers who whine that a bad employee really screwed them over.
I've seen it happen to small business owners over and over again, but in each case, I knew the employer took a lot of shortcuts in the hiring process. (EG. Hired based more on a concern about filling a position as quickly as possible, or hired a friend of a current employee without doing much background checking first.)
Despite you opting to "take the low road" and attack me anonymously:
1. MySpace being part of the popular culture IS completely relevant to this discussion. I had plenty of teachers when I was in school who referenced aspects of "pop culture", just to make themselves more human and "accessible" to the class. If you're going to be part of a captive audience, listening to the same person teach for at least an hour every day of the week, it's *normal* to want to learn a little bit about what their personal interests and beliefs are. It makes it easier to interpret some of the statements they make in class when you have a better handle on who they are as an individual.
2. No, it's NOT professional to go out and get drunk with your classmates - but I didn't think that was the issue here? The photo everyone was getting upset about was simply captioned "drunken pirate" and showed the teacher in a Halloween costume, holding up a glass. That means zilch! I bought a bunch of Halloween goblets a few years ago myself... ghoulish plastic cups that we usually just drink water out of. If I'm in *costume* as a vampire holding one, and a caption on my photo says "Enjoying a glass of blood!" - does that mean that's REALLY what I'm doing?
Umm.... I'm sorry, but when did it become "unprofessional behavior" to direct some of one's students to a perosnal MySpace page? In today's society, MySpace is part of the popular culture. It strikes me that this is about as "unprofessional" as recommending that some of your students "give a listen to your favorite classic rock or pop band when they get a chance".
If she really was given poor evaluations, strictly based on her teaching skills (or lack thereof), fine. But this whole MySpace photo thing should have never come up at all. The very fact that it did calls everything else about her evaluations into question.
Actually, if you believe some of the latest rumors, Disney might even be scoping out land in southwestern Missouri, near Joplin. I just read a big story in the St. Louis, MO morning newspaper about that. There's a fictitious company that's been floating around talks of buying up many acres of land for some type of "amusement park complex with shops and hotels", and the registered addresses on the "branches" of this fake company point to Disney corporate office addresses.
I think you're missing my point. When I came back for my genius bar appointment, I was informed that they had NO batteries in stock at all, and hadn't had any in stock for some time. They weren't even sure when they were going to receive more of them from Apple!
That's clearly information they could have passed along BEFORE I had to make the appointment and waste my time and gasoline making another trip.
I wouldn't expect them to hold a battery for me, if someone with an appointment ahead of me needed it. But even some basic info like "We've only got 3 in stock at this moment, but we can't guarantee anything." would help me make a more useful decision.
I've always been pretty pleased with my Apple purchases, until I ordered one of the early Macbook Pro notebooks. I had to wait about a month for its arrival, which wasn't any fun - but I went into it knowing that would probably happen. What REALLY sucked is, when it arrived, it was completely D.O.A.! I could plug the power adapter in and got the green light saying it was supplying power, but the computer wouldn't do a thing. I went through all the usual steps (reset PMU, etc.) and no luck.
Apple promptly shipped me a postage-paid return mailer to send it back in, but I had to wait several *more* weeks for a second unit!
Then, shortly after receiving the second (working, thankfully!) unit, Apple announced a voluntary battery recall. Knowing the problems people had with other batteries splitting open, etc. - I called in to get that taken care of. I had to send in my original battery, which I did, but the replacement they provided refused to charge at all! I tried to get it resolved at the local Apple store, but after getting the big runaround (make an appointment to talk to us at the genius bar, drive home, and come back hours later, etc. etc.), I was simply told they had no more batteries in stock so they couldn't help me! Ugh! Why wouldn't they simply tell me that when I first came in, instead of the bull-headed refusal to speak to me until I made that appointment and came back later!?!
Then I called in to Apple, only to wind up arguing with some guy who tried to tell me I wasn't allowed to get free phone support because I had my laptop longer than 90 days and didn't pay for AppleCare! WTF?! I was asking about the BATTERY they JUST sent me, not the laptop itself! He finally did swap the battery for me, but only after a condescending attitude and an insistence I understand this was only being done because he was "making a 1 time exception" to their policy.
By this time, I was really getting pissed off at the way Apple's support seemed to be rapidly going downhill! But at least I had a working notebook for a while. That is, until one day, my bluetooth suddenly quit working! It was still within warranty by a month or so, so I gritted my teeth and called Apple. They made me give them my CC number first, but did walk me through some steps (including making a new user account in OS X to see if bluetooth would come back that way, which it didn't). Then they agreed it was defective and had me ship it back to them again.
I sent it off the next morning after receipt of their mailer, bracing for weeks of waiting AGAIN. The next morning, I had a box sitting on my doorstep when I was heading off to work. Huh? My notebook! I was REALLY pissed this time. (Obviously someone screwed up and didn't get it delivered properly, or Apple messed up and sent it back without even looking at it!... or that's what I was thinking.) I opened the box though, and saw paperwork on top. Woah! It said they DID work on it already! New bluetooth module installed along with a few other related parts, AND they even fixed the display hinges I commented felt "a little bit loose"!
Was this service so prompt this time because Apple realized I had so many issues, and/or because I posted about all of it to several well-read forums? I'll never know - but THAT was TOP-NOTCH service!
Heh... I've been voting against HP with my wallet for a LONG time now. I had too many bad experiences way back in the early Deskjet 550C/6xx era with their printers completely dying (power supply problems, apparently?). After that, the era began where Epson and Canon had FAR better photo printing capabilities than HP (who kept reusing the same, years old print-head technologies instead of updating it).
And more recently, I've had endless hassles with the cheap all-in-one HP printers. The early ones had horrible drivers and lacked support for newer OS's. The more recent models like the OfficeJet 6210 just self-destruct after about 2 years of light use. Gears start grinding and rollers won't feed individual sheets of paper properly anymore.
I broke down and bought one of HP's Color LaserJet printers a little over a year ago, only because it kept getting good reviews and seemed reasonably priced. (LJ 2550N). Unfortunately, it has a real annoying issue where every so many hours, it cycles the toners around in its internal carousel, making loud "chunka, chuncka, chunka, ka-chuck!" noises that wake a person up in the middle of the night. This behavior is never mentioned in the manual or anyplace else... but owners of 2550N's often complain about it on Internet forums. Sure, you could just turn the thing off when it's not in use - but it's a *networked* printer that you'd normally want to leave on!
It seems like with everything HP I see or use, there's a "catch"... something about the product that's inferior, poorly designed/engineered, or overly costly. They just can't seem to get back to the "glory days" of peripherals like the original ScanJet models or LaserJet II, III and IV.
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Yeah.... I was born in '71 and I never did see Mr. Wizard (either the original or the 2nd. series). I only became aware of it when my friend's little brother started talking about watching it on Nick....
What I *do* remember, however, was the science-related PBS series "3-2-1 Contact", which also had a magazine I subscribed to for a while. It wasn't quite Mr. Wizard, but I learned a lot of good stuff from that show too.
I gave this a try for most of the afternoon, yesterday, on my XP box at work.
For a very first attempt releasing the browser for Windows, it's ok, in my opinion. You have to start somewhere... But right now, no - it's not exactly going to win a lot of users over from Firefox or even IE.
The ability to drag a tab out to form a new window is pretty slick, but of questionable usefulness most of the time. Faster rendering and launching of Java applets is always a plus, but just like Ars concluded, it's not important relative to stability and compatibility.
I was able to crash Safari on several occasions just by doing things like hitting the "back" button a couple times after submitting a form on a page and getting dialog boxes popping up asking if I was sure I wanted to re-submit it. I haven't tried it yet myself, but I've also read that it has some bugs with printing multiple pages to a printer if you tell it to start anywhere but on page 1.
I didn't think Safari's text rendering looked quite as "crisp" or easy to read as Firefox or IE does in Windows either. (On a Mac, it looks fine to me, by comparison.)
All in all though, I don't see why anyone would think this release is a "bad" thing? It's free, for starters - and it allows a hard-core Safari-using Mac owner to feel very comfortable if he/she has to browse on a Windows box on occasion. It surely needs testers to keep reporting bugs in it, so it can be improved. But by the time it gets to a release version and out of beta, I think it has potential to be at least another solid, free browser choice for Windows -- if not really a "superior" one.
I think the "surprise" of this announcement for some of us was that it seemed to squash earlier rumors that Apple might just buy rights to Parallels or vmware and incorporate it as part of Leopard.
I heard some earlier talk about how Apple convinced Microsoft to adhere to some GUI design standards that they suggested, and people pointed out that it seemed really odd for Microsoft to adapt to Apple's suggestions, unless there was a bigger plan in the works (like Apple developing their own virtualization for XP/Vista inside OS X). Perhaps this was for the sake of better Quicktime integration or something, instead?
It now appears Apple is happy to let 3rd. parties handle running Windows inside OS X - and I agree that there's not much wrong with that. (Early adopters of Parallels would feel rather cheated having to pay twice for the same product, if it was bundled in as part of Leopard.)
The last few times one of my co-workers asked me to find a "good deal" on a "nice Windows laptop" for them, it was more of a chore than I expected.
...
For example, visit one of your local retailers like Office Depot, OfficeMax, Best Buy, or Circuit City, and try to determine exactly which video chipset and how much video RAM a given notebook contains. Toshiba will sometimes offer a clue, only by the fact they've stuck a little square "ATI" sticker in the corner of the machine -- but the published "specs" on the store shelf won't even list it. Other times, I'll see things like "Intel 3D video!" - but no explanation that this usually means integrated video that shares system RAM with video RAM. The average user knows nothing about any of this....
And again, try to find out what speed of hard drive is included. They'll gladly tell you it has an 80GB or a 40GB drive or whatever, but not if they're short-changing you with some SLOW 4200RPM model....
The PC notebook makers seemed to conclude that hiding some of the facts is the best marketing tool... Brag about CPU speed, but bury it in fine print that it's a Celeron class CPU. Most of your model line hasn't been updated yet to use the new wireless N standards? Don't mention it at all then. Just announce they have "built-in wi-fi!". Even more savvy users won't always remember to check ALL of these items until after the sale
By contrast, when I order a new Apple notebook on their web site, each specific detail is listed, and can be customized in many cases. If the competition was sold identically, I think people would have a clearer sense of what they're getting for their dollar.
Maybe your "typical" Slashdot poster isn't really so typical after all?
I'm a single parent with a full-time job, PLUS running my own business on the side as a second job. Free-time isn't a concept I'm too familiar with anymore. But guess what? I'm still here, reading Slashdot pretty regularly. Why? Because I like to stay informed about computer and tech. related issues, and it's interesting viewing story summaries, reading articles of interest they link to, AND getting a sample of reader feedback and additional discussion. Much more "interactive", plus ability to view topics selectively, than I'd ever get sitting down watching TV.
I installed "censor-ware" type software where I work, full-time, so I'm pretty familiar with what it can and can't do. (Using a Linux proxy here, with Dansguardian - which is generally considered "superior" to these $50-70/year commercial Windows blocking products. But I've installed CyberSitter and a few others along those lines for customers at my 2nd. job too.)
I still maintain that the "Slashdot majority" is right, if they're saying these site censoring packages are NOT the real answer. They can be used as an additional tool in an effort to keep your kid/teen from surfing where you don't want them surfing. But at the end of the day, computer and unrestricted net access is all over the place. Things your "Cybersitter" package block can be viewed from a PC at a public library, or a friend's laptop brought to a local restaurant that has free wi-fi. If you lock things down tightly at home, it just drives a curious kid to try harder to locate the content elsewhere -- because nothing generates interest like denying them access to it.
If you have a small child (like I do), I'd think the best solution is to give them their own computer, and set it up so it can't access ANYTHING on the net except specifically allowed sites. My kid cares little about anything on the web other than a handful of sites like nickjr.com and pbskids.org anyway....
For older kids or teens, you can think of it like you might think of their access to porn magazines. Adding content filters is akin to making household rules saying "I won't let you order a subscription to Playboy that is delivered to our home." But don't think for a minute you just prevented their eyes from ever seeing one of those magazines.
I used to have a high-quality Epson flatbed scanner (ES-600C I believe it was?), purchased for over $800 in the late 90's. When Microsoft released Windows 2000, it was deemed "no longer supported" by both Epson and Microsoft, because it used a parallel port, and they didn't feel like developing an updated driver for it. My only solution? Purchase a whole new scanner, and relegate this one to the junk pile.
I also had an expensive Diamond Stealth 3D video card at one time, which was never supported with working drivers in Windows 2000 or XP. XP would "auto detect" the card, but selected an unusable driver each time -- and an exhaustive search for an alternate driver turned up nothing but frustrated users who had to junk the card, or save it for old Windows '95/'98 machines.
These things happen all the time in the computer industry, unfortunately. In the case of the rev. 1 B&W G3, a class action suit was probably in order - just like people did with Toshiba a few years back, when they discovered they used a defective floppy controller chip in almost ALL of their laptops, which could cause incorrect data to be written to diskettes when the system was heavily loaded.
But one such situation doesn't make me say "Never buy an Apple product!" -- just as Toshiba's big floppy controller screw-up doesn't make me necessarily avoid all their products today.
Why do the "authorized" publishers of the guitar tab feel they *must* shut down the other sites before they can be successful with a new venture, publishing them online themselves?
For starters, a lot of tab out there is really poor. Very inaccurate, or only partial tabs - made by some kid who wanted to share the fact that he "finally figured out the guitar chords for the first chorus" or what-not. If I can choose between one of these "unofficial" tab collection sites, or a real, "authorized" one that's still free to use (ad-supported), guess which one I'll pick?
But pissing off all the practicing/budding musicians who are currently trying to learn using whatever they can get, from sites like guitartabs.com, doesn't make any sense. "Hey, come use us now! We're the ones that forced legal shutdowns of all the sites you knew and loved before, so you KNOW we're a friendly, helpful bunch!"
The "spotlight" feature in OS X is supposed to be able to search metadata of many filetypes. Is it possible it will be enhanced (or can already?) search this info inside the music that's cataloged in iTunes?
If so, this seems like it could be beneficial if, say, you received a number of songs from a friend (ok, let's assume this is done "legally" for the moment), and you wanted to search for all of those just by searching on your friend's name.
I'm not trying to defend Apple here. I think any additional info of this sort that's tacked on to your files should at least be disclosed, with an option given to strip it back off of the files if you wish. But Apple has always been a company that enjoys (and seems to profit from) keeping little secrets about their products. OS X has loads of "undocumented features", and most of their apps have similar hidden "extras" built into them. I can easily see them incorporating this not because of any intention of actually gathering up your personal data or assisting in "copyright enforcement" -- but more because it would make another powerful "ability" of their search tool that the public didn't expect it was capable of.
Heck, even iTunes can work with multiple song libraries by holding down the "option" key when it first boots. Does it ever tell you that's an option when you run it? Nope!
Cecil,
I've been a KnoppMyth user for quite a while now, and I've been through several major upgrades as they've been released. I love the distro, overall.
I consider myself an "on again, off again" occasional Linux user. In the past, I've gone in "phases" of trying to run Linux as my primary OS on one PC or another, but I've generally settled on using an Apple Mac Pro as my primary PC these days, with a Windows XP based PC as a secondary "gaming computer". So basically, I can "get around" in most Linux distros, but I'm by no means "proficient" in writing shell scripts or coding in perl/PHP/what have you.
All of that being said, if I had to try to pin down my biggest frustration with KnoppMyth, it would probably be the "devil in the details". It's quite easy to get it installed and more or less "working", but even in the latest release, it always felt "rough around the edges". Each time I've installed one, I've had to spend hours pouring over your message forums to manually patch/fix one little detail after another, to address problems I ran into.
That's really what scares off many of my friends from trying KnoppMyth themselves. With something like Windows Media Center, they can not only get it installed easily, but it either works or it doesn't work, based on what hardware they're putting it on. They don't get all the little "surprises" over time that KnoppMyth has.
Just off the top of my head, for example, I had to:
1. Hunt down and manually apply a patch to the script that grabs movie info from the imdb, because the latest KnoppMyth, out of the box, wasn't auto-getting cover artwork or descriptions of any movies I tried to add info for.
2. Make some changes to a startup script to address a syntax error that could prevent the back-end from properly restarting. (Wasn't "critical", but looked like a good idea to patch, to avoid having to reboot the whole box in some circumstances to get it going again after the back-end was stopped.)
3. Edit a script so one of the serial ports would be "freed up" to use, if needed, because the default setup was effectively "locking" it from use.
4. Struggle and struggle to get the mythgame configuration in some sort of usable/workable state for running mame and a NES emulator. (This is one area where I've felt like KnoppMyth has "dropped the ball" to an extent. There seems to be a lot of "You'll have to figure it out yourself, since I don't really use that part of the software anyway." attitude on the forums. At one time, I did a lot of experimentation myself with recompiling source with various options enabled or disabled, and had some success. But some of this work seemed to be rendered "outdated" with newer releases of xmame and Myth too. I'd really like to see a KnoppMyth release with a sample game or two properly configured for xmame and a sample, if possible, for something like zsnes.)
The vast majority of people I encounter who complain about "email overload" are the ones still receiving everything into one huge "Inbox" folder initially. Then in most cases, they're manually sorting things out as they read them, placing them in manually created sub-folders.
..." rule. If you regularly do online purchasing with certain vendors, you can automatically dump their emails into a "Web order related" folder, for example.
If they'd take a couple hours out of their busy day, just once, to create some sensible automatic filtering rules in their email client, I suspect it would pay off for most of them pretty quickly.
The truth is, most people receive regular emails from specific addresses, so these could be sorted just by a basic "if mail is from xxx@yyy.com, then
Exactly... And I don't think it's still the case, but for quite a long time, MasterCard was actually listed as a *non profit corporation*! As a non-profit, they practically HAD to find large write-offs, to attempt to prove they weren't generating profit. I'm sure fraud losses were a big component of that whole business model for them.
I see plenty of valid comments and guesses as to why people aren't switching to Linux. But above all else, I think it's really about the software. The lion's share of software available today is written for the Windows operating system. Most people using a computer today are using it pretty much like an appliance. They have a specific set of tasks in mind to do with it, plus expect the flexibility to run out to any local store to buy a new piece of software to load and run, at-will, on it.
What products are almost universally requested by "typical computer users"? Microsoft Office (at least Word and Excel, and increasingly, even Outlook for email), Quicken and TurboTax, a random sampling of games (anything from Half Life 2 to Civilization 4 to The Sims 2 or even Deer Hunter), and probably some kind of greeting card maker and/or photo editing package to use with their color inkjet printer. Oh, and quite often, they want "Internet Explorer" too, because they plan on using some college or business web site that says it requires IE.
These people have generally already learned enough Windows basics to understand how to click the START button, go to "Programs" and find their program to run, how to do some basic locating of their saved documents, how to print from all their programs, and so forth. If Linux could guarantee, tomorrow, that it would run 100% of Windows software just as well as Windows does (EG. Stick the CD in the drive and let it auto-run the installer package to load the app.), you'd see MUCH more adoption of Linux over time. (People would figure, hey - I save well over $100 by ditching Windows? Ok... I'll go for that.) But right now, the idea of having to hunt down less common/familiar alternatives for many of the programs they need, PLUS the idea of re-learning some things about how to get around in the OS means they see NO good reason to change.
I'm not advocating total isolationism.... (That would entail refraining from importing or exporting ANY goods, in the strict sense of the word.)
.. with all of us ending up under some sort of "world government". But I'm FAR from accepting THAT as a good idea.)
You have to draw the line someplace, though - because ultimately, yes. Everything is indirectly related to everything else in some manner. That doesn't always give a country a good excuse to interfere with another country's affairs though. (Well, maybe it does, if you're an advocate of the "New World Order" concept
I tried to visit the link and it gave me a generic "site has been suspended" type message.
But anyway, I agree. A site like this may not make government happy, but who cares? If it deals in collecting and distributing data that's in the public domain already, all it REALLY does is serves as a "wake up" call to government, that they need to be more careful about keeping the covers on their "undercover" employees.
As a parent myself, I'm not really sure I agree with your conclusion.
Before I had a kid, I *used* to think most "bad behavior" was directly the result of "poor parenting". (Hey, it's easy to point fingers and blame the adult, since we all know kids just learn from what they see around them, right?)
But now that I'm in the middle of the situation myself, and most of my friends are now parents too, I'm seeing it's much more complicated.
For one thing, I see MUCH more pressure for kids to "grow up" and act like "little adults" than there used to be. (Heck, my kid's preschool already sent home a notice a couple weeks ago that they intended to let the kids watch a PG rated movie, because they already read the book it was based on and thought the kids would enjoy it.) I'm not necessarily opposed to that either, but I note the sharp contrast to my own upbringing in the 70's - where my parents tried to make sure ANY movie I watched was G rated until I was at least 8 or 9.
Before we moved, my kid's first preschool experience was a public school offering an "early childhood center". That school was sending 4 year olds down to the principals' office as punishment for hitting another kid with a toy or what-have-you! No differentiation between punishments/consequences for behavior of a preschooler or an 8th. grader!
I tend to try to parent in a "laid back/relaxed" manner. That's just my personality, plus the way my own father generally did things (and I grew up admiring that quality in him). Unfortunately, my kid is pretty wild and active, and has been officially diagnosed as being ADHD (seemingly like every other kid these days!). I'm constantly hinted to that I should be "more firmly setting boundaries" and so forth. But I've watched her school try all sorts of things for month after month in an attempt to "modify her behavior", and generally fail miserably at it. They're the ones "strongly recommending" I look into medication for her as a "supplement" to the behavior modification work at this point....
She's been on Adderall XR for several weeks now, and I've seen absolutely no improvement in her behavior. Before that, we tried Tenex for about a month. It initially seemed promising (though she complained a bit of being tired during the middle of the day), but its positive effects seemed to vanish completely after about 2 weeks.
But to look at your statements, my kid is a complete contradiction. She's acting more like what you say results from your "scenario 2", despite claims that I parent closer to your "scenario 1".
I think reality probably is, she's going to just have to "work through" a lot of this on her own. She knows what she's "supposed" to do in most situations, but she's stubborn, and wants badly to take more "control" of her own world. So she willingly breaks some of the "rules and boundaries" that are set for her, no matter how severe the consequences are - because it's simply worth it to her right now. (For example, you can tell you not to stand on the chair because she could easily fall and get hurt. Well, she'll fall and get hurt, cry a while - and 2 hours later, she's back up on that same chair, telling you "It's ok! I won't get hurt THIS time!" She might even fall a second and a third time, but she's back up on that chair - just to prove to herself she can do it without getting hurt at least SOME of the time.")
I tend to agree about tariffs being a viable option to help "level the playing field". But "Americans are, on the whole, too lazy to bother with the well being of overseas workers"??
I fail to see how "laziness" has ANYTHING to do with the discussion. It doesn't seem to me like it's America's responsibility to ensure the well being of overseas workers that don't work for our own companies. America seems like it is always called upon/expected to step in whenever there's a global issue. (Anything from cries for food or monetary assistance when a nation encounters a large disaster, to sending in troops to assist in matters which don't directly affect us.) Then, we're just as often criticized for "meddling" where we "don't belong".
The only aspect of this we should directly be concerned with in America is the financial one. (EG. Does importing from nations that refuse to uphold standards of living comparable to ours hurt OUR economy in the long-run? If yes, then we need to take actions that help fix it.) Otherwise, for all I care, China, with their poor stance on human rights and environmental issues, can wallow in their own pollution and filth.
That's just what I was thinking. I imagine .016% of their sampled users were people using some PC other than their own, who had some motivation to see the machine get screwed up or "break down" in some manner.
That or it may have even been people who were wise to the whole thing... thinking "Yeah, right.... This must be some kind of joke or really funny ad campaign. Let me see what it REALLY does when I click here."
You might even be right, but my instinct says no.
Intel should have realized, from how U.S. govt. treated Microsoft and others, that they weren't in NEED of someone like AMD to cut deeply into their sales for a while with truly competitive products.
I'd say your scenario would hold much more merit if govt. had already broken up Microsoft into separate divisions or something....
The fact is, AMD has occasionally built a very comparable, yet cheaper alternative to Intel's offerings. (Remember the success of AMD's response to Intel's 486DX CPUs?) Whenever they pull this off, they do quite well, UNTIL Intel ups the ante with another huge R&D effort, and produces something "next gen" that AMD has to counter.
I don't think Intel is afraid of AMD "taking over the marketplace" in processors.... but I don't think they'd be wise to ignore them as irrelevant either (or only existing as a "straw man" for the sake of legal arguments). They certainly proved themselves much more of a competitor than, say, Cyrix.
The "hire/fire at will" concept is a sound one. But that doesn't mean the systems we have in place are all "unjust" either.
Unemployment wages come out of an employee's paycheck anyway! When they file for unemployment, there are restrictions on how long they can collect it, and how long they must have worked continuously before they qualify for it in the first place. That's to ensure they've paid enough in to the system to warrant taking it back out.
If you, as an employer, are "discouraged with the threat of having to pay someone unemployment pay because they do a shitty job", maybe you should have done a better job screening your candidate BEFORE hiring them? With so many avenues of investigation available to today's employers (criminal background checks, driving history checks, financial checks, copies of college transcripts, Internet searches, etc.), it's hard for me to feel sorry for employers who whine that a bad employee really screwed them over.
I've seen it happen to small business owners over and over again, but in each case, I knew the employer took a lot of shortcuts in the hiring process. (EG. Hired based more on a concern about filling a position as quickly as possible, or hired a friend of a current employee without doing much background checking first.)
Despite you opting to "take the low road" and attack me anonymously:
1. MySpace being part of the popular culture IS completely relevant to this discussion. I had plenty of teachers when I was in school who referenced aspects of "pop culture", just to make themselves more human and "accessible" to the class. If you're going to be part of a captive audience, listening to the same person teach for at least an hour every day of the week, it's *normal* to want to learn a little bit about what their personal interests and beliefs are. It makes it easier to interpret some of the statements they make in class when you have a better handle on who they are as an individual.
2. No, it's NOT professional to go out and get drunk with your classmates - but I didn't think that was the issue here? The photo everyone was getting upset about was simply captioned "drunken pirate" and showed the teacher in a Halloween costume, holding up a glass. That means zilch! I bought a bunch of Halloween goblets a few years ago myself... ghoulish plastic cups that we usually just drink water out of. If I'm in *costume* as a vampire holding one, and a caption on my photo says "Enjoying a glass of blood!" - does that mean that's REALLY what I'm doing?
Umm.... I'm sorry, but when did it become "unprofessional behavior" to direct some of one's students to a perosnal MySpace page? In today's society, MySpace is part of the popular culture. It strikes me that this is about as "unprofessional" as recommending that some of your students "give a listen to your favorite classic rock or pop band when they get a chance".
If she really was given poor evaluations, strictly based on her teaching skills (or lack thereof), fine. But this whole MySpace photo thing should have never come up at all. The very fact that it did calls everything else about her evaluations into question.
Actually, if you believe some of the latest rumors, Disney might even be scoping out land in southwestern Missouri, near Joplin. I just read a big story in the St. Louis, MO morning newspaper about that. There's a fictitious company that's been floating around talks of buying up many acres of land for some type of "amusement park complex with shops and hotels", and the registered addresses on the "branches" of this fake company point to Disney corporate office addresses.
I think you're missing my point. When I came back for my genius bar appointment, I was informed that they had NO batteries in stock at all, and hadn't had any in stock for some time. They weren't even sure when they were going to receive more of them from Apple!
That's clearly information they could have passed along BEFORE I had to make the appointment and waste my time and gasoline making another trip.
I wouldn't expect them to hold a battery for me, if someone with an appointment ahead of me needed it. But even some basic info like "We've only got 3 in stock at this moment, but we can't guarantee anything." would help me make a more useful decision.
I've always been pretty pleased with my Apple purchases, until I ordered one of the early Macbook Pro notebooks. I had to wait about a month for its arrival, which wasn't any fun - but I went into it knowing that would probably happen. What REALLY sucked is, when it arrived, it was completely D.O.A.! I could plug the power adapter in and got the green light saying it was supplying power, but the computer wouldn't do a thing. I went through all the usual steps (reset PMU, etc.) and no luck.
... or that's what I was thinking.) I opened the box though, and saw paperwork on top. Woah! It said they DID work on it already! New bluetooth module installed along with a few other related parts, AND they even fixed the display hinges I commented felt "a little bit loose"!
Apple promptly shipped me a postage-paid return mailer to send it back in, but I had to wait several *more* weeks for a second unit!
Then, shortly after receiving the second (working, thankfully!) unit, Apple announced a voluntary battery recall. Knowing the problems people had with other batteries splitting open, etc. - I called in to get that taken care of. I had to send in my original battery, which I did, but the replacement they provided refused to charge at all! I tried to get it resolved at the local Apple store, but after getting the big runaround (make an appointment to talk to us at the genius bar, drive home, and come back hours later, etc. etc.), I was simply told they had no more batteries in stock so they couldn't help me! Ugh! Why wouldn't they simply tell me that when I first came in, instead of the bull-headed refusal to speak to me until I made that appointment and came back later!?!
Then I called in to Apple, only to wind up arguing with some guy who tried to tell me I wasn't allowed to get free phone support because I had my laptop longer than 90 days and didn't pay for AppleCare! WTF?! I was asking about the BATTERY they JUST sent me, not the laptop itself! He finally did swap the battery for me, but only after a condescending attitude and an insistence I understand this was only being done because he was "making a 1 time exception" to their policy.
By this time, I was really getting pissed off at the way Apple's support seemed to be rapidly going downhill! But at least I had a working notebook for a while. That is, until one day, my bluetooth suddenly quit working! It was still within warranty by a month or so, so I gritted my teeth and called Apple. They made me give them my CC number first, but did walk me through some steps (including making a new user account in OS X to see if bluetooth would come back that way, which it didn't). Then they agreed it was defective and had me ship it back to them again.
I sent it off the next morning after receipt of their mailer, bracing for weeks of waiting AGAIN. The next morning, I had a box sitting on my doorstep when I was heading off to work. Huh? My notebook! I was REALLY pissed this time. (Obviously someone screwed up and didn't get it delivered properly, or Apple messed up and sent it back without even looking at it!
Was this service so prompt this time because Apple realized I had so many issues, and/or because I posted about all of it to several well-read forums? I'll never know - but THAT was TOP-NOTCH service!
Heh... I've been voting against HP with my wallet for a LONG time now. I had too many bad experiences way back in the early Deskjet 550C/6xx era with their printers completely dying (power supply problems, apparently?). After that, the era began where Epson and Canon had FAR better photo printing capabilities than HP (who kept reusing the same, years old print-head technologies instead of updating it).
... but owners of 2550N's often complain about it on Internet forums. Sure, you could just turn the thing off when it's not in use - but it's a *networked* printer that you'd normally want to leave on!
... something about the product that's inferior, poorly designed/engineered, or overly costly. They just can't seem to get back to the "glory days" of peripherals like the original ScanJet models or LaserJet II, III and IV.
And more recently, I've had endless hassles with the cheap all-in-one HP printers. The early ones had horrible drivers and lacked support for newer OS's. The more recent models like the OfficeJet 6210 just self-destruct after about 2 years of light use. Gears start grinding and rollers won't feed individual sheets of paper properly anymore.
I broke down and bought one of HP's Color LaserJet printers a little over a year ago, only because it kept getting good reviews and seemed reasonably priced. (LJ 2550N). Unfortunately, it has a real annoying issue where every so many hours, it cycles the toners around in its internal carousel, making loud "chunka, chuncka, chunka, ka-chuck!" noises that wake a person up in the middle of the night. This behavior is never mentioned in the manual or anyplace else
It seems like with everything HP I see or use, there's a "catch"