Yes, those things could have been done, but it doesn't sum up to a choice between deaths or no deaths. You're just hand-waving to assume that the war would just "go away" by being ignored once the enemy is sufficiently weakened. That isn't a given, and so you can't assume it. If you're not attempting to calculate how many deaths would be caused by continuing the war with your back turned in that way, then you haven't even attempted an analysis. You need to list out all the assumptions you make, and predict how many deaths result if you're wrong in that assumption. Then you can have best/worst case evaluations for your claim. What you do instead is just Pollyanna "Gosh can't we just do without war, even when attacked?" nonsense. If you're serious about peace, and want to discuss it intelligently, learn how to do a basic analysis that doesn't assume that all your other assumptions are always correct. "Nobody" who is a historian agrees that you could just walk away and have zero additional civilian deaths. That is actually NOT the argument of the people who say that the nukes were unnecessary. Your position is ignorant, and not defensible.
The answer of course involves basic IT wisdom; never insert a "driver disk." Those are not going to be the correct current drivers.
Next time you have a problem with a Canon, you might want to try a compatible Epson driver. They license the print technology from Epson, but they muck up the drivers to differentiate. Also, you can usually use separate drivers for the printer and scanner; the multifunction driver is almost always the "wrong" one.
If you have trouble seating the cartridge, don't buy a new one; just take it out, and put it back in. Try to feel for whatever is hanging up or not seating properly, so you can feel when it clicks in correctly and how it feels compared to how it feels when it says it isn't there. The cheap printers don't have high precision plastic molding, so there might be a slight wiggling needed.
That is entirely fabricated. It isn't even the same driver that does scanning as printing. From the perspective of the OS, they're different devices. I've even scavenged the electric motors from the printers, and kept using the scanner.
You probably just didn't find the correct buttons to press.
Also, there is no such thing as a "USB fax/modem adapter." It would either be a "USB fax/modem" or an external fax/modem with a "USB to Serial adapter."
Just wanted to add, the linux drivers also can do this just fine, if you install the correct driver. And usually with the generic driver, too. This isn't only in the official drivers.
You do have to leave the empty color carts installed, though.
I'm a huge Epson fan at the pro level, but even I recommend that recommendation for anybody it works for. If that is all you need, a small-brand laser is optimal. There are no downsides except where you need better color or better media handling, in which case you simply "can't" use a laser.
Also, if an end-user only needs weird media handling and color, but not fancy color, a Brother inkjet is probably a better choice than Epson because it will function well with generic ink and refill kits.
The thing is, though, if that sounds like the same subject as the story... you didn't understand the story.;)
An example of the difference, I recently printed a large run of restaurant menus on color laser using a heavy "linen" paper. The laser only prints on the tops of the lines; there is a visible gap in the valleys between the linen strands. It comes out beautiful, because I wanted the linen pattern to show up and give a "classic" look. I printed a few on inkjet, and the color goes right down into the valleys. Most people in most applications would want the inkjet for that type of paper. As an art print, the inkjet would have looked better. People who even use the product in the story have to have both, and could never substitute one technology for the other. There will be a winner for each use case.
In retrospect I wished we had sued Epson for fraud. Some high-level executives should be jailed for this, though getting a refund would have been fine.
It is never too late to waste money talking to lawyers about it! Don't worry about filing deadlines, your complaint would not have amounted to a lawsuit, but just a consulting fee to the lawyer to meet with you and explain to you that misunderstood the product, and that the company never promised you that you could print with an empty cartridge. In fact, the product probably came with a manual (which you didn't read) that explained that exact situation to you and what features the printer had for it.
I know when I bought my most recent epson office model, I checked that it had print-black-with-only-black-ink features. Normally it uses all the colors in addition to black for the color "black." You get a much richer, deeper black that way. People who don't read manuals might not be well-served by the override feature anyways; it isn't immediately obvious that the cheap-o consumer model should even have the feature. Will that user understand why the print quality of black prints suddenly changed? Will they understand when and how to override the default setting? No. They need features where the printer will always either print at full quality, or refuse and tell them what to replace.
If the cheap consumer models had all the features, who would buy the cheap business models? Every small office would have the consumer one... and it would cost what the business one costs!;)
The cheap office epsons have a setting right on the printer, without even adjusting the driver you can turn off use of color inks when printing black. You can also force greyscale with only black ink, even when the print driver is sending a color print.
You do have to buy at least the $150 office model if you want those kind of "basic features." If you got the cheapest consumer model with 1 button, don't expect that stuff.
My experience is that if a name-brand inkjet is getting blocked print heads more than once-in-a-blue-moon, it is one of:
Very old
Used with generic ink or refilled cartridges
Used in a dusty or dirty environment
Never opened and cleaned, and has built-up paper dust
Generic inks often actually work better in cheap or off-brand printers, because the print heads aren't designed to expect the ink to have specific electrical properties.
I wasn't comparing name-brand ink to generic ink, I was comparing name-brand to name-brand.
If you use a CISS system, Epson ink is still cheaper than the other name brands. Generic ink is cheaper, sure. It doesn't have special electrical properties matched to the print head, though, and on high end fine art prints like in the story, that matters a lot. Also, the performance won't be as predictable on some media types.
And you can't compare 700ml carts to bottles. That is apples and oranges. Compare the cart to the cart and the bottle to the bottle.
And why do you think the price is based on ml? The price is based on the cost-per-page metric. If it used 10% more of the ink in the cart, the price of the cart would go up to meet the exact same cost-per-page metric. There would be no savings for the customer. Anybody who thinks inkjet ink is priced on cost+markup should buy a stack of "for dummies" books and try to make it up to "basic computer literacy" over the next few years. Because they're living in a cave.
True, but if the printer was more accurate on calculating the "empty" state, you would be getting a lower cost per job
False, totally false. This is the part people aren't understanding.
The ink itself costs pennies. It is not priced at some kind cost+markup. It is priced based on market values and the cost-per-page metrics that professionals who buy these high end printers are using to calculate the cost. If they spent $10,000,000 on R&D to improve the ink measurement, the price they sell it for would be exactly the same when calculated on the basis of cost-per-page.
Once you understand that, then you can understand the whole situation; there is a legit environmental angle here about wasted ink, and a legit issue regarding the customer in the story understanding the product, but there is no consumer over-charge type of situation relating to excess ink. It would have to be cost+plus for that to be true, and it isn't.
All serious analysis of the choices that US military commanders were making (nuke or ground assault) shows that more civilians would have been killed in a ground assault than were killed in the nuclear strikes.
It is totally OK to have negative opinions of the decision. Each of us chooses our own opinions. But you can't have your own facts. There was not a choice between "nuke and people die, or don't and have nobody die." If you also measure the civilians in China, Korea, and other places murdered by the Japanese soldiers without even being casualties of legit military strikes, then you would have to add in all the civilians that would have died if the US had simply not nuked, and not even bothered to win the war, and just went home at that point, leaving the Japanese empire to rebuilt.
I have never seen any analysis where NOT ending the war at that point would have saved lives, civilian or military. Ground invasion would have killed more Japanese civilians, AND more soldiers. Allowing the empire to rebuild would have killed millions of Chinese and others. So if you're using the entire number of civilian deaths, without subtracting the deaths you're predicting from the other choice, well that is just horse shit.
It isn't a sect, it is rank-and-file. I don't think you even know any Christians if you aren't aware that celebrating death and accidents that befall people of disliked religions is a standard type of social communication.
You seem to be simply claiming you haven't met these people, and that therefore they don't exist. It is a laughable claim to anybody who, due to being an employed adult who does business-to-business work, engages people from all walks of life in a relaxed atmosphere where they often say whatever they really think.
Your problem is that thinking of chromosome counts as some absolute barrier. It isn't. You can indeed have successful breeding with different chromosome counts. So it is still gradual.
Also, you mistake "most" for "all." Most means "not all." You could also take the opposite, and say "some. For example, "Some changes to chromosome count result in viable offspring."
I highly recommend doing a complete analysis of your needs, instead of fishing for broad recommendations.
Obviously, Epson has the lowest ink cost of major companies with consistent and vibrant inks. Some people care more about exact color replication than cost-per-page or color vibrancy.
Further, some people don't even need name-brand inks, and those people will not benefit from all the print head technology in the higher end inkjets. You're not going to get consistent minimum droplet size with a third-party ink; they are just regular inks, and don't have the special electrical properties that the name-brand inks do.
Generally speaking, Ricoh is the most popular professional CISS vendor. As expected, they're more expensive than Epson, but offer more accurate registered colors. So if you're printing the same image with multiple technologies on different media and want the colors to match most closely, then that works well. So advertising shops usually choose something like that, because their customers care about the exact shade of their logo. Fine art shops, like in the story, mostly don't care about registered colors, they want to reproduce the image as vividly as they can on the media they're using; if a print on another media type wouldn't have quite the same pop, they don't want to make the better media look worse in order to match registered colors. So even if you throw price out the window, you have to know what you need before you determine which type is good for you.
At the consumer level, I think Epson is the only one offering brand-name CISS systems. US customers might get stuck ordering from Europe or Asia, though. If you don't want name-brand ink, just buy a cheap printer and an aftermarket CISS system.
I don't think you're going to print 44" fine art reproductions in 11 colors with a 12 cent print. I can probably find 12 cent 3x5s, but 4x6 the standard rate is about 25 cents. An 8.5x11 color laser is going to run 55 cents. You're going to pay multiple dollars per print for what they're doing in the story, just for the same size, and at fairly low quality.
The part you're missing is that "consumer inkjets" and "professional inkjets" are very different. Consumer inkjets are more expensive than cheap laser; professional inkjets are much cheaper per page than consumer ones. And have superior photo reproduction. If you're a consumer, the answer is usually to buy a cheap laser, sure. But for a professional shop, the answer is to use the exact same 9900 inkjet in the story, but with a CISS (bottle) system.
They could actually just buy an aftermarket CISS system, which plugs in as regular cartridges, and then use the extra ink from their disposable cartridges in it. When it runs out, just replace with new disposables! This way they could solve their "problem" without even learning about how the pricing and product works, and still keep the extra ink out of the landfill.
Cartridge prices would have to go up, not down, if you added that sort of sensor.
It isn't priced by the milliliter, even though it is labelled that way; the prices for professional inks are based on the cost-per-page ratings. The physical ink costs very very little to manufacture. You're paying for use of the technology more than anything else. This is just the user misunderstanding how the prices are arrived at and which metrics are important to them.
This is absolutely not an over-charging scenario, 100% of the area of legit complaint here is environmental waste.
And as far as accurate measurement goes, Epson even makes systems that use bottles, and systems that have refillable cartridges. They are the best major company at offering that stuff, but people rarely buy it. Sure, the CISS (bottle) stuff saves you on ink, but you spend more money up front for the delivery system. Even professional users like the people in the story often don't bother, they just buy disposable cartridges and misunderstand the product. And then whine that it doesn't have the benefits of CISS; instead of buying CISS systems that are available for their existing 9900 model printers!
If you're turning on your inkjet, printing one page, and then shutting it off, you're running a print head cleaning cycle (which uses up ink) every single page. If you were to actually print 100 pages in a single run, you'd only use a tiny bit of ink.
And ink dries out. If you use inkjet, expect to replace cartridges, yeah, about every six months. Also, the "cheapest" ink cartridges are the most expensive on a per-page basis. If you combine buying the smallest carts with very short run printing, you won't get very many pages per cart and your cost-per-page will be very high. You might really be better served with a cheap laser printer, where light printing you might not use up the factory-installed toner for a number of years.
At the professional level, the high capacity (700ml) cartridges that Epson sells have the lowest cost-per-page in the industry. That is just fact. I hate wasted ink because it is bad for the environment, but the idea that the company with the cheapest ink is ripping people off with over-priced ink is just silly. Yes, tiny quantities are expensive. They price the small cartridge consumer ink at the same market prices as everybody else, and they compete for price on the business cartridges that are the ones in the story.
This is just a consumer-reports type of complaint, from customers that are overall very happy and who admit that the product is vital for their work.
Ink is priced based on the cost-per-page numbers, which are based on real print runs with standardized images. There is no scam here at all; the cost-per-page tests ended with ink still physically inside the cartridges, too.
There will be no apology, though there might be some attempts to explain the product to these guys.
My epson not only will keep printing past the warning, there is even a driver setting for black; if it refuses to print without color (which makes the blacks richer) or if it just switches to black-only black when the color cartridges are low. (you do still have to leave the empty color cartridges installed for it to work on black-only)
If the color is low, I do have to press "continue" every time I send a print job and it warns me.
Generally speaking that is a different brand. Epson generally will give a warning, but has driver options to continue printing with the warning, or refuse to.
Refusing to print is very useful where you have office idiots who will become unhappy if their print job actually fails. Requiring the printer to refuse when it hits the safety margin means that they'll contact IT or maintenance, the cartridges will get refilled, and the print job can continue.
Also, the printer is a wide format pro inkjet designed for short run photo quality reproduction. The emphasis is on getting perfect prints every time. My experience with professional short-run printing has been that on printers without ink level controls, the color starts to fail when the ink is low, but often before it actually hits 0. If you're under 10%, you need to be examining every single page for the beginning of errors. This particular printer is designed to provide higher confidence than that. The ink cost is still substantially lower than competitors.
Also, the cartridges are sold based on volume in ml, but when they talk about cost and when you're calculating print cost it is normally done on the basis of cost per page in a real test. If the cartridges still have ink in them when they're "empty," you're still getting the exact same cost-per-page that you researched before buying the thing. It would be great if that ink could be recycled, sure. But nobody is "losing money." If the delivery had less waste, they'd still be selling the ink at the same cost-per-page that they are now.
It is "standard" because most distros have adopted it. That is also part of why they are adopting it; standardization has benefits. Is it new that it is standard equipment? Yes. Doesn't stop it from being the new standard thing.
In fact, haters even latch onto the standardization that has been achieved to claim it is being "forced" on them. If indeed it isn't standard, that seems to be a problem for the haters more than anybody else. If it is only "standard" in the various distros I use, it would still be true for me even if you disagree that it is broadly true.
If you want to quibble even over the word "modern," my advice is to just not use it, and instead of hating it, just admit "it isn't for me and I don't understand the aesthetic choices." The same as if you look at a work of art and want to quibble over if it is suitably "modern" for fans of it to describe it as such.
As for the "we," I'll let you find an English major to explain that one. But I do stand by it.
Yes, yes, and yes. And yes dear child, that really is how "pagers" worked. And yes, that creepy guy down the street really was reading them all. Listening to all the cell phone calls, too; in the analog days, that is just how it was. Even know, I'll bet a standard shortwave radio can pick up a dozen unencrypted cordless phones in your neighborhood if you're in a city.
Many areas still have active analog pager systems. You could really build what he is talking about, using deployed technology. Notice how many people here claim to have much more important opinions than RMS, but they don't even understand the technical side of WTF he's talking about. Pagers are still the non-tracking, one-way technology that is deployed.
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Yes, those things could have been done, but it doesn't sum up to a choice between deaths or no deaths. You're just hand-waving to assume that the war would just "go away" by being ignored once the enemy is sufficiently weakened. That isn't a given, and so you can't assume it. If you're not attempting to calculate how many deaths would be caused by continuing the war with your back turned in that way, then you haven't even attempted an analysis. You need to list out all the assumptions you make, and predict how many deaths result if you're wrong in that assumption. Then you can have best/worst case evaluations for your claim. What you do instead is just Pollyanna "Gosh can't we just do without war, even when attacked?" nonsense. If you're serious about peace, and want to discuss it intelligently, learn how to do a basic analysis that doesn't assume that all your other assumptions are always correct. "Nobody" who is a historian agrees that you could just walk away and have zero additional civilian deaths. That is actually NOT the argument of the people who say that the nukes were unnecessary. Your position is ignorant, and not defensible.
The answer of course involves basic IT wisdom; never insert a "driver disk." Those are not going to be the correct current drivers.
Next time you have a problem with a Canon, you might want to try a compatible Epson driver. They license the print technology from Epson, but they muck up the drivers to differentiate. Also, you can usually use separate drivers for the printer and scanner; the multifunction driver is almost always the "wrong" one.
If you have trouble seating the cartridge, don't buy a new one; just take it out, and put it back in. Try to feel for whatever is hanging up or not seating properly, so you can feel when it clicks in correctly and how it feels compared to how it feels when it says it isn't there. The cheap printers don't have high precision plastic molding, so there might be a slight wiggling needed.
That is entirely fabricated. It isn't even the same driver that does scanning as printing. From the perspective of the OS, they're different devices. I've even scavenged the electric motors from the printers, and kept using the scanner.
You probably just didn't find the correct buttons to press.
Also, there is no such thing as a "USB fax/modem adapter." It would either be a "USB fax/modem" or an external fax/modem with a "USB to Serial adapter."
Just wanted to add, the linux drivers also can do this just fine, if you install the correct driver. And usually with the generic driver, too. This isn't only in the official drivers.
You do have to leave the empty color carts installed, though.
I'm a huge Epson fan at the pro level, but even I recommend that recommendation for anybody it works for. If that is all you need, a small-brand laser is optimal. There are no downsides except where you need better color or better media handling, in which case you simply "can't" use a laser.
Also, if an end-user only needs weird media handling and color, but not fancy color, a Brother inkjet is probably a better choice than Epson because it will function well with generic ink and refill kits.
The thing is, though, if that sounds like the same subject as the story... you didn't understand the story. ;)
An example of the difference, I recently printed a large run of restaurant menus on color laser using a heavy "linen" paper. The laser only prints on the tops of the lines; there is a visible gap in the valleys between the linen strands. It comes out beautiful, because I wanted the linen pattern to show up and give a "classic" look. I printed a few on inkjet, and the color goes right down into the valleys. Most people in most applications would want the inkjet for that type of paper. As an art print, the inkjet would have looked better. People who even use the product in the story have to have both, and could never substitute one technology for the other. There will be a winner for each use case.
In retrospect I wished we had sued Epson for fraud. Some high-level executives should be jailed for this, though getting a refund would have been fine.
It is never too late to waste money talking to lawyers about it! Don't worry about filing deadlines, your complaint would not have amounted to a lawsuit, but just a consulting fee to the lawyer to meet with you and explain to you that misunderstood the product, and that the company never promised you that you could print with an empty cartridge. In fact, the product probably came with a manual (which you didn't read) that explained that exact situation to you and what features the printer had for it.
I know when I bought my most recent epson office model, I checked that it had print-black-with-only-black-ink features. Normally it uses all the colors in addition to black for the color "black." You get a much richer, deeper black that way. People who don't read manuals might not be well-served by the override feature anyways; it isn't immediately obvious that the cheap-o consumer model should even have the feature. Will that user understand why the print quality of black prints suddenly changed? Will they understand when and how to override the default setting? No. They need features where the printer will always either print at full quality, or refuse and tell them what to replace.
If the cheap consumer models had all the features, who would buy the cheap business models? Every small office would have the consumer one... and it would cost what the business one costs! ;)
The cheap office epsons have a setting right on the printer, without even adjusting the driver you can turn off use of color inks when printing black. You can also force greyscale with only black ink, even when the print driver is sending a color print.
You do have to buy at least the $150 office model if you want those kind of "basic features." If you got the cheapest consumer model with 1 button, don't expect that stuff.
My experience is that if a name-brand inkjet is getting blocked print heads more than once-in-a-blue-moon, it is one of:
Generic inks often actually work better in cheap or off-brand printers, because the print heads aren't designed to expect the ink to have specific electrical properties.
I wasn't comparing name-brand ink to generic ink, I was comparing name-brand to name-brand.
If you use a CISS system, Epson ink is still cheaper than the other name brands. Generic ink is cheaper, sure. It doesn't have special electrical properties matched to the print head, though, and on high end fine art prints like in the story, that matters a lot. Also, the performance won't be as predictable on some media types.
And you can't compare 700ml carts to bottles. That is apples and oranges. Compare the cart to the cart and the bottle to the bottle.
And why do you think the price is based on ml? The price is based on the cost-per-page metric. If it used 10% more of the ink in the cart, the price of the cart would go up to meet the exact same cost-per-page metric. There would be no savings for the customer. Anybody who thinks inkjet ink is priced on cost+markup should buy a stack of "for dummies" books and try to make it up to "basic computer literacy" over the next few years. Because they're living in a cave.
True, but if the printer was more accurate on calculating the "empty" state, you would be getting a lower cost per job
False, totally false. This is the part people aren't understanding.
The ink itself costs pennies. It is not priced at some kind cost+markup. It is priced based on market values and the cost-per-page metrics that professionals who buy these high end printers are using to calculate the cost. If they spent $10,000,000 on R&D to improve the ink measurement, the price they sell it for would be exactly the same when calculated on the basis of cost-per-page.
Once you understand that, then you can understand the whole situation; there is a legit environmental angle here about wasted ink, and a legit issue regarding the customer in the story understanding the product, but there is no consumer over-charge type of situation relating to excess ink. It would have to be cost+plus for that to be true, and it isn't.
All serious analysis of the choices that US military commanders were making (nuke or ground assault) shows that more civilians would have been killed in a ground assault than were killed in the nuclear strikes.
It is totally OK to have negative opinions of the decision. Each of us chooses our own opinions. But you can't have your own facts. There was not a choice between "nuke and people die, or don't and have nobody die." If you also measure the civilians in China, Korea, and other places murdered by the Japanese soldiers without even being casualties of legit military strikes, then you would have to add in all the civilians that would have died if the US had simply not nuked, and not even bothered to win the war, and just went home at that point, leaving the Japanese empire to rebuilt.
I have never seen any analysis where NOT ending the war at that point would have saved lives, civilian or military. Ground invasion would have killed more Japanese civilians, AND more soldiers. Allowing the empire to rebuild would have killed millions of Chinese and others. So if you're using the entire number of civilian deaths, without subtracting the deaths you're predicting from the other choice, well that is just horse shit.
It isn't a sect, it is rank-and-file. I don't think you even know any Christians if you aren't aware that celebrating death and accidents that befall people of disliked religions is a standard type of social communication.
You seem to be simply claiming you haven't met these people, and that therefore they don't exist. It is a laughable claim to anybody who, due to being an employed adult who does business-to-business work, engages people from all walks of life in a relaxed atmosphere where they often say whatever they really think.
Your problem is that thinking of chromosome counts as some absolute barrier. It isn't. You can indeed have successful breeding with different chromosome counts. So it is still gradual.
Also, you mistake "most" for "all." Most means "not all." You could also take the opposite, and say "some. For example, "Some changes to chromosome count result in viable offspring."
I highly recommend doing a complete analysis of your needs, instead of fishing for broad recommendations.
Obviously, Epson has the lowest ink cost of major companies with consistent and vibrant inks. Some people care more about exact color replication than cost-per-page or color vibrancy.
Further, some people don't even need name-brand inks, and those people will not benefit from all the print head technology in the higher end inkjets. You're not going to get consistent minimum droplet size with a third-party ink; they are just regular inks, and don't have the special electrical properties that the name-brand inks do.
Generally speaking, Ricoh is the most popular professional CISS vendor. As expected, they're more expensive than Epson, but offer more accurate registered colors. So if you're printing the same image with multiple technologies on different media and want the colors to match most closely, then that works well. So advertising shops usually choose something like that, because their customers care about the exact shade of their logo. Fine art shops, like in the story, mostly don't care about registered colors, they want to reproduce the image as vividly as they can on the media they're using; if a print on another media type wouldn't have quite the same pop, they don't want to make the better media look worse in order to match registered colors. So even if you throw price out the window, you have to know what you need before you determine which type is good for you.
At the consumer level, I think Epson is the only one offering brand-name CISS systems. US customers might get stuck ordering from Europe or Asia, though. If you don't want name-brand ink, just buy a cheap printer and an aftermarket CISS system.
I don't think you're going to print 44" fine art reproductions in 11 colors with a 12 cent print. I can probably find 12 cent 3x5s, but 4x6 the standard rate is about 25 cents. An 8.5x11 color laser is going to run 55 cents. You're going to pay multiple dollars per print for what they're doing in the story, just for the same size, and at fairly low quality.
The part you're missing is that "consumer inkjets" and "professional inkjets" are very different. Consumer inkjets are more expensive than cheap laser; professional inkjets are much cheaper per page than consumer ones. And have superior photo reproduction. If you're a consumer, the answer is usually to buy a cheap laser, sure. But for a professional shop, the answer is to use the exact same 9900 inkjet in the story, but with a CISS (bottle) system.
They could actually just buy an aftermarket CISS system, which plugs in as regular cartridges, and then use the extra ink from their disposable cartridges in it. When it runs out, just replace with new disposables! This way they could solve their "problem" without even learning about how the pricing and product works, and still keep the extra ink out of the landfill.
Cartridge prices would have to go up, not down, if you added that sort of sensor.
It isn't priced by the milliliter, even though it is labelled that way; the prices for professional inks are based on the cost-per-page ratings. The physical ink costs very very little to manufacture. You're paying for use of the technology more than anything else. This is just the user misunderstanding how the prices are arrived at and which metrics are important to them.
This is absolutely not an over-charging scenario, 100% of the area of legit complaint here is environmental waste.
And as far as accurate measurement goes, Epson even makes systems that use bottles, and systems that have refillable cartridges. They are the best major company at offering that stuff, but people rarely buy it. Sure, the CISS (bottle) stuff saves you on ink, but you spend more money up front for the delivery system. Even professional users like the people in the story often don't bother, they just buy disposable cartridges and misunderstand the product. And then whine that it doesn't have the benefits of CISS; instead of buying CISS systems that are available for their existing 9900 model printers!
You can get CISS systems for Epson printers, including the 9900 in the story
If you're turning on your inkjet, printing one page, and then shutting it off, you're running a print head cleaning cycle (which uses up ink) every single page. If you were to actually print 100 pages in a single run, you'd only use a tiny bit of ink.
And ink dries out. If you use inkjet, expect to replace cartridges, yeah, about every six months. Also, the "cheapest" ink cartridges are the most expensive on a per-page basis. If you combine buying the smallest carts with very short run printing, you won't get very many pages per cart and your cost-per-page will be very high. You might really be better served with a cheap laser printer, where light printing you might not use up the factory-installed toner for a number of years.
At the professional level, the high capacity (700ml) cartridges that Epson sells have the lowest cost-per-page in the industry. That is just fact. I hate wasted ink because it is bad for the environment, but the idea that the company with the cheapest ink is ripping people off with over-priced ink is just silly. Yes, tiny quantities are expensive. They price the small cartridge consumer ink at the same market prices as everybody else, and they compete for price on the business cartridges that are the ones in the story.
As for Windows, Just Say No.
They didn't get "caught" at anything. LOL
This is just a consumer-reports type of complaint, from customers that are overall very happy and who admit that the product is vital for their work.
Ink is priced based on the cost-per-page numbers, which are based on real print runs with standardized images. There is no scam here at all; the cost-per-page tests ended with ink still physically inside the cartridges, too.
There will be no apology, though there might be some attempts to explain the product to these guys.
My epson not only will keep printing past the warning, there is even a driver setting for black; if it refuses to print without color (which makes the blacks richer) or if it just switches to black-only black when the color cartridges are low. (you do still have to leave the empty color cartridges installed for it to work on black-only)
If the color is low, I do have to press "continue" every time I send a print job and it warns me.
Generally speaking that is a different brand. Epson generally will give a warning, but has driver options to continue printing with the warning, or refuse to.
Refusing to print is very useful where you have office idiots who will become unhappy if their print job actually fails. Requiring the printer to refuse when it hits the safety margin means that they'll contact IT or maintenance, the cartridges will get refilled, and the print job can continue.
Also, the printer is a wide format pro inkjet designed for short run photo quality reproduction. The emphasis is on getting perfect prints every time. My experience with professional short-run printing has been that on printers without ink level controls, the color starts to fail when the ink is low, but often before it actually hits 0. If you're under 10%, you need to be examining every single page for the beginning of errors. This particular printer is designed to provide higher confidence than that. The ink cost is still substantially lower than competitors.
Also, the cartridges are sold based on volume in ml, but when they talk about cost and when you're calculating print cost it is normally done on the basis of cost per page in a real test. If the cartridges still have ink in them when they're "empty," you're still getting the exact same cost-per-page that you researched before buying the thing. It would be great if that ink could be recycled, sure. But nobody is "losing money." If the delivery had less waste, they'd still be selling the ink at the same cost-per-page that they are now.
It is "standard" because most distros have adopted it. That is also part of why they are adopting it; standardization has benefits. Is it new that it is standard equipment? Yes. Doesn't stop it from being the new standard thing.
In fact, haters even latch onto the standardization that has been achieved to claim it is being "forced" on them. If indeed it isn't standard, that seems to be a problem for the haters more than anybody else. If it is only "standard" in the various distros I use, it would still be true for me even if you disagree that it is broadly true.
If you want to quibble even over the word "modern," my advice is to just not use it, and instead of hating it, just admit "it isn't for me and I don't understand the aesthetic choices." The same as if you look at a work of art and want to quibble over if it is suitably "modern" for fans of it to describe it as such.
As for the "we," I'll let you find an English major to explain that one. But I do stand by it.
My wife and I are using Periodical, it is GPLv3 and available on F-Droid.
Yes, yes, and yes. And yes dear child, that really is how "pagers" worked. And yes, that creepy guy down the street really was reading them all. Listening to all the cell phone calls, too; in the analog days, that is just how it was. Even know, I'll bet a standard shortwave radio can pick up a dozen unencrypted cordless phones in your neighborhood if you're in a city.
Many areas still have active analog pager systems. You could really build what he is talking about, using deployed technology. Notice how many people here claim to have much more important opinions than RMS, but they don't even understand the technical side of WTF he's talking about. Pagers are still the non-tracking, one-way technology that is deployed.
Your word processor example makes me almost wonder if you didn't know about Emacs, or various traditional Free Software page layout systems?