PC LOAD LETTER.
Richard Stallman literally started the Free Software Foundation over his frustrations with a printer
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/rms-nyu-2001-transcript.txt
Xerox gave the Artificial Intelligence Lab, where I worked, a laser printer, and this was a really handsome gift, because it was the first time anybody outside Xerox had a laser printer. And, you know, copiers jam, but there’s somebody there to fix them.
Well, we had an idea for how to deal with this problem. Change it so that whenever the printer gets a jam, the machine that runs the printer can […] tell the users who are waiting for printouts go fix the printer.
But at that point, we were completely stymied, because the software that ran that printer was not free software. It had come with the printer, and it was just a binary.
And then I heard that somebody at Carnegie Mellon University had a copy of that software. So I was visiting there later, so I went to his office and I said, “Hi, I’m from MIT. Could I have a copy of the printer source code?” And he said “No, I promised not to give you a copy.” He had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Now, this was my first, direct encounter with a non-disclosure agreement, and it taught me an important lesson – […] non-disclosure agreements have victims. They’re not innocent. […]
(he goes on for a bit, but ultimately describes never accepting any software that requires signing an NDA ever, and then goes on to write his own unix)
You really don’t have to if you just make your kids use the computer instead of the phone
We are complaining about printers now? Outstanding! I can help! I never miss the opportunity to say double-fuck Hewlett Packard/Compaq and anything they’ve ever thought about producing with the heat of a thousand suns. Two shitty orgs that geometrically devolved into quintessential, archetypal enshittification enshrined, the unequalled horrors that are HP printers and drivers.
We are complaining about printers now?
Sadly, no. We’re complaining about age cohorts.
In the future, kindly refrain from introducing reason to my painstakingly constructed anti-HP tirades. It throws me off stride.
Are we having stereotypical talk shop about printers?
I though it was an urban legend, but I did buy a used brother and I’m def delighted. Spent less on it than a round of inkjet for my crappy Canon. Guess what, 6 months later and I’m still using the toner that came in it. I’d be in the 2nd round of dried inkjet.
Why, yes. Yes, we are.
My experience mirrors yours; 6 years later, still no issues. Moreover, old used laser Brother’s seem to love shittynonametoner.com cartridges as well.
To be fair I can make a 3D printer work more easily and for longer without any maintenance than a regular ass printer. I get that inkjets are actually super complex but bro there are now cases where it is literally easier to make a thing than to print out a picture of that thing.
Literally helped my parents with this last night.
Also, fuck windows for defaulting a setting I’d never seen before: “let windows manage my default printer”
That’s why it wasn’t printing. What a fucking stupid idea.
Ah, I see mom’s PC updated and it’s trying to print with the fucking “OneNote XPS” virtual printer again.
Also I see the “OneNote XPS” printer I manually remove every month is back again.
Gearing up for this tomorrow, every time I turn off automatic updates and uninstall a bunch of bullshit…every time it’s right back there.
I manually remove every month
People don’t learn about cron and scripting anymore, smh my damn head.
Not a terrible idea if there’s one printer plugged in. The idea isn’t bad, it’s Windows that’s bad.
Before things like the XPS printer showed up, if there was only one printer anyway, it was the default. Pointless.
So true
Here’s my obligatory Fuck You to ink jet printers and cartridges.
A few months ago I finally got a Brother b/w multi function laser printer and not having to refill Magenta or Black regularly is no longer, and my mind is at peace.
Mine just had a cartridge explode all over it and my counter. I took the hint and threw it out with no replacement.
My mom hates it since she can’t just drop by and have me print something, I’ve never felt more free.
I realized a while back that I print so rarely that I’m better off just using a print shop for the rare occasions when I do need to print something. They are priced for massive orders, so printing a few pages can cost under a dollar (though tbf, I haven’t needed to print anything since inflation got crazy, so not sure if that still applies). Then they can deal with DRM ink and all that BS.
We’ll see how things go when my daughter gets to essay age, though.
Hopefully all digital!
Yeah, fingers crossed. Though schools can be incredibly inconsistent with how they move forward with tech.
Won’t regret it, had one for 10 years changed the black twice. Also the powder doesn’t have a shelf life like liquid ink, so I bought the two drums when I first got it.
Oh, a Boomer needs tech support, of any kind, family, friend, otherwise?
$100/h.
Stop subsidizing their utter incompetence, time for ‘tough love’.
A kid?
Like an actual kid?
Free.
How would they know any better?
But, let em know the first fix is free, on the house, next one will be $5, then $10… or, they can spend no money if they want to spend an hour getting tutored on the basics maybe once a week.
Generate fishermen, not fish.
Show them that they are capable, can learn, can solve problems… if they’re patient and humble enough to try and learn.
Blame tablet culture. Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness. Kids can just download an app from the appstore and point at what they want it to do. People don’t even know anymore how the filesystem on their computer works. If the dow load pup-up in chrome disappears, they think the download has dissapeared and they need to download it again.
People never knew how filesystems work. It’s been tested time and again, people aside from nerds have trouble with hierarchical filesystems. They had trouble in the eighties, they had trouble in the nineties, had trouble in the two-thousandths and obviously still have trouble today. Saving every single file on the desktop didn’t start with tablets.
Nerds just have no idea how the majority of the population fare with computers, and don’t know that UI designers in fact test their UIs and continually check their assumptions. But nerds are cocksure in blaming UI designers and ‘tablet culture’, which culture made computing accessible to everyone from toddlers to decrepit geriatrics.
TBF, Android and iOS do not make it clear where files are going when you save them like desktop OSes do. It’s almost as if they are intentionally trying to hide their file structure, especially Apple, which is beyond frustrating.
It’s been known since probably the seventies that normies have trouble with hierarchical file systems. UI researchers kept testing the assumptions about file systems, and the results in the majority of populace have always been abysmal. Which is why people have the desktop piled with every file they ever created or downloaded, and why UI designers are trying to move away from shoving file systems into users’ faces.
They are intentionally trying to hide it.
The default file browsers don’t access the entire file structure, what exists and what you can see and edit, without root.
You can, or at least could, sideload a FOSS filebrowser, much more straightforward UI, doesnt shit itself if you arent logged into it.
What they instead do is make it really, really easy to upload all your personal files to their cloud, which is either going to cost you time, money, or your privacy.
Its why Microsoft genuinely doesnt understand why everyone hates OneDrive, why they genuinely don’t see a problem with Windows becoming an AI prompt/API with ads.
Because its basically the same as the mobile UI paradigm.
I know where mine usually go, but sometimes they go somewhere else. Why did it do that? Where did it go? Sometimes I run a search and still can’t find it. Wtf? So, I have re-downloaded when I was in a pinch.
Everything is now optimally desgined for user friendliness.
Feels like the opposite to me. Modern mobile style interfaces feel extremely hostile, designed to minimise the amount of information the user can extract from the application (and maximise the amount that can be extracted from the user and sold to the highest bidder) and our control over it.
Classic desktop interfaces (and no, the stupid office ribbons are not included in that), even when poorly designed, are many orders of magnitude easier to use and navigate, and provide a lot more tools and information.
I agree, but we have two have different meanings of user friendly here.
You: The thing makes it easy to do what I want, to understand what it can do.
Them: The thing makes it easy to do what the designer wants, makes it easy to understand what the designer wants me to do with it.
I thought the younger folk would be faster on computers than me but I had to show a junior new hire IT tech what a zip file was and how to open it. Something that I assumed would be second nature to them, they hadn’t seen. Growing up with analog and moving to digital as society progressed, I assumed the next generation would smoke me in tech but it’s been surprising that because tech has “Just worked” for many of them they haven’t had to learn how it works. A blessing and a curse I suppose.
Honestly sometimes having learned the analog counterpart is really useful. It’s a different field but the first time I mixed live audio was on an old analog mixer. It wasn’t really all that difficult to use once explained. Shortly after we replaced it with a digital mixer (behringer x32), and I’m so glad that I had the opportunity to use the old analog one because so many concepts would appear, at least to me, difficult to grasp if you’re starting out on the digital one.
Also I’ve noticed a total lack of curiosity or willingness to learn how to use these products. It takes a little brain power sometimes.
And a lot of Lemmy could be accused of having the same attitude towards sports, fashion or pop culture. People aren’t obligated to be interested in tech, for most people it’s a tool, not a hobby.
The things you’ve mentioned are hobbies, not tools you need to use
Honestly I don’t blame them, I fall into the not giving a shit about sports or fashion camp too. My inner boomer comes out when I’m forced to use microsoft products so I’m definitely a hypocrite but at least I’ll put a little effort into trying to get a surface level of understanding.
Literacy and numeracy scores in the US in general peaked in 2012.
If you graduated high school / college around then, statistically, everyone +/-5 of greater your age is generally less literate, less mathematically literate, less knowledgeable than you, ceteris paribus.
Back in my day we had to walk up hill both ways.
I haven’t had a printer in years. Best decision I’ve made. When you don’t have one, your need for printing things seems to decrease. We just order prints at the library the 2 times a year we need to print something for like 25 cents a page
Start needing legal assistance and see your printing needs skyrocket. Gathering evidence takes a lot of paper.
Legal is when you start needed the cursed tech that is fax as well. My condolences
At least faxing apparently can go directly to and from the computer. (Never dealt with faxing myself, so can’t guarantee it.)
We have young kids. So, we are printing things for them all the time. Doctor’s notes, coloring sheets, copies of forms for school (reading logs, etc.), on and on.
Plus, my wife is a musician and prints out music, we print our insurance cards, baby business cards, holiday card mailing labels, etc.
We don’t print every day, but enough that it’s worth it. It also scans and copies, which is helpful.
When it comes to school, I’ve been able to get by with signing forms on my iPad and then emailing them to the school. Doctor’s notes also go by email nowadays for me. Only one that needed to be physical in the last two years was a form for self administration of a medication. If I had remembered to ask for it at the doctor’s office when we had our appointment, doctor’s office would have gladly printed it. It can be slightly inconvenient at times, but I’ve really reduced my paper usage.
Choosing to print your own insurance cards, business cards, and return labels definitely is one of those things that you find another way to do if you didn’t have a printer. My personal opinion is that having a printer makes you need to print more and that’s what I’m still hearing from your comment.
Tho I will make the caveat that printing music as a musician is pretty much a business need. But business needs are outside the scope of my advice that getting rid of a printer is extremely doable and will reduce your printing needs.
We didn’t have a working printer for a few years. We spent more having stuff printed than we do printing ourselves. It’s a laser printer. So, the on-going cost for us is pretty minimal. Yes, we can (and do) buy coloring books, but if the kids want to color something specific (e.g., Lego people), we can print them and the kids can color right then and there. No driving to the store, no waiting for it to be delivered. Could I get by without one, absolutely, but it is way more convenient to have one for us, and less expensive. Printing services local and online are fairly expensive these days, and the local shop is a pain to get to. They’re right near the university and their parking is shit.
Tbf printers are the most unnecessarily complicated pieces of shit ever
I’m lucky that the people in my life do try some basics before asking me and tell me what they tried. Sometimes things just seem to start working when I arrive, so I just play along with it and say the printer was intimidated into working by my mere presence.
Oh, you have that aura too? I like it in that it helps me avoid spending time on fixes, but it’s annoying too because deep in my mind I wonder what really went wrong.
Same. What do you mean your device was suddenly incapable of performing one of its most basic functions for an hour and it magically got better just before you handed it to me? I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
Right. 😉
I don’t have panacea NFC tags embedded in my skin.
you’re sure about that?
The printers are playing the long game.
The panic my coworkers get in their eyes when they pull me from a task just to show me something that suddenly works for them is always funny.
“This was totally not working for 10 minutes straight.”
My partner and I fit in this range. We don’t have kids, but there is the offhand occasion where we need to print something so we just do it at work.
And if worst comes to worst, we have a shitty old cheap Canon that works if you turn off all the lights, light certain candles, and draw a penter-gram on the floor while we hold hands in the center of the room while saying a quiet prayer under our breath.
That’s why you give them a laptop and a Gentoo install iso on a bootable pen drive before they can talk.
“Billy, did you use genkernel rather than manually configuring and building your kernel?”
“Yes, Dad…”
“You know what that means.”
“Yes, Dad. No allowance for two weeks.”
If there’s any way to induce autism, this is gotta be it.
Yeah they were way off with Tylenol.
