It did take Time to stabilize the design, anything before the ql700 is clunky. But the ones I tried after have been Great
The only issue I saw is the toner color match on laser models could be a bit better. Still highly recommended for anything except photos.
"Innovating"
Stock buybacks only benefit shareholders and companies, not the economie. Trickle down and all that doesn't work, stock buybacks reduce a companies tax burden, especially when leveraged which they often are, do not lead to more investment. And they make the rich even richer.
See, for example, here:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
Kent Beck calls this the Explore and Extract phases (with the middle phase being Expand). I'm not sure if you had this talk in mind as you were writing your comment, but if not I think it'll resonate with you.
I think the situation with printers and appliances share a common cause, the financialization of firms that is part of “late-stage” capitalism as evidenced by the shift between C-M-C transactions to M-C-M, and now M-M’ (see https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section2/).
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
* you spent energy cooking it
* your supermarket had to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0, because of spillage
* the pepper had to be transported from the land, to and fro various logistic centers (sometimes 100's of miles)
* the farmer had to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides, heating, etc
https://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr/
It is true that they don't officially provide support for these drivers, but they work fine for me and are even GPL-licensed so that they can be (and are) packaged with Debian. Printer was immediately recognized via Avahi and worked pretty much out of the box.
I must also say that I really like the new "EcoTank supertank" concept, it's way cheaper and ink lasts a long time. So it's not like all innovation is bad. I had a Brother before and it actually had quite a few issues (leaked ink like crazy, and very poor photo print quality) but admittedly, it lasted a long time.
It already has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-growth-was-good-then-getting-...
This obsession with growth is so utterly self-centered. I still have those chairs, by the way.
[1] https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-reordering/refr...
At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for 64-bit Windows.
Brother HL-L8260CDW
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B06XDS1XW7/R2MQHUVV9JX7N...
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
There is a deep-seated myth that capitalism creates innovation. Capitalism builds enclosures, first quite literally [2] and now through intellectual property, rent-seeking, legislative barriers and so on to keep competitors out.
Look at the story of Tetris, invented by a few guys in the USSR for fun, basically. And what did the Western capitalists do? They simply licensed, re-licensed, sub-licensed that creation.
Printer companies maximize profit by creating enclosures. Limitations on ink, control of the drivers and so on. There's no motivation to innovate. industry is ossified.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0
[2]: https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-encl...
"How can we steal a man's shirt while convincing him he only lost it[1] instead?"
If there's only so many shirts to go around, and they have to come from someone else, maybe we just load a bag full of rocks, lie and tell people it's full of their laundry, and then leave the laundromat before they notice. When they do notice, they will blame themselves. "Why oh why," they lament, "did I not immediately recognize it was a bag of rocks all along!"
However, VueScan [1] - something I hadn't used since my Epson scanner in the mid 1990s - saved the day! They support scanning for it, and after a quick purchase I was able to scan from it again.
This sounds like shilling for the company, but just posting here if anyone has a similar problem to me. I wanted to scan something but macOS 14 (and maybe 13 or 12?) wouldn't work with my Brother multi-function scanner... although the printing still works fine.
Otherwise I'm still very happy with this scanner - one software purchase and one set of toner cartridges in over a decade is pretty good total cost of ownership :)
This topic reminds me a lot of the recent thread on Signal being so comparatively small but being scaled so big (and shaming big tech companies for being so big). https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/signal-meta-google-too-b... >>38382811
https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=segway_more_...
I'm just referring to the picture on that site of the segway.
I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the problem was that routers often selected low-power channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
Not if you drive it very much/for very long. See this graph [1] (from this article [2]) for instance. Note that they're evenly diving 173,151 miles across the 13 "years" (and don't ask me why they decided to make the x-axis "years").
And that's with a modern fuel efficient car, not some ancient one.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
oh and here's a bonus pic showing the $6 price tag from when I bought it 20 years ago https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAFemqYAfiHp2lWLqjwYCTI4WW0...
Take a look at these:
https://www.amazon.com/Qibaok-Connectors-Insulated-Electrica...
Crimp a wire in it. Look at it from the connector side. You'll see the bare conductor inside the connector. That's where the moisture gets in. Heat shrink tubing won't shrink enough to cover that. Wicking solder into it will seal it against moisture and corrosion.
We built a set of these: https://projectgallery.parts-express.com/speaker-projects/zd... which are a throwback to the old HiFi sets of the 70s-80s. I _really_ like the reference sound of this set. The only thing they don't really do is the sub-sonic punch that action movies require, but that's probably ok for apartment living with neighbors.
https://www.amazon.com/JRready-Connector-Waterproof-Electric...
The cheaper knock offs can work well, too.
Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks.
It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed.
[1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I have electronic equipment in nearly continuous use for 40 years. Daily heat/cool cycling. No solder breaks in it.
It seems that this debate is an old one:
https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/what-pros-cons-soldering-v...
https://blog.peigenesis.com/soldering-vs-crimping-advantages...
https://www.sig4cai.com/soldering-or-crimping-which-is-bette...
P.S. I'm pretty good with soldering, since I've done it professionally, so the disadvantages of a poorly soldered joint don't apply.
Even with replaceable batteries, there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
I've studied this a little since it effects my work, but I don't claim to be an EE. Sadly, I'm not finding any definitive authorities on the subject with a quick googling, though all the top hits tend to agree with the sentiment of not soldering crimped connections.
This was a short article that I ran across, dealing with the topic. As usual, the comments on hackaday are all over the place, but I still find them useful.
https://hackaday.com/2017/02/09/good-in-a-pinch-the-physics-...
Interestingly, I thought nasa banned soldering crimped connections, but as far as I can tell, rereading this doc now with a quick skim for the string crimp, they only ban crimping tinned connections.
https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/nasa-std-...
