Printers are known in IT to be a utter pain in the ass. Most brands are also using a lot of proprietary stuff and it limits interoperability. Drivers for example.
Well known example is about ink cartridges. HP added identification chips on them, so if you want to use an other brand, not HP, to fill your printer, you can’t because if no chip is detected despite a cartridge being inserted, the machine will tell you it is not genuine.
Another example with Rycoh. I don’t know if their printers still use this method, so take it as an example of capitalist greed more than a current situation.
Laser printers are using a sealed container to process waste created during printing. Rycoh had placed a led detector inside to know when it was full and trigger an alert, stopping the machine and request for a change.
Good idea in theory but in practice the detector was placed very oddly or on purpose near or in front of dust intake. So it was bathed very quickly in electrostatic dust and thus triggered the alarm very quickly, even if your container was not fully filled.
The only way to solve this was to shake your waste storage, hoping it would clean the led enough to keep going for a few days or change it.
Lastly, I have a Brother printer, bought to a neighbor sale. The oven inside, which is in charge of heating the ink, had a failure. It had melted. For the price, it was a deal. I only needed to buy a new part, unplug it, replace and I had a laser printer with colours. Well, Brother had lightly soldered pins linking the connector to PCB. When I unplugged it, soldering came with it. I contacted a repair store near me telling me they don’t do it and I should ask for a repair to a certified Brother technician. Which is overpriced. I also can’t open it fully as it is placed to be impossible to repair without disassembling half of the machine.
No printer is the same, some brands are better than others. Some are well accepted on Linux with CUPS, some other not. But so far, not one brand impressed me well enough by their design to keep it open, easily fixable and long lasting.
I’ve had the privilege of working with users with actual computer training. Old ladies who started working on terminals in the 70s and 80s. They were awesome, because they actually understood what they were doing. They could give me an accurate description of what they were doing when shit went wrong. They had real concerns and realistic requests for improvement. And they never blamed the computer when they encountered something they didn’t understand. They’re all dead or retired now.
Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don’t understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.
The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.
My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.
People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how many conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.
I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.
For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even define the ask.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.
IT people hate computers.
Correction: IT people hate printers.
Correction: printers hate people.
As a non-IT person, fuck HP in particular.
Fuck printers
Nom one invented a good printer still
I have read this ten times now, and I still can’t figure out what it is supposed to mean…
Printers are known in IT to be a utter pain in the ass. Most brands are also using a lot of proprietary stuff and it limits interoperability. Drivers for example.
Well known example is about ink cartridges. HP added identification chips on them, so if you want to use an other brand, not HP, to fill your printer, you can’t because if no chip is detected despite a cartridge being inserted, the machine will tell you it is not genuine.
Another example with Rycoh. I don’t know if their printers still use this method, so take it as an example of capitalist greed more than a current situation. Laser printers are using a sealed container to process waste created during printing. Rycoh had placed a led detector inside to know when it was full and trigger an alert, stopping the machine and request for a change. Good idea in theory but in practice the detector was placed very oddly or on purpose near or in front of dust intake. So it was bathed very quickly in electrostatic dust and thus triggered the alarm very quickly, even if your container was not fully filled. The only way to solve this was to shake your waste storage, hoping it would clean the led enough to keep going for a few days or change it.
Lastly, I have a Brother printer, bought to a neighbor sale. The oven inside, which is in charge of heating the ink, had a failure. It had melted. For the price, it was a deal. I only needed to buy a new part, unplug it, replace and I had a laser printer with colours. Well, Brother had lightly soldered pins linking the connector to PCB. When I unplugged it, soldering came with it. I contacted a repair store near me telling me they don’t do it and I should ask for a repair to a certified Brother technician. Which is overpriced. I also can’t open it fully as it is placed to be impossible to repair without disassembling half of the machine.
No printer is the same, some brands are better than others. Some are well accepted on Linux with CUPS, some other not. But so far, not one brand impressed me well enough by their design to keep it open, easily fixable and long lasting.
IT people hate users. IT people hate other IT people. We’re just a surly lot.
I’ve had the privilege of working with users with actual computer training. Old ladies who started working on terminals in the 70s and 80s. They were awesome, because they actually understood what they were doing. They could give me an accurate description of what they were doing when shit went wrong. They had real concerns and realistic requests for improvement. And they never blamed the computer when they encountered something they didn’t understand. They’re all dead or retired now.
Todays computer illiterate workforce is doomed to be incompetent because they don’t understand how their main tool works. Nobody bothered to train them.
The complicated thing here is there are so many layers of abstraction to make things easier to use and understand that if you didn’t age with the tech, it’s really hard to fully understand. That’s everything. I see Angular and React developers who don’t understand CSS.
My last position, we had classes that set sizes for everything in multiples of 4 pixels. So size-1 is 4 pixels, size-2 is 8 pixels, etc. And everything was sized with those classes. Which means if you ever wanted to resize anything, you have to go to every element and change the class instead of you know, having input controls have distinct classes.
People are layering on abstraction without understanding why and throwing away all the benefits, time to invent another abstraction layer! I had my tech lead argue with me that this was a better system because “standards”. I’m going to assume the standard was poorly understood because I can’t imagine a multi-billion dollar company hires idiots to set standards.
I got started learning transistors and Boolean algebra and programming an 8-bit cpu in college. Had computers for a few years before that. It’s surprising how many conditionals I see that can be simplified by Boolean algebra.
I don’t actually hate computers, and I try to give IT workers some grace because I’m not always proud of the work I do when I have to finish 3 months of work in two weeks. But I’ve worked with a lot of folks who aren’t curious or looking to learn and improve, and I have to wonder why they ever got into IT in the first place.
For me the worst part of IT is the god damned management. Any possible productivity gains from agile are undercut at every turn by management who has to have a concrete promise of a delivery date before they even define the ask.
Anyway, sorry for the rant. Started my long weekend early and starting a new job next week, so I have a lot of pent up rants from my last company.