It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription • Hacker News Board

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#181

Post by tonyedgecombe » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

AnthonBerg wrote: post #170

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

Same, except: Get a HP color laser printer that does duplex printing. (“Duplex”. Funny word. It seems to be latin for “can slurp the paper back into itself to flip it and print on both sides of the page”.) In all earnestness, I am 100% convinced that yours is the best possible printer advice for many people! Maybe the majority? People like me might have the competitive disadvantage of lower reading speed of black-and…

My last HP colour laser was a nightmare. It cost a fortune to run and was unreliable. The mono Brother I replaced it with has never missed a beat in the ten years I have owned it.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#182

Post by lwansbrough » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

taurath wrote: post #54

> Good business sense is to do only what is reasonable for yourself but great business sense is to make others do what is not. I think its interesting to meditate for a moment on the great amount of meaning in the closing sentence here. Great business sense by this definition seems inherently immoral and extractive rather than productive for one. Secondly the it seems quite the antithesis of competition under free ca…

> I think that we should try to strive for a world where good and moral business sense is better rewarded than great business sense.

This stuff gets outcompeted by the free market every time. You don’t have to look far to find failed attempts to plan economies around the morals du jour. The whole point of free market capitalism is it’s game theory - if something worked better anybody would be free to use that better method. Humans have a consensus on what better means, and free markets are structured around that (+ a sane amount of government oversight because humans act dumb at scale.)

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#183

Post by TeMPOraL » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:41 AM UTC

AnthonBerg wrote: post #171

nwallin wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

++ I have a Brother printer without duplex printing. I kick myself basically every time I need to print because I almost always need to manually flip/reinsert. I dream of the day that my printer will die and I can buy a new Brother monochrome laser printer with duplex, but it's been over a decade and I'm pretty sure this motherfucker will outlive me. (it's also USB only, no ethernet/wifi/bluetooth and ... I dunno wha…

Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.

I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother.

We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killing the planet by printing one-sided vs. duplex. The use of ink or toner is the same.

So I don't mind anymore. I do occasional manual duplexing for convenience or out of courtesy (e.g. when printing contracts), otherwise I print single-sided, and keep the prints around after they've served their purpose. I have a small stack of one-sided prints which find their second life as source paper for further non-critical prints, or as drawing paper for my daughter.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#184

Post by labawi » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:42 AM UTC

SavantIdiot wrote: post #58

He mentions "Smart TVs". I always thought you could just buy a SmartTV and not connect the internet and have a dumb TV. Nope. HDMI changed that. I bought a TV a few months ago and it started showing adverts because it was connected to the internet through my ROKU via HDMI. That's right, you can't even have a dumb TV anymore. Someone needs to make an HDMI internet filter, stat. But Adobe? That smells like extortion.

It seems blocking/removing Pin 14 or cutting the wire should work [1] So yes, a simple passive HDMI ethernet filter should be possible. You can also buy cables without ethernet, but then you also need do verify it actually isn't present.

I knew ethernet was in the spec, but this is the first time I heard it actually works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDMI#HDMI_Ethernet_and_Audio_R...

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#185

Post by opheliate » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:44 AM UTC

dsr_ wrote: post #16

Printers. Yeah. Herewith, my standard advice. Buy a Brother monochrome laser with duplex, an ethernet port, and BRScript/3 (their PostScript clone). Even if you're sure you will never need one or more of those features, get them all. Wifi and Bluetooth and NFC are strictly optional, and probably not worthwhile. If you need color printing, send it to a printing company. There might even be a local one. It will be done…

For colour printing, I found an Epson EcoTank on Gumtree that a local business was giving away for free, having found the process of replacing ink too tedious. For those who don't know, the EcoTank line don't use cartridges in the traditional sense, you just pour ink directly into tanks on the printer. It's a bit of a hassle to fill compared to just putting cartridges in, but for just printing stuff off for around the house, it's worked out so much cheaper for me so far. Plus there's no worry about proprietary cartridges being discontinued in the future. If you can find one for free/cheap, I'd say go for it :)

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#186

Post by datenhorst » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:45 AM UTC

geocrasher wrote: post #162

Fun story: My adult daughter lives at home. She does our shopping and came home one day with a toilet bowl brush that was "revolutionary" (my words based on her excitement about it) because it is refillable and can be used to clean the outside and the inside of the toilet. Recognizing this as a refill subscription, I forbade its use. It sits there, unwilling to be thrown away, and unable to be used. If not for the re…

Why would you want to use the toilet brush to clean the *outside* of your toilet? I struggle to make sense of this product

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#187

Post by selectnull » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

yinyang_in wrote: post #90

PretzelPirate wrote: post #20

> …so if you are into your environmentalism then milk is the SaaS for you. Dairy isn’t know for being great for the environment.

Imo dairy isn't good if done via industry model i.e. central company provides value for all. All cow in central place, profit oriented. Old cows thrown for slaughter, it becomes very inhumane. Coming from village where cow is part of family and treatment like family and has name as we do, then same dairy become very beautiful relationship.

When that named cow gets old and dies, does it get buried in the family cemetery along with the rest of the family? Do you mourn for it? Or perhaps, it turns into a steak of some form or another?

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#188

Post by yunohn » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #132

zizee wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am in Australia, but 15 minute drive into a small town without a print shop. Perhaps Australia is a oddity, and most people/places worldwide do in fact have easy access to a local print shop, but I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a north American and in my experience it is a relative safe bet that the north American experience does not usually translate to the rest of the wo…

> I am guessing the grandparent is seeing things from the perspective of a North American No, I’m basing this on extensive travel experience in Africa, South America, and South Asia. If a town has anything resembling a hostel, then it is also 100% likely to have a copy shop or an Internet cafe with a printer. ————— I think the actual failure of shared model here, is that there are people here who think something bein…

Driving 20mins in a polluting case, just to print a few pages? I think you’re the one missing some perspective here…

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#189

Post by denton-scratch » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:53 AM UTC

> all of it just lines the pockets of wealthy sysadmins.

Never met one.

Re: It looks like a product but is secretly a subscription

#190

Post by AnthonBerg » Tue, Aug 03, 2021, 7:55 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #183

AnthonBerg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please forgive me for the brash and commanding tone of the unsolicited advice, but: Sell it!! Get one that has duplex. Someone else will love your non-duplex printer just like it is. Duplex is so absolutely and completely worth having if one is so inclined.

I generally agree, though I personally stopped caring and learned to love my non-Duplex Brother. We've all been conditioned to believe the bullshit about saving the trees, despite the reality being, paper manufacturing is very efficient and mostly uses its own specially-grown trees these days; plus, a typical office worker in a bank will print more paper a day than you'll use in a year. Point being, you aren't killin…

Ah, makes sense – I am just now becoming aware of the fact that practically speaking, I print duplex only because it … reads nicer? The printed product is lighter and smaller and easier to staple, and feels like a book. For me the effect is like a “cleaner workspace” for reading.

I’m sure this varies between people. (Incidentally, it seems that individual variety is most clearly represented in abstract activity. As an example, we all learn mathematics in our individual way. And reading is highly abstract! And what matters for reading efficiency probably varies a great deal from person to person.)