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Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

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Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#251

Post by BizarroLand »

benj111 wrote: post #225
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inequality is getting worse and worse across the west: https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers: https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for... Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefi…

So what was your story 2 years ago when energy was cheap and producers were closing down?

What was your story on May 18, 1980 when no one was prepared for Mt. St. Helens to explode and people died?

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#252

Post by aliswe »

Hellbanevil wrote: post #189
Aeolun wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Printers became garbage when we switched from dot-matrix to inkjet. Then they were horrible for 20 years until I decided to buy a Brother laser printer, and suddenly everything was right in the world.

I had a inkjet (bought for an Atari 1020?) printer in college. Four years plus graduate school, and all I needed to pay extra for was 2 ribbons which were cheap. I was concerned my instructors might question wether I typed it, or used a dot matrix printer. None had a clue. I was one of the first people to have a computer and printer, and I was embarrassed. It felt like cheating. I will never understand why we as a so…

> They should teach this in MBA day school.

it's a basic dichotomy of long versus short-term thinking. markets in general and their people tend to be on the short-term side.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#253

Post by GuB-42 »

billpg wrote: post #244

I'm old enough to remember buying a mouse and having to install the driver that came with the mouse on a floppy disk. Once the mouse market agreed to a single interface standard (and again when USB mice appeared) the world got simpler. Any computer you could buy would just work with whatever mouse you happened to plug into it. You only needed a custom driver if your mouse had lots of extra buttons that no-one really…

PCL and PostScript are standards. If you have a printer that supports it, some supported both, a generic driver is all you need, except for special features.

Entry-level printers didn't support these standards as it required what at the time was significant computing power on the printer side.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#254

Post by petra »

nicoburns wrote: post #124
TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're right. There's nothing particularly magical about a printer. The PCL and Postscript specs have been in place for decades. Writing a driver to take that output and drive a print head to put it to paper should be pretty straightforward. (Needing to mark each print at the behest of the Secret Service to prevent counterfeiting is a question mark to me. Is that spec public?) It SEEMS like you could make printer…

I believe it's the print heads that are the bottleneck. I don't think they're available to put in your kit.

A chinese company recently began manufacturing inkjet printheads.

https://www.keypointintelligence.com/news/editors-desk/2018/....

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#255

Post by jeffdn »

projektfu wrote: post #148
pid-1 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK, I'm in my mid 30s and I really can't remember printers being alright.

I do. I had a number of great printers before they adopted the DRM to enforce their razor+blades model. 1. HP Deskwriter. Built-in localtalk networking, connected to two Macs over phonenet. Bulletproof, paper handling was great. 2. HP Laserjet 4N. Built-in Ethernet print server, fast, bulletproof. Worked with 3rd party toner just fine. It was priced to pay HP enough for the printer even if you never bought toner. 3.…

Those HP Laserjet printers were just incredible. They printed pages so quickly and crisply. That warm toner smell :)

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#256

Post by pdonis »

s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #191
scarface74 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”. We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.

Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms. Unfortunately, they tend to facilitate and reinforce the problem instead of combat it. My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.

> Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms.

This is not even close to being correct. First, monopolies are almost always the products of government interference with markets; "natural" monopolies are rare. Second, antitrust mechanisms were not put in place by benevolent governments to help consumers; they were put in place by governments who were getting political contributions from the failed competitors of the so-called "monopolies", who could not compete on a level playing field and so went to the govenrment to buy favors. The actual results of antitrust enforcement have been to make things worse for consumers, not better.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#257

Post by clint »

carpenecopinum wrote: post #13

I can't wrap my head around how the printer market has turned into this absolutely dispicable, foul state that it is in right now. Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers". I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spendin…

Its because American consumers value cheapness over everything else and American corporations value profit over anything else.

Setting aside the general decline of the printer industry, and simplifying slightly, those two interests compliment each other into:

1. Producing the cheapest possible product, and then selling it for a loss while concocting subscription schemes to make-up for the lost profits at the point of sale of the product.

2. Paying employees in general less and less money proportional to inflation to "reduce costs", thus forcing the average person to demand cheaper and cheaper products. Completing the cycle.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#258

Post by clint »

blitz_skull wrote: post #193
s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is a general one - the printer market is doing exactly what all elastic markets do.

Well, without hyper-focusing on printers, I fail to see the call to action here. I don't understand why "this is not an economy that works for ordinary people". I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.

Then you, by definition, are not ordinary.

The average person is impacted by capitalist market economy shenanigans on a continuous basis on nearly everything required to stay alive.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#259

Post by EarthLaunch »

s0l1dsnak3123 wrote: post #191
scarface74 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, There is no “monopoly” in the printer industry and it’s definitely not holding the economy “hostage”. We do not need the government to break up “Big Printer”.

Capitalism optimises for monopolies. Everyone agrees on this - this is why we have antitrust mechanisms. Unfortunately, they tend to facilitate and reinforce the problem instead of combat it. My comment is a general one on markets at large, hyper-focusing on the printer market is only valid as a rhetorical device.

> Everyone agrees on this

If you don't know the argument against your point of view, that is a good time to do some reading, not more writing.

Re: Tell HN: Brother printers now locking out non-OEM paraphernalia

#260

Post by mgkimsal »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #218
mgkimsal wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish ours connected to any wifi? I have a strong feeling this is somehow related to our local office network, but... any wifi printers we have never 'wake on lan'. If I reboot the printer, it's connected. 30-60 minutes later, it will not respond to any network commands. It's on , and you can go insert USB stick to print, or make a copy on it, and it says it has an IP address, but it's essentially 'dead'. Although i…

Wake on LAN means that you can wake the device from sleep mode by sending it a special WoL packet; I'm not quite following how that's related to your problem?

It's not 'sleeping' in the sense that the printer is 'down' or what not. It's 'on', but no one can ever send print jobs over wifi until the printer is reboot. That's the closest thing I can think of though - is it in some 'sleep' mode and just can't talk over the network because of that? It's been frustrating, and has happened over multiple printers, so it seems it's 'my network' but... absolutely no idea how to fix it. End goal would be 'leave printer on for 3 days and still be able to print to it whenever needed without having to reboot printer'. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard of a request, but... no dice.
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