People are paying to break printers with sledgehammers in smash rooms
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Also, try to start a new printer brand today that is user-friendly, and you'll be blown out of the water by patent trolls. And if you do manage to live, your shareholders will force you to squeeze more juice out of your loyal customers.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36678914
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36611245
P.s.: I should also mention that my Brother Laser printer has been functioning just fine for quite a few years new.
And just to be clear: they didn't just disable the printer; I can't even use the scanner on top unless I go and buy the Brother toners.
Screw Brother. I'm tired of reading that they're "the one good brand" out there. They are very not.
OK but is there any other alternative? Wife's SME: two Brother printers (these are with official support for everything although I did have to modify a few settings here or there when they moved office and their router IP changed for example). Home number one: Brother printer. Home number two: Brother printer.
It's really pathetic if they started preventing other toners from working but they're still fine machines.
What would I replace our four Brother laser printers with?
Basically I read your post and Brother "won": I'll just make sure to buy official Brother toners. Which sucks.
I upgraded my Mac and it resulted in my brother mfc losing the ability to scan from the mac. It seems brother did not port the driver to the new OS. Accordingly, they are dirt and I will not buy from them again.
I always buy the Brother toner cartridges because they're the best quality, reasonably priced, and I want to support the business model of the only(?) decent printer manufacturer left.
All of this said, if I found out the printer was locking out third-party toner cartridges, I'd stop at nothing to defeat the lock, and would only use knockoff toner from then on.
It's an honor system through and through, I hope somebody in charge takes note.
Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you do this without blocking wifi printing? Are you just stopping network egress from the printers IP address?
Edit - by wifi printing I mean on the same network, in house.
> Maybe this is a silly question, but how do you do this without blocking wifi printing? Are you just stopping network egress from the printers IP address?
> Edit - by wifi printing I mean on the same network, in house.
I can guess that their routing table only allows routing from/to the printer's IP in the local network (wired or wireless). Any packet to/from outside world for the printer is dropped.
In my opinion there's never any reason a home office printer with one or two users should need to talk to the Internet.
I too have an old Brother that I keep around. Some years back I bought an HP on eBay that was at least 5 years old at the time — it was a model that the 3rd party toner companies had figured out how to hack.
In fact, that is generally my suggestion: to determine which used printer to shop for, find the ink/toner cartridges that are in abundance and see which models they work with.
I suppose software support is the only danger of this (although it has not bitten me yet). But I believe there are perhaps open-source or 3rd party solutions here?
Okay, I guess anything's removable if you try hard enough.
I should use my arduino one to make some sort of printer server.
It was surprising how complex cheap printers are compared to prosumer models where things are like lego. Nicely modularized, few pluggable blocks, clean and simple where as entry level ones use the same old design with tons of parts, screws and plastic clipping..
Always use protection kids, don't catch shareholders.
HP hold the guns and if you dare compete good luck not infringing any of their patents and get sued. They love the cash cow it creates, the security their parents provides against competition and antitrust laws, and the lack of innovation and having to spend more money on R&D is fine for them.
If you sue them for breaking antitrust law they will show you how they don’t and how you are free to create your own printer company. But in reality again good luck not hitting any of their patents.
Patent laws are quite broken and will be for a long time. We need to change them.
The processors and memory capacity on these things are so antiquated that unless you are printing text in a font that is onboard the printer you are waiting forever for it to "process" the document and then fail because it ran out of ram to be able to fit the page to draw it on to the drum.
Once you get the document processed and into ram, you are then waiting even longer because these printers actually have slow print speed.
All so you can save on some cheap toner and have some sort of perceived "reliability".
Its like those people who tell everyone to just use Linux. Yeah use it...if your time is worth nothing.
You actually missed the point, it was its reliability I was talking about (if you'd ever seen one then my comment would have been self-evident). And I wasn't advising others to use one.
It was built like a tank, nothing breaks and it takes a lot of bashing. I purchased it over 30 years ago and it still works because it was built in the days when engineers ran HP and not fucking accountants.
"Once you get the document processed and into ram, you are then waiting even longer because these printers actually have slow print speed."
This is the clincher fact. Nothing like that happens, it works damn fast—no RAM delay and no waiting to print. (If I want more than 300dpi I just change to another printer.)
I have owned a LJ-IIp, Laserjet 5p, and currently have a Laserjet 4050tn(with less than 5,000 sheets on the engine) in the corner serving as a paperweight.
If I had known prices would explode post COVID I wouldn't have sent the others to recycling where they belong.
>You actually missed the point, it was its reliability I was talking about (if you'd ever seen one then my comment would have been self-evident). And I wasn't advising others to use one.
I did not miss the point but you seemed to have missed mine so let me reword it: Giving up everything else for "reliability" is not ideal because you just have a reliable printer that makes you miserable.
>It was built like a tank, nothing breaks and it takes a lot of bashing. I purchased it over 30 years ago and it still works because it was built in the days when engineers ran HP and not fucking accountants.
It was built during the days where they had text mode only and if you were lucky your printer could process some fonts on board. It sounds like thats all you print anyway. If you print a PDF of any meaningful complexity you'll be in a world of hurt real quick. I know from experience. All of a sudden all the reliability in the world means nothing because I can't get the contents of the darn file on to a piece of paper.
>This is the clincher fact. Nothing like that happens, it works damn fast—no RAM delay and no waiting to print. (If I want more than 300dpi I just change to another printer.)
Have you used a more modern printer?
Compare this: https://youtu.be/Ka60XggECiQ?t=131
To this: https://youtu.be/fEjD8DikLB0?t=14
The new printer printed three pages in the time it took the old one to print one! Don't even try to print a pdf or anything with graphics on it.
In addition to the engine just being faster, the speed is limited by the CPU in the printer that decodes the file and the speed by which it receives it: both of which are slower on the old printer. That is if you don't run out of RAM and then the printer errors out.
You have rose colored glasses on. This is like those crazy cat people who continue to justify their love for an animal that is scratching them and destroying their stuff all the time.
PS: I often print gigabyte-size TIF-file photos at 1200dpi (sometimes 1600dpi) onto special stock.
Just saw this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36734563. Nice to know I'm not alone.
Then I looked at self printing. Buying an inkjet and 1 set of ink carts was like $130. Even if I borrowed the printer, the ink was VERY expensive.
It is 2023... printing pages should be extremely cheap both in color and b&w. Why hasn't there been innovation in that front?
With ink tank printers, you pay extra to escape the "razor and blades" pricing model. Probably worth it if you print sufficient volume using an inkjet.
For $100 on AliExpress you'll find ink by the liter instead of milliliter, syringes or custom cartridges to refill the printer, and "chip reset" tools, if applicable.
It sucks that you need to do that, but with a bit of research in advance you can get a cheap printer and escape the razorblade model.
The problem is that competition to provide a cheap printer has driven away all the profits so of course the manufacturers start looking elsewhere.
You can't benefit from the latest but the inkjets and lasers of 20 years ago were pretty good and had more or less assumed their modern form already.
My suspicion is more that it is a difficult market make decent margins in. The effort to lock in consumers to name-brand consumables, even by Brother these days, seems to belie that problem. Maybe there are other hurdles like sweetheart deals with chem manufacturers as well, I don't know.
I can't find a single example of this happening. Perhaps it has given someone some trouble but it would be exceedingly rare. It's hard to imagine anyone trying, the law explicitly forbids it.
[1]: I did it here, 20 miles from Philadelphia: https://store.diggerlandusa.com/retail/modifiers/10470/
I like the concept, and I guess kids would like it since I know kids like garbage trucks and fire trucks and stuff. I just never would have expected someone to actually build it.
These mongrel devices cause me untold problems, waste my money, never print when I'm in a hurry, have nobbled ink cartridges that go belly-up with lots of remaining ink, have no manual override when printing stops for no apparent reason, or the slightest problem stops the print spooler, etc. etc. — ad nauseam!
My way of dealing with these evil-intented contraptions is to chuck them out of a second-story window so they land on concrete. That softens them up for further bashing with a sledgehammer or axe.
I always feel wonderful afterwards.
What we need is a printer-smashing Olympics to find and finely hone the best methods! It would have different classes and categories—for example, 'Smash with forklifts', 'Destroy with .50 Browning Machine Gun', 'Drop from helicopter', and so on.
Of course, there should be a special HP category aimed at finding the fastest and most inventive method of removing these evil devices from the planet.
Crowd-sourcing would provide the prize money and the winners and best entries would have a special YouTube channel or TV series. Printer companies should be shamed out of existence and shareholders and investors in these companies should be publicly exposed and made a mockery of—like we once did when we chucked society's most egregious offenders in the stocks.
Eventually, with enough effort we could bring these bastard printer companies to heel.
This really isn’t true. Printing is painful but it’s rate of decline is less than:
Internet search quality. Invasive advertising. Invasive tracking. Creepiness of online services. Online buying and its timely arrival.
Search quality, in particular, has taken a huge hit over the past ten years.
...It's absolutely insane to me that the exact search operator (" ") no longer works. Google automatically assumes that it always knows what I'm looking for better than I do.
Yet people do not want to spend $1000 on a printer, so compromises need to be made.
Expensive printers, like those found in printer shops, work just fine day after day and are cheap to operate. But they can cost $10k.
Unfortunately, the end is in sight for this device: my Chromebook doesn't support scanning on it. I've already permanently mothballed its POTS FAX feature, because I disconnected my landline. So when my Windows 10 machine dies, I won't have any scanning capability. Do I still need that flatbed/ADF scanning when I can just use my smartphone camera? Hmm.
PC_LOAD_A4 just isn't confusing enough.
LOAD_A4_PAPER or INSERT_A4_PAPER etc also fit within the limited length of the message.
I have done a stint of helpdesk work and can’t see that this would be too catastrophic.
Yes, it'd cause the person to check every tray, but in my experience they do anyway.
The "LETTER" part was meaningful, because it meant the "LETTER" size, as opposed to some other size. "PC LOAD LEGAL", for example, is another message it displays.
Probably they could have just omitted it entirely and let the use work out which paper source was empty. After all, since not everyone knew what the message many at all, that's what they did anyway!
To our young people in IT: Watch "Office Space"! It is still hilarious and you may find it easier to recognize some more or less subtle repferences (for example to red staplers, tps reports etc.). Also, it features some solid rap songs by Scarface, Geto Boys etc..
Edit: Here is the printer scene https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9wsjroVlu8
For me printing is a "special interest" and I try to never "get mad" at printers but always "get even" in that I don't complain about the results I get but I figure out how to get better results.
For instance lately I found the color management system of the printer and Photoshop was screwing up my red-cyan stereograms so I developed a CMS specifically for stereograms and I am now applying the same method to high color gamut displays.
Almost all the photos I put on social media are pictures of my cards with photos and other images on them
The use case was being able to analyze game balance through it, which seems to be a killer application for that. But I didn't get to note how ontology relates to calculations.
Previously I thought ontology was just about categories or hierarchies. Manning's Knowledge Graphs Applied mentions ontologies:
I am currently working on redoing my web presence, I really need a Python-based SSG which is good for technical and scientific content.
Perhaps you should write an article about the brands/models of printers which inspire the least loathing in the people who have to use them? That could both be useful to people "neurotypical enough" to want a non-crappy printer, and (eventually) help to reduce the anger, waste, and environmental infractions which you're writing about.
I think the attempt at politeness here made an oops.
I don't think it's the printer company policies at play, I am pretty sure a CRT monitor would be a more than adequate substitute in the "smash rooms" (if you could even find those any longer).
Not only hazards of batteries. I used a sledgehammer and related tools as a kid, without lasting injury, but I wonder whether some adult city office worker suddenly swinging a sledgehammer one day, without prior conditioning, has a significant risk of quickly pulling/tearing something.
And on something like a plastic printer especially, I suspect you'd get "chaotic" behavior unfamiliar to many as they strike it, which initially seems innocuous, and could lead to shrapnel injury when it's suddenly not.
The liability risk makes this choice of example customer funny...
> Islas and two classmates were celebrating the end of their law school exams at Bay Area Smash Room,
Online, I've heard local apartment landlords say they don't want law school students as tenants, because they think the law student will be very assertive about their rights, and even actually want to go to court just for the experience. :) (Besides being illegal housing discrimination, it's not fair, since I've known a poorer law student in town who quietly endured an awful below-market apartment, but it remains.)
Do these smash room businesses have a really good waiver that would not only stand up in court, but keep it from getting very expensive merely going to court? Do they have insurance against customer injuries? Do they go out of business the first time there's a major injury? Will an LLC or other corp. shield personal assets?
(I'm not a lawyer, and my understanding is that law doesn't work like computer programmers think it does.)
These are mostly foolproof in transferring liability to the customer but they're sometimes phrased to imply you can't sue the operator if anything at all bad happens, which is usually not true - it's usually not possible to waive gross negligence. The particulars of what can and can't be waived vary state by state, in the USA.
And yes, they usually carry insurance against such things, which is typically priced according to the strength of the waiver and lack of negligence on-site.
Injuries at such waiver-gated locations are usually not business-ending or Top Golf never would have taken off the way it did... but at Top Golf scale you can be sure they have retained really good lawyers.
Here's an example of such a document:
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5a50f094268b96e867707...
Does that mean if someone gets injured and they try to file a lawsuit, the clerk laughs in their face, and tells them to go away, before the defendant incurs any costs at all?
Does it mean that the judge dismisses the case after only five figures of initial legal costs by defendant?
Does it mean probably a settlement? (And maybe the settlement is smaller because the victim did sign something?)
Does the victim signing something hardly matter, because they can show some other legal principle was in play (e.g., something involving negligence or recklessness, or some other law violated)?
Does insurance cover it, and if so, what happens to rates or the policy continuing to exist?
Etc.
Sometimes insurance will pay all the legal/settlement costs, sometimes they won't, sometimes a business will have to negotiate to avoid a rate hike (we did x, y, and z to avoid this liability and minimize the settlement) and sometimes the insurance policy does vanish.
Sometimes without being given the opportunity to read the document, too! I've literally had these waivers put on computer screens with timers on them that would time out before you could read it, assuming a reasonable reading speed.
I really wish someone could standardize such a document, like how the GPL is. "Oh, the Public Death Waiver v2? I'm quite familiar with that." easy signature Of course, this will never happen, as what would put bread on lawyers' barren tables, otherwise?
A bit OT, but wanted to note it's not illegal in the US to discriminate against prospective tenants because of employment or lack of employment as long as that discrimination is not related to membership in a protected class (gender, race, religion, disability, medical condition, etc,). [0]
[0] https://prioritycommerce.com/resource-center/can-you-deny-pr...,
Ethics aside, I'm not sure it's actually illegal in the US. Discrimination is only banned for protected classes, and I don't think those include field of study or work.
Nationally[1], the classes are race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Some states have additional protected classes[2], but I don't think they include this.
---
[1] https://www.hud.gov/program_offices/fair_housing_equal_opp/f...
[2] https://lawatlas.org/datasets/state-fair-housing-protections...
Make something folks want, but keep the models with long-term, open-source drivers.
If I hadn't gotten a job when I did. I would have given myself a job removing scam job listings from "America's Job Bank."
It might always be fiddly from start to finish, but at least the source is there.
That's funny, California! I'd be curious to see what exactly is illegal about smashing trash, in particular e-waste. Presumably there is something toxic, but I'm skeptical. at the very least the toxic parts could be subtracted from the smash, but that depends on California's perception of toxic. We all know California has a very progressive view of what is toxic, so I'd assume that's an expansive topic.
Ultimately I would argue this conduct is covered by freedom of speech, but that depends. IF the event is documented with photography, video, or even has any kind of spectator audience... then it's clearly a form of exhibition, and speech.
But even actors performing probably have to obey OSHA regulations, and so it goes...
This is ridiculous.
The video itself is protected speech, but the activity is not.
Same with chainsawing, if the chain breaks and comes swinging the trajectory shouldn't be towards my groin or neck
The ceramics, such shattered into dozens of pieces, were by far the most fun!
Our economy was just starting out, and we had no way to compete with established businesses.
Now that patents and copyrights don't protect individuals, but instead protect multinational corporations and investor profits, they should be removed.
Only human beings should be granted either patents or copyrights. Corporate entities should be required to fight-it-out in the marketplace with no protections in place.
You and I pay for the protections. I don't want to protect multinational corporations. Do you?
FWIW I've still got several HP LaserJet 4M+ printers and I did configure one of them to show that message when there's no paper ; )
Nothing in the world stops printer companies to produce a printer which you can connect via USB and which will print the the desired document through a system dialog, but somehow they are incapable of even that.
HP just released an auto-update to block my printer (without my consent), I’m going to smash it in front of their offices soon for free.
After 2 months he threw it away and got a deal with a local shop for printing online to them.
He'd learnt enough.
And i use the dame printing service, and have recommended it to several others.
Bye, hp.
Additionally, any ink ribbon printer (or typewriter) will suffer from dry ribbons in occasional service.
Really there's nothing wrong with laser printers. If you want a trouble-free model you need to spend maybe $50 more than the absolute lowest price you can find. If you think about what they do, it's sort of incredible.
Yeah, things tend to break much sooner when they're made of moving parts made of flimsy plastic.
We've been conditioned to expect shoddy products sold at a high margin, with few viable options.
inb4 "ackshually printers are sold at a loss" - yeah, not really when you consider that you're actually being locked into high margin [1] ink cartridges.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/sfm7e/til_pr...
tl;dr it's not just that printers are awful, but that they're crunchy
Mr Pötter:
Well, Mr Öldrup, are things a little better now? Otherwise, take a couple of printers and then off to the shooting range.
Reporter:
In Stenkelfeld, you don't have to succumb to troubles with modern computer technology anymore. After a total crash or file loss, PC users were only able to weep, pray in silence or use the good old gas oven ... but the newly established rage center in Annex 2 of the Jürgen Koppelin Training Center offers frustrated computer users the opportunity to appropriately express their desperation. Next to me is institute director Friedhelm Pötter. Mr Pötter, just a quick question, what solutions do you offer?
Mr Pötter:
Well, uh, in the large field of word processing, we offer in our hammer chamber the opportunity here to take revenge on the device itself. We use a few decommissioned computers and monitors here, on which one can express one's displeasure. Right?
Reporter:
And this is being used right now in front of our eyes...
Mr Pötter:
Yes, here at the 20-kilo hammer, that's the well-known writer Ludwig Ölldrup, uh, who spent four years working on the computer to write his historical homeland novel "Das Große Buchboelken in der Rössnitzer Senke". Finally he wanted to print out the whole thing and now the system tells him "Fatal exception error in drive C:. Path and file name unknown. All saved data will be lost." So he was off straight away to the canal bridge with a calf rope, but luckily we were able to catch him just in time. And now he's given his rage some breathing room, right Mr Ölldrup?
Reporter:
In addition to all sorts of bite-proof table edges for inconsistencies with Windows 95, a soundproof padded cell for the hapless Macintosh user, and a set of heavy baseball bats for various printer problems, I see a soaked life-size doll with burn marks and strangulation marks...
Mr Pötter:
Well, this is a faithful recreation of Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, available to be hanged, drowned, or burned. Yesterday, Mr. Öllrich from the Wittmann architects' office tampered with it. After completing all the calculations and drawings for the new district hospital with the MS Statik Pro 5.0 software, the computer accused him of a general protection violation of the graphics card. Afterwards, only small yellow balls could be seen on the monitor. And the message to contact the manufacturer with this problem. And that's what Mr. Öllrich did, as you can see here. Right?
Reporter:
Yes. Finally let's take a look at the shooting range - a sprawling 50m facility that is getting very busy. Mr Pötter, what is that all about?
Mr Pötter:
Yes, this one is popular. Here we enable targeted retaliatory measures for disappointments with hardware and peripheral devices - or their compatibility.