Talk about your uber scam! I bought a cheap Epson printer. I just needed it to print black and white pages for school. I have NEVER printed a colour page. Today, however, I find that I’m out of ink. I grabbed one of my extra black cartridges and threw it in. The printer still complained that I was out of ink… cyan ink! It won’t let me print a black an white page without all of the colour cartridges!

A little Google searching and I came across this blog post. A few things to pick up from the post and the comments:

• The printer spits out a little ink each time you turn it on so you can run out of ink without ever printing a page
• It defaults to printing in colour mode (I made sure I always switched it to b/w though)
• It won’t let you print w/0 colour cartridges
• There is a chip that prevents refilling

This is when greed starts hurting your business. Sure I could go through all the hoops of buying a refill kit and a chip reset kit but I don’t want to. I just want to print black and white pages and this fracking printer won’t let me!

I’m not sure why businesses feel compelled to give their customers what they don’t want. I’m moving back to HP the first chance I get. They overcharged for their cartridges but at least I could print with just black ink if I wanted to.

p.s. It’s exam time and I can’t print.

Update 11:55AM: Slashdot just posted this related article.

Well done Sony… well done. Sony has implemented a new copy protection scheme (apparently):

YES ! It appears that Sony have done it again.  In their zeal to make their DVD movies copyproof (yeah right) they have in fact made their latest releases unplayable on some DVD players, including my Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. I recently rented “Stranger than Fiction” (2 copies) and “The Holiday” ( please no comments on my choice of movies) both by Sony Pictures.  Both load up to the splash title screen and then load no further,  then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!  

Of course this is going to help stop piracy and is well worth pissing your customers off. Oh wait… Shit.

Cheers Eve.

T-mac made another great find, The Homeless James Bond. Best line: The day I enter a home is the day I stop being James Bond and just become, unemployed. Then he starts making out with the chick… in classic James Bond style.

Related to my previous post, here’s another example from Newsweek:

I’m starting to feel guilty about this because it’s been happening so often…

Unfortunately I didn’t post this one on my blog but I did talk to many friends about how I didn’t understand how changing daylight savings would save energy. The reason I didn’t understand how it would save energy is the exact reason why it DIDN’T SAVE ENERGY:

For example, households may draw less electricity for lights at night, but will use more power in the early in the day as they wake to darker and chillier mornings.

I’d like to see how much this actually costed the economy due to the confusion and tech changes that were needed.

From the press release:

Apple has announced that iTunes will make individual AAC format tracks available from EMI artists at twice the sound quality of existing downloads, with their DRM removed, at a price of $1.29/€1.29/£0.99. iTunes will continue to offer consumers the ability to pay $0.99/€0.99/£0.79 for standard sound quality tracks with DRM still applied.  Complete albums from EMI Music artists purchased on the iTunes Store will automatically be sold at the higher sound quality and DRM-free, with no change in the price. Consumers who have already purchased standard tracks or albums with DRM will be able to upgrade their digital music for $0.30/€0.30/£0.20 per track.  All EMI music videos will also be available on the iTunes Store DRM-free with no change in price.

A great step forward but I’m not a fan of the DRM-free “tax.” The sound quality increase won’t be noticeable by most  but lets say it’s worth 5 cents. This means that they are charging an extra 25 cents for the DRM-free aspect. One way to look at it is that EMI is essentially expecting that 1 out of 4 DRM-free tracks will be pirated off to someone else. I’m not sure that this is really a valid charge to pass on to the consumers who pay for their music. Remember, DRM doesn’t stop piracy.

Either way, one step at a time…