Mike Judge | The Magpie Gazette

The Proof Is in the Printing

December 19, 2017 Techly DoRight

When a computer printer works as it should, smoothly turning out page after page and photo after photo, it’s a wonderful thing that is easy to take for granted. But when that printer acts up and doesn’t feed pages or photos properly, or prints unevenly in streaks even though it has full ink cartridges, then a user’s patience can be stretched to the limit of frustration. Unlike the computer a printer is often connected to, a printer has a lot of moving parts, and that is typically the source of their malfunctions.

Since a home user likely has an inexpensive inkjet printer, replacement of the entire unit is usually preferable over any repair that will get time consuming and therefore expensive. The cost of such a printer is subsidized by purchase of proprietary ink cartridges at inflated prices, which is an economic model a bit like cell phone subsidizing through service contract, but not quite. In the case of a cell phone being available at a nominal initial cost while the complete cost is spread out over the term of a two year contract, the user of the phone is the one and only subsidizer. With printers, the artificially low cost of many of them is subsidized by all the users of the ink, and the heaviest ink users do the most to support the cost of printers for everyone.

If people had to pay the full cost of a printer, they might have a better understanding of the value of these remarkable machines. Like computers, printers that fit on a portion of a desktop now are doing the work that machines in earlier times did while taking up a full room. The inflation adjusted price has also gone down over time, and really the comparison of technological capability does not hold up beyond basic numbers in saying that a modern desktop printer or computer can do the same work as room size machine of fifty years ago. The new machines can do much, much more.

Peter Small demonstrating the use of the Gutenberg press at the International Printing Museum in Carson, California, in 2009. Photo by Flickr user vlasta2.

What appears to make a printer a special object of loathing when it doesn’t work as it should is the usually mechanical nature of its breakdowns, something that people have a visceral understanding of, rather than the electronic or computing problems of a computer or its hand held cousin, the smartphone, which many people find inaccessibly difficult. When a printer’s paper feed mechanism breaks down and starts chewing up pages, leaving a crumpled mess stuck partway in the printer’s maw, it’s like a willful dog has chewed up our slippers. We can understand that, and it taps into an older, simpler part of our brains than the aloof error message we occasionally see on a computer screen.

In this scene from the 1999 dark comedy Office Space, written and directed by Mike Judge, a few workers take out their frustrations on the temperamental office printer, a stand-in for their frustrations with their workplace generally. Warning: foul language.

This time of year, Christmas, can be especially perilous for an inexpensive home inkjet printer to get glitchy. People are trying to print out photos for their Christmas cards, invitations for parties, and year end summations of their activities and personal growth to include in Christmas cards. In addition to the increased demand on their services in the lead up to Christmas, another danger to marginally useful printers is the frazzled, harried state of mind of their users during the year end holiday season.

No, a printing machine at Christmas that has started to show its age and groan with mysterious mechanical aches and pains is more likely to end up getting recycled by a user whose patience is at an end, rather than get repaired and restored to tip top condition. The latter outcome would be more likely if the printer was valued at its true price. Instead, the home user will replace it with a new printer promising two or three years of trouble free operation. The lesson there for the home user is that inexpensive inkjet printers are a reasonable investment for light use, but people who print a lot are better off with a more expensive machine that reflects its true value, is worth repairing, and relies on a fairer economic model than the highly subsidized market for ink.
― Techly

Devices California, Carson, Christmas Day, Computers, Gutenberg Press, Ink, International Printing Museum, Mike Judge, Office Space, Peter Small, Printers, Smartphones

10 Reasons Your Mind Is Not a Waste

April 30, 2017 Techly DoRight

“When you take the UNCF model that, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”
― Vice President Dan Quayle, speaking at a luncheon for the United Negro College Fund on May 9, 1989, mangling the Fund’s slogan “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Is the internet making us dumber? stupider? how about less bright? Listicles like this one could be one reason why we might not be that smart anymore. Maybe they’ve helped make us smarter than we used to be. Did listicles ever exist outside the internet, meaning a long, long time ago? Maybe in magazines, most of which were not meant for serious people, the way newspapers were, way back when.

Mel Brooks shows us an alternative past involving lists and tablets in his 1981 movie History of the World – Part 1.

Anyway, enough history. Here we go ―

Before the internet, you needed to know and remember stuff, because you couldn’t just look it up online at the drop of a hat. You maybe could find out from a book, if you knew where to find one.
Because you can look up practically anything now on the internet, some people think it’s making us smarter, especially about what our favorite celebrities have been up to lately.
Without the internet, we couldn’t check on what our friends had for dinner and all the cool places they’ve been out to eat, unless we called them, which we don’t want to bother with, just text. Everything would have to be texts, which is probably okay.
Spending lots of time playing computer games is good because it trains you for a good job with the military remotely piloting drones to drop bombs on terrorists over in their country from an undisclosed location somewhere else, and that’s really smart because otherwise they’d be over here blowing themselves up.
Knowing a lot of internet and computer stuff is also a smart way to get a job with the National Security Agency (NSA) looking into everybody’s business.
There’s no need to develop social skills when there are social media networks like Facebook and Twitter around.
The internet is also good for getting things off your chest by commenting online, and you don’t have to worry about being nice about it, because on the internet no one knows who you are, unless they’re with the NSA.
It used to be that before the internet you could be bored a lot. Now with smartphones and tablets that you always have with you, you don’t ever have to be bored and think about stuff, because you can do other things online, like Facebook or Twitter again.
According to Hebb’s Law, which you can look up online, when your brain spends a lot of time doing something, it gets smarter doing that thing. Even though the brain is mostly fat, it’s like a muscle that way.
Your brain is wired just like the internet. Well, actually, since your brain was here first, especially if you were born a generation or more ago, the internet is wired like your brain. Not that any central authority planned it that way, it just happened. If you’re an old person, that’s probably why you might not understand everything about the internet, because you have to think about it, instead of being wired up ready to go from early on.

Mike Judge shows us a possible future in his 2006 movie Idiocracy. Okay, it might be more than just a possible future and might be closer to now than is comfortable. Warning: foul language.

Okay, that pretty much wraps it up. It was fun. Now you know the internet isn’t necessarily making us any dumber, just different, but don’t think about it too hard or your brain’ll seize up and crash like you drank something really cold really fast. You can’t email Microsoft tech support about that.
― Techly

Internet Dan Quayle, Danny Cochran, Email, Facebook, Hebb's Law, History of the World - Part 1, Idiocracy, Listicles, Mel Brooks, Mickey Kaus, Mike Judge, National Security Agency (NSA), Smartphones, Tablets, Ten Commandments, Texts, Twitter, United Negro College Fund (UNCF)