Epson's Built-In Cheating Mechanism

(A little righteously indignant background music, there, maestro... just a bit lower? Thank you, that's perfect.)

I turned on my printer yesterday, and it informed me that the ink was out in three of the six cartridges. Okay, these things happen. But then there are these puzzling occurrences, and a rather troubling number of them, in fact.

This is a printer series that is infamous for shutting down and not letting you print once it decides any one of the cartridges is "out" of ink. (You can guess there's more to this subject, and I'll get to it in turn.) I didn't realize when I bought this thing that Epson was withholding the right I'd enjoyed with every printer I ever owned or used to that point, to print a faded copy of something I needed right then.

First of all, even though I'm supposedly out of a color ink, it refuses to print even a purely black-and-white page. There is really no reasonable justification for this, except to hasten the hapless owner's purchase of more of "the Barbie clothes." (Would prefer to use "razors and blades," but that one is so over.)

Secondly, while "the paperless office" is an absolute that is still beyond reach, I certainly live and function in the "much-less-paper office," and as such wind up printing very little. I use this machine much more often for its scanning.

So it was obvious to me when I turned the machine on several weeks ago and it informed me that the ink was getting low on those three cartridges, that I hadn't printed anything between the last time the device was on and then. Some timer had clicked over a notch, and the ink in half the cartridges was duly reported as having evaporated below the sensor lines or escaped or something.

But Wait, There's More: yesterday I turned the machine on for the first time since the last time, still not having printed anything, and was informed that I was completely out of ink in all three of those cartridges.

It turns out that in 2005, Epson, the maker of my Stylus Photo RX620, settled a a class action suit against them for exactly this behavior. According to a PC World article when legal actions were filed in, oops, 2003,

"…chips are used to monitor the amount of ink inside the ink jet cartridge. Cartridges actually contain up to 38 percent more usable ink after the chip cuts them off, according to research cited in the suits.
"The chip does not measure the real volume; instead, it estimates the amount of ink used and predicts when the cartridge will be empty. The chip transmits estimated ink levels to the printer, which alerts the user with a screen message."

The gist of that message: "You're Gist Out Of Luck!"

In the settlement, any owner of an Epson printer manufactured and bought within some period of time, and who heard about this in time (it wasn't referenced on their home page when the settlement was in force), got a $45 dollar certificate from Epson's own online store, as I recall. Since you pay full retail there, that's not even three cartridges. And, critically, Epson was not required to change the programming in the chips or offer a download to correct the cheating calculations, and give an accurate reading of the ink levels. Bad settlement.

It's a shame, and an insult to the engineers who put this printer scanner copier together, because they did a really nice job. It prints beautiful photos, the scanner works fine and has very good, well integrated software. But somewhere between the various departments with input on this design, the dark directive came down to operate on its brain to turn it against its owner. (Hm, sounds like a great sci-fi movie concept.. .)

===

Good grief, I think I just released my first real, full-out rant. !, even. My apologies; but these skunks should be aired out appropriately. And I feel a little better now.

Epson Faces Consumer Suits - PC World (10/24/03)

Epson ink cartridge controversy - Wikipedia

Front Seat TV Found "Distracting"

A situation sorely in need of a firm grasp of the obvious:
I was astonished by a recent story in the NY Times on the problems being caused by television and other screens in cars' front seats. The caption of a photo of one such cockpit display read, "Safety experts say electronic devices can be distracting."

Well, DUUHH! Excuse me, but how could the people in positions of responsibility for launching products with such obvious critical flaws not see the problem here?

Even if you're fine with an utterly distracted state from a philosophical point of view, didn’t anyone bring up the issue of the potential liability? (Or if someone did, and you figure that's the likelihood, why didn't the decision makers get it?)

The best part of the article was a quick mention of how legislation came to be introduced in New York to ban all “display generating devices” in the driver’s view. To it's credit, the state already has a law against TV sets in the front seat.

State Senator Carl L. Marcellino, who sponsored the bill, "learned this firsthand while riding in a cab in Miami — the driver was watching a boxing match on a television mounted on the dashboard." I can testify that having lived in Miami for many years, I have no problem at all imagining this. (It can be quite a surreeaalistic place.)

"High-Tech Invitations Take Your Mind Off Road" By Bill Vlasic

Related, here:
(Tag:) Focus

(Image uploaded to Flickr by wiseacre photo)

Predators In The Televised Bushes (Tracing Back To Root Causes)

We tend to think of ourselves as "highly evolved," but while our mental world and all the technology we cook up with it has certainly evolved very speedily over the last, say, 100 to 150 years, our body and the back of our brain is still far behind. I think this fact goes a long way towards explaining how confused we are as a species, mostly clumsily crashing our way through life on this planet...

One day, watching some poor band of musicians trying in vain to compete with a couple of television screens just off to the side, I was once again troubled by the fact that I seemed unable to ignore the (stoopit) TVs. My gaze repeatedly switched to the screens, and away from the performance of the real, living, breathing bioforms that I was trying to watch.

Finally, it occurred to me that the reason we are virtually unable to ignore a flickering television, our eyes drawn to it unwillingly again and again, is due to the part of our brain, still very much active, that is always on the alert for any activity in our peripheral vision -- because it might be a wild animal in the brush, measuring us up for a snack.

So I was mightily interested when I came across the same thought applied to a different sense, in, ironically, a blog on a subject that almost could not be more contemporary or "highly evolved," that of digital musicmaking.

The post in Create Digital Music is titled, "Windows Sound Glitches Explained, Plus Glitches and the Fight-or-Flight Response" (11/2/07, by Peter Kirn).

"Your ears and mind are incredibly sensitive to tiny details of sound. Result: if your operating system can’t keep up with sound output for any reason, you’ll get a noticeable “glitch” in the sound — and that’s a big deal. "Microsoft has a great post on their Vista Team Blog today from Steve Ball --

'My colleague on the Windows Sound team, Larry Osterman, also pointed out to me recently that humans are actually “hard-wired” to be disturbed by audio glitches. In an exchange about this topic, Larry observed that audio glitches are more obvious than video glitches because the ear’s tuned to notice high frequency transients — his visceral example of this idea is an image of a stick snapping in the woods behind you as an audio event that wakes you up before a bear wanders into your path.'"

So, it's not that we are so dreadfully unfocused and ADD -- although we most certainly are -- it's more because the base of our brain is still executing a seldom-needed Primary Directive. Unless you live in a big, dirty city, in which case it's just doin' its equally contemporary job.

(Photo on Flickr by Edgar Thissen)

NYC to ban PEDs outdoors?

New York City continues to make news, now with the proposed ban on pedestrian use of Portable Electronic Devices (PED – and you may have heard that HTA* here first).

A New York State Senator who shall remain mercifully nameless has proposed a ban on not just the headline-grabbing Podthing but on the whole Boysenberry/ cell phone/ video game/ palm-sized-home-theater gestault. It will be against the law to appear to be in a state of "iPod oblivion" while on a public thoroughfare.

General opinion goes well beyond mere disapproval, tending towards the slightly incredulous. At the end of this article by India’s Techtree.com, a commenter in California put it succinctly: “You can't fix stupid.”

Some predictable smirks in the headlines for a caper like this --

“Lawmaker wants to outlaw street grooves” said Earthtimes.org, stating the law will be for “fining pedestrians caught grooving to MP3 players while crossing the street.”

“Move's afoot in NY to force iPod pedestrians to unplug”
- Seattle Times, WA, where a a civil-liberties attorney suggests we also go ahead with ticketing people when they don’t look both ways before crossing.

(That's not a bad idea to consider, from all the angles, since the approaching saturation point of video surveillance, with software monitoring, will actually make that do-able.)

I mean, we did survive the Sony Walkman (or… did we, really?), an early, now-extinct species that once stalked the earth in great numbers. It bore a startling resemblance to a Pod, except that it was manually fed and the earbuds were inside-out.

It brings to mind a favorite quote of Opus (the Penguin, of course, Berke Breathed's subconscious voice): “Go away, you lawyers! Whatever happened to personal responsibility?”

( * - "High Tech Acronym," of course. And the PED thing is just a wisecrack, alright?)

But while e-jaywalking laws seem a stretch, the sense-saturating potency of all the devices we’re expected to carry around does create a situation that'll have to be dealt with. The story in Australian IT, discussing the two pedestrians who died after walking in front of moving vehicles, cites the fact that, “in one case bystanders screamed ‘watch out’ to no avail.”

Another "Giant Leap For Humankind": TV-B-Gone!

All it does is turn television sets off (and now, optionally, on).

Techies like to talk about designing simplified software or devices that only do one thing, really well, despite the fact that consumers evidently prefer to buy clumsy, uneven products that promise to do everything you’ll ever need (SUVs, the “cell phone/music player/camera/web browser/micro-movie theater/GPS tracker,” MS Office...) But here’s the device that fairly defines simplicity, and in an added Thoreavian kick, offers to return a little peace and quiet to your harried life:

“Your TV-B-Gone® universal remote control resembles other TV remote controls, but is different in two important ways. First, it only has a power button that allows you to switch a TV on or off.”

“You can use TV-B-Gone® to control access to television for philosophical or practical reasons, or simply to have fun!“

—Mitch Altman, Inventor of TV-B-Gone®

Ever turned off a television that no one around was watching, and noticed that nobody noticed? But you actually did those people a favor. Subtly but definitely you helped reduce the amount of noise in their environment, with its attendant stress and drain on their biophysical components.

You see, unlike even the most insistent conversationalists you know – the ones who never seem to stop – the television does not even have to pause for a quick breath; in fact, they even edit the breaths out of the announcers' spiels. A TV never needs to sleep, either; it requires only that lifeline of electrical connection to literally continue to yell at you, vocally and visually, 24/7/365.25 (accounting for leap years).

Stress, the professional health and medical fields agree, is the number one cause of physical malfunction in "advanced" societies. Television run wild is not merely a proven source of stress, it’s practically the poster child of stress-sources! So, by putting the TV-B-Gone to prudent use -- "Click Responsibly" – you may actually be doing a significant service towards promoting the general public health.

(And we’re only half kidding.)

~~~

Trying to figure out what to get me for Christmas this year? (This question is addressed to a very small of group of people, some of which I share a last name with.) This is it. A TV-B-Gone would let me feel like Robin Hood; it'd be my bow and arrow.

And I'll really find it handy for some of the restaurants I otherwise like.

Note on the title:
(We’ve tweaked an historic quote there, but are sure that if Neil Armstrong had first set foot up yonder in recent times, he’d have put it that way. Kudos and appreciations to Mr. Armstrong, btw, for realizing that was a hugely historical moment, and rising to the occasion. He could have just said, "Roger, Houston, that's a big 10-4, we have touch-down," or something equally dull and functional.)

Related, on Rosswriting.com:
"It's a Loud, Loud World"