this is like one of those IQ scale wojaks memes
everything electronic is just a tracking device <----------> electronic components are highly specialized <------------> everything electronic is just a tracking device...
Personally I think HP is missing the point focusing on putting drm on inkjet refills, it is only half committing to the business strategy.
The existence of a finished, printed paper begins at the moment of conception when the customer conceives of wanting to print a document. Really every step after that point (including the conception step itself) is monetizable by HP and more importantly rightfully owned as intellectual property of HP that you are technically stealing if you don’t follow through with actually printing the document on an HP printer.
HP is just leaving all of that money on the table, or maybe the printer market is just too heavily regulated for HP to innovate properly in a healthy free market.
The problem is that they can't control open source drivers. They could, however, release a printer that ran on proprietary closed source drivers. But they'd have to spend money on developers to maintain that code whereas right now, drivers are more or less stable and developed for free.
What they could do is require the use of HP printer paper, with embedded RFID or watermarks that would be readable by HP printers. I'm honestly surprised they haven't gone down this road.
I mean, hypothetically couldn't they mix some proprietary chemical formula into the ink and incorporates some device that analyses the ink chemistry and doesn't print if that proprietary mixture is not present?
Even better, each and every particle of ink can be a network connected nano-machine, the usage of which, is available as a subscription.
If and when your subscription expires, all ink connected to your account will stop working.
Ink previously used for printing, will fall off the paper.
This can be prevented, on using special HP papers, with an ink-capturing coating of nano-machines which can be separately subscribed by the owner of the product of printing.
Meaning, now you can print books with HP printers and the customers can pay you a subscription fees to keep the book alive.
Alternatively, they can print on HP paper and you can pay subscription fees to HP yourself.
I call it IaaS (Information-Retention as a Service)
I thought the joke here was that even when they're not locked your average inkjet printer is a hot pile of garbage machinery that works only when the planets align and you've sacrificed 3 goats and a your firstborn.
Meanwhile laster jet printers work most of the time except when they don't.
Edit: one time I wanted to buy more ink for my inkjet and there was a brand new inkjet printer that came with ink that was less expensive than a new cartridge. (Of the same size)
The new printer was $30 and worked just as poorly as my $150 inkjet.
I've done printer maintenance for years among other things and inkjets are literally designed and manufactured in the deepest layer of hell.
They are way better. You can print thousands of pages on a single toner cartridge and the toner basically last forever. Unlike ink printers that dry out and clog if you don't use it within a week.
I could have used this when I was a kid playing games and would go "sorry, my cpu is bad" whenever I had lag issues even though the cpu was actually okay and it was really because of playing on a laptop with integrated graphics and a spotty internet connection, because at the time I thought CPU was just a short way of saying ComPUter...
I think think for awhile as a very young kid I thought the former (by the time I learned about hard drives I knew what a monitor and computer were), but in my defense, my first exposure to computers and what my family had at that age was one of those old imac computers that really did have the screen and the computer in the same device.
My mother still calls her desktop the CPU. Infact you could make this chart with everything inside the computer called CPU except for the ram and the hard drive and your pretty much there.
Edit: I was upgrading her graphics card and she asked "Is the CPU going to work?" The first thing I said was "what's wrong with the computer. Does it still turn on?"
No I'm pretty sure that was also literally referring to the CPU inside the computer or whatever console you were playing on, as that is the specific module that would be calculating the moves for (or, "playing as") said bot player.
My ram just dumps its contents to whatever it feels like whenever it fancies like a rogue waste disposal truck that goes around neighborhoods collecting trash and then just delivering it to other random homes.
That's like saying HDDs will forget numbers if you store them next to a powerful magnet. Most SSDs have an operating range up to 70°C, so that hot room would have to be more like an oven.
That is why I Ilisted the unpowered/ unplugged. there are white papers on ssd data loss when it is disconnected from mobo and stored. The lack of trickle power allows decay in the mem cells simce they are just packed charges, and heat accelerates that loss. They said in as little as a week in a hot room it will have started bit rot. And in some cases a few months in a hot space (say 40 degrees in summer heat we have) and data is gone.
Not the whitepaper research paper I was trying to reference but if you read just below the temp chart image is explains similar info about how quick SSD (unpowered) data loss is based on ambient heat. HDD while also succeptible to data loss is a better archive medium than SSD https://www.anandtech.com/show/9248/the-truth-about-ssd-data-retention
Floating Point Unit. The thing that does mathematical operations on floating point numbers. It used come separately from the CPU as an add-on chip, but around the 486 era, manufacturers started integrating it on the same die as the CPU. Of course, as these things go, from the system programmers point of view, there is still no difference between an add-on FPU and an integrated one.
The one pictured here is an add-on FPU for an Intel 80386 CPU.
I'm one of those! Or kind of at least... I build a computer (and ofc one of the parts was a alu) that sort of workt in MC pocket edition. The only longer program I think i ran on it generated the Fibonacci sequence. It took it like an hour to do the first few!
But mine was definitely not one of the fancier ones. I'm not even sure wether it did any logic or not, it might just have been a AU
Inkjet definitely has a place; it's for high-resolution and accuracy printing, esp. photography. Consumer-level inkjet printers are mostly a waste of money. A correctly calibrated ink jet printer will print color more accurately--within it's gamut capability--and be higher resolution than laser printers. I've really liked Epson large format printers in the past, but I'm not sure who currently does the best large photo printers.
I'm sorry, I was going to reply, but my printer had a forced update and then detected an unauthorized cyan cartridge from a third party, shut down, and called the police to arrest me for violating HP's terms of servitude, er "service".
There are better inkjets like tank printers using ink bottles. Cheaper per page than even laser printers, and can't detect 3rd party ink (cause it's a liquid lmao). None of this subscription stuff is required. They don't have the gamut of say 7 cartridge ink jets obviously, but still better than laser printers I imagine. The main drawback is the extra maintenance of an inkjet with them drying up and all that.
In all this printer talk... Shout out for dot matrix printers! As long as I send ascii, it prints exactly what I want it to, and graphics are a predictable format detailed in the printer manual
I worked in an office building that had a dot matrix printer on the 4th floor. You could always tell when it was printing because the whole building would vibrate as it laid down characters with power and authority. If you moved an HP printer within 15 feet of the dot matrix printer the cheap plastic parts on the HP printer would spontaneously break which would cause HP to raise their monthly fees.
They use a fuser unit to cook the toner and bind it to the paper. It's not exactly burning the paper itself per se, but high heat is definitely involved.
Source: repaired a laser printer with a damaged fuser unit that was actually burning paper.