I’ve taken to de-DRMing any e-books I bought from Amazon for that reason.

Also, the “You can only view this book on 3 devices” – yeah … fuck off.

Calibre + DeDRM plugin + KFX plugin. Perfectly legal too, as long as you aren’t distributing them.

deleted by creator

Content leaves unexpectedly? Not on my Nas.

Except when I accidentally rm -rf the media folder but shhhhhhhh

Content leaving isn’t a problem. If they give up some things they have more money to get the rights to other content, and usually by the time it leaves I’ve either watched it or don’t want to. If it’s one of the rare things I want to watch several times, I can just buy it. But cracking down on password sharing is ridiculous. They’ve been functioning fine with people sharing passwords. I bet the current pricing accounts for password sharing. But now people in college can’t be on the family netflix? Pure greed.

Old school pirating or new school? Last time I remember pirates was like… Napster, Limewire, Kazaa… Then went to TPB before it got raided like 8 times… What’s the current? Is it still torrenting with proxies?

Or get the brother printer while they’re still good.

What’s next?

Printed ads.

What’s next?

The firmware will ask for a tip every 10 pages.

If they could get away with it, they would have made paper that only works on their printer, and it would be more expensive than normal paper but you have to use it.

Why not just not allow it to connect to any internet and use wired printing?

A whole other brown ring of quality

Please drink verification can to continue

Actually, someone already came up with the idea of anal fingerprinting, albeit in another context: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

I love the fact that brother basically does no marketing as far as I know. They just end up shining like a diamond because they make a generally good product and everyone else around them makes absolute trash.

Yep, totally. In the vile shit that printer business is, Brother seems to be the only brand to not be straight-up anti consumer. I have a Brother all-in-one machine at work, it works out of the box on all devices, scans with whatever app, doesn’t push some bullshit custom nagware every time you print and, best of all, ACCEPTS NONAME TONERS without saying a single word of complain. It doesn’t refuse to print, doesn’t even mention that you may get worse quality prints (yeah right). It just prints and we don’t have to think about it and I really appreciate it.

I shit you not I have a brother laser printer that I don’t even know how old it is. My dad pulled out of our basement and cleaned it up and got it running so I could use it in college back in 2009. Skip ahead to 2016 and I’m using it for the table cards at our wedding. It’s 2023 and I still use it from time to time. I’ve only changed the toner once and cleaned it a handful of times, but that sums up the entirety of the maintenance while I’ve had it. I have to plug it into my computer via USB which isn’t so bad. But they don’t have a driver available for OSX anymore so it’s now a PC only printer. I’ll keep using it until it stops working or isn’t compatible with any computer anymore.

Sorry to burst your bubble but Brother are also going down the subscription path.

No joke. I had HP and I knew Brother was painfree experience and when I was buying said HP, I completely forgot about them. Few years forward my old HP avoided destruction by sheer luck and my brother’s will to try and tame it. These days I have Brother laser printer and it takes whatever you throw at it without complaints. It’s so obedient am having issues accepting such behavior.

Yes, I have a b&w brother laser/scanner than is 6 to 7 years old and it goes on without any issues (except networking BS at times, but that is likely my problem)

Got it, but which printer if I want to print photos (only a hand full every one or two months)

But people will think something is wrong when it just works and prints for years without needing any replacements

I’ve moved to Brother from HP. Disappointed by the support for Linux. While the driver exists, a lot of them aren’t packaged. HP does a better job at that.

What about Epson? Specifically I’m considering one of the ecotank ones because I need to print stuff for board games like info sheets and so on that need rich colours and designs. Might even look into A3+ printers.

Are those useful? The per-page cost looks crazy low for an inkjet.

But never EVER buy a brother inkjet, its the same as all the other brands. You cannot insert bootleg ink anymore. My printer didnt accept any ink apart from the oem.

Got one of these years ago and it’s still kickin’

I find myself being a printer snob by judging a friend of mine for buying into HPs ink subscription ecosystem.

Epson ink tank. Bought it second hand and downloaded the drivers directly from them. They always want you to buy ink, but thats expected.

That article was a surprisingly funny read. Thanks for sharing it.

Can confirm. Support brother for their ethics and quality.

HP can make good printers. It has the right hardware, capabilities and price (Of the printers, not the ink) to be a very good product. It’s just their obnoxiously asshole-design software that is designed to make you to keep paying for using a product you already own.

The driver support for Linux is just awful. I couldn’t get the Brother 7055W to work on Arch. It worked on Fedora though, but I don’t have that anymore.

I have this one. NEVER had an issue with it. It’s now years that I use it with 3rd party cartridges without problems.

Hahah, I opened the link and it’s the exact model I have.

The average person is not invested into printers and just needs a printer to occasionally print something. It’s not something they know a lot about and in the store they see a cheap printer from a well known brand that gave them good experiences with other products. It makes total sense for them to buy it. I’m sure they will know what products/brands to avoid in other areas that are unknown to you.

The simplest proof that the Homo Economicus human model used in the mathematical models that justify Free Market Theory is complete total bollocks is that the Marketing that has no mention of the qualities of the product whatsoever, actually works (perfumes and cars are prime examples but there are tons of examples for consumer tech also).

That and some people from Behavioural Economics (the only part of that domain which is actually scientific) have shown with various experiments that there are lots of ways in which people are not rational in their economic decisions, hence not at all the “pure personal upside maximizer” which is the Homo Economicus model.

People sticking to a well-known name such as HP is probably down to the effect of familiarity (at times known as “name recognition”) - maybe one of the biggest irrationalities in human economic behaviour and one of the pathways most commonly exploited by marketing.

My hp laptop works fine, but yeah hp printers are terrible. They are very slow to print, and the ink was quite expensive.

Most people just buy a printer, they’re not doing research on the subject. And if they’re not using computers day to day, or for work, they’re even less likely to know what shit hp is up to.

There was a time when Hewlet Packard products were the best, them it became HP and…

If you only print something once every couple of months I only need a cheap printer and dont care if the ink is a bit more expensice since I never use it. Though I admit my blood pressure always rises trying to get the thing to work

Five years ago people were saying the opposite. My old Brother printer broke after 2 ink refills. I’ve had an HP for 2 years now and I’ve never had an issue with it. I was genuinely surprised people were trashing HP lately.

HP have been on my shitlist for so long. Everyone needs to have a shitlist. Anti consumer behaviour should never be forgotten.

On a side note, Vodafone are also on my shitlist. I did give them a reprieve once only to be reminded of why they were on my shitlist.

People, get your shit together.

This is true if everybody do it, otherwise nothing will change. As we know there are too many people on the planet and too many idiots among them that will buy these products and so company can’t get away with everything nowadays. Look at Facebook, Twitter, reddit, hp. In my country there’s a huge food company that put fucking poison in baby formulas, and killed some of them (and others with lifetime growth issues) and guess what? People stopped buying from them for 2 years, they pulled through and now they are one of the top companies.

People are still buying HP printers because there are no alternatives. In my experience Epson is the worst. The are all the same, and we have no alternative other than letting them fuck with us. And they know it.

Funny thing is, I know all of this and their bad behavior. I needed a new printer, ordered it but they didn’t have it in stock so they asked me to change my order and offered HP with extra toner and all that. Half asleep I didn’t even think twice. It was good price, extra toner.

From day one, nothing but problems until I broke the spell last year and got a Brother printer. Night and day in terms of quality and obedience.

I assume that’s the case with many people. Cheap printer available right now or some local deals make it even better looking. Someone who doesn’t know better like mom or pop buys it and there it is, pain. Then they realize what they have done and perhaps sell the damn thing, so pain jumps on someone else who just needed a cheap printer.

I’ve bought HP a few times, because the new printer was about the same price as buying new ink cartridges. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just being real. And I’m not proud

I can speak for their terrible cheapness, I work at a repair shop and we got a lot of HP laptops. It’s extremely common for the very stiff hinge just to snap the upper case because they didn’t even try to reinforce it. Just 3 screws to hold down this half an inch long hinge and that’s it, you can see it flexing and twisting when using it.

I swear all those HPs and frankly a lot of dells have the build of wet newspaper, I wouldn’t touch them (minus HP elite books, my 8770w is great).

On another note Lenovos and Thinkpads are always very sturdy and are very good.

Snagged an 840 G6 for a little more than 100 and it’s working fine. Had the company send me a new touchpad and there hasn’t been an issue since

HP is a horrible company. They make things up just to make life difficult for consumers. Everyone should boycott them I make sure none of the hardware the company I work for is HP as well.

But your subscription to what exactly ?