APAB
My HP laser printer is amazing, no drivers needed, lasts long on ink, connects to everything, I love it.
Sure it doesn't have colour printing, nor scanning, not Bluetooth. But the thing just works every single time!
Hello, printer driver developer here. I hate you all
Man, I just love the way you guys ignore basic exception handling, insist on using undocumented APIs, exclusively hook into system resources, fail to address even the most fundamental of good memory management practises and then demand your software runs as an unprotected kernel-level driver.
It's fucking great.
Hey, you can blame my senior who did most of it and left this mess to me when he quit. I just pray everyday that nothing breaks since we don't even have internal documentation for this code and almost no comments whatsoever :)
I love my job :D
PC Load Letter
We can tell.
My Brother laser printer sends its regards.
Back in my day. Printers printed in dots. And that's the way we liked it.
Put cabled in. And it worked.
And it was so satisfying ripping the side holes off.
Ripping the side holes off and putting them into a box so you have an entire box full of shredded paper sides
Also satisfying: folding two strips like this:
Brother brand Laser Printer, gentleman. Only printer I'd ever touch
I couldn't convince my dad to get a Brother laser printer, so he got a Brother Inkjet. It still works so much better, and the ink lasts so much longer, than any other inkjet I've used.
This is the way.
13 years going on mine. Only ever bought new toner 2 times.
6 years total, first 4 was as a uni student on mine. Never gave me a single issue and still running off the same toner
Same here. And somehow windows just detects and Installs it every time over the network.
printer is one odd bunch of computing output devices
when other types of output devices (such as monitor display, hdmi, usb, etc) evolves and improved over decades, printer is bring so much little into the mix
They evolved backwards. Back in the day you sent the raw text over the parallel port and it just printed it
They have tho. Like, they have made it cheaper. And the new inktank models are economically efficient.
Why tf do printers even need drivers? Where do they have to go? Why can't they get there by themselves?
CUPS my beloved
They usually have casters but they're pretty flimsy.
Quote me after dealing with print drivers acting up and spooler service crashes for the nth time that day (also worked in it support for several years):
"We can land men on the moon, but somehow getting a printer, a technology that has existed litteraly since before computers had screens, to work is still complete and utter black magic...!"
Printers are proof there's a God and that it thrives on our suffering.
Ink for the ink god, drivers for the driver throne.
I never noticed, but it looks like the guy who took the photo got sprayed too.
pc load letter?
WTF does that mean?
I literally go to the copy place now and tell everyone I "don't know how" to work on printers.
Life is too short.
#1 reason to go paperless at the office lol
Multifunction-Printers are even worse. If you got a decent one by chance, after 5 odd years the integrated server gets wonky and the usb controller starts randomizing MAC addresses, so you have to setup it anew each time. Those things are haunted!
This may explain the issues I have at my buddies automotive shop... every few months all the PCs loose connection, then I have to uninstall all the drives and install them again. Fucking HP.
so we have an uncovered smiling cop pepper-spraying and a dude with a full protective mask and gas type filters turning head and closing eyes. :) Is it only me who find this pic weird.
It's what pigs do. Don't matter the country.
Also keep in mind, the person getting spray isn't just a regular protestor but the press.
I believe the OP was asking why the cop isn't worried about spraying themselves in the face. Pepper spray has a habit of getting everywhere.
Printers are the worst!
We have central printing with color Kyoceras on each floor, with black and white as default preset (pushed via GPO) we managed to decrease our printing expenses by 80%
Printer and scanner drivers are going to be the death of me, I swear
if there is a single piece of advice I can give anyone looking to make a living, it's to always pretend to be completely incapable of understanding what's wrong with the printer. If at any time the printer does not print when it has power and paper, stop and give up. Do not under any circumstances try to problem solve anything related to them, lest you immediately become the designated printer person because you didn't reflexively recoil at the thought of troubleshooting one. Leave the troubleshooting to the masochists who chose to make a living of it, blessed be their twisted souls
Idk why, I had a good experience with my canon multi functional
I know it is all fun and games.
But the real reason printers are so fucky is because they convert digital to analogue, which rarely happens without complications.
In digital, everything is very neat. If something says it is 24,76%, then you can be damn well sure it is exactly 24,76%.
In analogue, the tolerance is much wider. A paper can move a whole millimetre to the side and there isn't much we can do.
Yea if that was where the issues happend that would be a great explanation.
But most issues in my experience (10 years in support fos business with about 25000 users) it's getting the data to the printer that is the issue. Drivers are unstable, the print spooler service randomly decides to just stop working and needing a restart etc etc.
And this is across lots of brands and different implementations (directly connected, network send to printer, central print server... You name it).
Somehow the complexity of this just makes it (apparently) impossible to make something that is just plain reliable. Personally I think it's a combination of several layers of tech needed to work that compounds the issues.
You have the software that need to encode the data in one of many ways a printer can receive data, you have the windows print spooler that apparently is a complete piece of crap held together with shoestring that gets to receive this data and then use the driver (often also a unstable piece of garbage) to send the data to the printer in a way the printer now understands.
Then you get to the part that actually mostly works unless something whent wrong with the encoding (like using the wrong driver) the printer gets a stream of data and does as it is told.
Yes you might get a paper jam or an unaligned page, but that is actually pretty rare in a professional, well serviced machine.
I got volunteered to fix printer driver issue for a family member. The had one printer, and got another bcz the first one broke. New printer wouldn't work so they just kept installing the drivers. The software gladly let them. Thankfully only took 15 mins to fix, but I told them printers are for bitches, me and my home print at the library.
I've had one printer issue come up in like 7 years.
If you are quitting a higher paying field over printers in modern tech, you are doing something wrong.
