I bought an HP C6380 all-in-one printer the other day and just noticed something weird. The time it takes before it starts printing is exponential to the number of copies I want to make. How stupid is that? If I want to print the same page 20 times it shouldn’t have to take 20 times longer for it to figure out what to do before printing, should it? Just calculate everything once and use the same calculation 20 times. There is obsiously something I don’t know about writing printer drivers, or the drivers are just bad. Scary.
I snapped this in the London Underground a few days ago. What’s wrong in this picture?
(Hint: What % is 30 seconds out of 3 minutes and 20 seconds?)
Today I tested a Packard Bell Easy Note BG45-U-300. After the smaller models in the Panasonic Toughbook series this is the only other laptop I know of that has a touchpad in the shape of a circle.
What are they thinking???!!!
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I did not have a Compact Flash card but needed one. I do however have other types of memory cards and if I could utilize any of those I would prefer that to buying yet another type.
There are as far as I know two types of adapters for this. Secure Digital to Compact Flash and Memory Stick II to Compact Flash. Since I have cards of both types already, it didn’t matter much which kind I got hold of, although I would prefer SD since I have more devices that accepts that kind.
After asking around in local shops it turns out that SD to CF is not a common product. No one had it. Maplin’s got it but I needed the card ASAP and going to the nearest of their stores would cost me a big portion of what a CF card costs + the time, so that wasn’t an option.
OK, I thought, I’ll go for MS to CF then. I wasn’t far from a Sony Centre and it’d be strange if they didn’t have it. They did have it, great!
- I’ll have one of those please.
- That’s £49.99.
- (silence)
- But you can have it for £39.99.
- No thanks.
That’s just madness. I am not an economical person but I can spot a ripoff. Who in their right mind would pay 50 quid for that? No memory included mind you. What are they thinking?
I have a theory. This is one of those products that they don’t really plan to sell individually but rather give away or give a heavy discount on when sold together with something much more expensive. So the customer should feel they’ve done a bargain. I’ve seen it before. When I bought a digital camera a few years ago(not Sony) I got the memory at half price. I had done my research so I knew I got the camera at a good price, but I also knew what the memory should cost and it wasn’t far from what I paid. They just had a type of memory with a price sticker on with a ridiculously high price so they could throw it in front of customers and say you’d get it for half price to close a deal. Pretty clever, but if you know your stuff it feels a bit silly when you’re supposed to appreciate it more than you do.
I’m not paying £39.99 for an adapter when I could get a Compact Flash card - the right type of memory - for half that. So I gave in and bought a CF card.
Sony would benefit from selling the adapters to a reasonable price or even giving them away for free. I don’t get it. Don’t they want people to buy and use Memory Sticks? If not, it worked with me, I will try to avoid it.
