HP OfficeJet J6450 All-in-One ... sucks?

Years ago I bought a Sharp AJ-5030 "all-in-one" color ink-jet printer, scanner, fax machine. The advertised functionality definitely fit a need I had. I was extremely disappointed to find that the ink cartridges were excessively over-priced and that they dried out and failed 100% of the time, whether you actually used them regularly or not. Can you say, "designed obsolescence"?

BURNED?!

After coming to that realization, I vowed that I would never purchase another Sharp printer product and for years I've kept my vow. And, I intend to continue to do so. After all, any company that succeeds in alienating their customer (someone whose money they took after gaining their trust, using lies) should reap the reverse benefit of that alienation: Declining subscribers, declining revenue.

HEALING

After years of self-imposed wandering in the wilderness...hmmm, perhaps that warrants some clarification... Once I finally resolved to roof test the Sharp printer, I basically went through a period where I was so convinced all ink-jet printers were conspirators in a large scheme, not to provide users with a genuine value, but rather to prop-up corporate balance sheets with new streams of recurring revenue--from ink-jet cartridges; that I could not make it over the hump to purchase another machine, from any company.

This past Christmas I was excited to finally have found a machine that was the correct balance between price (my primary trigger), and features (inextricably tied to my primary trigger--in fact the only way that I'll even entertain setting my primary trigger, after all not everyone has money burning a hole in their pocket). The machine we had found was an HP OfficeJet J6450 being sold at Costco.

THE VALUE OF BRAND

Having worked in a past life as an on-site service technician--and repairing among many other brands, HP printers and faxes, I had gained the conviction that HP built great hardware. Once the price, features, and brand/quality stars aligned I reached my tipping point and pulled out my wallet...well, actually its my family's wallet since I'm simply the purchasing agent/accountant/steward of the money required to sustain them until we win the lottery or God comes back and hands out song books and Washingtons. (It sure as hell isn't the market, CEOs, or Bernard Madoff that are going to help raise my kids.) But I digress.

So, we unburied our jar full of pennies from the backyard and trotted in to Costco to purchase our ticket back into the world of printer ownership. Long story, well yeah, so Christmas rolls around, wrapping paper comes off, printer gets unboxed, setup, much trash goes into the landfill, feelings of guilt at being a part of the problem subside enough to continue on, begin installing the printer drivers (which are usually no big deal, just a tiny little driver)...

BURNED AGAIN?!

And voila, megabytes of questionable crap get loaded onto the hard drive of any machine on which you install the printer driver. Oh brother! Worse still, resident in memory, auto-launched at start-up, suckling the teet of CPU cycles and further contributing to yet another mess of moronic me-too'ism that characterizes the Windows computing landscape. It would appear that HP has decided to screw around there too. I can just picture some dumbass marketer or business-type (perhaps you know them as "MBAs") chattering in their devil-language "I know how we can get more money, let's bundle every conceivable revenue-stream producing gizmo we can and load it onto unsuspecting user's computers during the driver install process--they won't mind." Well, they might not, but I do.

I've always been curious whether those business-types simply don't understand that loading programs into memory steals productivity from someone else...or if they just don't care. Do ethics come with any of those business programs, or is that just some feel-good crap you dismiss when you sign away your soul? (Ok, sorry :-)

A PLEA TO HP -- IMPROVE YOUR J6450 DRIVERS

In our case, we had three machines that we needed to be able to print from. The first, an XP "home" (home in that it's not the XP "professional" OS, wow there's a whole 'nother load of crap) machine went through the excessively long installation process only to fail twenty minutes or so into the process. (I literally burned two hours trying to troubleshoot why this didn't work before I gave up in frustration and went on to something more theraputic--granted, I'm a moron, but I'm a moron that paid you...perhaps I repeat myself.)

The second machine was a Vista machine. The installation succeeded, but the performance characteristics of the machine have changed recently (for the worse...why can't it ever be for the better); which leads me to suspect some aspect of the HP drivers.

The third machine was an XP Pro machine. It's a laptop which operates in at least two distinct device landscapes. The installation went ok--taking way too long, but at least it didn't require any strange combinations of swear words in order to get the installation to "take". However when I restart the machine it loves to chirp about the printer being inaccessible--whether I have a print job or not. I really don't want to be reminded that some crap just loaded itself into RAM without my intervention.

Lest you think this is a gripe session about my new HP printer, it's not...entirely. I love the printer--so far. It gives off the impression that it's well-built. So far the machine is everything I'd hoped for. I'm optimistic that I'm not repeating my experience with the Sharp machine, but I'd really like to feel that HP has my best interest at heart and not just their corporate profits.

MY PRIMARY COMPLAINTS ABOUT THE DRIVERS

-They bundle a lot of stuff some of which didn't seem necessary, but which takes time and space, and which I fear hogs my system resources by running resident in memory after auto-starting.

-The installation process was way too long. It's a printer after all--shouldn't it be a simple installation?

-Everything gets installed at once. I haven't used the fax or scanner yet, do I really have to wade through that process when I'm in a rush to get my kid's school report printed?!

-Everything seems to get auto-started. I'm really a fan of launching programs when I want access to them, and expecting to see programs disappear from my running process list when I close them. I hate stuff that stays resident in memory. (Apple's ITunes crap is the worst! I don't even own an IPOD, why the hell do I need iPodService.exe running in memory--thanks Steve, do you mind if I pitch a tent in your back yard and just hang out and use your pool for as long as you own the place? I mean, I've bought some songs from the IppleStore.)

-Configuring the wireless functionality (namely keying in the WEP key through the numeric dialer interface) was an exercise in frustration. It took numerous times before my router recognized the machine, each time I keyed the WEP key in again...ugh! I guess this really isn't a driver issue, but I thought I'd toss it in.

...and with that, my fingers have finally run out of frenzied typing energy.

Are Your Stats Lying To You?

Have you seen these folks purporting to be able to provide metrics regarding "unique" visitors to your website? Worse still, suggesting they can associate revenue, lead generation, or indeed any level of accurate behavioral analysis to these so-called unique data points? It turns out they are either ignorant, or lying. And rather than educating their consumers regarding the small reporting set they actually need in making important decisions they instead deluge them with a plethora of whiz-bang reporting to keep them lazy and entertained, without actually helping them to learn to know better quickly. Of course, with paychecks and revenue streams in jeopardy, one might be forgiven for openly wondering about the tactics of these service providers in justifying software upgrades--and increased subscription fees, using such smoke and mirror tactics.

Sadly this all seems to be characteristic of a brand of institutionalized learner that engages in corporate ladder climbing, trading the long term health of a business and the needs of the many for short term gains as they do their brief stint until the next rung becomes accessible to them. The close cousin of this for the more entrepenurial is that of building a business with the primary intent not of achieving maximum sustainability but rather that of "branding" the business as an attractive growth engine for the primary purpose of selling it at a multiplier of earnings and getting rich in the process (at the expense of the employees, suppliers, customers, and the acquiring companies shareholders, employees. etc.)

Looking at this more holistically, many of the consumers of this kind of so-called information aren't held accountable for their failings and thus large segments of the supply chain shelter severe dysfunction. Of course, maybe I'm just a jaded crazy person and this whole world-wide financial melt down is just a figment of our collective imagination.

Either way, believing that you can get accurate data regarding "unique" visitors, and it's cousin "market reach" is ridiculous. Personally, since I might be investing in your company indirectly through my mutual or index fund, I'd very much like to know when you foster this kind of activity--so I can invest more responsibly, elsewhere.


It's the Delta Stupid.

Many of the mechanisms that provide so-called unique reporting are based on browser cookies. The word "accuracy" and "browser cookies" have no business being used in the same sentence unless you are stating that there is no quantifiable correlation between the two.

It's very difficult to know how many people allow cookies to persist--and so many people just assume it's a tiny percentage of people that are smart enough to clean up after themselves.

I don't know if this has ever been true on the web. The landscape changes so quickly that during the adoption phase the data held in cookies may have been tainted for analysis purposes due to adoption issues. And, certainly over time hyper-commercialistic sites have trained us through sheer self-defense to clear our cookies with increasing frequency--if only to allow our browsers to continue working as tools for other sites we frequent. It's even a game among many to deliberately provide misinformation in the form of personas, some amusing in their blatant stupidity but others insidiously more clever in their misleading. What?!, you don't believe people are capable of this--but you do believe in the ever present threat of hackers exploiting your systems? Wow, who's paranoid now?

So, am I suggesting all statistics should just be thrown out as inaccurate? Certainly not. The data your bank provides about your account balance is a great example of a statistic you should pay very close attention to for example. And, as it turns out useful statistics exist for gauging visitor behavior on your web site as well. In fact, it's very likely those statistics are hiding in the same reports and datasets you are using to derive so-called uniques from. It turns out it's not the data at all, but rather the delta in the data that's meaningful. All actions have three possible outcomes: they either get better, get worse, or have no impact. Since two of those three outcomes have negative implications you might honestly question the value of doing anything--at least to an already functioning process, and you would be right to do so if your goal is to manage risk. However, for those folks who decide to roll the dice, you are specifically looking for an improvement in a key performance indicator. Or, in other words, you are looking for a delta indicating an increase.

This approach has implications on the development life cycle as it demands a baseline before any statistics can become meaningful, but consider the consequence: You might actually learn something from your time and effort.

It may well be that decision making based on so-called unique visitor data is no more valuable that putting it all on black and letting it ride. A better approach is to throw away the unique user data and instead monitor the delta on a stable data stream--don't bother with trying to gauge whether its unique or not. Focus instead on defining what is human traffic and what is not--that's likely to yield far more actionable results anyway.

Is AJAX wireless router friendly?

I've been experiencing a strange problem of late that I'm embarrased to admit I don't entirely understand. Connecting through an ancient Netgear router and a broadband connection, I've noticed no problems checking email, surfing the web, etc, etc.

In the last few weeks I've begun to notice that if I visit maps.google.com, maps.yahoo.com, or even good ole' mapquest my wireless connection appears to get overwhelmed and my gateway becomes non-responsive as evidenced by pings timing out. It doesn't happen until I start interacting with the AJAX portions of those mapping interfaces. In other words, I can reach the map url, but as soon as I start using the drag/drop interfaces and I can see the interface waiting for data to come back in order to display panels of the map (not only the satellite photos), it appears to just spin and spin... and suddenly I'm unable to ping the router from any machine connected to it.

Curiously the same behavior doesn't appear to happen through the wired side of the same router.

Has anyone experienced a similar issue? Any suggestions for troubleshooting this issue?