Penultimate Reality

Inkjet printers, especially the cheaper ones aren’t a very good investment. A recent article attempted to compare different third-party inks with the manufacturer’s inks on different papers. This particular article found that third-party inks seemed to outperform inks from the printer manufacturer. That may very well be true, but isn’t the point that I really want to make.

The cheap printer market is an example of the “razor and blades” business model. In this business model, the manufacturer sells an initial product (like a razor or printer) at a low price, often at a significant loss. They then expect to make the bulk of their profit on the future purchases, such as refill razor blades or refill ink cartridges, wherein the customer pays inflated rates on those products. Other popular examples of the model are mobile phones (get a cheap or free phone but later pay for minutes) and video games (consoles are sold at a heavy loss, and the difference is made up in the games).

One thing I’ve noticed, particularly in the printer market, is that the printers are almost designed to need ink. A lot. I’ve personally only had extensive experience with two printers, both Epson (who was recently the target of a class action lawsuit, no less). In particular, the second of the two was a cheap $150 model that I purchased sometime in 2001 for school. I didn’t end up using the printer incredibly often, but it seemed to use ink at the same rate regardless of whether or not I was printing anything. I expect this is slightly exaggerated from the truth, but it was disheartening to buy a new cartridge, print a few documents, come back a couple of months later, and find that the ink nearly needed to be replaced again. Perhaps my particular printer was just broken.

The lesson in all this is to be wary of cheap printers, because while you might get a great deal up front, you’re going to be buying cartridges left and right if you do any serious printing. Then again, if you’re into serious printing, springing for a good laser printer is probably less of an obstacle. I’m not sure how the toner cartridges for laser printers compare to the ink cartridges used for cheap inkjet printers, but I can’t imagine it possibly being as bad. If you do need to buy replacement ink, take the original article’s advice to heart, perhaps. While the manufacturer may warn you that it may damage your printer, it’s better than spending enough to buy an entirely new printer every few months on ink alone.

AMD’s first quarter financial results are in, and it looks like they’re posting big losses so far. This brings up the question of just how much the current battle with Intel is hurting them.

As I recall it, from about 2001 to 2006, AMD was more or less dominating the price/performance ratio in the microprocessor market. Intel’s chips were far more expensive, and didn’t perform nearly as well. Intel’s Pentium 4, among other things, had a very long pipeline that could be very detrimental to performance under certain conditions. In short, for this time period, I wasn’t about to even consider Intel for my next processor. The value just wasn’t there.

All that changed last year when the Core 2 Duo was released. The Core 2 was less power-hungry, performed very well, and seemed to decimate AMD’s domination of the whole performance per dollar question. AMD slashes prices in an effort to compete, but so far, it hasn’t been enough, as I think these losses are showing. I hope AMD’s next major processor release helps them regain some of the momentum they had, if only to keep competition fierce. Intel doesn’t seem to be letting up yet, but if AMD goes the way of the dodo (which I don’t think is quite a concern just yet), Intel might get back to the place of sitting on their laurels.

No one wants that.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe it’s just me, but this whole thing seems kind of silly, though I can’t say I’m incredibly familiar with this particular market. Yesterday, VIA apparently released some kind of press release giving information about a new form factor of motherboard they’re working on. Despite the overzealous claims by some writers out there, it is still somewhat larger than a credit card, so it kind of leaves me wondering, what’s it good for? I guess there are two basic categories of products that could make use of such a thing.

Small Portable Devices

This is your category of PDAs, music players, and I suppose even mobile phones. The problem here is that even at its current dimensions, Pico-ITX is still a bit large for these applications, at least with the way they’ve shrinking lately. I don’t know what the characteristics of the Eden processors are (the processors used for Pico-ITX), with regard to issues like size and cooling. The previously smallest form factor was certainly too large for these devices, so they were probably using a more custom solution. As far as the consumer’s concerned, there won’t be a whole lot of changes noticeable as a result of Pico-ITX. Perhaps the biggest would be the potential for increased features and performance, but those were more or less expected anyway. Whether or not VIA will get the credit remains to be seen.

Small PCs?

This is a very strange category for me. I’m the kind of person that likes to have a large luxurious case for my machine, and I think a lot of the needs for powerful machines and upgradeable machines will keep Pico-ITX from having any real impact on the desktop market. I suppose it’s possible it’ll affect the laptop segment, but I don’t think VIA’s processors are incredibly popular either. Perhaps this new motherboard design will be the springboard that brings VIA to power in the market. I really have no idea. Finally, this leaves hobbyists who want to build weird and unique designs. I can’t see these kind of people going for a VIA processor either, but I suppose there could be a real niche market.

In the end, it’ll be interesting to see if this has any noticeable impact on the consumer. Somehow, I doubt it…

Today was perhaps a big day in the open-source world, with at least two major releases that I’m aware of. The Mozilla project released version 2.0 of Mozilla Thunderbird, their premier e-mail application. Perhaps the bigger story, however, is that Ubuntu released version 7.04 of its popular GNU/Linux distribution.

As far as Thunderbird goes, the release is sort of lost on me. I’ve been running betas and release candidates for at least a month or two, so I can no longer recall what the major changes were for me. Since I tend to use it as little more than a glorified IMAP client, I don’t necessarily use a lot of the more interesting features like spam detection or message tagging.

I installed Ubuntu last night in a virtual machine, and I’m becoming more impressed with the distribution with every release cycle. It’s definitely a very polished system, and one of the first things I noticed was the restricted drivers manager. Since the virtual machine doesn’t require any restricted drivers, I didn’t have the opportunity to try it out, however. Even so, the six month lull between major releases is perhaps the biggest reason I would stray away from Ubuntu personally. I know backports can help somewhat with that, but especially with major libraries, that doesn’t help so much. Maybe I just need to lose the bleeding-edge mentality. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive release, and I expect it’ll only continue to get better. I’ll probably be staying with Gentoo myself for now, but I’m certainly open to change.

Over at arsgeek, there’s a brief article on some things you might experience when transitioning from Windows to Linux. I traveled that road myself a few years ago, and I can relate to some of those experiences, many of which might trip up the person considering switching operating systems, or at least dabbling. I’d like to talk about a couple of those in particular, and then I have another one to add to the mix, that sort of sums up the whole process. I’d suggest you read the article over at arsgeek first, so you have some idea what I’m talking about.

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