DVCS (was Re: Moving to D)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"retard" <re at tard.com.invalid> wrote in message 
news:igpm5t$26so$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> Now, I've also bought Canon, HP, and Epson inkjets. What can I say.. The
> printers are cheap. The ink is expensive. They're slow, and result looks
> like shit (not very photo-realistic) compared to the online printing
> services. AND I've "broken" about 8 of them in 15 years. It's way too
> expensive to start buying spare parts (e.g. when the dry ink gets stuck
> in the ink "tray" in Canon printers). Nowadays I print photos using some
> online service. The inkjet printer quality still sucks IMO. Don't buy
> them.
>

A long time ago we got, for free, an old Okidata printer that some school or 
company or something was getting rid of. It needed a new, umm, something 
really really expensive (I forget offhand), so there was a big black streak 
across each page. And it didn't do color. But I absolutely loved that 
printer. Aside from the black streak, everything about it worked flawlessly 
every time. *Never* jammed once, blazing fast, good quality. Used that thing 
for years.

Eventually we did need something that could print without that streak and we 
went through a ton of inkjets. Every one of them was total shit until about 
2 or 3 years ago we got an HP Photosmart C4200 printer/scanner combo which 
isn't as good as the old Okidata, but it's the only inkjet I've ever used 
that I'd consider "not shit". The software/drivers for it, though, still 
fall squarely into the "pure shit" category, though. Oh well...Maybe there's 
Linux drivers for it that are better...

> PSUs: Never ever buy the cheap models. There's a list of bad
> manufacturers in the net. They make awful shit.

Another problem is that, as places like Sharky Extreme and Tom's Hardware 
found out while testing, it seems to be common practice for PSU 
manufacturers to outright lie about the wattage.

>
> Optical drives: Number 1 reason for breakage, I forget to close the tray
> and kick it off!

Very much related to that: I truly, truly *hate* all software that decides 
it makes sense to eject the tray directly. And even worse: OSes not having a 
universal setting for "Disable *all* software-triggered ejects". That option 
should be standard and default. I've seriously tried to learn how to make 
Windows rootkits *just* so I could hook into the right dll/function and 
disable it system-wide once-and-for-all. (Never actually got anywhere with 
it though, and eventually just gave up.)

>
> Hard drives: these always fail, sooner or later. There's nothing you can
> do except RAID and backups

And SMART monitors:

I've had a total of two HDD's fail, and in both cases I really lucked out. 
The first one was in my Mac, but it was after I was already getting 
completely fed up with OSX and Apple, so I didn't really care much - I was 
mostly back on Windows again by that point. The second failure just happened 
to be the least important of the three HDDs in my system. I was still pretty 
upset about it though, so it was a big wakeup call: I *will not* have a 
primary system anymore that doesn't have a SMART monitoring program, with 
temperature readouts, always running. And yes, it can't always predict a 
failure, but sometimes it can so IMO there's no good reason not to have it. 
That's actually one of the things I don't like about Linux, nothing like 
that seems to exist for Linux. Sure, there's a cmd line program you can 
poll, but that doesn't remotely cut it.

>
> Monitors: The CRTs used to break every 3-5 years. Even the high quality
> Sony monitors :-| I've used TFT panels since 2003. The inverter of the
> first 14" TFT broke after 5 years of use. Three others are still working,
> after 1-6 years of use.
>

I still use CRTs (one big reason being that I hate the idea of only being 
able to use one resolution), and for a long time I've always had either a 
dual-monitor setup or dual systems with one monitor on each, so I've had a 
lot of monitors. But I've only ever had *one* CRT go bad, and I definitely 
use them for more than 5 years.

Also, FWIW, I'm convinced that Sony is *not* as good as people generally 
think. Maybe they were in the 70's or 80's, I don't know, but they're 
frequently no better than average. It's common for their high end DVD 
players to have problems or limitations that the cheap bargain-brands (like 
CyberHome) don't have. I had an expensive portable Sony CD player and the 
buttons quickly crapped out rendering it unusable (not that I care anymore 
since I have a Toshiba Gigabeat F with the Rockbox firmware - iPod be 
damned). The PS2 was reining champ for "most unreliable video game hardware 
in history" until the 360 stole the title by a landslide. And I've *never* 
found a pair of Sony headphones that sounded even *remotely* as good as a 
pair from Koss of comparable price and model. Sony is the 
Buick/Catallac/Oldsmobile of consumer electronics, *not* the Lexus/Benz as 
most people seem to think.

> Mice: I've always bought Logitech mice. NEVER had any failures. The
> current one is MX 510 (USB). Previous ones used the COM port. The bottom
> of the MX510 shows signs of hardcore use, but the internal parts haven't
> fallen off yet and the LED "eye" works :-D
>

MS and Logitech mice are always the best. I've never come across any other 
brand that put out anything but garbage (that does include Apple, except 
that in Apple's case it's because of piss-poor design rather than the 
piss-poor engineering of all the other non-MS/Logitech brands).

I've been using this Logitech Trackball for probably over five years and I 
absolutely love it: 
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Trackman-Wheel-Optical-Silver/dp/B00005NIMJ/

In fact, I have two of them. The older one has been starting to get a bad 
connection between the cord and the trackball, but that's probably my fault. 
And heck, the MS mouse my mom uses has left-button that's been acting up, so 
nothing's perfect no matter what brand. But MS/Logitech are definitely still 
worlds ahead of anyone else. (Which is kind of weird because, along with 
keyboards, mice are the *only* hardware I trust MS with. Every other piece 
of MS hardware either has reliability problems or, in the case of all their 
game controllers going all they way back to the Sidewinders in the pre-XBox 
days, a completely worthless D-Pad.)