Jeff Woods wrote:

> Sometimes it pays to spend a little more up front.  The good news in
> this situation is that the "throw-away printer pricing" means there is
> very little investment holding you to a vendor who uses this model.

A friend of mine bought a traveling sales show "Pentium computer
package" complete with monitor for some small-ish amount ($399?).
It was a slightly over-the-hill Gateway P-III with no CDs, no diskettes,
and no image (at all) on the hard drive.

Caveat emptor.

On the printer thread, the printers are also getting progressively
dumber, dropping the price and raising the "disposable factor" quite
a bit.  These "Windows printers" have all the smarts in the driver and
only a minimum of controller bits in the printer.  Contrast these with
an Apple printer (or any PostScript) printer where all the intelligence
(well, most of it) resides in the printer.

What next... one-use digital cameras?  Shoot a flash stick and throw the
camera away?

A bit further off topic, Kodak now has a disposable and really
waterproof camera good for around 50 feet depth.  The predecessors were
OK for a swimming pool, but around 20 feet they got stiff, and at 30
feet the shutter stuck down.  Fifty would have probably produced a
resounding crunch (never tried).  Anybody care to buy an Ikelite
Aquashot housing made for the disposable cameras they don't make in the
same dimensions anymore?  :-(  About the time I upgraded to a real
underwater film camera (a Bonica) my diving friends started going
digital.  A group of them just returned from the Cayman Aggressor
liveaboard (that I was supposed to be on before my illness) and they
were all livid about getting to show the shots to each other right after
surfacing from the dives.  Lucky buggers :-)  Maybe next time...

Jeff

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