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I have a Canon Pixma something or other printer. After an upgrade of OS X, Canon stopped suppling drivers for newer versions. It wasn't even straight forward to
by Thlom 10y ago
I have a Canon Pixma something or other printer. After an upgrade of OS X, Canon stopped suppling drivers for newer versions. It wasn't even straight forward to use the driver for the previous version. I think I had to extract the driver from their lousy installer to get it to work. Very fun when I just wanted to print flight tickets ASAP. It's a PRINTER. All it does 95% of the time is printing B/W documents. How hard can it be to get this right?
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoPrinters are really just a hardware distribution mechanism for printer drivers, which are an unusually bulky form of malware. Any printing functionality is entirely incidental, especially on inkjets. If you need something printed urgently, you can guarantee that one of the following will happen: drivers need updating (=> 400MB download, if you can even find the file on the site), drivers don't work, out of ink, clogged nozzles that need cleaning (followed by out of ink), paper jam, file prints landscape instead of portrait, or vice versa, and there's no obvious way to fix this.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoBeen this way for years. Old dot-matrix printers often had a dip-switch to select 'options'. If there were 4 of them, you had a 1-in-16 chance of it working. If there were 8, forget it. Its like mean-time-between-failure, excepts more like chance-of-succeeding: multiply all the probabilities of success at a stage together, you get the total chance of success. It becomes diminishingly small the more screw-ups are possible. Inkjet has two or three more places to fail, so.