We have a contender to exceed Microsoft's stupidity... and it is....
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Having to be online to use an HP printer immediately disqualified them from consideration when we were looking for a new printer. That design decision is totally unjustifiable.
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The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. -
HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
From what I can tell HP no longer develops the printers they sell. I believe their model is to provide generic software built around a set of so-called standards. Printer mechanism OEM's then provide the hardware, HP smacks a label on the CMYK-spewing abortion, and sells the result. HP gets a cut. The last couple of HP printer's I've purchased function adequately without installing the HP software crap, so I haven't. That thin, high-pitched whine you hear reverberating in the background is from Bill Hewlett and David Packard spinning in their graves.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
charlieg wrote:
who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection.
This is why I refuse to replace my wonderful, ancient, HP inkjet with a newer model. Sadly, any printer manufacturers seem to be going this route. The whole automatic re-ordering of ink is another thing that annoys me.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Maybe this will help? [Can't use the printer without Internet - HP Support Community - 8215620](https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printer-Wireless-Networking-Internet/Can-t-use-the-printer-without-Internet/td-p/8215620) I share your sentiment though - it should just work without an internet connection.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
You are so right, Charlie. HP was the premier provider of equipment and services when I was designing test systems for the DoD, along with Tektronix. As quality providers, neither still exists so far as I can tell.
Will Rogers never met me.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Exactly the same WTF I had a couple of days ago. You can bypass it with the windows integrated scan software, but still.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
My sympathies, it sounds like a total pain. And apologies might be due to bananas also, yes? x
Paul Sanders. If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter - Blaise Pascal. Some of my best work is in the undo buffer.
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From what I can tell HP no longer develops the printers they sell. I believe their model is to provide generic software built around a set of so-called standards. Printer mechanism OEM's then provide the hardware, HP smacks a label on the CMYK-spewing abortion, and sells the result. HP gets a cut. The last couple of HP printer's I've purchased function adequately without installing the HP software crap, so I haven't. That thin, high-pitched whine you hear reverberating in the background is from Bill Hewlett and David Packard spinning in their graves.
Software Zen:
delete this;Gary R. Wheeler wrote:
The last couple of HP printer's I've purchased function adequately without installing the HP software crap, so I haven't.
That worked for me for a while but then it realised and installed PrintSmart (or whatever it is called) itself. Then everything stopped working, had to uninstall and re-install. It then failed to install wirelessly so I ran a cable to it and now the PC sees the printer twice and I can print either way, even though it claimed not to have installed the wireless version. Oh, and the printing software occasionally tries to re-install itself and for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, I have one desktop icon for scanning mode and another one that accesses printing and scanning .... And when it does re-install itself it changes some print settings that disable double sided printing and I have to go deep into Windows settings to change something to re-enable it. But apart from that, it's great.
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You are so right, Charlie. HP was the premier provider of equipment and services when I was designing test systems for the DoD, along with Tektronix. As quality providers, neither still exists so far as I can tell.
Will Rogers never met me.
I loved HP Test Equipment (Hughes Aircraft Missile Systems 82-85). Tektronix was the only digitizer we used as well. We were working with one of HP's new HPIB counters, and the code in it was so messed up. I finally tracked an engineer down for the product and sent him a list of defects. One example: you can trigger going high or low, but I finally figured out that they had them backwards. The engineer *tried* to play down the issue, said "well, you can fix that in your code right? I pointed out that for the $$ charged, why was I having to dick up my code because of his crappy code? To his credit, he did not hang up on me.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I just scanned a document without creating an account or logging in, using HP Smart, to verify this. And as I expected, you don't have to create an account, you can cancel out of it and still scan documents. It just looks like you need to create an account, but you technically don't have to agree with that. After that, it doesn't prompt you again, as far as I can tell.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I use Canon. It has none of those quirks. Maybe they'll get ideas from HP, in future.
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It's not stupid, it's mean and deliberate.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I've always rated HP bloatware (it's self-bloating) as worse than useless since I got an HP compact camera years ago. I downloaded, then ran the software for the first week before uninstalling it. Worst UI and slowest application software I've had the misfortune to use in 50 years of assorted computer use. PS the camera had the shortest battery life of any battery-powered device I've ever used!
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Another example of stupidity, although in a very different area: I am certainly not a 'prepper' of the kind that they make TV stories about, I just want to be somewhat prepared for eventualities. So I wanted a gas stove, in case we have a power blackout. 99.99% of all cooking stoves in Norway are electric, so it makes me slightly eccentric, but a few of my friends are gourmets insisting that gas burners are superior. I settled for a model for my remodeled kitchen. At the very last moment, reading its online instruction booklet, I discovered that this stove had a 'security system' that would close all gas valves in case of a power blackout. There is no way to override this (I have that in writing from the manufacturer). So when you really need a gas stove because of a blackout, it won't work. It is totally dependent on household electric power. I found an alternative. On my request, the manufacturer has provided a clear statement that in case of a blackout, the stove will still work, although not with the electrical ignition - I will have to lit the fire with a spark igniter. That is perfectly fine with me - I always used spark igniters on camping/cottage gas stoves. (This second alternative also solved another problem. In Norway, all your friends - except for the gourmets - will run you down: 'You are crazy, not going for an induction top! It is just sooooo much better!' The solution I ended up with was a half-with, two-burners gas stove for the power fallouts and for my gourmet friends, and a half-width induction stove for all the other friends of mine ... It is not just for my friends: I bought it with a cast iron grill unit that I can put on the most powerful induction zone, for grilling my steaks!)
At one house I had, with it's shiny new appliances, I looked into getting a gas range instead of the white electric glass top that came with the house and promptly turned brown. I was told that in case of electric power loss, I would need to have the gas stove plugged into a UPS in order to light it, and that matches wouldn't work becuase of the 'patented sealed-burner design' that has finally made gas stoves 'safe'. I kept the electric glass-top. I did have a prolonged power-outage (7-days) in the middle of a snowstorm. An underground transformer blew, and I ate out a lot, did some homework by candle and PDA (I was working on my Master's), got extensions on some assignments, and a letter in the mail from the electric company espousing their efficiency to get everyone's power back on in 2 days. Standing their without power reading how they had the power back on really was ... irritating, and I sent them a letter in response to their nonsense, and another letter to the regulating agency. The electric company sent me a greenbar printout to 'prove' they had everyone's power back on in only 2 days, and chastised me for contacting the regulating agency.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
Printers first be like 90s, i got a personal printer at home. oh no, my computer does not have that specific port 😞 early 2000s, USB printer 😲, nice, plug and noooo, driver not work, install this, and download this, and then maybe. win 7 2000s, USB printer that drivers just work 🫡 win 8, nah just kidding. 2000-2010s - wifi printer 😲, and find and connect to printer on network without fuss win 10 - ha ha, you thought things just going to work. also we change the find printer menu to match the UI of rest of Windows, not necessary making UI intuitive late 2010s, internet enabled printer. 😲 make print so easy 2020, in a cold cold bunker, the 3 only printer companies (all others subsidiaries of them), realise they can remotely commander printers, thus course correcting the annoyance by the leak of printer ink not actually low
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I work for the US Air Force and we've had HP printers as long as I can remember (20+ years). It'll be interesting to see what the govt ends up doing because we have a LOT of printers that are on classified networks that obviously have no Internet access. It always amazes me when companies make decisions like this that they just have to know is going to alienate them from many of their customers. Baffling...
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Oh man, I get you. Here in America, most of the houses could have been designed by 5 yos. Whatever you can slap together in 30 days, and if we slide enough cash to the "inspectors"... My biggest beef is that there are no real range vents. If the vent over the stove sends the air back into the kitchen, it's a joke. So, when we decided to redo the kitchen, there were two non-negotiables. I wanted a gas range and I wanted a REAL range vent. I paid for both. And we are foodies, sorry, electric/induction is cute but it just does not cut it. But about your stove. Why the heck would a gas stove need to have electricity (looking at mine now)? Sure it has electronic ignition, but :) wait one...... well crap, I need to go turn off a breaker - I'll have to test it later. The only reason we have electronic ignition is to avoid pilot lights. But seriously, friends shaming you for cooking on gas? Stop feeding them. ;P tell them the induction part is broken.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
I rented a house over Thanksgiving and cooked with gas for the first time. Actually hated it. While it responds quickly to temperature changes, it was always slow/questionable to light with the electric clicker and never really seemed to get as hot as my electric at home. I'll keep my electric stove. I also have an external vent over my stove that I wouldn't go without!
Hogan
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
That's not new. Smart doorlocks failing because of an internet outage ain't even news anymore. The HP one is harmless by comparison.
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I'm okay if they want to change their business model, etc. What I am not okay with is when the printer won't print. And it does not tell you why. And the software doesn't tell you why. Or they make a trivial process harder than it needs to be. It's like Windows 11 and Microsoft's rape of the menus and what not. They *say* it was for a better user experience, but I challenge anyone from MS to justify it. Now I read that one of the later updates reduces file transfer performance by 40%. Huh? HOW DO YOU BREAK THAT? :)
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
charlieg wrote:
Now I read that one of the later updates reduces file transfer performance by 40%.
They accomplished that with the release of Windows 7, IIRC, and never fixed it in any subsequent version.
If you think 'goto' is evil, try writing an Assembly program without JMP.
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HP. Yes Hewlett Packard who has decided you cannot using what you just bought without an online account _and_ an internet connection. Imagine - you need to scan a document. The laptop is 10' away from the printer. I have to login to an account to be able to scan. wtf? And their s/w is absolutely terrible. They call it HP Smart but it's really HP dumb, clearly designed by a bunch of monkeys beating on keyboards with bananas. Apologies to monkeys everywhere. I should not drag them down to HP's level.
Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.
All you need to know about HPs crapware stack is that at one point it was bigger than the OS it infected. Rumor is that they were really :elephant:ing mad when microsoft's Vista team outbloated them in '06.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason? Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful? --Zachris Topelius
