Over the last few days, BoingBoing has been highlighting some particularly loathsome examples of DRM craziness. HP seems to be responsible for two of the most ridiculous examples:
*shakes head*
Over the last few days, BoingBoing has been highlighting some particularly loathsome examples of DRM craziness. HP seems to be responsible for two of the most ridiculous examples:
*shakes head*
There isn’t anything to back up the first one – a woman is suing them.
I’ve not heard of the other one in HP Laptops. If it is true then it wouldn’t really surprise me. Dell and the like have been deliberately stopping people changing to non-dell parts for years by using non-standard connectors. Early compaq kit wouldn’t accept non-compaq parts. OEM’s do it all the time.
HP printers won’t print in black and white when they run out of colour ink. Talk to any of HP’s call centre staff and they’ll tell you that they get tons of complaints about that every day, but they still do it.
I suspect people like us must be a tiny minority for this sort of thing to be economically viable. Not only would I never buy an HP printer, but, just because of that one problem with the printers — more specifically, because of what it says about the attitude of the people who built it — I would never buy an HP laptop or digital camera or MP3 player. I wouldn’t buy a toothpick from them.
Its the same way with a lot of things. You can fill a prescription that has a liquid inhaler but cannot legally buy the nebulizer tool needed for it to work unless you have a doctor ok for buying the part. You can buy a hi def movie but are not allowed to play it thru the digital connection unless your pc internals are considered secure.