No, the REAL reason it failed was bad project management, though of course you can argue that is the real reason every project fails. Not limited to Kickstarter, of course, but look at the failures of IndyGoGo, CrowdRise, and my personal favorite graveyard of good ideas, SourceForge. Reiterating that I do NOT speak for my large and supposedly successful employer, but there's a reason my employer values and even highly rewards project managers.
My own economic model to solve this problem for charitable projects actually goes back before I ever heard of Kickstarter. The idea is similar, but with integrated project management. "Reverse auction charity shares" if anyone is interesting. Or should I just wish well to an old acquaintance who also struck it rich on Kickstarter with a project that gathered vastly more money than he had proposed? I don't think crowd-based funding should be another kind of lottery or goldmine, but management is hard and I admit that I personally wouldn't want to do it.
I think that Aaron Swartz's death is mostly yet another metric of the increasing insanity of American society. While I still think things will get better over the long term, none of us get to live so long. In particular, I think that secrecy is collapsing at such a rate that pretty soon no one will be able to afford it. I'd like to think that will cure some of the problems, but at least it will change the games...
However, this topic obviously ties to the police trying to gain privacy by deleting recordings. Are you aware that you can set your phone to immediately transfer a copy to a remote server? I use google+, though the increasingly evil google poses its own set of intrusive threats.
Well, I see that I left my story in suspense, and that was about 5 months ago. Anyway, I did receive the new ink cartridge, and it is working well, and I'm even making a bit of an effort to print on a more regular basis in hopes of preventing this one from dying prematurely. I'm not exactly thrilled, but I still think that HP is mostly being treated too harshly in most of the other posts here. (And no, I'm not working anywhere in the HP food chain, though (as mentioned below) I once sold their printers among other brands.)
I offer my poor joke about how all printers after Benjamin Franklin are the spawn of Satan, and their only goal is to mangle and ruin as much paper as possible. Having said that, I basically think that HP is the best of the troubled lot. My own personal experience with printers has been kind of limited to three or four brands over 30+ years, but there was a period when I was in sales in a computer store, and I collected lots of stories from my customers, so I feel like I have a pretty broad view. In conclusion, I feel the printers have mostly gotten less evil over the years, and HP deserves a lot of credit for the inkjet technology that brought color printing to the masses.
Having said that, I doubt I'll refill this particular HP again, so I'll be shopping for a new one when it dies, and support for extremely low-volume printing will be a feature that I'll be searching for.
The Darwinian approach may seem brutal, but the genes are steering backwards. May I strongly recommend The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins? It is only our human ability to look beyond the fact of death that allows us to create such things as Darwin Awards, and perhaps to learn from the fatal mistake without making it.
Having said that, I think the Darwin Awards need to evolve to be more accurate. There should be categories and rankings depending on the degree of Darwinism involved. In particular, they often award Darwin Awards for people who are too old to reproduce, and in such cases there is no Darwinian penalty. Only a young person who dies from stupidity BEFORE reproducing has truly earned the standard Darwin Award. In contrast, if an older person dies by idiocy while killing some descendents, now that does merit a Darwin Award, perhaps with a gold cluster for each descendent. Of course the grand prize should be reserved for true Darwinian idiots who manage to take their ENTIRE family with them.
"Warranty" means something after all. When I looked at it yet again and more closely, I realized the printer cartridge in question had a FUTURE date written on it. Only two months in the future, but there's still no way to interpret that as a manufacturing date or anything along those lines, at least not without a time machine.
Armed with this new information, I returned to the HP website. That was actually kind of unpleasant because of the language issues, but I don't want to make a big issue of it because when I finally managed to find the right phone number and received the return call from the right person, they quickly agreed to replace the ink cartridge. It hasn't arrived yet, but I'm confident it will soon. The policy of quickly standing behind their warranty actually makes a lot of sense, though I still think they could do a bit better--except that it seems they have now gone the other route...
He told me that the ink cartridges for their their new printers no longer integrate the print head. I actually think this is a bad decision for the consumers, but probably more profitable for HP. I guess I'll have to rest content as a HP shareholder, and just mask my consumer-level dissatisfaction behind the replacement ink cartridge.
Still, on balance I have to give kudos to HP on this one. Not sure if I'll have to buy another printer given how rarely I need to print these years, but I'll probably go with HP if it happens. (Don't get me started on my evil experiences with printers...)
For whatever it's worth, I've seen this kind of thing repeatedly with my oldish HP 2750 printer. However, I'm pretty sure it can't be hard-coded on a date in the print cartridge. One reason is that HP can't be sure the printer will know the correct date. Even if it's a network printer, it may not have any access to a time server. The other reason is just from the evidence of my latest round of experiences. First it fails, then it works, then it fails, then it works... Right now it's working, and the sensor apparently reports 3/4 full, but I definitely haven't printed much with this cartridge.
Having said that, I don't print a lot and this printer has been fairly problematic over the years. Less so than other brands I've tried, but about par for HP. My guess is that it's just in their interest to allow the ink to clot up after a while. It's confusing because touching a tissue to the print head seems to show plenty of ink coming out, but I'm guessing the ink has actually changed its consistency enough so that the printer thinks it's dry. Perhaps there is a temperature-related aspect, too.
If you want to put it in more polite terms, why should HP try to make print heads that last a long time even if you only print a little? They just optimize for the needs of most of their customers, and you can always 'restore' the printer with a new print cartridge since that includes a new print head.
Yeah, I feel a bit swindled with ink that I didn't use, and I wish they sold an even smaller cartridge for my case, but it's still better to spend $30 for a new cartridge than much more for a new printer--except that the new printer would have various new features.
On the post: It's Fine For The Rich & Famous To Use Kickstarter; Bjork's Project Failed Because It Was Lame
Re: Project management is difficult and VALUABLE
c/interesting/interested/
On the post: It's Fine For The Rich & Famous To Use Kickstarter; Bjork's Project Failed Because It Was Lame
Project management is difficult and VALUABLE
My own economic model to solve this problem for charitable projects actually goes back before I ever heard of Kickstarter. The idea is similar, but with integrated project management. "Reverse auction charity shares" if anyone is interesting. Or should I just wish well to an old acquaintance who also struck it rich on Kickstarter with a project that gathered vastly more money than he had proposed? I don't think crowd-based funding should be another kind of lottery or goldmine, but management is hard and I admit that I personally wouldn't want to do it.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
However, this topic obviously ties to the police trying to gain privacy by deleting recordings. Are you aware that you can set your phone to immediately transfer a copy to a remote server? I use google+, though the increasingly evil google poses its own set of intrusive threats.
On the post: HP Accused Of Expiring Ink Cartridges
Should close out my relatively happy story
I offer my poor joke about how all printers after Benjamin Franklin are the spawn of Satan, and their only goal is to mangle and ruin as much paper as possible. Having said that, I basically think that HP is the best of the troubled lot. My own personal experience with printers has been kind of limited to three or four brands over 30+ years, but there was a period when I was in sales in a computer store, and I collected lots of stories from my customers, so I feel like I have a pretty broad view. In conclusion, I feel the printers have mostly gotten less evil over the years, and HP deserves a lot of credit for the inkjet technology that brought color printing to the masses.
Having said that, I doubt I'll refill this particular HP again, so I'll be shopping for a new one when it dies, and support for extremely low-volume printing will be a feature that I'll be searching for.
On the post: DailyDirt: Stupiditry, Yah
Nature is like that
Having said that, I think the Darwin Awards need to evolve to be more accurate. There should be categories and rankings depending on the degree of Darwinism involved. In particular, they often award Darwin Awards for people who are too old to reproduce, and in such cases there is no Darwinian penalty. Only a young person who dies from stupidity BEFORE reproducing has truly earned the standard Darwin Award. In contrast, if an older person dies by idiocy while killing some descendents, now that does merit a Darwin Award, perhaps with a gold cluster for each descendent. Of course the grand prize should be reserved for true Darwinian idiots who manage to take their ENTIRE family with them.
On the post: HP Accused Of Expiring Ink Cartridges
Re: Not just a calendar thing
Armed with this new information, I returned to the HP website. That was actually kind of unpleasant because of the language issues, but I don't want to make a big issue of it because when I finally managed to find the right phone number and received the return call from the right person, they quickly agreed to replace the ink cartridge. It hasn't arrived yet, but I'm confident it will soon. The policy of quickly standing behind their warranty actually makes a lot of sense, though I still think they could do a bit better--except that it seems they have now gone the other route...
He told me that the ink cartridges for their their new printers no longer integrate the print head. I actually think this is a bad decision for the consumers, but probably more profitable for HP. I guess I'll have to rest content as a HP shareholder, and just mask my consumer-level dissatisfaction behind the replacement ink cartridge.
Still, on balance I have to give kudos to HP on this one. Not sure if I'll have to buy another printer given how rarely I need to print these years, but I'll probably go with HP if it happens. (Don't get me started on my evil experiences with printers...)
On the post: HP Accused Of Expiring Ink Cartridges
Not just a calendar thing
Having said that, I don't print a lot and this printer has been fairly problematic over the years. Less so than other brands I've tried, but about par for HP. My guess is that it's just in their interest to allow the ink to clot up after a while. It's confusing because touching a tissue to the print head seems to show plenty of ink coming out, but I'm guessing the ink has actually changed its consistency enough so that the printer thinks it's dry. Perhaps there is a temperature-related aspect, too.
If you want to put it in more polite terms, why should HP try to make print heads that last a long time even if you only print a little? They just optimize for the needs of most of their customers, and you can always 'restore' the printer with a new print cartridge since that includes a new print head.
Yeah, I feel a bit swindled with ink that I didn't use, and I wish they sold an even smaller cartridge for my case, but it's still better to spend $30 for a new cartridge than much more for a new printer--except that the new printer would have various new features.
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