Thanks for visiting, Andrew.

My office has a quite expensive Minolta digital copier/scanner that we bought 2 or so years ago.

It has a truly appalling user interface — both from a user/usability standpoint, and a functional standpoint.

For instance, one of the big features touted is the ability to scan and store files on a file server — via ftp. Sounds good. But, in reality, you are limited to 5 different folder names, and they all have to be on the same server with the same username and password. And you have two separate lists — one of “servers” and one for… I forget what… but in the end, it means choosing the same “LocationX” option twice from differently-laid-out-but-otherwise-identical lists.

You can create “accounts” where each job is billed to a specific account. This works great for copying, but if you turn that on, and then try to print from a PC… it doesn’t give you a convenient place to choose your account. The only place the option lives is buried on one of the tabs inside the driver — and you can’t see the list of accounts, it just asks for a “job code” (which happens to be, in actuality, the identification number for one of the accounts created on the device).

And then, to make things more fun, changing the job code field sometimes saves it for as long as you use that printer, and sometimes only for the current job. So you always have to check.

We’ve ultimately just made 8 copies of the printer — one with each job code already assigned — and then try never to change it.

Anyway… these are just some of the flaws, but… the problem isn’t that it’s a budget device. I think the problem is that in a hardware company, the software guys are thought of as a necessary annoyance — so they don’t attract the best… they attract the marginally-good-enough.

The Jefferson quote inspires me with so much more than petty concern over controlling how people use the results of this “costless” transfer. It’s a stark contrast to me between the path where we try to control the use of ideas and knowledge and the one where our civilization can really take off in some amazing new ways because it is all freely available and shared. Not that the way is at all clear how to get there, but freedom just feels right.

My Xerox(-branded) scanner has an appalling software interface, which tries to use a file manager-style tree ‘hierarchy’ to set the various options, but despite appearances, they’re not independent parameters, and if you change one, all the others are reset (difficult to explain, but very irritating).

On the other hand, I had a fantastic (and cheap) Canon CanoScan LiDE scanner which had very simple, clean and intuitive software. But the scanner itself stopped working (belt slipping) soon after the warranty expired, and my attempts to repair it didn’t improve its behaviour much.

I don’t know what the motivation is behind the crappy software, or if there even is one.

(In some cases where there is a driver update, there may be a deliberate degradation “you need to buy a replacement product” motive, but I have no idea if this is common or just paranoia. My old HP Deskjet 320 printer’s Windows 3.11 drivers allowed a wide range of quality options, including a very attractive kind of half-toning of images for ‘Presentation’ quality. But the Windows 95+ drivers removed the variety and left the highest quality print as something quite dreadful and unusable for printing images. Incidentally, I gave that printer to a friend, and it still works fine, 14 years later - and it keeps printing until its cartridges run out.)

P.S. That Thomas Jefferson quote - “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me” - is what really got me thinking in the first place about ‘intellectual property’.