Printer Cartridge Price FixingWritten by Stephen Bucaro
Permission is granted for above article to forward, reprint, distribute, use for ezine, newsletter, website, offer as free bonus or part of a product for sale as long as no changes are made and byline, copyright, and resource box below is included. ---------------------------------------------------------- Printer Cartridge Price FixingBy Stephen Bucaro Printers are one of biggest rip-offs in computing today. Companies like Hewlett Packard (HP) and Cannon throw together a bucket of cheap plastic parts and charge you $150.00 for it. Then, they price gouge you for ink cartridges. CNET.com analyzed cost for inkjet printing and reported that costs ranged from 14 cents to $1.32 per page. If it costs 21 cents per page and you print only an average of two pages per day, annual cost of ink would be more than cost of printer. The ink cartridge for a low end HP printer, containing only one tiny ounce of ink, costs a mind boggling $30.00! That’s price gouging, and all printer manufacturers are doing it. That’s called PRICE FIXING and it’s illegal. To add to rip-off, some of them put all colors into one cartridge. Then you have to buy a new cartridge when only one color runs out, wasting remaining ink. This price gouging makes it impossible for businesses like direct marketing or mail order to survive. The only way you can protect yourself is to refill your own cartridges. Most people feel that it is too difficult or too messy to refill cartridges. But for cost of a new cartridge, you can refill your old one 12 times (per color).
| | The Bad Side of a Slide PresentationWritten by Rafael Van Dyke
A couple of years ago, I went to a conference for programmers in Arizona, where I had opportunity to attend several one-hour classes. Virtually all of instructors used slide presentations to get through material. Though there was nothing wrong with material that was covered, slide presentations they used really did nothing to help them in their session. It would have been just as good for them to print out their speech and give it audience a copy to read along with. There were a select few with slide presentations that actually aided in their session. In fact, they were so good that after a while I paid more attention to presenter than slide presentation (for me, that an accomplishment!); but they were rare. I’m sure it was because they were programmers; but all same, allow me to outline why they were so bad: A Slide Presentation Is Not Presentation The first mistake most presenters made was to think that a detailed slide presentation would compensate for poor communication skills, when nothing could be further from truth. Some of them almost had their entire lecture in presentation. A slide presentation is to be used as an outline to keep everyone on track, not as your teleprompter. No matter how much you know about a topic, reading most of your presentation makes you look unprepared and certainly not an expert in your field. A Slide Presentation Is Not a Book This goes along with prior point of having too much material in a slide presentation. You can’t simply take copy and paste from your book and try to make it into a slide show. The audience doesn’t come to a session to read a book on screen … you have to summarize it for them. This means that you won’t be able to give them all of your knowledge in one hour, and you’ll need to cut out some things. If they want more, then maybe they’ll read your book.
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