XR #70 (And Bill Gate's Rip Off)


It's up: the PDF version of my hardcopy zine, Ray X X-Rayer, the latest issue. A select collection of posts from this blog. Find it at http://xrayer.com .

As for the hardcopy version -- well, once again, a problem but not with quality. My computer printer does a good job of producing copies but it gets troublesome when I do double-sided pages, even though I carefully follow the on-screen directions. So some readers on my snail mail list got copies printed only on one side. And that's the way I'll probably keep printing out my zine. No more out of sequence pages and wasted sheets. Less chance of a paper jam.

I suspect my printer problems are related to the much-vilified Vista. I'm not spending one dime on Windows 7. Why should I pay for Bill Gates' mistake? He should be giving a free copy of W7 to everyone who has Vista. But why bother when he can charge for an upgrade? It's amazing how a company can stick people with a bad product and then make money by providing the good product it should have made in the first place.

Take a automobile company. When there's a public uproar about a defect, the car maker will try to fix the problem for free. It doesn't tell you to pay for an "upgrade," pushing a new model with the defects corrected. That's a money-losing proposition for the consumer who didn't get the full value of his initial purchase, even if he gets a discount for the new model.