Computers are simply way too hard.
I spent some time this evening helping a well educated adult get a driver for her printer. Nightmare. In the end I went to the website, downloaded the driver and sent it over instant messenger. Then was the fun of getting her to run it. Absolute nightmare.
Made me think “My god, Windows is crap.”
But really, Mac OS X is not different in this regard. Both operating systems include a slew of printer drivers but adding a printer driver is NOT as easy as it should be.
Mac OS 9 used to have a mechanism where, if you plugged a USB device in, it would ask you if you wanted to search on the Internet for drivers. Of course it never really worked, never found anything and that was probably due to poor communication between Apple and device manufacturers.
Isn’t it about time that a device included its drivers on a built-in Flash RAM chip? Or at least a mini-app that dialled home to download the appropriate drivers?
I’d bet that the privacy goons would be out in force bleating about how some printer manufacturer was using this to spy on them and whether they were using sanctioned cartridges. Woo woo!