>> It still bemuses me that they could go to all the trouble of writing a
>> huge, complex USB driver,
>
> I doubt they wrote their own USB driver from scratch.

I doubt integrating whatever 3rd party code they bought into their own 
codebase was a five minute job.

>> the minor glitches that the manufacturer didn't
>> bother to iron out in their rush to market are extremely annoying, and
>> they're going to annoy us for the next 10 years.
>
> They've already got your $$$s though :-)

Indeed. And that seems to be all they care about.

(E.g., the user guide has a "go to this URL for support" printed in it. 
The URL is 404, and when you check out their support section, the model 
we bought isn't even listed. Not bad for a 4 month old product...)

>> What, fundamentally, can we do about this? How can we make it
>> unprofitable to produce poor quality products?
>
> You need to stop the demand for cheap consumer goods - good luck with
> that ;-)

If we paid £20 for this thing, I wouldn't mind it being a bit naff. But 
we didn't. It cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds. For that price, you 
damned well *expect* it to be good quality!

> Alternatively you could make it illegal to sell anything that hasn't
> scored a certain amount in some unbiased consumer testing, but you're
> likely to be pretty unpopular when the price of everything goes up.

Yeah, I'm guessing that's not going to work too well...

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