For the whole of 2004, [Drewry Shipping Consultants] estimates that the number of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) leaving Asia bound for America’s west coat could top 11m, while the number going the other way may be only 4.9m. — Economist

If you couldn't see the money flowing, what would you make of one part of the world carefully crafting hundreds of millions of artifacts and sending them to another part of the world in an endless stream of ships, and getting back in exchange ... less than half as many things. And repeating this year after year.

My grandfather had a problem with his new HP scanner. Every time his Windows XP desktop starts up, it automatically reinstalls the drivers. Every time he tu rns the scanner on or off, it automatically does some sort of reshuffling or reinstalling. Despite all this, it still worked for scanning and printing. Unti l this week, when it mysteriously stopped responding. It took me an hour just to get the HP drivers and miscellaneous crap removed. I then tried the Windows install to get a newer driver; this failed. I then tried the Windows install with the drivers from the CD-ROM. The system successfully installed the scanne r driver, and then cheerfully announced it had found some new hardware and would I like to install a driver for it?

Thinking there might be a hardware problem with the printer/scanner, we tried again on his XP laptop. Same results.

More out of curiousity than anything else, and since it was already on, I tried my Thinkpad running Debian Linux. I plugged in the printer, and the system log showed it was recognized. A bit of google searching revealed that sane was the standard scanner backend, so I installed it with "apt-get install sane." Then I needed a front-end, so "apt-get install xsane." A minute later I was ready and ran xsane - it said no scanner found. I searched for the model number of the printer and quickly discovered I needed another package with extra drivers; "apt-get install hpoj". I ran xsane, and got a preview, and scanned, and emailed him the picture. Total time: under 10 minutes.

This is perhaps the first time in my personal experience that linux has given me a radically better experience with new hardware than Windows.