Posts by ComicalEngineer

Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

I thought you'd do this for free, as a favour

When I left my last large employer I was effectively last man standing with the knowledge of certain technologies, including having a database of over 3,000 technical references relating to the modelling of things that might burn or go bang. I had five filing cabinets of paper which I had been told to remove from the building otherwise they were going to be shredded. These filing cabinets & two bookshelves were living in the back of my double garage. This was the days before fast scanners so much was still paper although I had begun scanning the important stuff into PDF format.

About 7 or 8 years after leaving the big company one of my former line managers rang me up requesting a particular (important and obscure) reference which he was having great trouble in finding. A quick look on my personal (Lotus Notes) database showed that I had a copy of the reference but it hadn't been scanned in.

"Oh, good can you just send me a copy".

Yes, but there will be a charge

"I thought you would do it for free, as a favour [for me]".

To get you a copy I will need to go out to my garage, root through the filing cabinets, then either scan the file in or else photocopy it for you and post it. It will cost you £150 for my time to do this.

"Oh, can't you just do it this once?"

No, your company hasn't given my new small company (I was a director) any work in the past 5+ years. if you had been giving us regular work, or else you had an upcoming job for us, then yes, I'd probably do it either for free or else bung a few quid on the next job. As it is, if you want it then you can pay.

Conversation terminated with a very grumpy former line manager (for whom I had no great love in the first place).

This JCB doesn't dig – it does 406 mph

If only ...

the JCBs belonging to our local water company could work anywhere near as quickly.

Double trouble for Microsoft as pre-owned software license claims converge

Lawyers license to print money

This sounds like the most fun lawyers can have with their clothes on.

They will be the only dead cert nailed on winners from this.

New Boeing finally gets going, 15 years after debut

777

The flight deck isn't the problem, but I completely agree that the over-complicated electronics are a major problem.

As someone who spent 10 years designing controls for complex chemical plants (thing throughputs of 500,000 tonnes / year size) some of Boeing's systems make me wince.

The 737 Max crashes were directly attributable to cost cutting i.e. using only one Angle of Attack (AOA) sensor - which is a critical flight instrument, thus a single point of failure can bring an aircraft down, especially when you allow a single instrument to take control of the flight computer (MCAS) without an obvious OFF switch.

On the gas plants I worked on we had a Two out of Three voting system for critical instruments. I wonder whether Boeing are even aware of LOPA (Layer of Protection Analysis) or SIL (Safety Integrity Levels) or MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) or even FMEA (Failure Mode And Effect Analysis).

Some of Boeing's error messages on their control systems are often cryptic and I have stories of pilots having to dig into the flight manuals to understand them.(To be fair Airbus are just as bad on this).

In addition, having to go down 3 or 4 levels of menus to identify a problem or turn something on or off is ridiculous when you are trying to control an aircraft during takeoff or landing.

As for multiplexed systems, wiring looms passing through fuel tanks etc, don't even get me started on that one.

[/OFF RANT]

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Corruption and collusion

You will note that all the large providers have the same price hikes.

"Your bill will increase by X%" where X is a number > inflation plus and additional amount (3.9% springs to mind).

Anyone notice that the number was / is exactly the same regardless of provider? Dare I say "Price fixing"? Which is, of course illegal (if you get caught). Not that OFCOM could catch a fish in a barrel given a large net and half a stick of dynamite.

Ofcom waded in and said that price rises must be "clearly in pounds and pence" rather than a percentage figure "to make things clearer for the customer".

So the phone companies simply added on a number larger than the expected largest inflation figure plus their additional 3.9% and hey presto, your annual rise is even larger than before. Again you will notice that the price rise numbers are remarkably similar for every provider.

Once again the law of unintended consequences rises from the deep.

OFCOM? Don't make oi larf. OFFUCK more likely. Clueless, toothless and in cahoots with the telecos.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Code on Floppy Diskette

Thankfully I'd moved the software from 5.25" --> 3.5" --> CD ROM --> USB stick --> external HDD (with 2 backups)

I have some backup files that date back to 1993 which are still readable as they are now on HDD

Some older CD ROMs have deteriorated to being unreadable, but thankfully I'd copied most of them onto the HDD on a desktop before they failed.

In the early 1990s I was involved in some complicated explosion modelling using software that ran under DOS. The code was written by Stanford University and performed calculations that took several minutes using a fast 486. For convenience I compiled the code to run in a DOS box under Windows. I used the code numerous times through the 1990s until I left the company. As the code was public domain, I kept a copy on a floppy disc. It's a complicated piece of code and requires a thorough knowledge of thermodynamics plus the relevant data files for each component in the calculation (think three books each of 800 pages).

Almost 20 years later the original client (long since divested and bought out by a large corporation) found me via LinkedIn and asked if I could carry out some additional calculations to cover the changes to their process. It turns out that the code was no longer available on line with the code writer being (I believe) deceased. Of my old company only 6 of us used the code and they were all retired or (in one case) dead.

The code was last used under W98 but it turned out that it would happily run under W7.

The job put a goodly chunk of cash into my pension fund.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

Our village technically has fibre available, currently only via one small provider, with whom I refuse to deal because of their high pressure marketing techniques (emails, letters, texts and calls several times a week). They also have a poor reputation for reliability.

We are currently waiting for our current provider (with whom we have no issues) to be able to make a connection into the fibre network, even though the connection box is literally 10m from our house.

The whole fibre roll out to less populous locations has been shambolic and piecemeal with small companies installing fibre networks with a captive audience until access is granted to other providers at a considerably later point in time.

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint leaves some Linux boxes defenseless after update

Doh!

Microsloth can't even make security work properly for their own products.

What would make anyone think that the situation would be any better for any M$ product running under Linux?

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

Re: Oops

I may have mentioned this before, but in the late 80s I shared a PC with a young engineer who had a bad case of Dunning Kreuger syndrome when he had his hands on the keyboard.

At one point I physically removed the keyboard from his possession just before he hit ENTER having typed FORMAT C:

Whilst I had recent backups, it was the days of 360K floppies and I didn't fancy reloading the entire 15MB of software and data from floppies.

I fully admit to threatening him with physical violence if he tried anything so stupid in the future, with the advice to RTFM before hitting ENTER.

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

Just something else to uninstall

SWMBO has a W11 Dell. I spent a couple of *happy* hours uninstalling and blocking crapware and adverts.

We have Iiyama monitors so the LG thing isn't going to arise, but the sneak installing of an app that you don't need to use the monitor is nasty.

Knowing that it does autoload, it should be just one more bit of crapware that you can uninstall and then forget about.

There should also be a method of blocking the automatic installation of software to the machine, but then LG might be slipping M$ a brown envelope - oh wait, that's exacty the sort of thing that M$ does as a normal part of the advertising operating system.

I haven't used McAfee for about 30 years when a free 3 month subscription came with a new PC. It got replaced as soon as the free period ended. I've got Norton at the moment, but they are also always trying to sell you extra services.

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

Re: Communique to the plebs

Sarcasm recognised. Have an up vote

Windows 11 Start menu changes trickle into Beta, movable taskbar still MIA

We'll give you adverts but not the functionality you had before

I'm sure even Claude could vibe code the necessary changed to have the taskbar on the left without buggering about with the registry.

Further proof (were it needed) that M$ doesn't give a hoot about the average user and is happy to "depreciate" features that many users find invaluable.

I've had the taskbar on the left since W95 as a user of wide screen monitors and needing to have 2 pages side by side on the screen.

That said I'd like to thank @Nematode for posting that link

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

Gaius Petronius Arbiter

“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form into teams, we would be re-organised. I later was to learn in life that we tend to meet any new situation by re-organisation; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress, while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralisation.”

I also have this T shirt. In my final job before leaving the big company I had been re-organised and my department re-named 4 times in 7 years.

Without giving anything away, I started as "engineering" then "engineering technology", then "technology" then finally "XXXtech" [XXX because it would give the game away] before we were finally sold off to another company at which point I abandoned ship.

In a previous life I worked on a government project bringing computer aids into the chemical industry. This was supposed to be a 6 year project, which I joined at the start of year 2. Except that the Department for Trade & Industry decided to rebrand as "the Department for Enterprise" and pulled the plug on the final 3 years. Just when we were making real progress.

Arbiter was truly a man for all times.

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

A user view

I started using Open / Libre Office 25 years ago and moved as far away from Word as possible when they issued Office 2007. I dislike the ribbon intensely.

After a while I realised that Libre Office was actually more convenient for the type of documents I write which contain a mixture of A4 portrait, A4 landscape and A3 landscape pages. LO is faster and more efficient at doing this than Word. My documents also tend to have multiple tables which may extend across several pages. My reports often run to 100+ pages.

Mostly I issue my work as PDF, and I found that LO makes smaller PDFs then Word from the identical document.

I very occasionally have to use Word or Excel but in the majority of cases LO can convert to .docx with minimal issues. This has improved over the years with only complex documents having occasional formatting issues.

There is no incentive for M$ to release the full OOXML standards as they want to lock everyone into O365 SaaS and by definition Windows. If M$ did become fully compatible with ODT then there would be no incentive for the majority of people to have an O365 subscription.

I retain a copy of O2010 for when I need to use M$ products and while these continue to work I won't be giving M$ any more of my hard earned cash.

Colour me shocked that M$ want to lock people in to their software [not]. Equally that they will use fair means or foul to prevent full compatability.

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

I'll be retired

Thankfully I'll be retired when ESU ends for W10 :)

I spend 90% of my time on Linux Mint but occasionally need Teams / Word / Excel. I won't be using W11. SWMBO has it and I've tried it and I absolutely hated it, even after I'd removed a lot of the crapware.

I have no wish (and no time) to re-learn an operating system with 12 months to retirement.

Home Office hands £28M to immigration IT incumbents after procurement challenge

Procurement

The whole government procurement process is an utter clusterfuck:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukdsi/2024/9780348259728/contents

There are reams of complete BS in the regs and (from experience) the regs are often interpreted badle and in a manner not within the intent of the regs. But no surprise there.

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

Not really new

I remember over 20 years ago receiving spam / phishing texts which used hidden text. Typically setting the font colour to white or else using an extremely small font.

Click on the wrong area of the email and hey presto, instant infection. I'm sure that the current ones are more sophisticated, but it's basically an AI twist on an old technique.

It was much the same intention to evade the spam filters of the day.

AWS sustainability claims don't hold water, lawsuit alleges

Re: But why water?

It's about efficiency.

In your PC where the CPU is liquid cooled the liquid then goes through an air cooled heat exchanger. This is needed because the CPU is small and it's difficult to get enough air cooling into the CPU.

The basic heat transfer equation is Q = U*A* (T1-T2) where U is the overall heat transfer coefficient and A is the surface area. The heat transfer coefficient from a solid to air is <10% of the heat transfer coefficient from solid to water.

The evaporative cooling in a cooling tower is more efficient because the heat removed from the falling water droplets is the heat of vaporisation by direct contact which is not only relatively efficient but also has a massive surface area as the droplets fall through the tower. Cooling towers are extremely efficient because they use only the power to pump the water to the top of the tower and they are also relatively quiet. Which is why they are used on power stations.

Cooling a data centre using conventional cooling e.g. closed water circuit and a forced draft air heat exchanger would require a huge set of heat exchangers and a massive amount of electrical power to turn the fans. There would be a massive hot air plume and it would also be extremely noisy.

Re: But why water?

Cooling towers typically lose 1% of the water flow. The heat used in evaporating the water gives the cooling effect but then there are also direct losses by droplets of cooled water being blown out of the tower.

A 500 MW (Megawatt) plant with a standard wet, recirculating cooling tower typically consumes between 7.5 to 15 million litres (7.5 - 15,000 cubic meters, or 2 - 3 Million UK gallons) of water per day. Depends on atmospheric conditions and temperature differential, worse in warm humid climates better in cold dry climates.

Thus roughly 30,000 litres (30m3 per MW per day).

Therefore 500MW gives 5,475,000 m3/year.

An Olympic size swimming pool is 2,500m3 so 2,190 swimming pools worth per year.

Microsoft cancels Patch Tuesday for some Dell users over surprise shutdowns, overheating devices

Re: Validation and quality

Well, at least there's someone who believes they have such a thing....

The same people who believe in the tooth fairy?

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Surge team

I can tell you how this will go.

The surge team will consist of any single person limited companies that they can sweep up.

They will all be contracted under IR35 and screwed to the bone on rates

They will be herded into a rented open plan office space and given minimal training.

As soon as Crapita can get away with it these contractors will be awarded the DCM (Don't Come Monday).

Crapita will charge them at 3x their hourly rate.

Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out

I'm not an expert in the licensing area, so this is a genuine question:

Would each license not have an individual ID registration / number that allowed Broadcom to check it? And similarly, do the licenses not phone home periodically to check for a valid license and updates?

OK if they are perpetual licenses but then where would the issue be if they were perpetual (other than Broadcom wanting to move the use to a subscription service?)

NHS told to show its working on Palantir platform benefits

There are ...

... lies, damn lies, and statistics.

This seems to tick all of the boxes.

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses spat

Translation

"We continue to believe that was both legal and the right thing to do. Helping our customers move to the cloud improves productivity and security."

Translation:

Moving customers to the cloud means we can screw them over for a subscription.

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

The first but not the last

The level of shoplifting - let's call it what it is - theft - from supermarkets is estimated as about £2.2BN per year. On top of that it increases prices at the tills and puts up insurance. It's NOT a victimless crime.

The UK Police (you can't call them a force) are too busy monitoring social media for hurty words than turning out for shop theft offences. In fact they won't even bother to respond if the value of the theft is less than £200 (that's in a statement from our local Police). That's why you're starting to find items like spirits, baby food, high value meats and even razors in locked cabinets.

There are several reasons for shop theft, and it's one thing if you're starving and need to eat, but most of the thefts are done for money, whether this be organised crime gangs or in order to pay for drugs - again this is from our local police.

Do I like the idea of facial recognition - absolutely not. Do I understand it being used in this situation - absolutely yes.

Our local paper frequently runs stories about offenders with multiple convictions - sometimes in the hundreds - being caught again and again even when banned from shops.

Crime and punishment is another discussion, but I can understand why Sainsbury's is doing this.

As per the title, Sainsbury's may be the first - my opinion is that others will follow.

As we know the tech is not 100% accurate but like all tech it will improve over time.

A last point is that maybe it would not be necessary if the UK had a punishment system that was actually a deterrent. Again, that's another argument.

Former Microsoft engineer shrinks Notepad down to size

For many years I have used a very basic app called Darkroom. No spellcheck and very simple.

https://dark-room.en.softonic.com/

Takes no space at all and works with Win 10.

Unfortunately hasn't been updated for many years.

HS2's latest reset ditches autonomous train tech to get project back on track

Vanity

As a regular rail traveller:

The current journey time from Warrington or Manchester to London is 2.05 hours. A trip I do regularly. 2 hours is just time to have some breakfast, have a quick look at the newspaper (crossword in my case) and go through my presentation or meeting notes before arriving at Euston. Even with the Manchester extension the super new trains were only going to "save" 30 minutes at best on a London trip.

Personally I'm quite happy with a 2 hour trip.

HS2 was advertised as being a capacity increase as the WCML is running at capacity and has a mixture of slower 75mph goods trains local trains and 125mph Pendolinos. This causes issues at several points on the network, especially the single track each way sections.

Bear in mind the Dr Beeching closed the third route to the North, that being the Great Central main line to Manchester via Leicester and Nottingham.

Given the relatively small geographical size of the UK compared to say, France or Spain, there is no real case for travelling at 225mph. This was pure vanity and willy waving on the part of a well known party loving politician with scruffy hair.

Building a railway for 225mph is a lot more difficult than for 125mph as you have to go more of less in straight lines or at least very large radius curves.

Another issue is that the HS2 trains won't fit in a standard platform, the coaches are too long for standard curved platform and the wrong height.

An utter fustercluck from day 1.

End of era as the BBC switches off Radio 4 Long Wave service

DAB

DAB has been pushed so that more channels can be shoehorned into the same limited bandwidth. In many cases the quality of DAB audio is significantly worse than FM. If you want to check this just look at the bit rates on your DAB tuner.

I'm old enough to recall listening to R4 long wave with my late father when I was unable to sleep as a child. The sound of Ronald Binge's "Sailing By" still makes me all nostalgic.

It's true that no-one has made the thermionic valves for many years and the technology to make them again in the sizes required would be prohibitively expensive but I cannot help feeling a sense of loss.

In years gone by my little Roberts R862 accompanied me on my regular travels and I could more or less guarantee to get R4 LW wherever I was. (This was before the days of radio via a freeview TV or internet).

Look at it this way, we now have a wider choice of sh!t commercial radio stations owned by Bauer media all playing the same anodyne pop crap. Adding insult to injury you may have to retune the DAB signal 3 - 4 times on a long journey.

Still, choice is good, innit?

Re: Irreplacable...

Can't get "The Archers"?

Please tell me where so I can move there.

UK firm bombarded debt-ridden people with 5.5M texts

Re: KRA Consultancy Ltd

Unfortunately, the current rules around micro company accounts don't give details of company turnover or "directors emoluments" which can include a variety of things such as out of pocket expenses, dividends etc.

It could be that money was being withdrawn from the company as soon as it was *earned* or rather extorted. This would give the impression that the company has minimal assets, which is a common ploy for dodgy limited company directors. Note that directors can get a combination of salary and dividends which makes it more complicated.

I know of one such company which (legally) earned about £100k per year and yet never had more than £1,000 in the bank on the accounts.

Unfortunately, Companies House is pretty useless at picking up fraudulent activities and dodgy directors.

Sysadmin broke hardware worth more than he made in a month – and lied his way out of the mess

Dynamite

Working for a well known UK university on a government project in the late 80s were were loaned a PC owned by a government research centre (now sadly gone) called Warren Spring Laboratory.

This was one of the early PCs with a 4 colour video card and full height disc drives. WSL were just over 100 miles from us and so they sent the PC by courier. TNT no less, I kid you not.

When we unpacked it from the large cardboard box we found a 2" diameter hole in one side of the box and the PC made odd rattling noises when we lifted it out of the box.

Needless to say we decided to open it up only to find the highly expensive full length graphics card dislodged and various components rattling round inside the case.

Now the early PCs consisted of a substantial steel crate (bottom and 4 sides) with the motherboard at the bottom and full length cards running front to back. IIRC the crate was made out of 1.5mm steel and very solid.

We found a quarter inch deep dent in the front of the inner steel crate and a corresponding crack in the outer plastic cover.

Needless to say it was returned and an insurance claim made against the courier.

A couple of weeks later we received the repaired PC with a new graphics card delivered by a company estate car and driver.

From memory the PC cost as much as a brand new small hatchback (about £4,500 in the day) and the graphics card was over £500 of this.

TNT by name ...

How the AI bubble could pop and take down the global economy, according to the BIS

I have shares in tulips being imported by the South Sea company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

In all seriousness, there are distinct echoes of the South Sea Island Bubble here.

Germany went off the rails as wireless outage saw all trains cancelled

Working tirelessly

"Our IT experts worked tirelessly to resolve the issue"

I would love to be able to work tirelessly.

When I've been working hard I find that I inevitably get tired.

Microsoft's latest Windows bug belongs in the Recycle Bin

Re: Server 2025 affected too...

Same here on W10 Pro build 19045.

To err is human. To screw up properly requires Microsoft.

Users claimed they'd never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles

Tabs

Back in the days my employer used AmiPro as their default word processor.

One of the secretaries used TAB instead of indent for text.

.....And so her text had a series of diagonal spaces across the screen

If, like ..... me your screen had a different resolution

Having gotten ..... totally fed up with trying to read her documents

I tackled her about ..... it, and received a very abrupt

reply along the lines of ..... not to tell her how to do her job

as she had been a typist when ..... I was in short pants.

She was, needless to say, PA to a ..... senior manager and

known for being an arrogant battleaxe. ..... I reported her to

the group IT manager who arranged for her ..... to get a lesson

in word processing rather than typing! I got a very ..... grudging

apology.

[Using full stops to illustrate as spaces are suppressed]

Microsoft once used its own brand of 'Lego' to optimize Windows

Re: The simple answer was responsibility.

I am ancient enough to remember having to optimise Fortran 77 code to run in Bill Gates "no one will ever need more than 640k of RAM".

1987 if anyone is old enough to remember using a mighty 8088 and a 10MB HDD.

In fact the first IBM PC I used had 512k and 2x 360k floppies. That took programming skill if you wanted to avoid multiple floppy swaps during execution.

I have said previously that modern code needs to be optimised properly, perhaps the rising cost of RAM might promote a return to efficient programming.

I won't hold my breath,

Smartphone market to shrink 15 percent this year due to memory crisis

iphone 13

Paid for 6 months ago and currently costing me a whopping £11 per month.

Does everything I foreseeably need.

Surface tension rises as Microsoft's latest kit starts at a pricey $1,499

At those prices I would expect it to be adware free.

But that's not going to happen as they'll be W11.

Plenty better bargains out there than these.

Capita is about to sail past deadline to fix civil service pensions scheme

Not a chance

I have more chance of making the cut for being an astronaut on the Artemis moon mission that Crapita have of meeting this deadline.

There is no way that they can magic up a "surge team" of trained people large enough deal with the backlog in any credible timescale.

The Y2K bug is back! Dutch dev digs up untimely flaw in old BSD build

Re: Niche^3

Schroednger's logic?

MX Linux 25.2 provides possible refuge from AI as well as systemd

taskbar on the left!

It's nice to see that I'm not the only one who has the taskbar on the left of the screen.

Something than still can't be done with W11.

Apple version of Office 2019 becomes useless in a month

Re: Time-Bombed Software from Microsoft

Quelle surprise!

M$ want everyone to go subscription based SaaS by hook or by crook.

Having used Open/LibreOffice for 20+ years I actually prefer it to Word for the documents I write.

My spreadsheet requirements are generally modest but I've not had any issues with it for my needs.

Look on it as another reason to migrate away from M$

Canonical sends Ubuntu into the AI agent era

The one thing I don't want is AI in my Linux Distro.

Message ends.

Yes! It's true! Windows 11 is an agentic platform

Every breath you take...

I'll be watching you.. [The Police 1983 - the pop group ones, not the Feds]

Basically your operating system is sucking up everything you type and reporting back to the mother ship, well it is if you're using MS, Google or Apple(?)

I'm typing this on a Linux machine. :D

Your data is becoming increasingly more valuable for marketing purposes and for "monetisation" of everything you do.

Probably one of the most sinister I have come across is one of my acquaintances who has a particular medical issue and who receives targeted advertising for all sorts of drugs and quack cures, most of which originate from China, India and Russia with offers of cheaper medication than his prescription medication.

Council in UK's City of York outs hundreds of disabled residents with a single email blunder

Re: Mass email using BCC

I am a member of a small model making club, about 100 people. The club administrator is an elderly bloke who simply doesn't get the idea of using BCC and therefore I have a list of the entire membership email addresses.

One member of the group insists on hitting "reply all" and therefore the entire group receives messages like "great I'll be there on Saturday" etc.

After several attempts at education I gave up and have therefore set up a separate email address just for this group.

Media giant settles for $930k with FTC over allegations it lied about eavesdropping on conversations through smart devices

Smart TVs

Read the instructions to your new or even not so new smart TV.

Your TV may well be listening to you.

If you have a Samsung it may be listening to you via the "voice guide".

This from an official Samsung info release dated 2015:

"Samsung is warning customers, external about discussing personal information in front of their smart television set.

The warning applies to TV viewers who control their Samsung Smart TV using its voice activation feature.

When the feature is active, such TV sets "listen" to what is said and may share what they hear with Samsung or third parties, it said."

LG TVs will monitor your viewing habits. LG then uses that data to offer "personalized services," including content recommendations and advertisements.

Big brother is watching

HP customer claims firmware update shoved printer off support cliff

HP on a slippery slope

At one time I would not have bought anything other than an HP printer. Hell, I'm old enough to have used HP pen plotters to produce overhead projector slides!

I went through various printers for my home office starting with an ultra reliable HP Deskjet 500 and later going to a Deskjet 1220C A3 printer. We also had 2 laserjets in the proper work office.

Downside of the HP colour laserjet (a 2550) was the cost of cartridges and the print drum which was almost £600 for a full set of cartridges and drum in 2010! Fortunately these were paid for by the business.

The various firmware updates and the inability to refill or buy 3rd party cartridges convinced me to look elsewhere and after a couple of cheap Canon printers (cheap until the ink absorber gets full, then an absolute pain in the backside to dismantle and clean) we now have an Epson printer scanner with ink tanks which has no issue with generic inks.

HP's printer drivers and associated software have also become increasingly unreliable bug ridden bloatware.

Unless HP get the message I won't be buying HP again.

The 1220c still works quite happily with Linux Mint BTW :)

Burnham backlash: UK Digital ID plans in peril if Manchester mayor succeeds Starmer

Re: Prime Ministers

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDfAdHBtK_Q

You don't find out any politician's true colours until they get elected.

And despite Burnham being an Everton supporter, his colour is red.