Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi 329 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2023
Zanzibar could have ended up with that if it was fully autonomous, and still might want it if they ever did go off on their own again, so really you can never tell what some new country name might end up being and what other combinations might be available that will make sense. There are only 676 combinations of English letters and nearly 200 recognized countries right now, with 308 ccTLDs already designated.
What if it's a domain that crosses multiple physical locations, connected by WAN services and VPN?
LAN is also close to the newer top level domain of LAND so there could be a risk of mistakes. The new list of domains is ridiculous and such a cash-grab by ICANN. I just saw that .kim is a TLD. The relevance to the Internet? It's a Korean surname, so OBVIOUSLY it deserves to be a top level domain name. Kim and Wang are the only surnames in the list, but wang can at least also be a rendering of a word meaning "web" or "portal" so it's meaningful in Chinese.
Country code TLDs are only two characters... Although I suppose if we move to unicode for those, as mentioned by another, they could technically be a few characters longer. There just comes a point where the reason for DNS existing is somewhat eliminated by letting the domain names become so long that they take an appreciable amount of time to type.
The 64 character limit for TLDs is really weird. In most cases, a low limit in things is bad because it doesn't take into account future expansion, but seriously, do they think the world will ever be albe to use TLDs of more than like, 12 characters, at the very most? The whole point of DNS is to make addresses human-readable. Is every device on Earth supposed to get its own TLD, which will have to contain random alphanumeric strings? Is every personal TLD going to look like AOL email addresses, with random numbers added to your name? Will the current concept of domain names and TLDs even apply if your personal TLD is equivalent to your email address and assigned at birth?
In fact, .local is already reserved by the IETF and IANA for essentially this purpose (apparently not specifically for use with internal DNS servers, but rather mDNS, but it's what has been done for decades and has always been the default in Windows). Does ICANN just feel like they need to be seen to be doing something, and it can't be just agreeing with some other organization, so they are willing to fragment the ecosystem and make it more confusing? Or are they deciding they're going to "fix" what they see as being used incorrectly by everyone?
The proper disposal method is to keep them in a closet for at least 2 years, just in case, then when you move, take them with you for another year, then eventually give them to a donation center (Goodwill or whatever there is in the UK) with the hardened ink cartridges still installed. You're not a polluter if you give your trash to someone else.
The wholesale cost of bulk ink (OEM or generic) is kind of irrelevant to most people, and you can't get the price for just the Red Bull liquid without a can, and vodka is only relevant bottled (or x10 at a bar), and both it and bottled water have WIDE ranges of prices. They kind of mixed different kinds of purchasable items in the graph. If they'd used an average price for the ink as purchased by users, which is what we care about, all those other items would have barely registered on the graph compared to the full height of the ink bar and made it even more impressive. (I know, crude oil isn't something most of us buy either but it's a well-known item that is considered horribly expensive and highly-valued to the point of causing wars. Even if they showed the more relevant price of gasoline instead of oil, which would be nearly double, it would have barely moved the marker.)
"At the low end" is the key point, and I don't just mean "cheap trash", only inexpensive. Despite seeming to be a cheaper way to make more reliable printers, they all stopped making really inexpensive ones using LEDs, unless like Brother they use misleading marketing to call them "laser" printers. Maybe it's because they're more reliable so they won't fail as often and need to be replaced. But my laser printers have mostly worked just fine, despite being cheaper than LED printers, and the price difference makes the failure rate more than acceptable. LED printers also do have some drawbacks compared to lasers, so they're not universally better.
Brother doesn't even really admit that they make LED printers. They call them "laser quality" printers, or list them as "laser/LED", and they cost at least $100 more for the same feature set as a laser. Xerox's cheapest LED printer is $950 on their site meant for 15-person workgroups.
A basic color inkjet printer, which these days always includes scanner/copier functionality with wireless connectivity or USB, is $40. This is what a home user is going to go to the store and take a look at, and they'll buy it because it sounds like it does what they need with no obvious downsides since they don't know what happens with liquid ink cartridges or how expensive they are.
https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-DeskJet-2752e-All-in-One-Wireless-Color-Inkjet-Printer-with-3-Months-Free-Ink-Included-with-HP/651507182 (this even includes in the description that it will only work with HP ink, and that they WILL update the firmware to enforce that)
LED printers are basically a dead technology at the low end. The cheapest ones I can find are $500. The cheapest decent single-function monochrome lasers are still $100, and for color it's $200. (I just found an $80 Canon on Amazon that's got the "frequently returned item" warning on it.) Add $25 for multi-function but that's making the other parts cheap. A good color laser is absolutely a great investment in my opinion even for a home user due to the high cost of ink compared to toner based on page count and the short lifespan of liquid cartridges and the odds of the ink ruining the printer itself, and the absorbent pads that they don't tell you about replacing.
I have a 4 year old Canon printer that I'm still using the starter toner cartridges with. Maybe $300 or $400 but I forget where I bought it. I still consider that to have been a good value as it's amazing for home use and I expect it to last a long time AND I can repair it (probably), but a home user is going to look at that and think there's no way printing should cost so much. Even a "high-end" inkjet with the full feature-set equal to my Canon is only $150 or less.
I did have a Xerox color laser previously that was even cheaper, only like $150, and something in it failed after only 2 years and despite having done laser printer repair in the past, I couldn't even get the stupid thing taken apart to find out what was wrong because of the way they designed it, intentionally preventing repair.
Don't have to track ink levels? They still have to track toner level. Tracking 4, whether it's ink or color toner, instead of 1 is a matter of adding more a few more copper traces, and obviously having the extra physical slots, not a lot more complexity. (And the shitty inkjets that use a single color cartridge are even less.) And plastic casings and frameworks have nothing to do with what voltage levels the wiring can handle. And laser printers still have limited amperage since they plug into the same standard power outlet. I've disassembled laser printers and they have WAY more components, even a monochrome.
Heroin is sold by the gram, and one recent page says 1 gram (10 doses) is $60 to $100, or a kilo for 10,000 doses is $50k to $100k. Hard to units of weight to units of volume, and doses to pages printed per mL. Typical inkjet cartridges only have 8mL or less (and that's an XL) and print 300 pages.
https://boingboing.net/2009/12/30/graph-compares-price.html
https://www.consumerreports.org/printers/the-high-cost-of-wasted-printer-ink/
Both of those seem to be off, because $0.70 per mL, or $13 to $95 per ounce, would make a cartridge only cost $4 to $25 at the highest, and no OEM ink cartridge has ever cost $4. A cheap cartridge these days, or even in 2018, was $30 to $40 and that would be lower than average volume. If we call it a 5mL cartridge that's $6 per mL or $176 per ounce. Gasoline at $5 per gallon is $0.04 per ounce. Crude oil is $0.015 right now.
Anyway, $60 worth of heroin would be a lot more fun than $60 worth of printer ink, and given the way ink is wasted during use and dries out if unused, the heroin might last longer. And you'd probably regret the heroin less.
Downvotes are because it's one person applying their poor experience to everyone else on the planet, despite almost everyone else having a good experience. There are plenty of very good third-party, remanufactured and refilled cartridges, which cost FAR less than 2/3 the price of the brand-name cartridges and last as long or longer than the brand-name. Decades ago before all this chip stuff started, I used brands that deliberately refilled beyond an original cartridge because there is a lot of empty space in them to make it look like you're getting more than you are. (Not to mention the kits that let you refill them yourself, but that was too much of a messy hassle.)
There ARE many shitty cartridges out there as well, but that's what happens when you don't pay attention to what you're buying. Anybody that paid 2/3 the price for a lower capacity cartridge was being stupid, and in many cases just going with the OEM brand is a better idea because it avoids any risk.
A single toner cartridge for my previous Xerox printer is $11 third-party, versus $77 from Xerox, and it worked exactly as well and had the same capacity. A full set for my current Canon is $70 third-party, versus $255 Canon-branded. Haven't had to buy any yet. I'm still at 30-40% on the starter cartridges after nearly 5 years. Good luck getting that with an inkjet, even with brand new full-size cartridges that would have been dried out within a month at that rate of printing and and would have ruined the printer (or at least messed it up to the point that the cost to repair it was as much to replace it).
Printer manufacturers DO have subscription services for ink and paper already. Inkjet printers are on the verge of free at this point, priced to where they're basically just paying for the shipping it took to get them to the store. They are basically just covering the minimal cost, possibly even selling at a loss, in order to make people FEEL like they're not being locked in and are just buying a product with no strings attached. Then they control what cartridges you can use, and price direct cartridge purchases so high that a subscription actually makes sense for some people. (And companies love subscriptions with predictable income.) Some of them aren't even exactly ink/toner subscriptions, you're actually just paying for the number of pages you print, and you may not even BUY the printer, which is common in the business world but they moved them to the consumer space as well.
HP Instant Ink with Paper Add-on Service
Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription
Epson ReadyPrint (may be defunct and may have had some value with their EcoTank printers)
Canon PIXMA Print Plan and Auto Replenishment Service
Yeah, some sort of buffer overflow COULD be the way it happens, with the shitty programming and security that happens today. In which case HP is complaining about how they keep getting robbed when they leave all the doors and windows on the house open and a big sign on the lawn that says "We're on vacation until xx/xx/xx." But to then actually transfer that data into the computer's OS? Or even to be able to run code that does anything useful (to a hacker) within the printer's own OS, when the thing may have like 2MB of RAM, and who knows what kind of proprietary OS they're running? And man, that is some serious dedication to violating a printer to actually create a custom chip with enough code to infect anything else with malware and create a printer cartridge company to sell them into the world, or even if it just means finding such a small vendor and violating their security and being able to modify their own chip designs to do it. I think HP is both exaggerating the interest anybody would have in all that effort for so little potential return while at the same time pointing out to people just how shoddy their own work is that would even allow it to happen through all those hurdles on a device that should never be doing anything remotely capable of it happening, just to create an artificial barrier to people having a choice in their consumables.
As long as it's made very clear right up-front that it will only work with brand-name or properly licensed cartridges, so that people know they will not be able to get anything cheaper, I don't see a need to make it illegal. It's a customer's choice if they want to buy a product that is limited in that way. But I'm talking a large label with high contrast on every side of the package, a clear statement in any text, audio or video marketing (not fast-talking or small print), legal requirements for any online sellers like Amazon that the listing must clearly describe the limitation, so that it's known before purchase, then clear information in the manual, a sticker on the device, a popup message when installing drivers, and no arguments if an opened device is returned unused. But any company that tried that, like selling a car with a clear statement that you can only use Hyundai brand gasoline, would never make a sale. And obviously modifying the product at a later date so that it's not possible should be illegal.
Laser printers in general are more solidly built and better designed than inkjets as the people buying them generally do expect to be doing a lot more with them and are often businesses. They also just have a lot more moving parts and electronics than an inkjet so they kind of have to be otherwise they'd be falling apart at an even faster rate and couldn't justify the increased up-front cost.
I doubt they were getting any of your money for some time anyway as they stopped manufacturing those types of printers a long time ago and moved the name onto the shittier models. They simply lasted so long that with some maintenance parts made by third-parties, the original ones continued to work and could be re-sold over and over again, even with warranties when they were refurbished. HP may possibly have gotten some few cents out of licensing to be able to make parts but nothing significant, and I'm sure they hated having to allow it since it meant they weren't selling more of their newer printers, and those have been off patent for quite a while now so they haven't made any money at all for nearly a decade.
HP was still selling reasonably good printer products around that time period, at least laser printers. Ones that weren't deliberately crippled, designed to be discarded after a short period of use, or sold at a loss to make it up on the consumables (though the supplies were still overpriced), and they were never modified to disable third-party supplies. People are still buying and using Laserjet 5 monochrome printers, first introduced in the mid-90s, and there are still replacement parts made for them. And their print quality is exactly as good as new model monochrome printers, just not up to the speed of good new ones.
You are probably due for an imaging drum replacement, though, if you haven't changed that before. :-)
Even if the cartridge does have a chip that is used to identify whether it's HP-branded or not, WHY should any of the code in the printer EXECUTE any code from the chip?! Why should it get loaded into memory in any way that is transmitted to the computer?! Why should the printer driver be able to load a VIRUS onto the computer?
There are many perfectly reputable brands of third-party ink/toner that have been around for many years, selling quality products that work just as well as manufacturer-branded products at a fraction of the cost. Yes, on a site like Amazon or other marketplaces where anybody can sell anything, you'll find a lot of junk that is even cheaper from companies that were just registered 3 days ago and won't exist 2 days from now, but there are also good third-party brands there as well as brands that have their own sites.
There is virtually no manufacturer-branded ink/toner that is priced to match the quality difference that it may have over third-party ink (10% better quality doesn't even deserve 25% higher price, let alone 300%), at least in the consumer space and for businesses just printing random items that don't need to be perfect or last forever. Obviously niche applications use specialized ink/toner with special requirements which third-party makers might not meet due to the added costs and low volume. The simple fact that liquid ink will dry out if not used regularly, often disabling the printer itself, makes it absolutely stupid to spend extra for manufacturer-branded ink (beyond the poor value of inkjet to start with).
I thought "Cloud" was supposed to make all this stuff nigh-unbreakable, with seamless failover in the event of an issue, everything tested to destruction before being put into service, absolutely safe for us to give up all control and put all our eggs into their single basket at a much higher cost than just doing it ourselves.
I started saving mine regularly (so now I have like 20 old text files laying around with random bits of information). And Windows itself now has the option, which I think is on by default, to save the state of its own apps to be restored when you log out and back in, so you can just restart without being too worried about it, assuming nothing crashes.
California as a US state didn't exist at the time, and that's what I and most others would be referring to when saying they didn't reach California, so in that sense technically nobody in the group "reached" California. Some of them were probably in it when it came into existence as a state though. (And many of them were still there as frozen piles of poop.)
I'd say they can't claim to have successfully made a soft landing until they rule out the possibility that the landing disabled the craft's solar panels. If it did, then they didn't have a successful landing, they had a minimally-damaging but ultimately crippling crash. The Donner party didn't make a successful wagon train migration just because half of them eventually reached California. If the scientists can't figure out why they're not working or what caused the problem, then it's kind of a failure because they can't know what to do differently to avoid it happening again.
I just freshly set up 2 virtual machines last night, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro using the default setup from the latest ISO, no BitLocker and they created default recovery partitions of 522MB. Got them progressively updated until just now, when both of them gave this error message. So stupid.
The instructions are for increasing the partition size by 250MB, not to make it 250MB in total. The recovery partition is supposed to be at the end of the drive with current versions of Windows, so when you shrink the C drive then delete the recovery partition and recreate it, it will be 250MB larger because the instructions use all available unallocated space. The assumption is that no matter what the current size, it's full because of all the cruft that builds up with updates, but another 250MB will fix it. Until the next time it's not big enough because this is a stopgap solution. Disk management won't tell you how much space is being used, as it isn't marked as a "valid" partition type with a filesystem, but diskpart or other disk utilities can tell you. However mine is 82% free (1.6GB) so that is just as likely not the problem as being the problem.
The instructions are for the "standard" situation and don't take into account systems that still have the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive, between the EFI partition and C drive, or if you have your drive partitioned with anything other than a C drive, or if you're trying to leave unallocated space on an SSD for overprovisioning. If anything exists other than the default configuration created by a fresh installation of a current Windows release, you have to figure out how to do it on your own. If your installation is from a Win10 DVD from like 7 years ago, then it created the WinRE partition size which that version of Windows needed, but every major update/version since then has created a larger partition during a fresh install, but they don't increase the size of it when you update one by one, and now the most recent versions can't function with that original recovery partition size. And with buggy updates like this, even sizes beyond what is required don't work properly.
I have a recently-made Win11 VM that created a 625MB recovery partition which is already 538MB filled.
Ugh. Fixing the partition doesn't fix the issue. My recovery environment was somehow disabled although the partition was there and I was getting this error. I deleted the recovery partition (partition 3 with my C and D volumes AFTER it as well as 300GB of unpartitioned space), which had 600MB used, and recreated the partition using the instructions, which created a 300GB recovery partition at the end of the disk. Brilliant! Exactly what I expected. Creating a partition using interleaved free space with diskpart is a pain so I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to make it unformatted, then used the rest of the instructions to turn it into a recovery partition and format it. But then enabling WinRE failed still because the WinRE.wim file was missing so I had to go into the Windows ISO to find the install.esd file (using 7Zip because Windows doesn't open that format and SOME ISOs use the esd file instead of a wim file) and inside that find the WinRE.wim file. Enabled WinRE and everything says it's working, but still get the error, even after a reboot. And I noticed the recovery partition only showed 11MB used. The WinRE.wim file was deleted since that data is supposed to move to the partition so I dug it out again, disabled and re-enabled WinRE, and now the partition show 333MB used. But I still get the error.
It's really quite amazing that anyone is able to just use a Windows machine and never run across completely unfixable problems.
Windows installers haven't fit on common optical media for a very long time. Dual-layer DVDs were never really popular due to limited need by the time they were readily-available and much higher cost, and half the speed of single-layer DVDs, much slower than even a cheap USB 2.0 flash drive, so 4.7GB was the max for most people. MS probably tried to keep the installers below 4GB for a long time so that flash drives of that size could be used, but once they reached the point that it wasn't enough, there was no longer a need to try very hard because they just moved to requiring an 8GB stick and had plenty of room to be inefficient AND include a lot more garbage.
They mentioned the leak has slowed. Kinda seems obvious that less fuel leaks out when most of it has already leaked out. Whatever failed is probably freezing cold and with lower pressure in the tank it may not be able to force open whatever gap there was as wide as before so at some point it will stop leaking entirely. I had a car tire recently with a very small puncture that would lose air after I filled it up, but after a certain point it would stop for that reason.
C'mon, we need to mount an Armageddon-style mission to rescue, repair and refuel the craft so that it can swing around Earth and make another try for the Moon. Too bad Bruce Willis and Michael Clark Duncan couldn't make it this time; it would be great if we got the entire same team together, 26 years older.
I say we still using an oil-drilling crew for it, too.
These people are waiting until they're at ZERO battery before plugging them in?
Other than that, it's a hilarious situation that you have to use 10% of your car's total range just to warm it up to the point that you can plug it in. And then the charging costs more because it's taking longer than normal (sounds like a design goal for Tesla), and you're blocking the charging space from other people for even longer.
Maybe a thin wrapper of uranium on every battery would do the trick.
Or maybe a pedal device you could attach to generate power for a heater.
One reason I like my city is that I have 2 cable options plus AT&T fiber at somewhat reasonable prices, and the cable has always been reliable from both providers. (I've never actually had bad cable service anywhere I've lived. Rarely ever had anything more than an occasional brief outage during maintenance hours. Never anything less than the rated speeds.) I don't even consider DSL service options. And in a small part of the city, Comcast is even available as they were planning to expand into the city but stopped the buildout quickly for some reason and were allowed to just service whoever they could reach at that point.
Spectrum's prices are about as expected for a big bad ISP that has a little competition. Download speeds can be high but until recently they have always simply refused to provide anything but 10Mbps upload speeds at any tier, even on business packages. The other provider is WOW! which bought out a city-owned cable ISP years ago, and their prices are a bit lower but they provide up to 50Mbps upload speeds (although they charge a $14 gateway/modem rental fee). And AT&T is surprisingly cheap. For a little bit more than the price of Spectrum's un-discounted non-promotional 500/10 cable service I can get symmetrical 1Gb fiber. And AT&T might suck but I just don't want to give Spectrum equal money for such horrible speed plans. (OOOOH, gigabit download with 50Mbps upload!)
Unfortunately everything else about living in this city or surrounding cities is on the high end of cost. At some point in the next several months I'm going to have to move and I expect that when I find a place with affordable rent I'll also find that I have limited ISP options at higher prices.
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