Posts by Doctor Syntax 42510 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I believe it was thought as a way for "planned obsolescence"
No doubt, but it doesn't work with the make money on cartridges problem; that works best if the cartridge design has a large installed base of printers to fit. If it only fits those you sold last week and maybe the week before it's not going to recoup its costs let alone those of the printer. I think HP's problem was too many ideas for screwing customers colliding with each other even without third party interventions.
"near" is the killer word there. I didn't find my Laserjet 3020 on the Mopria site. I'm not sure if it's not there or whether their website simply couldn't find it in a long list. I got the impression, however, that the website was simply cycling through the same list of Laserjet Pro, Laserjet Enterprise etc. The site wouldn't encourage me to use their drivers.
"Traditionally, printers were sold at a loss and the profit was generated by consumables over the lifetime of the device, in much the same way as the razor industry operates."
Just how old is this tradition? I doubt that printers were being sold at a loss when I first bought an HP printer. I suspect that somewhere along the line someone in what HP became decided that they could play this trick on customers provided they overcharged on cartridges. AFAICS there are a few of flaws with this.
The main one was that once third party makers realised they could make and sell cartridges profitably at much less than HP's price HP should have realised that that game was up. Cartridges had become a commodity and they should have readjusted then. Another is that if the disparity was great enough they could lose overall by customers replacing cheap printers before they'd bought enough cartridges to make back the upfront loss. Also, looking at the racks of different HP cartridge types in office supply shops I wonder if the cost of spreading cartridge sales across all that variety is cutting profits at that end of the chain.
All those LoC and everything else needed to put this together were intended to do something else and this was an accidental and totally unintentional side-effect? Or it was an unconscious doodle by some day-dreaming developer that by the magic of DevOps got released without anyone knowing it existed?
You might try not insulting our intelligence.
"No-deal Brexit instantly guarantees a hard Irish/NI border."
Not instantly. It'd take time. And that's only in terms the extend to anyone could guarantee such a thing.
I suspect the solution is going to be Boris crashing us out with no deal in defiance of the Benn Act followed by a strong dose of reality. After that the defiance of the Benn Act can be invoked as the basis for saying that it never happened, rather like the first prorogation never happened. Alternatively as a punishment Boris should be kept in place to run the mess he created up until the end of the fixed term Parliament next May.
"the Maybot (who voted remain) "
We don't know how she voted in the referendum. As a thoroughly house-trained Home Sec she'd have wanted to get out from under the ECJ but saying so in public would have ended her career after the expected Remain victory. I'm convinced that a minimal support for Remain was simply a career choice.
The international order follows county borders. I'm not sure how old those are but I'd guess they follow older parish and/or townland borders and maybe property borders before that. As at the time it was all one country it didn't matter too much if a property straddled a county border. Given partition the border had to be drawn somewhere and, short of sending out a team of surveyors and lawyers to argue every inch, the county boundaries would have seemed the most practical. But as to whether partition was ill-judged or not, the alternative would have been the north fighting a war of secession. Whether that would have settled the Irish Question permanently is a matter for speculation but as we know politicians favour a short term solution whatever the long-term cost.
People also do legitimate business over the internet. That requires that it should be possible to exchange information confidentially if that's required and essential to confirm a transaction reliably. By "reliably" I mean that it shouldn't be possible for some third person to intercept and amend the transaction, impersonate one of the parties, forge a transaction nor for one of the parties to repudiate their part in it. That requires an end-to-end secure system. Whilst that may upset some branches of government others, those concerned with trade and the economy, should be pressing for it.
While personally I'd not want to use anything provided by Facebook for such a purpose the need for a secure, end-to-end secure messaging system needs to be met somehow and the best way to achieve it would be through an open standard defined, in the internet way, by an RFC with multiple, including FOSS, implementations available. Email ought to provide that but doesn't, not without add-ons. Either e replacement standard is required for that or a new standard is needed to sit beside it to provide for such messaging.
"In any case, it seems that UK businesses are capable of just as much foresight as UK government."
Well, they can't have more foresight. They have to fit in with what actually happens and as HMG has spent several years not knowing that nobody else can know either. Making provision for 4 different outcomes is expensive with no guarantee as to whether something completely different will happen. As an example AFAIK the Irish farming industry still doesn't know if it will have to spend a few million on a new meat processing plant in the north.
" two down votes ... No explanations why!"
I think it works like this. Somebody posts something. You post an irrefutable reply which contradicts it. OP can either mutter "oh shit, why did I post that?" and move on or get upset and resentful. OP's only recourse is to keep downvoting every post you make.
TL;DR Wear your downvotes with pride, you were right and somebody knows it.
"police must be able to see all conversations on messaging platforms in order to protect the public, specifically children, from predators."
That sounds reasonable.
Now come back and tell us how you propose to do so that (a) it really is restricted to police and not accessible to some ne'er-do-wells who work out how to crack it in the future, (b) it requires a warrant issued on a genuinely* made serious crime case to a magistrate and (c) by what painful bits of the body you're going to string up those making unauthorised use to spy on political opponents, neighbours, the guy sitting at the next desk or spouses.
* Unlike, say, the warrants obtained on "Nick's" victims.
Oracle will probably want him to point to the company / guy using the IP address at the time. ...Oracle could then sue and get a judge to subpoena the ISP's customer record for the offending customers.
"Sorry, we don't keep records of that."
The Beeb's latest article on the King's Cross CCTV ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49921175 ) includes amongst the reasons for not being able to audit that setup the fact it wasn't designed to be audited and the lovely phrase "the limitations of corporate memory". I think they meant "shredder".
As I recall when Pipex took over Nldram they reckoned Nildram's support system was so good they rolled it out over the entire business. It went downhill when Tiscali took over but with few problems it wasn't an issue. Then TalkTalk tool over Tiscali and the combination of the two was the end of the line as far as I was concerned. I realised the best way to keep flexible for the future was to separate mail from ISP and even better to use a personal domain to separate email address from MSP should it become necessary. That last step hasn't in fact been necessary although moving both from one provider to another was.
ISP provided email is a trap. Use it as a short term measure if absolutely required but no more.
