> On the other end, if the lamps were impersonated by 2 men wearing a suite nobody would have said a word.
To quote the excellent documentary "Spinal Tap", on a surprisingly related subject:
There's a fine line between clever and stupid...
18 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2015
I can definitely reassure HP that they need not worry in the slightest about wasting any of their investment capital on me. I will not, at any time, ever be buying an HP printer.
And that's despite the fact that I usually do buy the manufacturer's ink for printers, because I just don't trust what random crap has been put into a cartridge by a "manufacturer" whose company name is a randomly assigned string of 5 letters...
Many printers accept print requests from a local area network -- in fact, a printer that doesn't would be useless in many environments.
Given the unnecessary complexity of network protocols and print request protocols, that's a continual minefield of bugs to get incrementally fixed.
So yeah, a printer likely needs to upgrade its software. Deliberate sabotage by the manufacturer, on the other hand, should be entirely optional.
"Drafting software that their mechanical engineers wrote"
There are two sides to that coin.
Having been intimately involved with software written by hardware engineers, and constantly astonished at how the resulting code even manages to pretend to work at all, the idea of mechanical engineers (with no training in the craft of writing software) writing 3D drafting software fills me with dread.
But having been intimately involved with every other kind of software, in particularly elegantly structured software using sensible, modern principles of software structure and design -- yet which was so completely unusable for the actual task at hand because the software engineers in question clearly had no concept whatsoever of what problem was actually to be solved -- the idea of software engineers writing software also fills me with dread. (Including the software that I am currently writing :-) )
"Free downloads of LibreOffice for macOS from the foundation's site will remain available and arguably be superior to the App Store offering, because that version will include Java."
Arguably the App Store offering will be superior to the free download, because that version will _not_ include Java...
> I'd like to see you try running Windows on a PowerBook,
I had no trouble at all running Windows on my Bondi Blue iMac, back in the days when Apple laptops were branded as "Powerbook"... (Courtesy of VirtualPC, of course. I was even able to use it to test a kernel-mode network driver I was working on...)