Posts by Pincushion Man

Saved by the Bill: What if... Microsoft had killed Windows 95?

I'll see your SoundBlaster PCI (or Soundblaster Awe 64?), and raise you a SoundBlaster ISA, which had its default IRQ set to 7. As everyone knows (now-a-days, anyway), your parallel port is set to 7. I believe the SB documentation recommended to change it to 5, and just run the setup/install/config for each app to point it to that location. Trouble, to be sure, but better than no POST what-so-ever. Why not change the default printer IRQ? In that day and age, most stuff was hardcoded to 7, with nary a way to change it. Printer usage on PC was (and ever shall be) a dark art of the lowest order. Has anyone ever met a print driver programmer? Anyone who has worked on the spooler in Windows? Perhaps a long time ago. I suspect these days they've been assimilated into/replaced with AI (or at least a near sentient collection of macros).

There was also a SB16 SCSI that could drive one's SCSI CD-ROM (50-pin) and provide one's SB sound needs, all on one card - assuming one terminated that chain properly and set one's SCSI IDs correctly. It doesn't help if one sets the drive ID to 7 - that's the SCSI Adapter's ID (by convention). Too bad if one was running an IDE hard drive with said CD-ROM, some game copy protection schemes would flip out and refuse to work at all.

Micropayments company Coil distributes new privacy policy with email that puts users' addresses in the ‘To:’ field

Re: I can't help feeling that there is a market for an email client

From what I recall, SpamAssassin hates messages with multitudes BCC recipients and not a single user in the To: field.

If you are saying that if we put users in the To: field, we make individual messages to the users in the SPAM, err, Marketing client, then yes, I agree, they should do that. Give them the send as one message option with a big red blinking warning box that says, "Enable send as one message with multiple To: recipients at your own peril".

Panic in the mailroom: The perils of an operating system too smart for its own good

Re: Negative Billing

I had the same issue with my water company. I lost the bill, I remembered it was around 30, so I paid 35 to it. Next bill, I got the "pay your bill or else" notice: If you don't pay your bill in full by the 15th, you will be disconnected. It said I was short 2, what in the world happened?

As I found out, the bill was 32. But because it was not evenly paid down to zero, the penalty charge then applied, making the bill now 37. Because I'd paid "only" 35, I was underpaying. Luckily, I was able to talk to a human to get this all sorted out.

But one still can't overpay. It doesn't charge you the penalty difference anymore, but they will still disconnect you for non-payment if you do not zero the balance precisely.

Still waiting for your Atari retro gaming console? You're not alone: Its architect has just sued the biz for 'non-payment'

Re: This was alays a bad idea

Agreed. That's not Atari Thumb you're thinking of, that's Nintendo Thumb, especially with the stiffness that the NES controller would get after a while.

The Atari controller was pretty ergonomic for the time frame, and the stick had a rubber mount over the top of it to protect the right hand. The rubber wore out over time, and eventually it falls off during longer sessions. But, when you're in the middle of it, you keep going at it. It's trouble when you have to go find it later, though.

Also, if you did it without the rubber, you'd get an odd callous on your right hand, between your thumb and first finger.

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

Re: CUPS

I guess you haven't heard. Michael Sweet, the developer of CUPS (at the behest of Apple) is planning on removing RAW queue support and PPD supported printers. Reason being is that if the printer doesn't support IPP2, it's considered 'old'. He went on to say that it breaks proper print reporting and driverless printing. Maybe Apple is wanting to get in on the print metadata slurping business now?

Further reading:

https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5269

https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5271

Dissed Bash boshed: Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' 10.15

Re: CUPS

Right, well, the direction is not so good. Mr Sweet is the main CUPS developer.

1) They are removing support for print drivers (PPD). If you driver doesn't support IPP2.0 & ZeroConf - you will have to work around it (see 3).

2) They are removing support for RAW print queues. Reason being same as above, IPP2.0 printers support logging features, and RAW queues enabled breaks that. Also, Mr Sweet says that it simplifies his code not having to support the corner case of RAW print queues. (see below).

3) If you need to use a RAW queue or a PPD driven printer, you'll have to code a driver that masquerades as an IPP2.0 printer to keep these devices working.

Source:

https://github.com/apple/cups/issues/5271