Posts by Alan Brown

Re: HP printers

"So one day the printer is totally buggered by a mechanical fault it still scans but printing is out. "

We've had consistent problems with users who should know better putting all kinds of crap through printers instead of the normal paper.

Metallised christmas wrapping paper does not work well in a desk-sized laser printer

Nor does putting inkjet transparencies through a laser (the fuser will destroy the transparency, which will in turn destroy the fuser....)

The solution was paper locks - not to stop people stealing paper FROM the printer, but to protect the printer from people putting mindbogglingly stupid things INTO it.

Re: HP printers

"The pay per print model is as old as Xerox "

It's still around on the high end devices. The difference is that once you factor in all the other costs it's usually not a bad deal (one of the primary reasons outfits like Kyocera still push it is due to the number of disasters they had with people maintaining the big Taskalfas and suchlike themselves.)

Re: HP printers

"For many vendors PS support was an optional extra, and often required memory upgrade."

It's worth watching out for "PS capable" printers. We've been burned by that within the last 5 years (Canon!) - the "capable" bit meaning "only if you plug this $80 daughterboard in" - which went off the market before the $500 printers that hosted them did.

Nobody bought the daughterboards and you can buy them on Ebay for $12 - but I wouldn't bother as Canon's PS implementation is every bit as bad as the HP implementation that was based on it as well as being hellaciously slow and prone to crashing if it sees PS headers it doesn't understand/exceed 1024 characters (the standard allows for 4096. Formatting and explicit mode setting can push the boat past 1024 trivially)

OTOH Kyocera printers work better, are cheaper to run and slightly cheaper to purchase. Overall TOC is lower too.

"But if the failure was due to the car manufacturer deliberately and unnecessarily modifying the car after you had bought it so that it disabled the car when a non-recommended oil brand was detected,"

Not quite this, but Glade modified their AirWick range so they ONLY work with "glade" refill cans - which they then jacked the price up on to make the difference between "theirs" and the generics more stark.

The "detection method" relies on seeing a couple of ID stripes on the spray nozzle. This is easily bypassed by swapping nozzles from the old can or with a couple of suitable stripes from a black marker pen.

"The only problem is HP appear to have moved the other way towards "subscription" ink."

Yes, and IIRC at least one lawsuit fell over because the printer had been purchased with a subscription model that the buyer didn't activate. HP argued for that instance that they were effectively renting the printer to the buyer and use of third party ink constituted a breach of T&C

Previously to this, one of the favourite methods from the printer makers was to detect "non-genuine" cartridges and deliberately waste inordinate amounts of ink on unnecessary cleaning cycles.

It's not even as if the printers in question are very good. HP print quality is mediocre at best.

"And the EFF maybe didn't spot that, maybe couldn't afford to continue and felt they had to take whatever they could get, or maybe hoped HP would learn a lesson from the whole thing."

The EFF can definitely afford to continue and I'm surprised that this wasn't brought back to their attention as a breach of their settlement (contempt of court hearings can be entertaining when it's corporate C-levels in the dock and facing a judge's grilling)

The best overall solution is: "Don't buy HP" - and I use these ink lockouts as a prime example of why they're best avoided.

It's not just printers either.

We caught HP (not HPe) dropping very low spec SSDs in high end desktops (Elitedesk800s), charging us for higher grade drives, then moving from attempting to gaslight us on speeds (which failed when I generated benchmarks exactly per their requirements showing the drives were crap $45 Hynic BC501a devices instead of the $150 Samsung 970s we'd paid for) to then attempting to gaslight us by claiming that was what we ordered all along - to which we showed the purchase orders for the items showing the itemised price of the drives purchased vs the "value" drives they claimed we'd ordered.

Annoying buying groups who spend several tens of millions dollars each year and then gaslighting the complainants and denying everything to the buying group coordinator - who had possession of the chain of correspondance on his desk at the time the denials were made - makes for a spectacularly egrarious own goal.

Re: It's a decoy

"The real invasion fleet is coming sneakily from behind the sun."

You may jest, but most "previously unknown" earth-grazing vistors do EXACTLY that and are only seen once they've gone past us.

Something to do with being very small and grey-to-black, against a very large, very bright object more or less directly behind them....

Re: "Resistors, which cost a few cents apiece"

"A colleague was told by the company accountant that he should find and re-stock or formally account for any resistor that got dropped on the floor in the workshop."

My response to that would be to tell said accountant that the time spent doing so would be charged to the accountant.

Back in techie days, the supervisor not only allocated jobs but also filled in timesheets for the staff. When supervisors were removed (for cost reasons) and staff told to fill in their own timesheets, the accountants objected LOUDLY to the techies documenting the time taken to fill in timesheets because it was being charged back to them.

"As this is potentially a large scale replacement programme, it is unlikely that there is sufficient stock in said countries so they trey and flag this to their customers."

They know how many they've sold in any given country. This means they can bulk ship the replacements to the local warehouse NOW and announce a proactive replacement program as soon as they have sufficient stock.

Re: Missing info from the article.

" the field notice says not only that you can proactively replace, but they recommend that you do."

The problem becomes if that 3 months delivery time applies to units under support contracts.

If so, the support contract isn't worth the paper it's printed on.

"DPA/GDPR lawsuits don't care about the actual consequences, they care about the potential consequences."

Which is the EXACT response any journalist worth his/her salt should be using when they get that canned bullshit routine, then listen for the sharp intake of breath

Re: No login details or authentication of any sort was needed to view and search the live system

"If the fine is a personal one if would be wrong for the council to pay it."

Except that indemnification is a standard part of most employment contracts

"If the fine is a personal one if would be wrong for the council to pay it. If it did then the councillors responsible could be surcharged."

In a lot of cases the councillors responsible for such policies are dead and buried. In any case councils don't care because this invariably comes out of their public liability cover.

AS SUCH:

A better path is to find who underwrites the council's public liability insurance (Zurich?) and let them know that a: this is happening and b: It's extremely UNlikely to be isolated to one council

One of the reasons liability cover is so cheap is because there are requirements to take full care to comply with legal requirements, etc and failing to do so blows the cover

Servers have IPMIs.

IPMIs have remote command (and watchdog hardware timers)

If you need to bodge something to monitor lights and/or press a reset switch then you're WAY out of your depth.

20+ years ago it was a different story of course, but these days if it doesnt have this level of functionality, it's not a server, it's someone's cheaped out solution waiting circa service call

And for watchdogs on old PCs, whatever happened to the PC speaker ticking on network packets duverted to driving the input of a 555 to hold off a relay connected to the reset switch?

Re: A long time ago

A 'temporary' radio hut I worked in was finally replaced with a more permanent building after an earthquake dropped chunks of concrete from the edwardian water tower it was parked under - through the roof. It had only been there 44 years...

It wasn't so much demolished as simply disintegrated when the racking support ironwork inside was dismantled

Re: Man-made vibrations

" They're strong enough to make the monitor wobble on its stand, CD cases rattle in the storage rack and dust to fall from the 5mm crack that has opened up between the wall and the coving since the bus route opened about 5 years ago."

FYI: UK councils are _required_ to ingestivate complainst about this kind of thing and deal with it. Whilst traffic noise issues are exempted from environmental protection legislation, traffic _vibration_ shaking buildings is not - and the liabilities if they ignore complaints can be stupendous - as Croydon council found out after traffic vibrations caused the frontage of a building to fall off a few years back.

Re: ...in order to itemise a customer's bill...

"A decoy is much cheaper for the same effect!"

Hence why my employer sometimes deployed wooden antennas prior to actually rolling anything out....

Re: Something Smillar

"To be honest it would have been better to replace the faulty microwave"

Some people might have arranged a "wee accident" to occur to said device to ensure its expedited removal....

Or just alerted the tinfoil hatters on the staff

Re: Interference ...

"Not just a case of of curing the fault, not the symptoms, but also a case of not every problem needs a high tech solution."

There's still a problem there (three problems actually(*)). They just punted the problem down the road

(*)

1: servers being knocked out by voltage drops

2: The VERY REAL RISK OF FIRE if voltages are dropping that far due to current draw without blowing breakers - meaning there's bad wiring somewhere

3: very poor maintenance of the equipment

Re: Another elevator anecdote.

"Perhaps it was the small motor that opens the doors?"

It's invariably a combination of the motor operating the doors, switch arcs and long unshielded runs from the car to the relay logic in the controllers in the hoist room

Dry risers and building comms risers invariably run beside or inside the elevator shafts so you learn very quickly that anything with high impedance ends sees a lot of capacitive/inductive coupling and that no matter how many times a building might have steel covers specified for the trays to achieve electromagnetic isolation, they're either never installed (cost savings!) or never replaced (lazy arsed electricians who don't see the point of them - which brings up a point of one sparky firm who'd been contracted from day one on a building and were forced to pay for replacing every single missing one they'd "lost"....)

Re: Another elevator anecdote.

My days were mid 80s onwards. Yes you'd use RS422 or current loop in olden times.

I actually did build and maintain a few 20mA current loop setups when playing with RTTY as a spotty youth - mainly to tame the prodigious EMF kickbacks you get out of old style Creed model 7 teletype.

I did a bit more with loops and optoisolators in later years interfacing various ancient technology in university laboratories to "modern" computers

Re: radio interferences

"Years ago, I was checking a cabling infra in Paris, only to hear a perfect radio signal in the controller."

One of the more annoying problems around landmobile repeater stations is that the wire fences of the surrounding farm boundaries fences act as antennas.

Which wouldn't be so bad, but fence wires tend to be nailed into fence battens using galvanised staples and when things rust (as all things left in the weather eventually do), some of these turn into perfect diodes.

If you have 100-plus transmitters all turning on and off, combining in antennas and being rectifiied in diodes, then you end up with all sorts of nasty intermodulation products and sooner or later some of those intermodulation products show up at the same frequencies of the receivers. At that point you can end up with a cascade effect.

At some point someone has to wander around, hitting said fence battens with a hammer to dislodge the rust, and encourage farmers not to use galvanised wire fencing.

Re: Another elevator anecdote.

"Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement"

The number of "lifts and IT equipment" stories i've heard over the years always made me check for shielded cable and correct use of RS485 instead of RS232 for long runs in such installations as a matter of course when problems were reported.

I've got a set of my own EMF interference stories but they tend to involve radio transmitters rather than electric motors

Re: "Cars of the day... " Harumph. I owned an original shape Ford Ka from new.

"Carefully maintained. Never crashed. Rust all over the bugger."

Quality Bru^Hitsh craftsmanship that is. Don't call it rust. It's "patina"

Re: RE: AC

"You can overdose on water if you drink too much."

Fun fact: THC destroys DNA - when applied directly to it. Water does too.

"Back in the 1930s legalization of alcohol dealt a body blow to organized crime financing that the traffickers survived by moving into the illegal drug trade"

Except there virttually wasn't an illegal drug trade back then.

A lot of it had to do with the fact that the newly created FBI had a shitload of newly minted G-Men who were about to be unemployed if there wasn't a new public enemy to deal with and it mostly started with a substance smoked primarily by mexican immigrants.

Cocaine and heroin were a rich peoples' party drugs at the time and nobody blinked an eye, Opium smoking was frowned on in the USA but not usually illegal. Remember the british empire went to war with China for the right to sell the stuff when China wanted nothing to do with it.

"He also admitted what everyone with half a brain already knows - the war on drugs is lost. It was lost before it ever really began!"

"The war on drugs was won by the people with the drugs years ago" - George Carlin.

Re: Economics, mate.

a medical knockout dose of cocaine or heroin is less than £1.

The street value is considerably higher than this (as in closer to £100), so there's quite an incentive to flog it even if the risks are high

Interestingly the "Turkish opium" problem was solved by getting the growers to contract to the medical supply industry. Morphine and heroin are _extremely_ useful drugs which the artificial replacements don't come close to replicating. The growers were happy as they get paid more than the narcogangs were paying...

"Decriminalizing drugs would be a better option, the war on drugs will never be won"

Of course not. Drugs are a symptom, not a cause. The motivation is PROFIT, not narcotics - and keeping them illegal benefits both the sellers (higher profits) and the enforcers (various)

Like terrorism (another symptom), it's your FOREVER WAR and the authorities can shout down anyone who disagrees as a traitor and supporter of the enemy.

The real homeland security threats are the "domestic terrorists" - Unabomber, McVeigh and their ilk. The ones who actually believe that Obama was coming for their money, nasally implanted mind control chips and that a certain Pizza place in Washington DC has a basement (hint, the water table is just below street level. Washington DC is built on a swamp.)

Re: @ Alan Brown

"It's much harder to find the unbelievably low recovery rates for the U.K."

Because it's impossible to do so

You can't show recovery rates if you don't have accurate reporting rates and we know the reporting rates are wildly inaccurate due to the sampling method (essentially: only people who are very sick are being tested. The number of asymptomatic people being tested is a number approximating zero by comparison)

The only thing that's accurate at the moment is death stats because people dying of any cause is recorded as "he dead". Spikes above the long term averages can be inferred as being attributable to the pandemic even if not reported/diagnosed as such, and whilst it's only an inference for statustical purpose it's good enough for most purposes (you'll see the influenza/pneumonia rate has dipped slightly. you'd continue that at the normal level to get your covid rate)

"What you conveniently forgot to mention is that those figures put the UK bang on dead average for death rate increase during this outbreak when compared to countries globally."

Early days yet - and the numbers the ONS has are a couple of weeks old at best

This is the "honeymoon period". Historically, pandemics have had at least 2 wave and the second one is the deadlier one.

We won't know the REAL image until looking back a year from now. All this is preliminary - but bear in mind that just like everything else, our systems are geared around people dying at a predictable rate and having 10-20k extras clogs things up, let alone the possibility of having 10-20k extra PER MONTH for 12 months.

"Deaths that occur due to organ failure that may be related to Covid-19? No, don't mention them. Deaths outside of hospital, care homes etc - can't be sure leave them off the stats."

Overall population deaths are harder to hide and you can compare those to the 5-20 year averages.

This is a link to a google search for death stats for the year 1918 (overall and per 100k are showing)

https://www.google.com/search?q=1918+death+stat+chart&sxsrf=ALeKk00Sij5Gi35Pbp0zx6O7zbHwDtGDAA:1587644949403&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=wT-FkiYtWQk6iM%253A%252CG8PXEPLzi_y03M%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kS3H-G8YFUc9mMMDAJHe0VFiKagJw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjN8fOpxv7oAhWGN8AKHeuJDvcQ9QEwAHoECAoQBQ#imgrc=wT-FkiYtWQk6iM:

It's MUCH harder to hide this kind of peak - and the ONS numbers trace a curve in the UK that shows that the "above normal" death figure was in excess of 40,000 people when the government was claiming 10,000 Covid fatalities (that was the most recent release, these things are necessarily a few days delayed)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending10april2020

Re: No it wasnt

"Not new at all"

Even without the antiprotest legislation there are a bunch of laws on the books in NZ and AU left over from the 1918 epidemic that have never been removed in case they needed to be reactivated.

There is provision for a 14 year sentence on either side of the Tasman for spitting on someone with intent to pass on an infection or to cause fear of having passed on an infection. So far in NZ the only sentence handed out for doing it in this pandemic has been 14 days, but it's there if needed. Under normal circumstances it'd be a simple common assault charge.

Quarantine laws are also on the books with virtually unlimited enforcement powers and open-ended provisions to actually enforce them if needed for the same reason

The reason is simple: Death rates in the Pacific and in rural/native communities in both countries were the highest in the world and hit 30% of the population in Samoa(40+% of the male population!), 20% in other areas. 1918 is still part of the history books.

Re: Then after...?

"The shoe thing is annoying"

not as annoying as when I put a few shots of skunk spray in them before I go to the airport

Re: Then after...?

"Homemade Security in the US is mainly theatre"

The fact that it's theatre should be underscored by the theft rate from checked baggage in US airports.

If stolen things can be slipped OUT easily, then dangerous things can be slipped IN just as easily.

Re: Then after...?

"rather than a binary liquid explosive, which requires careful handling and pretty precise mixing to cause an explosion."

Actual attempts to mix simulated binary explosives in an aircraft lavatory have NEVER suceeded

And that's on the ground, stationary, with the lav module sitting on a solid concrete floor, not shaking around as flying aircraft tend to do (let alone the slight wavering they tend to do in the wind when sitting on landing gear)

Which underscores the "Hollywood" aspect of binary explosives in real life. They don't work with kitchen/bathroom or bucket chemistry equipment. Get it wrong and you tend to just have a hot toxic mess on your hands. (Bringing up the aspect that terrorists who only manage to blow themselves up get laughed at, not feared)

"Previous actions have been about individuals or very small groups at the most. "

Amoy Gardens being an abberation?

Or the global lockdowns in 1958 or 1968?

or the wildly different spanish flu experiences in Western Samoa (no quarantine - 30% of the population died, So the British administrator pulled a Boris and skipped out, refusing to acknowledge responsibility until the day he died in Dorset in 1927)) and American Samoa (rigid quarantine, no deaths)

"COVID-19 is no more deadly than the typical nasty virus with a 1.8% death rate"

Most viruses with that kind of death rate are shockingly hard to pass on.

Coronavirus SARS-Cov19 passes on at least as easily as the common cold (being closely related to it), but the common cold has a death rate well below 0.01% and influenza is 0.1%

51,000 people died in the UK last year of influenza/pneumonia with that 0.1% death rate

That means 1.8% could be 1.2 million dead people. In a year

- and that's assuming 1.8% when it looks like it's actually significantly higher than that if you look at actual numbers of deaths in this period vs the 5 year average.

There are a lot of cases NOT being reported and a lot of "excess deaths" NOT being officially attributed to Covid19, but in the absence of secret undetectable assassination squads wandering around in the night it's a pretty good bet that it's the culprit.

You can't bury, store or cremate that many people at once. The systems aren't setup to cope with it, which is why ice rinks across the UK have been requisitioned to do duty as morques and bulldozers are digging mass graves (which are ALREADY being used)

Is it still a big joke?