Posts by J. Cook

Plus one, at least in Arizona, where the tenant laws are pretty well spelled out- landlords can't just come in whenever they want, unless there are specific reasons (danger of property damage or to life and limb, etc.)

I changed out the locks at the house I was renting when the roommate moved out, with the landlord's provision of "send them a copy of the key".

And the first thing I did when I took ownership of my house was a wholesale replacement of all the locks and knobs from whatever mashup of vendors to a single vendor.

If I owned or managed a multi-tenant property, the locks would have a mastering system in them (i.e., a master key and separate keys for each unit.), which is perfectly normal in the US for commercial properties.

Re: This feels like an own goal...

THIS.

The last 'good' Laserjet that I dealt with was the 4350 series (which was a rehashed 4200/4250 engine with QoL improvements), but I still expect there are still original 4 series and 5 series chugging away, and will continue to do so until they wear completely out. Back in 2002 or so, I was sent over to a customer's place of business to replace the main gear train on a 4si, which has something like 2 million pages on the counter(!) and after that dirty, dirty job was completed and the machine was back in service, is probably good for another 2 mil, null sweat. Damn things weighed a ton, but as long as maintenance was kept up on them, they'll run practically forever. HP stopped making the 4si model in the 90's, pushing customers to replace them with the 5si / 8000 series (same engine, just different skin and formatters, but there's a reason I refer to it as the "mighty" 5si Those were beasts that could crank out pages proper-like...)

I have no great love nor loyalty to most tech or IT vendors, but I do value the ones who don't abuse the relationship, and they're more likely to receive return business. N.B. we aren't "partners", in spite of many of them trying to claim otherwise, this is a vendor sales-customer relationship. Abuse it, and customers go elsewhere. Lock-ins, especially when implemented after the fact, are well inside the range of "abuse".

A great many people are discovering this about the Broadcom/VMWare buy; a lot of VMWare partners are also discovering this, and they ain't happy about it either.

Re: It is going to create a mess

.. On top of the "we've removed all the SKUs except for the combo SKUs, and delivered a great big, spiked, unlubricated shaft to almost every reseller, and are dragging our feet on the remaining ones" debacle from two months ago?

(I assure you, that is the toned-down version- the full strength one has profanity in it from my weapons-grade vocabulary, and requires several linear feet of paperwork to use in peacetime...)

Re: Sounds About Right

re: locks on side panels

Usually (at least for the ones we have) they run off the same key for the front door of the cabinet.

Also, the two keys I've seen in general use by server cabinet companies are the infamous CH751 and the Elco 1333, both of which can easily be found/obtained from the usual scumbags. :)

You forgot #4: they fired most of the UI/UX people some years ago, if they even had them. And then they burned the UI/UX design guidebooks. /sarcasm

Re: Make It Happen

.. Bonus points if the phrase "I didn't know a goat could do THAT!?!" was uttered.

Re: Don't give Microsoft ideas...

Shhh... that's the "special" part of it.

Re: You were warned to shut things down!

... Does it matter? /snark

"Pinkie, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

"I think so Brain, but where do we get rubber pants in our size?"

Re: literally fell out of the back of the cargo truck taking them from the airplane

Maxim 11: Everything is air-droppable at least once.

When I worked at [ISP] back in 2000, we had a couple times where the Stupid Shipping Gang had ben called in for our stuff. The first was a Juniper M40 that was dropped off the back of a truck somewhere, landed on it's side, speared with a forklift and then delivered to us. We were not amused at the boot prints on the side of the box, the neat rectangular hole, the dent and scratch in the back of the unit from where the forklift tine was in contact with it, and all the Shock Watch and "Tip 'n Tell" indicators were tripped. Two MILLION US kopecks it had cost us, and to it's credit, it survived and served in our lab there for a time. I credit the wooden crate it was shipped in and the copious amount of foam packing inside it that it survived.

The second time? was a pair of Cisco ASR10000 units, fully loaded. The bare chassis was 50 grand at least, and the cards were probably more than a house. These both were also dropped off a truck, and since Cisco shipped them wrapped in cardboard (two layers!) and expanded foam, they were unusable when delivered- the packaging was held together with tape, the chassis was all bent to hell, we couldn't get any of the cards to move, and the department director, along with our Cisco rep, had some really nasty words for the shipping company, and by nasty words meaning "filled out a couple pages in the book of the obscene and profane" nasty. Words that were banned by the Vatican nasty. :)

Re: HP Toner

The brother color laser MFP that I have only whines that I've put a non-OE cart in, but it doesn't brick itself, and I've been getting the expected lifespan out of the carts.

:: puts on printer tech hat ::

For the record, every color laser printer I've ever work on, or with, is largely a stack of consumable items stuff into a frame with the electronics to drive it all.

the toner, the fuser/fixing module, the image drum(s), the image transfer belt- those are all consumable items, and any of them can cause a quality issue. I think the most exotic color laser I've ever dealt with were the 'carousel' style units (HP CLJ 4500, and a Kyocera model that I forget the name of) that had the carts on a rotating carousel that built up the image one toner at a time over four passes.

And the wax crayon Tektronix Phaser was even more exotic- 20 minute warm up from cold start that burned a set of the crayons during the warmup, but once it was warmed up, it could crank out full bleed color page in 6 seconds and it was quality. (unless you did something stupid like force a black crayon into the yellow hole, which is why the crayons were different shapes.)

wonderful printer, but horrifically expensive to buy and feed.

Re: Strange words

And the LJ4, as long as it's fed maintenance kits on the regular, is likely still chugging along.

The engine on the 4si was good for about 2-3 million pages before it needed an overhaul, as long as you kept up on the maintenance kits for the beast.

I will note that [RedactedCo] at one point had a 4250 with 2 mil on the counter back in 2007 or so; the department that had it probably ran a box of paper through it every month. (they ended up getting their own copier that was used to handling that volume a few years later.)