Posts by Roland6

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

The joke also shows how daft normal economic measures are. You and milllions of others in cutting out needless expenditure has had a negative effect on GDP….

Re: "if they want to keep their tax breaks"

> it's hard to fault them if the offices lie empty and the cafés close for lack of lunchtime customers.

Prior to Covid the coffee shop in my village struggled. After Covid we now have two coffee shops and people who are more engaged with the local community…

I think part of the pressure is living with the consequences of property leases. Property leases tend to be long ie. 10~20 years, expensive, with upwards only price increases, difficult (and expensive) to get out of. So executives are having to live with having to service a large opex cost. Now if you owned your own premises, you can simply dispose of the “asset” and whilst you will have reduced the book value of the business its opex will be reduced and there will be some cash/capital in the bank ; enabling you to undercut those who’s opex is a millstone…

Re: Disappointing

If your subscription does not include a static IPv4 address the change won’t affect you.

Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

It is worth noting Microsoft has made no such promises, since 2003/Xp it would seem their deliberate policy is to break things with each new release.

Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

Hardware may have caught up, but today’s system design paradigms are basically the same as those used in the 90s. Yes, we’ve now got web and cloud but we are still building client-server transactional systems.

Re: large mainframe-class business system

The big thing people were trying to get away from was a systems design paradigm established decades previously, where hardware was slow and expensive and thus batch was the only way to tackle big jobs. With the risk of fast, large (by the standards of the day) and cheap disks, faster and more capable processors and software. A new system design paradigm was possible - replacing those tape based databases and batch systems with an online disk-based relational database and transactional systems. The savings to be had were significant, for one client the overnight batch run changed from having to process the entire 5m customer (tape based) database every night to only having to access and process less than 200k customers assigned to that nights billing cycle. Obviously, once that customer data was accessible online, businesses were able to both mine it and to deliver new services to customers.

> Sorry, but "uptimes running into the years (decades?)" is a BAD THING.

So the planes aren’t falling out of the sky often enough for your liking?

Re: I guess no further extention to the deadline possible

The lengthening of system lifespans as technology got better and matured is inevitable, just that some, particularly in sales and marketing are obsessed with “new” .

The challenge is finding a way for a company to survive such timescales to provide on-going support and maintenance.

Re: It’s Either That Or Move To Linux

> Wow - you worked on Solaris that recently? What a waste of time.

If it pays the bills and some, not such a waste of time…

Re: adopt the role of 'code reviewer' and study how to identify and improve bad code

Back then and to some extent now, you coded in a high level language but debugged in assembler. Hence having an understanding of how a compiler transformed a high-level language into assembler was very useful.

Tools such as MicroFocus Animator (COBOL) and LivingC (C) showed it was possible to perform logic testing and debugging at the high-level language level of abstraction, reducing the effort needed to debug at the assembler level.

I’ve not used either Eclipse or Visual Studio, in recent decades, to know to what extent they provide debugging tools that support debugging and testing of high-level code without dropping into assembler.

Re: Pointless if potless

> America is a coffee culture, not a tea culture. Coffee pots are self heating.

I remember the ubiquitous filter coffee makers, with the pot that had been left on too long, so contained a warm brown liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike coffee. I fully understood why Americans raved over Starbucks.

If you want to visit a real coffee culture, visit Europe…

Also a Computer Science degree is only the first step on becoming a fully fledged professional. I suggest the problem isn’t what is or isn’t in a “Computing degree” but what professional societies demand to confer chartered status.

Okay a big problem is that industry likes cheap and cheerful…

Both android and iOS phones call home and provide location data and much more…

You don’t need to actually listen to individual communications to get useful intelligence…

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/chinese-tracker-hidden-in-sealed-part-in-uk-government-car/

(I think this also got covered by ElReg, but link didn’t come up on my search.)

Trouble is these days, the printer drivers seem to read the serial number, so you can’t just drop a new printer in and expect it to automatically start printing queued jobs…

Re: Retarded, or What?

>” and no OEM ink cartridge has ever cost $4.”

But the ink in the cartridge?

What you have highlighted is the cost of cartridges.

Compatible ink for an HP-971 can be had for £62+vat per litre, ie. 6.2p per ml. Difficult to do a comparison as HP only rate their cartridges by number of pages.

Whilst this specific bag of ink is compatible with the OctoInkjet BagCIS, decanting this into 8ml cartridges (at scale) and distributing said cartridges is going to cost. I doubt a cartridge is as cheap as a plastic zipper bag (100 for £1.50).

My local printer leasing company I had dealings with use third party toner cartridges, they’ve not had any problems, so suspect you need to investigate your sourcing…

It is notable they don’t supply HP printers unless the customer explicitly asks for them, their preference is DEVELOP…

Re: "to make printing a subscription"

My point was, if you want it to be a restrictive subscription the. Don’t mislead people by selling the printer.

Remember whilst many cheap mobile phones are locked to a network, there is a reasonable expectation they can be unlocked, via completion of contract or payment of a fee.

Yes, I’m aware of the HP paper add-on Service, currently the printer does not perform any paper detection, hence you are free to use third-party papers. Following the logic of the ink subscription, we can expect a future HP printer to scan every sheet of paper to confirm it was supplied by HP…

Personally, it is looking increasingly likely my next aid/printer will be a Konica Minolta/DEVELOP device…

Re: "to make printing a subscription"

Simple unambiguous solution: stop selling printers, provide them free (like ISPs and routers) when someone signs up to an ink subscription.

Today it’s ink on subscription, tomorrow it will also be (HP) paper on subscription…