Crimping our own cables is more common in data center or IT. Normal people wouldn't cut their own cables. I've given up cutting my own cables for home use (fixing busted heads) because it's easier to just grab a new cable.
The last time I crimped one was three years ago when we moved into this house - I wanted a particularly long run of cable, and it was difficult to buy Just One.
The last time before that was when I was working as an IT tech in high school 20 years ago.
But yeah - I'm not even sure if "normal" people know you can make your own cables.
There's no laws about it. It's mostly a "handshake agreement" enforced via the WiFi Alliance. You go through the WFA certification process to get the "WiFi Certified" sticker. https://www.wi-fi.org/certification
I wrote printer code for 10+ years. I appreciate how hard the technical problems are but vendors make it so much worse. I loathe printers. Printers peaked with the LaserJet III.
Agreed, I ran several busy printers for a large department. The ljet IIIs were work houses and ran nearly forever if you used the recommended part replacement schedule.
We had a ljet III that outlasted ljet 4, ljet 5, and ljet 4000. Ljet 3 was the last with the HP print engine, afterwards they used Canon print engines.
The network interface was brittle, even a nmap would hang the printer. So we firewalled it off and used CUPS to handle postscript -> PCL. Sending only PCL to the printer (postscript memory and CPU is unbounded) made them faster and MUCH more reliable.
IIRC the Laserjet 4 had a much better warm-up time (and lower power consumption) by switching to a thin ceramic heating element rather than heating half the printer. But yeah anything after that is downhill.
do you mind lightly summarizing what technical problems make it more difficult? I'm assuming there are all sorts of things web-devs never even think about from that world.
Poor status, often a 1 line LCD says "processing..." and hangs infinitely.
Different handling of duplex, monitoring ink levels, file formats (PS? EPS? PNG? PCL? Which versions? Etc).
Issues with ink that expire by date, reduced functionality with 3rd party inks, not being able to print black even when only yellow is out of ink.
Different postscript versions and the nature of a language where CPU and memory use is unbounded means you get a nightmare of which files can print to which printers.
Most of our printer nightmares, at least the software issues, ended when we handled postscript -> PCL (a raster based format) on the server side.
Companies have internal processes and typically can’t say “here’s an extra 5k for saving our butts!” unless there’s an existing program and money set aside for such spot bonuses. It’s a huge audit risk.
If your management is good, it absolutely is remembered and impacts future performance and promotion cycles.
Decompiling the microcode blob might run afoul of intellectual property laws. A clean room implementation needs to be done without reading any of the product's actual code.
Clean room design [1] comes down to one team reverse engineering the code and translate that to some high-level specification and let another team write the code based on that high-level specification. This still allows the use of a decompiler by the first team.
which was run by politician Newt Gingrich which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012 and I must say it boggles my mind that he didn't think this would have an effect on "do I trust this guy to be President?" or even "do I want to donate to his campaign?"
> which he had let go bankrupt and get evicted from its offices in 2011 so he could run for president in 2012
Right now, at least, the Wikipedia article states that the law required him to leave the organisation. It doesn’t sound like it was insolvent when he left, just that without him it found it hard to get additional donations. It also sounds like it was evicted after it was dissolved, many months after he terminated his relationship with it.
Lacking any other details, it sounds strange to blame him for what happened after his required-by-law departure.
