Microsoft killing off third-party printer drivers in Windows

What a long, strange road it's been. The intended cut-off date is 2027, but it may be moved further down the road past then, not a hard and fast date.

I hadn't heard about this, but there's a consortium of computer and printer makers called Mopria. From the article: "Mopria is part of the Windows' teams justification for removing support. Founded in 2013 by Canon, HP, Samsung and Xerox, the Mopria Alliance's mission is to provide universal standards for printing and scanning. Epson, Lexmark, Adobe and Microsoft have also joined the gang since then.

Since Windows 10 21H2, Microsoft has baked Mopria support into the flagship operating system, with support for devices connected via the network or USB, thanks to the Microsoft IPP Class driver. Microsoft said: "This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on." It should be noted that Samsung sold its printer division to HP, and I think most people know my opinions on HP printers.

Standardized printer drivers are a wonderful thing. Back in the early '80s when PCs first came out, you literally WROTE your own printer drivers. For standard printing needs like spreadsheets or program code or stuff like that where you didn't need formatting, you just shot the output out to the printer. But if you wanted to do word processing niceties like bold or underline or things like that, you pulled out the manual that came with the printer, fired up a printer driver program that came with the word processor, and entered a whole bunch of finicky codes that told your word processor how to talk to the printer to do things like bold, underline, etc. Proportional printing wasn't much of a thing in the early days until laser printers and desktop publishing came along a little later in the '80s.

I kid you not. It was a royal pain in the butt. Get a code wrong with a typo, or plug the wrong value into the wrong part, and you got results that were, shall we say, interesting.

So when printers largely became plug and play, you have no idea how nice it was compared to 40 years ago!

I remember around '86 or so I programmed a dot matrix printer, a tractor-feed Okidata, to print 1099 tax forms. I had it doing micro-line feeds and going back and forth to fill in the boxes on that form. It was fed from a database that I wrote in dBase III. It was a lot of work to get it to do it right, and some tricky coding, I kid you not. And I heavily documented the code, including a giant disclaimer that you could not miss that said "WARNING: DO NOT TOUCH THIS CODE AS IT INCLUDES MICROSPACING FOR PROPER FORM ALIGNMENT. You'll break the alignment!" After I left the company for a better job (they wanted to turn me back into a word processing typist), my boss's husband, who was a "professional", touched the code and broke it.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/11/go_native_or_go_home/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/09/11/1828213/microsoft-to-kill-off-third-party-printer-drivers-in-windows

The sad story of Julian Sands' death: he wasn't properly equipped

The hikers who found the body of Julian Sands noticed a number of things at the site, all of which pointed to someone who was hiking in an area far beyond their skill or what they were prepared for, which is tragic and directly led to his death.

1. The only communications device that he had was a cell phone. There's pretty much zero cell coverage in the area. The hikers who found him carry a Garmin emergency device that cost about $400 and uses satellites, once they triggered it they had a response in eight minutes.
2. Sands was dressed in dark grey clothing, no bright orange or yellow that searchers would have had an easier time spotting. His clothes would have been almost indistinguishable against the rocks.
3. He was wearing detachable microspikes on his shoes, which are ok for light snow and ice on fixed trails, not for the area he was in.
4. No evidence of an ice axe or helmet. An ice axe could be used to stop a slide if you were to lose your footing and start to fall down a slope.

An emergency search for Sands began January 18, his body was found June 24. The official cause of death is still undetermined until the full autopsy results are released, I would expect it'll be exposure or injury from a fall. Very sad, he was a fine actor. The first thing that I saw him in was Boxing Helena from 30 years ago, which was quite the disturbing thriller.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-10/julian-sands-mt-baldy-hikers-who-found-his-remains-body

A secret and illegal Chinese bio lab outside of Fresno, CA. So much fun!

Last December a City of Reedly (close to Fresno, CA) code enforcement inspector was driving in a warehouse district and noticed something that should not be: a water hose going into a supposedly unoccupied warehouse. His followup discovered a pharmaceutical lab housed inside.

The lab had twenty-some infectious agents, including Covid-19 and HIV. It also had genetically-engineered mice, many dead.

From the article: Jesalyn Harper, the city of Reedley’s code enforcement officer, thought the call would be routine - following up on an anonymous complaint about a business operating without a permit in an old warehouse. But when she found a jury-rigged garden hose sticking through a rear wall and a ventilation fan blowing foul-smelling air through an opened back door, things took a turn.

Harper knocked on the front door of the decades-old cold-storage warehouse for an inspection. What she discovered inside on that December day was almost the stuff of science fiction: Dozens of refrigerators filled with vials of blood, viruses and bacteria; containers of chemicals; hundreds of laboratory mice; and an array of stored laboratory equipment – all inside an unpermitted business operating illegally.

“I wasn’t looking for an unpermitted lab,” Harper told The Fresno Bee this week. “I was just looking for an unpermitted business.”

Prestige Biotech Inc., a company whose owners live in China, was using the building near Reedley’s downtown for storing and shipping an array of diagnostic test kits for COVID-19, pregnancy, drugs and more after apparently being booted out of their Fresno location in late 2022. The inventory of biological agents in the refrigerators include coronavirus and other exotic contagions, such as malaria, Hepatitis B and C, chlamydia, human herpes, and rubella, among others, used in the production of various test kits.

It is quite a story. The company had been kicked out of several sites before popping up in Reedly.

https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local/article277836263.html


And it gets worse. The FDA has issued a safety alert on several pregnancy test kits from several brands that may have been made from this outfit!

https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/08/dont-use-pregnancy-tests-linked-to-illegal-california-lab-fda-warns/