Don’t let it connect to the wifi/internet?

I mean, sure, you have to do the SD card shuffle, but it’ll guarantee you don’t end up having to deal with this.

If you have a more advanced set of network hardware (which it doesn’t sound like you do) you could add a firewall rule to block traffic from the LAN IP of the printer, or for something like Unifi, simply block internet access entirely. But, even then, if you screw it up now or in the future, surprise software updates will happen.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

nothing of value will be lost

I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)

The praise came from the people who have jobs being pixel peepers, not people who actually enjoy playing games.

From a perspective of it looking slightly better when you pause a game, take a screenshot, and enlarge it so you can then discuss about the fruity bokeh or whatever the shit, the PS5 Pro is much improved.

For everyone who just plays games on it, it’s essentially unnoticeable.

(This applies a lot to PC gaming stuff as well, but it looks like nVidia stepped on their uh, leather coat, so hard with the 5000 series that not even the pixeleyist peepers had much positive to say.)

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Glad my last phone had a slight fire-related incident and that I got a iPhone SE 3 before they killed it, because as a replacement this is just plain a bad deal.

$170 more for a whole lot of shit that I cannot summon a single care about.

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

I really, really wanted one as a kid, but they were quite expensive. Like, actual-real-computer expensive, if I recall correctly.

The good news is the tech pretty much ended up in the S60 Nokia phones, of which I had uh, a lot. And some of them even had normal keypads, and not one from whatever meth-induced fever dream some guy in Finland had.

I still have one!

It’s broken because it was designed by crazy people.

(The battery is required, the battery failed in such a way that it leaked and ate everything on the battery charger/temperature board, so uh, I have to find a replacement controller board and then put a new battery on it and I have to admit I just haven’t been motivated enough to try to find a non-destroyed board from a tiny production run that’s like 30 years old now.)

I don’t think you’d need to use an A-series SOC, considering the power usage of even a M4 is basically a rounding error - and they’ve already got M-series stuff running passively jammed into a tiny case anyways.

I’d be on something like that immediately, but I somehow doubt Apple will ever make a 12" Macbook ever again, given that the majority of people seem to like the 13" airs just fine.

Love to be wrong, though.

Man, I had one of those. And I hated every minute with it.

It was, by far, the slowest “modern” computer I ever used, and I legit do not miss the whole netbook thing with slow-ass atom CPUs and the world’s slowest hard drives.

(They probably would have been far less awful with a more modern SSD option, but well, that wasn’t a thing soooo…)

Mind you the way some of these articles sound is that the whole Xbox gaming division is on its knees and doesn’t sell a machine or make a penny.

It does feel like they’re using excessively narrow defintions and picking facts to create the narrative they want.

Okay, the smaller of Microsoft’s gaming platforms isn’t selling as well as the PS5, while the other one is growing so fast even Sony is porting all of their exclusive games to it.

Doesn’t really feel like a complete market failure to me?

I have to ask: what j2me games would you actually want to play?

Like, given you have enough compute to run the actual version of most of these games, (why play the GTA java mobile thing when you can just run all the actual GTA games?) what is there out there that’s a game that’s worth playing on its own merits?

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

See, IBM (with OS/2) and Microsoft (with Windows 2.x and 3.x) were cooperating initially.

Right-ish, but I’d say there was actually a simpler problem than the one you laid out.

The immediate and obvious thing that killed OS/2 wasn’t the compatibility layer, it was driven by IBM not having any drivers for any hardware that was not sold by IBM, and Windows having (relatively) broad support for everything anyone was likely to actually have.

Worse, IBM pushed for support for features that IBM hardware support didn’t support to be killed, so you ended up with a Windows that supported your hardware, the features you wanted, and ran on cheaper hardware fighting it out with an OS/2 that did none of that.

IBM essentially decided to, well, be IBM and committed suicide in the market, and didn’t really address a lot of the stupid crap until Warp 3, at which point it didn’t matter and was years too late, and Windows 95 came swooping in shortly thereafter and that was the end of any real competition on the desktop OS scene for quite a while.

Was replacing ‘24’ with ‘25’ too much work, or something?

Oh, I’m pretty sure they fully understand how it works.

They simply expect tech to roll over when commanded, and in this case, it does indeed look like Apple is going to do exactly that.