- Joined
- Dec 7, 2020
Even Catholics divorce now, bub. /pol/ is shit. Don't date a church girl. Date a cheerleader. She'll be hot, so at least you'll get something out of it before the divorce.
Old women age 65 (not the same in my last post).
Her apartment always smelled like playdough.
This women I worked for a number of times and she was on my lower rates back when I did this kind of work. She too was very poor and could hardly pay me. She had gone though 2 computers since I'd known her and her second one was an All-In-One. One day she was having trouble with her printer and for some reason the driver wasn't working. This women was better than the other religious nut women. She was mostly nice, but sadly couldn't even afford my lower rates. Money was always very tight for her and she would complain that she didn't get enough in Social Security, so any kind of expense was always a big trouble. I came over in the evening to her apartment. She had her computer setup in her bed room and it was mostly decent. I think she'd eat over her keyboard a lot and never cleaned it, but aside from that it wasn't too bad. One funny thing was one of the times I went to work for her she had me make the icons and menu bar duplex sized so everything would be really big. I get logged-in and I try to print a test page. The women had explained that she was having problems and nothing was printing all of a sudden. I though, maybe the driver for some reason got uninstalled or had an idiopathic issue, which would be a common occurrence on ms window 8. Basically all versions of windows.
I find the driver online and tried to download it. This women all the time I had worked for her hand the absolute slowest Internet ever. She had cable television, and I think phone though the same company too, but would not give up her ISP which had been the same for about 20 years. The speeds were the same as 20 years ago too. I get the driver read to install and I go through the wizard and it wont work. I tried a few times and then by accident discovered looking at the file properties window for the driver that the driver was signed up until the year before current. On windows for some stupid reason they have drivers who’s certificates can expire. So the cryptographic check that proves that the software is legit is now failing because someone put in a date that was too early. Let me be strait: the printer’s hardware was fine, the driver if installed world presumably work as expected, and then computer was compatible with the driver and the printer. The missing link was that the installer was not allowed to complete because windows saw that the cryptographic certificate was marked as expired. In retrospect, I wonder if this could have been the source of the original problem. She didn’t do a lot of printing, so maybe she didn’t notice until before she called me. Windows might have deleted the old driver because the certificate was out of date and had disabled the driver because of this, but it’s only a theory. I thought logically, all the installer must need to see is that the date set on the computer is the same as before the driver’s certificate expires. Simple. I unplug the ethernet cable, configure the computer to have a manually set date, and set the date back before the printer driver’s certificate was set to expire. I repeat the install process. The drives seems to install alright with no warning saying it’s experienced. This is a good point to say, the issue was never explicitly given by an error message. The driver just failed to complete instillation the first time with a non-descript error message. So the strategy I’d just tried was on a hunch.
I tried to print a test page and still no luck. I hadn’t even changed the date back, but it wouldn’t let me print a test page. Again, in retrospect, maybe the certificate check used the real time clock on the motherboard for the time, so my trick only got past the bullshit the installer was giving me. Sadly I reported to the women that I couldn’t fix it and she’d have to buy a new printer. That evening she didn’t give any trouble about paying me. She remarked that all the time I spent clicking around must have been some some significant work, and this had impressed upon her that this issue couldn’t be trivially fixed. I remember thinking I hadn’t really done anything. I had messed around with settings I barely knew would make this driver install. This is one of those instances when I could have been playing mine sweeper for 2 hours and she’d have respected the effort I put in. The good thing was that she didn’t fight paying me that night.
Before leaving I had changed everything back and she setup a time for me to work for her again and buy her a new printer. The next time I come to work for her we had settled on a small cheap printer that I think cost almost 20 dollars off Amazon. She really didn’t like having to pay almost 40 dollars for shipping, but insisted on buying the extra protection plan that Amazon pushes on you at check out. Since she always complained about money I tried to tell her she didn’t need it and that it was just for when stuff breaks in the mail and that usually people forget they bought it so it doesn't help out in the end anyway, but she insisted on buying it.
Since I was there just to help her pick out a printer I said she could pay me for the shopping visit and the setup visit on the setup visit. On the next visit I remember thinking it was a real shame that she had to can her old printer. It still had the cellophane on it to keep it fresh out of the box. Installing the replacement went smoothly and that was the end of that incident.
Coming away from it, I can now say all drivers should be illegal. There is no intellectual property value in receiving commands over USB and then triggering control over stepper motors and ink sprayers. Companies shouldn’t be able to copyright drivers, have any interest in them, or sell them. They should just come with operating system and should work out of the box on any model, even a model that don’t exist yet. I extend this belief to GPUs, Printers, Oscilloscopes, Cell Phones, 3D Printers, wifi cards, all adapter cards, and Car Stereos. If security camera footage can’t have an intellectual property interest in it, then why should a blob that runs firmware have it either? Both should not have it. All peripheral should work and be built to work with the operating system’s standards for that peripheral not some custom shitty software written and decked out with branding. It’s all a scam.
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