On 03/18/2013 04:02 PM, S. Dale Morrey wrote: > Just a thought, a mental exercise if you will. > > If someone were to implement a workaround that didn't require a > firmware update to a dev firmware, they might look very carefully at > each cartridge and realize that the cartridge has a serial number. A > little bit of thought might reveal that this serial number might just > be placed into a table that is tracked by the printer in nvram. > > When page count reaches x, then it would throw that error and refuse > to use a cartridge with that serial number. Now I'm not saying this > would work, but a full hardware reset has been known from time to time > to erase the all the contents of nvram and frankly it's not that hard > to do if you're in there replacing a part anyways. :) > > Of course this doesn't work for cartridges that have their own > counter, so I also heard through the grapevine that there is a super > secret firmware that you can load for every single printer made by HP > that features the awesome Quality Assurance single vendor lock in > tool. > > The word is that this firmware is a development tool created by HP > Printing Engineers, because when developing firmware and drivers, > having that stupid page count thing go off can be a real PITA. Perhaps > they use some compile time magic changes pagecount+=1 to something > else. (It's not written in C or ASM that's all I'm allowed to say) > > Now of course as some of you already know, I used to work for HP and > while there, I lead the team that developed the new toolchain that > they use to write their firmware and I'm still under NDA for another > year or two. The NDA is very strict. I can't discuss anything other > than my general role (can't even mention tools used) therefore I'm not > saying this firmware exists, so I'm just speaking purely > hypothetically. > > It's all postulation, but if it did exist, perhaps it would be listed > under modelnum_firmware_revnum_dev or modelnum_firmware_rev_eng > instead of _rel or _release and maybe they would list it on their > site, or possibly on bittorrent somewhere. Again I have no knowledge > of these things, it's just speculation :) > > > I'm hypothetically flabbergasted. I might hypothetically stop printing in protest.
;-Daniel /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
