Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.
I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.
The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.
But there are tons of small businesses that use IT MSPs. That's how it used to be done for companies that aren't large enough for a full-time IT staff member.
Take for example my friend who works in a ~15 person office in a specialty finance field. Most of their software is SaaS, but they still need someone to manage that software. Plus, the eternal struggle of setting up, managing and supporting employee machines means they need IT services, they just use a local firm. Before SaaS, they would likely have a small on-prem server, but they would be hiring the same MSP firm and probably paying roughly the same amount. SaaS software is normally way more expensive, and that cost increase isn't often offset by a greatly reduced consulting fee for many small businesses.
I have a friend that works at an MSP, they have customers who need help setting up and managing a Square POS system. While that is easier to configure that a locally hosted windows based one from 20 years ago, it's still more than many people opening a restaurant are comfortable with. And is the monthly fee cheaper that a one-time purchase and setup fee plus occasional paid upgrades? I'd genuinely be curious to see an accounting breakdown for a restaurant's software & hardware costs now vs 20 years ago. Hardware is certainly cheaper, but I'm not that convinced that it's really much cheaper overall. Square POS is 69/mo + 50/mo/device for the minimum anything beyond a popup or food truck would need [0], and $828/year minimum isn't exactly free, damn near doubled to $1428 if you have a second register. Especially if you also need to hire the same MSP, just at a potentially reduced number of hours per year.
You say before SaaS like you weren't there. As someone that was trust me there is a reason businesses jumped at the chance for SaaS. On-Prem is awful for just about everyone. Even when I was working with very large companies like PwC that had IT departments those departments spent half their time complaining about having to managing the office servers and random installs. Companies didn't just force SaaS to happen, clients moved to companies offering it then the rest of the companies followed.
SquarePOS is free. The monthly fees come from addons which you'd be paying for as multiple separate pieces of software previously. Stuff like Kitchen management/time roll/online ordering/etc. Plus your merchant account costs which if I remember right last time I got an actual merchant account about 15 years ago was $500-1000.
Also the monthly fee is per location not terminal so you've doubled up the fee incorrectly.
Do they need to post sources for every possible municipality? Los Angeles is actually a very definitive source on them being bad for sanitation systems. LA is a pretty young city, they really don't have any terribly ancient sewage systems. There were apparently still wooden pipes in service in Philly in 2017 [0], probably there still are some in service right now. LA's oldest infrastructure could conceivably be from the 1860s, and realistically their oldest infrastructure would be from the 1910s. If their sanitation district advises against it, why would we expect older cities like NYC or Baltimore to fare better?
Yeah, NEC only requires 1 outlet within 3 feet of each sink in a bathroom, and 2 sinks 6' apart could share 1 outlet. Bathrooms are the really the only place where the NFPA hasn't extended the required number of outlets, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that changed in an upcoming revision. At the very least I wouldn't be shocked to see a NEC requirement for an outlet within 3' of each toilet in the next decade.
Umm, GFCI isn't an arcane thing, they've been around and required in bathrooms since the 70s [0]. People may not know the acronym, but they 100% are familiar with the outlets with the two little buttons that you sometimes have to reset. Local jurisdictions may have delayed adoption, so your city might not have required them right away but it was national code in 1975 for bathrooms.
They also don't have a circuit breaker built in, they perform a completely different function from a circuit breaker. And have been required in at least some portion of a property since the early 70s under the NEC, expanding over time to include anywhere where exposure to water is a possibility.
Even if we look at a super old version of the NEC, in 1965 I don't see anything that would prohibit installing an outlet near a toilet. I'm referencing a PDF of the 1965 version, but I don't have a shareable link.
I'm posting this not to shame you, but to point out that you have some misunderstandings of what is electrical code and so other members don't see your first confident statement and take it as fact. Plus, you can't tell if an outlet is GFCIs protected or not just by looking at it, even the very early ones could protect downstream outlets and at since the late 00's GFCIs combination breakers have been common. An outlet may look like a normal outlet and be GFCIs protected, I would wager that most of the kitchens you have been in have had GFCIs outlets.
FYI for anyone that uses wet wipes: please don't. If you have to, ignore any marketing they have about the wipes being flushable. They absolutely are not, and cause major issues for sanitation operators. Even the ones labeled septic safe really aren't, from what I understand the 'septic safe' marketing just refers to them not containing chemicals that will poison a septic system. They don't break down in a septic system like paper will.
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