Re: Investment?
"a huge implied "Beta" tag on its front door"
That's an insult to Beta.
32762 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
There isn't a complete division between colour documents and colour photographs. If I want a good quality print of a photograph then a special photo-quality printer is needed but for occasional use it's far cheaper to take it to a print shop. OTOH it's perfectly satisfactory to produce written material with colour photographs included as illustrations.
"if you are not careful, colour lasers can be very expensive to run"
My experience with a Brother is that it has a separate black cartridge and that by default when printing black text it only uses the black cartridge so this is no more expensive to run than a monochrome laser give or take the price per page of the respective models.
Since I got it I've printed quite a bit of colour work. I run off handouts for my wife's patchwork class with a colour photo of the current week's project on the front page.
"If you absolutely must have colour, then an inkjet coupled with a cheap monochrome laser makes the most sense, unless you are printing a *lot* of colour stuff that needs to look professional."
Your way is also expensive if you're printing colour rarely because inevitably the ink has dried up since the last run. So you then have the situation where an ink cartridge only lasts a few sheets and your have the inconvenience of having to go out and find somewhere to sell you a cartridge or wait a few days for an on-line purchase to be delivered when a colour laser would print it out right now.
Just get the colour laser - which includes a black cartridge - and set the driver to only use the black cartridge for black text. You might have to replace the black cartridge more than the coloured ones but so what?
I agree it now has proper privacy terms. However it's not surprising that people will treat it with a degree of distrust.
Firstly the original world-beating plan was going to harvest personal details and keep them (strictly for limited purposes of course) for a few decades.
Secondly successive governments have shown themselves to be data fetishists and the current government's reliance on more of the same only makes things worse.
Thirdly the whole shebang has been put under the charge of a serial failer when it comes to protecting customers' PII.
There should be a lesson for governments here. There will come a time when you really need peoples' trust about handling personal data. Trust is a fragile thing. Once you lose it it's not very readily rebuilt. Best not to lose it in the first place.
No it is not better. for reasons given in the post to which you replied.
Look at it on a personal level. If, having emerged a day or so ago from your 3rd groundless period of self-isolation - unpaid if you can't work from home - what are you going to do when you're told yet again you're a contact?
If you lack the imagination to see how it plays out in that way ,let's try reductio ad absurbam. If false positives are good let's just declare the entire population as contacts and have everyone self isolate. A bit rough on those depending on carers to live but once everyone's emerged again and cleared away the bodies we're free from the virus. Was it a good idea?
The requirement of any sort of test is its ability to discriminate with a minimum of false positives and false negatives. The problem with this sort of test is that it hasn't really got a good discriminating power. The appropriate response isn't to bias it towards false positives toavoid false negatives and leave it at that. False positives are just too expensive at both the individual personal level and at the collective economic model; we can't afford them.
What should be done with a test like that is to refine it as much as possible but then treat it as an indicator that a more definitive test is needed. The number of tests currently being processed is well below capacity. Instead of telling the positive contacts to self isolate use that spare capacity and test them. I suppose in another month or two the idea might dawn on Cummings or somebody.
I remember a chemical balance that changed its reading as you leaned over it. It was one of these https://oertling.com/balances/top-pan/tp-series.php used to weigh out small amounts of expensive reagents. The reading would change as you leaned over it which made using it a tad tricky.
It was on a bench on the first floor of a building put together by some 'orrible '60s steel-framed pre-fab technique. The concrete floor slabs were supported on a triangulated mesh of steel tubes sufficiently flexible to move very slightly in response to the movements of whoever was standing on them.
We didn't have any problems with the replacement. It was replaced after the building was destroyed in a fire and the replacement building was a nice solid reinforced concrete job.
It's not at all a simple issue. The right to be in business - and sub-contracting is one way of running a business - is something that I think should be protected against the predations of the likes of HMRC. OTOH, back in the days when I was on the PCG's consultative committee we were concerned about forced incorporation of low paid workers.
It's something that needs to be properly addressed by legislators.
" We were sold this package on the basis of 99.999% uptime."
And there's the flaw in the thinking. Start thinking in terms of useful availability and downtime. You're trying to manage for minimum loss of useful availability due to downtime. If downtime isn't planned - you had a hardware failure, you got hacked, whatever - then there's no guarantee of it falling into a time of minimum usage. Planned downtime can be arranged fro when it will have minimum impact and its purpose is to minimise the risk of unplanned downtime. But risk is harder to measure than uptime.
In this case you've got to wait for them to make the mistake and have the inevitable result. Originally in CC security actually mattered;. Communications were point-to-point and none of your internet nonsense. Even internally subcontractors had to have secure production networks to handle the data. Now it's cloud.