Posts by Elongated Muskrat

OSIRIS-REx's stuck asteroid sample canister finally cracked open by NASA

Do enlighten us - what conflicts with the previously understood "facts" of solar-system formation theories? Chemical / isotopic composition? Grain size / structure? Something else?

My understanding is that the primordial makeup of the solar system is already pretty well known from studying meteorites, with it being fairly certain that if you cut one open and sample the inside, you get a good representation of what was there when it was a rock floating around space and before it got battered about and the surface heated up by entry into the Earth's atmosphere (somewhat counterintuitively, meteorites of any appreciable size that have just fallen are often very cold, because only the surface gets heated by atmospheric friction, and the middle remains at the temperature of deep space, which is only a couple of kelvin). Such rocks tend to be either chondritic (basically fused pebbles) or metallic (usually iron/nickel alloy with pretty crystallisation patterns) depending on where in the solar system they formed (things with a higher melting point closer to the centre of the protoplanetary disk) - the other ones that formed further out, that are largely icy tend not to get sampled because they come from the outer solar system and ice melts or shatters when it reaches the Earth; cometary bodies from the Oort Cloud are thus usually mostly icy rather than rocky or metallic.

Anyway, it's a fair assumption that if a space rock hits the Earth, and it's not one that shows signs of having been blasted off the surface of another planet (such as some meteorites from the Martian surface), then its makeup is representative of the time it formed, which statistically is almost always going to be when the solar system as a whole was forming. Ricks sampled in space might give us more information, but essentially, it's going to be more detailed versions of the same information unless there's something shocking going on (which you allude to but don't specify).

The Andromeda Strain

No need to panic.

More that this in no way contradicts any theories I've read about the origin of the solar system.

BOFH: Looks like you're writing an email. Fancy telling your colleague to #$%^ off?

Re: "coloured pencil office"

The very best you might hope for is a gluten-free sourdough "bread alternative" made from something like buckwheat or rice flour. I can't imagine such a thing would be pleasant to eat.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

We are lucky to live somewhere where there is still a street of independent shops nearby - I'm told it's the longest independent shopping street in Europe, although this may be a bold claim. This means there is a choice of a couple of different bakeries; the one we frequent does a decent 1200g genuine sourdough loaf, which not only tastes better than shitey-white supermarket crap, but keeps longer and doesn't go quickly mouldy. It's not cheaper, though, it costs several times as much as a cheap sliced-white jobby. You get what you pay for, and in my case, it's (hopefully) not diabetes.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

The greengrocers around our way usually do three or four (depending on size) for a pound, which works out as enough to spread on 6-8 large slices of toast (we buy large 1200g loaves of authentic sourdough from the local bakery, a slice of which is probably twice the area of a standard slice of white garbage). Call that an equivalent of £1 to cover 15 slices of sliced white food-like bread.

A 250g packet of butter currently costs £2.40 in a well-known-supermarket-that-heavily-features-the-colour-orange. At 20g of butter per slice, which is a reasonable amount to use, that would cover about 12.5 slices for 2.4 times the cost. Even if you were to use twice as much avocado on your toast, and say half an avocado per slice of standard-white, that still works out cheaper than butter (and gives you more of a coating).

Typically, one avocado in our household provides the covering for two large slices of toast, which is breakfast for two people (usually plus a couple of poached eggs or similar). If you do find yourself with half of one left over, they do actually keep for several days in the fridge if you wrap them in cling-film. Certainly long enough to get used before they go off.

As a gen-x'er, I find myself amused by the way in which the generation of our parents likes to criticise the generation that came after us for their supposedly profligate avocado use. I'm old enough to remember that every middle-class household in the 1970s had a set of little dishes for eating avocados out of. That certainly seems like a bigger waste of cash than providing yourself with an affordable breakfast.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

You might find that (proper) sourdough works better with diabetes, since the simple refined carbs are essentially fermented out, and it tends to contain more complex carbs and fibre. Gluten is only really a consideration if you also happen to suffer from coeliac disease. Even for coeliac sufferers, there is some good evidence that eating gluten-containing foods doesn't cause a big problem if the foods themselves are not highly processed, and it's the combination of gluten and highly-refined ingredients that causes the worst flare-ups.

The tl; dr; here is that white bread (and most processed "brown" bread) is awful stuff that really fucks with your digestive health.

Re: "coloured pencil office"

Would it blow your mind to hear that spreading avocado onto toast works out cheaper than using butter, if you buy them from a greengrocer?

In any case, I'm all for the inexperienced having a bit of a think about what they are going to do, before doing it. If only we could apply that to the sales team.

The rise and fall of the standard user interface

Re: Yes, but

Amstrad's choice of 3" disks (not 3.5" ones) was a bit odd, though. They had a lower capacity than a 1.44Mb 3.5" disk (IIRC, 180K per side), and the drives were single-sided, so you had to flip the disk to read the other side. They certainly weren't "next gen", because the next gen (after 5.25" floppy disks) was definitely the 3.5" disk, the 3" disk ended up being the Betamax of the removable media world.

Amstrad used them because they were cheap (the same reason why the printer port in the CPCs was 7-bit, because the 7-bit controller chip was cheaper than an 8-bit one), and because Alan Sugar was (and still is) essentially just a spiv.

The Post Office systems scandal demands a critical response

Re: the Post Office, had the very unusual power to bring private criminal prosecutions

Sadly, the organisation that Starmer was in charge of, the CPS, wasn't responsible for bringing those prosecutions. As its name suggests, the CPS brings prosecutions for "The Crown", although it is generally accepted that the "C" actually stands for "Clown".

Private prosecutions, brought by ROCs or the Post Office, are not within the remit of the CPS, and my understanding is that most (but not all) prosecutions sidestepped the CPS in this way. Arguably, those brought by publicly owned bodies, such as the Post Office should have been handed over to the CPS for a charging decision, which many, if not all, would quite likely not have got, due to lack of evidence. I think one of the things to come out of this scandal should be to make the CPS the de facto body for bringing all prosecutions on behalf of publicly owned bodies, and not just on behalf of the police. That is, if they don't starve from the lack of funding and swingeing cuts inflicted by the last 14 years of tory government.

Re: It's still happening

The problem is that people who are not developers do not treat software development as an engineering process, and as such, they go for the cheapest option, rather than acknowledging that doing it properly takes more time and costs more. Sure, you can hire cheap developers to write code fast with no formal design process, tests, or modularity, and it might even work. You'll have no way of verifying it, though, short of extensive integration testing, which, in many cases, because the software crosses boundaries such as asynchronous processing, storage, and database access, are impossible to make comprehensive. In some cases, even unit tests are damn hard to write, and might be more work than the code they are designed to test, for example, tests that use fixtures to cover all edge cases in a database layer might require extensive mocking of test data and enumeration of expected results, whereas the functional part of the code they are testing might be a dozen lines of code or less.

Re: Who was in charge of the Help Desk

Whilst this sounds like a plausible explanation, it also doesn't ring true, if, as is alleged, all the victims were told "you are the only one this is happening to." This implies a call centre script including those words, which, at the very least, implies knowledge of the underlying problems by the person who authored that script. The same person who probably thought, "ignorance of the problem sounds like a plausible explanation, nobody will question it."

Re: It's still happening

Well, in my role, I will typically know how any new code fits into the "whole". Small "modules" specified without any context (usually shipped off to cheap devs in India) must define all inputs or outputs, or they won't do the work.

If the end users of the software use it in a way beyond what it was specified for, the response of the business would typically be, "it wasn't designed to do that, would you like to pay us some money to change it so it does do that?"

Problems only arise when the salespeople tell prospective clients that the software does things it doesn't, we find out at the last minute about such promises and have to drop all the well-organised and specified work to run around like headless chickens hacking together a solution so that we don't get sued. When this happens, I always make damn sure that everyone knows that this is the case, and that when the shit inevitably hits the fan, it is documented that I am not at fault. Anyone who doesn’t cover their arse in this way is hopelessly naïve. The fact that this seems to happen on a semi-regular basis indicates a trade-off that has been made at a level above my head, and those people are the ones who are culpable if something goes wrong.

Now, of course there are bad programmers - usually those who have never heard of encapsulation or SOLID, and who write blocks of monolithic code with no division of responsibilities. It looks like Fujitsu were in the habit of hiring such programmers. It is incumbent on the employer to make sure that they hire someone suitably qualified or experienced, and to ensure that they are doing their job properly. If they didn't issue coding guidelines, they were at fault. If they did, and they weren't followed, and the code still went into the product, then the obvious question is why the code was not reviewed, or if it was, why it passed that review. If the coding standards were so lax, or absent, that no checks were made on code going into production on a flagship multi-million-pound piece of software, that is very definitely a management failure. To make another pointless car analogy, if a mechanic builds a car out of cheese, it's not the fault of the cheese when it falls apart.

Re: It's still happening

You have never worked in a paid role before.

Yes, because I am in the fortunate position of not requiring food or housing, so having no need of an income, I don't have to work for money. Would you like to come and visit me in the magical land of the Fae?

I have been working as a professional software developer for over two decades, all the time being paid for it. If there aren't proper requirements for the work, it doesn't get done. If I have to gather those requirements, I make damn sure that, once they have been written down, the person stating them signs off on them. I also make it clear that my role is not one of a business analyst, and I do not possess the skill set that would allow me to do this job effectively, in terms of time taken, and costs.

I also have very strong opinions about "golden path" programmers. If your code falls over the second it is given arguments that are out of the ordinary, then you have not fulfilled the requirements. If you have not defined the parameters under which your code should function, and not enforced them, then you are also not doing your job. You wouldn't accept that attitude from a mechanic working on your car.

Re: It's still happening

That El Reg is full of programmers saying "It's not our fault that we can't do our jobs. It's our managers' fault for not giving us enough time to fix our mistakes."

Absolute horsehit.

As a developer, with many years experience, I can assure you that when buggy code is delivered, nine times out of ten, it is because the developer was not given adequate time and resources to do their job properly. This stems from the expectation that we will be able to say how long a job will take before we have done it, and then always be absolutely spot on with that finger-in-the-air guess. Almost by definition, the job we are doing is producing new code, so an estimate on development effort can only ever be an estimate. When we say "that will take about ten days" and then our manager says, "That's too long, the client won't pay for that, I want it done in five", that means that corners get cut. Tests don't get written, programmers put in extra hours to meet unrealistic deadlines and make mistakes.

You wouldn't want to be on a bus driven by someone working 12 hour shifts driving without a break, all the while with their manager sat behind them telling them to drive faster. That dickheads think that this ethic should be applied to developers, and then think it is fine to blame them when they fail only deeply underlines their total unsuitability to be in charge of anyone, ever.

Add to this, that programming is a creative process, akin to a craft, which requires an understanding of requirements, in order to produce software that meets those requirements, If those requirements are vague, or poorly expressed, or, as is all too often the case, partial or contradictory, then they won't be met to the expectations of the person expressing them. Add to this "magical thinking" that goes on from some people where, "make the computer do this thing that I can't be bothered to write requirements for," is the whole of the specification, and quite often we are set up to fail.

If, for example, you were to employ a craftsperson to make a piece of furniture for you, and gave them the only requirement that "it has to have things on top of it", then complain that they deliver you a standard flat-pack Ikea-style table when what you actually wanted was a French 16th century-style walnut desk, that is entirely on you for not expressing your requirements, not getting a written specification, with diagrams, schematics, and agreement on costs. Your bad, not the craft person's.

Then, of course, you get programmers who think they are more competent than they are. Again, the failing here is lack of peer-review, and an expectation that professional development happens organically, when you're not looking, and certainly isn't something that you should be paying for.

Anyway, it's pretty obvious that the failings of Horizon are primarily ones of stupidity, arrogance, and laziness. These failings didn't sit merely with the developers, who, it seems were either incompetent, or motivated somehow to write bad code (I suspect, paid by the line by managers who didn't understand what they were doing, hence overly verbose code); they were deeper organisational failings, not only within Fujitsu, and within the Post Office, but almost certainly, within those in government responsible for initiating, overseeing, and reviewing the overall project. Blame should be aimed at everyone who didn't do their job.

Re: It's still happening

It also has the smell of code that is written to be slower than the simpler, obvious, code. For example, to work around a timing bug that they didn't have the time, or skill, to correctly diagnose. Arguably, this is a much worse code smell, of course, and even further from "correct" than mere ignorance.

Re: It's still happening

It's not developers who gather requirements (or should not be) - that is essentially marking your own homework. That too many organisations fail to see the need for adequate project management, and business analysts is not the fault of developers. Claiming as much is exactly the sort of buck passing that you are alluding to that needs to stop.

Requirements first. Full, written, specifications of what the system must do, and all constraints (i.e. what it must not do). Failure to plan is planning to fail.

Apple has botched 3D for decades. So good luck with the Vision Pro, Tim

Re: Have you ever seen the ra.......hololens?

Shhhh. Don't mention the "B" word, you'll summon CodeJunky and the other mouth-frothers.

Re: Amiga had 3D capabilities ?

Elite demonstrated that the Amstrad CPC, the BBC micro, and the humble ZX Spectrum ALL had 3D capabilities.

Re: Not convinced

American pizzas are vile, and nothing like an actual pizza, like the ones you would get in Italy.

As for "doing something useful" with gunpowder; I'd politely disagree with the idea that warfare is useful.

Anything where the thing in front of your eyes doesn't correspond with the motion of your head, with close to zero latency is a recipe for motion sickness. Some people are more susceptible than others to this, but for a "virtual meeting" to work, you are going to need all participants using these or it is pointless (hint: it already is pointless). The technology for something that can do this, whilst fitting into the space occupied by a normal set of glasses, without weighing a considerable amount, or setting fire to your face is decades away, if physically possible at all. As for ski-goggle type devices, that's a hard no-thanks to sweaty panda-face.

Re: No Love For QuickDraw 3D?

The iPhone on the other hand is a gaming powerhouse.

I'm sorry, what? Does anyone actually use their phone for anything beyond trivial gaming? A small screen with no controller, beyond a virtual "thumb stick"? My experience of virtual gaming is one of simple throwaway time-waster games, which all seem to be full of unskippable ads that are touting other throwaway time-waster games full of unskippable ads?

Most serious gaming requires some sort of controller, be it a console-type controller, keyboard, or HOTAS joystick and throttle. Phones, on the other hand, fit in your pocket. The two do not make a natural marriage. I'm sure you can plug in a thumb-stick, or couple a controller by bluetooth, but who is carrying these things around with them? The lack of ability to properly control something severely limits the capabilities of the device for gaming, whatever its hardware capabilities. You are basically limited to "point-and-click" type games, or ones where you permanently have one digit smeared on the screen moving a figure about. Neither of these shouts out "gaming powerhouse".

France fines Amazon €32M for watching staff so much they'd have to 'justify each break'

Re: Going to try and be mostly Amazon free this year

The problem with eBay isn't just that they're as evil as Amazon, but that you have to wade through 6,000 pages of Chinesium priced at £0.01 + shipping that has nothing to do with your search criteria before finding something you might want, which is priced at 25% above the odds, because eBay and Paypal take a 20% cut.

Poor communication led to complete lack of communication

It wasn't a company whose name rhymes with Bujitsu, was it? The name of the app didn't rhyme with Borizon as well?

The fact that this whole thing was "a day's work" probably tells you all you need to know about how well it was implemented.

I've been involved in a lot of integration projects of varying complexity, and a day wouldn't be long enough to write down the basic requirements for agreement, let alone to develop a working (and robust) end-to-end solution.

Junior techie had leverage, but didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation

Re: Shaky location

I was going to say the same. In general, big shiny machines go in basements, not just because they are heavy, but because that's where the vibrations typically aren't. The same goes for temperature fluctuations. Anything doing imaging at high resolution, like an X-ray, or MRI, or CAT scanner doesn't like vibrations (although they are typically vibration-damped, especially the ones with big spinny bits in them like CAT scanners). The same goes for the machines found in university basements, like NMR machines, thin-film diamond vapour deposition thingummies and suchlike. Put them where the temperature is (more) stable, services are available, vibrations are minimal, and so on. Just not below the level of any sewerage services...

The minion should get the bollocking for putting it in a silly place in the first place. His manager should get the bollocking for not closely supervising the corrective action from a minion who has already demonstrated that they don't know what they are doing in regard to physics and heavy things. At the very least, there's a shared responsibility there.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Ah yes, the dialect that makes the word "pal" sound like the most threatening word in the English language.

Re: hexadecimal, DE AD BE EF

Apparently that pattern was used both for memory fill on Amigas, and for disk filling on some older IBM mainframes. One of the "cute words" you can spell with the first six letters of the alphabet.

Re: Potty mouthed password generator

Technically, base-64 is an encoding, not an encryption. It is trivial to un-encode, and is the standard encoding for images and attachments in emails.

The failure here, by the sounds of it, is some sort of "profanity filter" being applied to emails which doesn't distinguish between plain text parts and base-64 encoded parts, which in turn implies it was written very badly and doesn't actually know anything about the structure of emails, or look at the headers.

This does put me in mind of the possibly apocryphal tale of the vegetarian boss who was poking around with a disk editor, and was offended by an old machine's disk formatting which filled the newly formatted disk with the 64-bit word, which read, in hexadecimal, DE AD BE EF.

Re: Errors that *should* never occur

This is why standard practice is also to log it to a file, wherever possible. Of course, that can inadvertently lead to running out of disk space if you program logs it to a file and then continues, whilst stuck in an infinite loop. Cleverer developers will trap for this.

I seem to have missed the bit where anyone claimed "speach" was an English word. Now, let's talk about "doesent", and your lack of an apostrophe in the contractions of "cannot" and "it is".

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Re: So what was actually wrong?

No, it could have returned -d. The negation operator (the overloaded subtraction operator, equivalent to "subtract from zero") is unary, and I don't know of any programming language that does not have it.

There may be an argument, in modern languages, for writing -1*d for clarity, knowing that the compiler will optimise it to 0-d, but I'd say that any programmer who reads and does not understand what "-d" does should hand in their keyboard.

I'm all for political parties being only allowed campaigning grants, and not being organisations that are otherwise allowed to hold assets.

The problem then, of course, is how do you determine which is a genuine political party, worthy of £10M* for general election campaigning, and which is Fred Bloggs starting the Fred Bloggs Party to pay himself £10M to stand on a soap box and shout?

One solution might be to ban political campaigning altogether, and to only allow the publication of a manifesto at election time, to be printed and distributed equally for all parties, by a state functionary independent of government. Ideally, that would be a single document with the manifestos of all parties in it, with each individual one printed in a random order, so as not to favour one party over the others. That might be technically a bit difficult to do cheaply, though.

*Or other agreed amount. Obviously, this should be the same for all parties, to allow equal access to democracy.

I thought that particular injustice had recently been appealed to the supreme court (which we now have because it's important to be more like the US where their way of doing justice definitely isn't broken), and struck down, so that the government can't try to do this any more. I can't remember the actual case details, but I'm pretty sure it was some time in the last few months.

Re: So what was actually wrong?

I seriously doubt any of this code was written to be multi-threaded. The concept barely existed in most programming languages in the late '90s.

Re: So what was actually wrong?

So, how about:

PO Sends transaction including unique Id

HQ receives transaction

HQ updates account

HQ sends acknowledgement to PO

if PO doesn't receive acknowledgement, PO resends transaction

if HQ receives transaction with an ID it has already seen, it resends the acknowledgement to PO

Rinse and repeat until both the PO and HQ know they have synched the transaction.

It's not an insoluble problem, and it's not even one for which trivial solutions don't exist.

It's literally a dumbed-down version of how key exchange for every secure connection on the internet works.

Re: Lost in the post?

Remind us who the previous totally-not-crooked CEO of that company was? Oh yes, (now Baroness) Dido Harding. Why was she in the news, again?

One could be forgiven for making the, no doubt false, observation, that it's almost like there's some sort of revolving door between crooked business and crooked government...

There, I think I phrased that so that I don't get sued.

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

Quite. I reckon the actual number here is "one or two" over many decades, and at a time when their accounts were scrutinised much less, and it would be easier to "cook the books".

Sub-postmasters, under Horizon will have known that their accounts were audited, they had to submit them every month. They would have known that there was a very good chance of getting caught if they doctored them. Crooks (with the exception of very dumb ones) would have looked for an easier fiddle without the obvious prospects of getting caught.

The sheer number of prosecutions this threw up should have set alarm bells ringing that could be heard in France, and if there had been just one, there should have been an expectation that it would be investigated properly, including looking for evidence that the supposedly "missing" money had been spent, or sequestered somewhere. It's not as if people who embezzle money don't typically suddenly turn up with expensive new cars and designer clothes. The sort of person who does this is usually also the sort of person who likes to flaunt wealth.

But in that case, how would you balance the £5 in that other ledger, without the balancing entry for the goods those £5 were for. Did it get put against some sort of "service provision"? It sounds an awful lot like false accounting to me.

Of course, IANAL, and I am not an accountant either, thank $deity.

Only if I insist that her name actually is Venables, and that the poster who corrected me definitely wrong, and their error means they owe me £20k.

Instead of, you know, 'fessing up and correcting the record.

HP customers claim firmware update rendered third-party ink verboten

Re: S

Colour lasers aren't up to the quality of inkjets

I feel this is a statement that really needs qualifying. I've never seen an issue with colour printing on a laser printer, and the modern (actually LED, not laser) ones seem to be very good. They print at high DPI (600-1200 DPI is typical), don't seem to suffer from bleed, and as far as I can tell, ave decent colour reproduction. On the other hand, whenever I've printed something with a colour inkjet, I've been underwhelmed by the quality, it certainly hasn't appeared to be better.

Of course, if you want to print photographs, neither is the right solution. If you were to print out a photo on an inkjet onto standard printer 80gsm paper, it might look okay for five minutes. Don't let it get damp, though, because inkjet printouts really like to bleed. So, you've printed your nice family photo and put it in a frame. What does it look like 2 years later, when the UV in sunlight has bleached out the magenta dye more than the cyan and yellow ones? How yellow is the paper? Are you now considering that maybe you should have got it printed properly at a photo place on a dye sublimation printer that uses proper UV stable dyes, onto photo stock that doesn't degrade (as fast)? The same arguments go for laser printers too, but to a lesser extent (and toner isn't water-soluble). Because the dyes in toner are distributed throughout a layer that is fused onto the surface of the paper, they tend to be more UV stable, compared to a layer of water-based dye sprayed onto a surface, which is what an inkjet does. Because they are fused onto the paper, they also have to be thermally stable, unlike inkjet dyes.

If you buy a new car for circa £20K, you're not going to be too bothered whether it has £10 or £100 worth of petrol in it.

If you buy a new inkjet printer for £50, you might be more bothered whether it has £10 or £100 worth of ink in it.

See the difference?

As is the Brother LH-L3230CDW that is sat next to me. I sense FUD from an HP employee.

The knock-off cartridges I bought did need a bit of swearing at to get them to work, but they were very cheap and flimsy ones that didn't make good electrical contact with the fuser units. You do get what you pay for. Once installed and working, though: no problem.

Re: Look at the supply costs when choosing a printer

What do both Ricoh, and Brother have in common? They are Japanese companies, and reflect the Japanese cultural epic of making things that are designed to last. HP, and Lexmark on the other hand, are US companies, and reflect the US cultural ethic of making something that only just works, and then locking in the customer for as long as possible to make as much profit from them as possible. Samsung is a South Korean mega-corp, and also reflect the US ethic, having imported it and run with it with a vengeance.

Interestingly, Both Canon and Epson are also Japanese companies, and if they are as shitty as the US based ones, I am disappointed, but I just suppose it goes to show that greed truly is a multinational phenomenon.

I think that's an indictment on Cannon and Lexmark (I'd forgotten about them, probably through the trauma of owning one, once), not on colour laser printers in general. I'm very satisfied with my Brother one, which has much better network reliability than the old Samsung one which I had to swear at for half an hour to get it to reconnect to the home network every time the Vermin Media modem fell over, experienced a power cut or otherwise needed a reboot. Samsung are pretty much as guilty as HP concerning "DRM" and locking down their printers to "genuine" consumables, and if I'd known that at the time I bought it, I'd have swerved them too. I had a Lexmark inkjet once, and they are about the guiltiest in terms of selling the (incredibly flimsy) printer at a loss and stinging you for consumables. Cannon, I have no experience of, but it sounds like they are playing the same game as HP, Samsung, and Lexmark. By the way, the replacement printer might be cheaper than the set of inks, but the cartridges they come with are only part filled, so caveat emptor.

Re: S

Seriously, spend the £50 more and get a colour laser. You can easily print only in black and white/greyscale if you need to, without using the colour toner cartridges, and the black ones are usually cheaper (especially non-branded compatible ones). That way, you don't need a shitty inkjet for the occasional low-quality colour print, after half an hour of cleaning the dried ink out of the clogged nozzles.

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

A lot of red would be two cartridges; yellow and magenta. Just saying...

Re: Obsession with colour printing is the problem

A shout-out too, if you do need or want colour, for the Brother HL-L3230CDW which I bought a year ago to replace an ancient failing Samsung colour laser that had seen around a decade of service (it was due a replacement of both the main image belt, and fuser roll, and door and cartridge sensors were starting to fail, so it was more economical to replace). It seems you can now buy this one for around £160.

It is now on its first full set of toner cartridges, after exhausting the partly-filled "demo" ones it ships with, so the annual running costs are about £50, which is less than the price of a single ink cartridge for some ink-jets.

Re: Automatic "upgrades"?

Absolutely, 100%. Find which machine is the source IP and wipe it, you may well have one or more rootkits on your machines, or otherwise compromised hardware, and are possibly subject to a state-level cyber-attack, for which this bears a signature.