It was not so many years ago that printing anything from your computer gave a very poor and unsatisfactory result. Printers were still being developed and most printed only in black and white.
They still cost an arm and a leg to buy even though their output was poor but they used ribbons for printing and the cost of ink was a small consideration.
These days the inkjet printer has changed everything and we can now print out top quality pictures and text that is as good as anything a print shop could do. The problem now is the cost of ink. While inkjet printer are cheap to buy the ink we use in them is very expensive and it only takes a few full page colour images to empty one or more of your inkjet cartridges.
Fortunately the size of this market of people who want cheaper inkjet supplies has led to a whole industry of compatible inkjet cartridge manufacturers appearing on the scene. I have been using these alternative suppliers for years and have been very happy with the savings in price and the quality of the printing. The printer manufacturers may not like it as it reduces the profits they make from supplying very expensive ink and they say that the quality of ink is much worse from the compatible inkjet suppliers but then they would say that wouldn’t they.
Personaly I have used compatible inkjet cartridges for years and will continue to do so while the branded manufacturers continue to charge such ridiculous prices for their official cartridges.
It is strange how some memories stick in our minds for years after the event and yet others have gone the very next day. I remember as a child some four decades ago being in the playground of my school talking to another boy. Looking up at the sky he pointed to a contrail running across the clear blue sky. “Do you know what that is?” he asked, clearly wanting to demonstrate hi knowledge. “Of course” I replied, “It’s a skyscraper.” Now I may be wrong but I have a feeling that I knew the word skyscraper from somewhere and instantly assumed that must be what it was. Quite an interesting idea I think, as I look back at it now, but wrong, of course, and the other boy was very pleased to show how much more knowledgeable he was by explaining it was the vapor trail of an airliner. That was forty years or so ago and on every single day since, at every hour of every day there have been planes criss-crossing our skies until one day last week when everything came to a halt.
Only a handful of scientists would even have been aware of the potential problems a volcano in Iceland might cause to the travel plans of people throughout Europe but cause problems it did and because air travel has become so normal a thing to do it was not just intrepid adventurers who were caught out. Families, groups of schoolchildren on trips, businessmen,sports personalities and entertainers were all caught out by this unexpected chaos.
It could have been a lot worse. It could have been that the first we knew about the problem would have been planes falling out of the sky as the volcanic dust stopped their engines. It looks now as though the risk was not quite as serious as first thought but given the choice I would rather be stuck in an airport for 6 days than scattered as body parts across the burning wreckage of a crashed aircraft.
Expect the unexpected and most times you will be wrong but come the day you were right and you will be glad you planned for it. We live in a very complicated, interconnected and fragile society where everything depends on everything else to keep working as expected. The ash cloud from the volcano in Iceland caused chaos throughout Europe but it demonstrates that we cannot and should not take technology for granted. Things can go wrong and there may be lessons we need to learn.
The technology that keeps our society humming smoothly along seems to be pretty robust but then so did the system of for air travel. In a society that is so dependent on technology we cannot simply assume everything will carry on working day after day and we need to plan for the most unlikely situations.
Imagine, if you will, that something occurs somewhere on the internet. The internet was designed to be quite literaly bomb-proof but if a virus was maliciously placed there or some other problem that nobody ever thought possible occurred we would all suffer. In a society that is so dependent on the internet this would cause massive disruption to the daily lives of millions of people. It would cause major disruption and many businesses would be unable to operate without it. Imagine that small mishap were to last for several days or even weeks. Most business are dependent to some extent or another on the internet these days. Many of the airlines that suffered recently are totally dependent on the internet for bookings and their business would come to a grinding halt. Anyone who uses VOIP internet phone systems would lose their phone connections to the world and everything would just stop working.
It may never happen but we surely need some sort of backup plan and the way everything is internet based these days does make the assumption that it will always be there. The lesson of the Icelandic volcano is that perhaps we should not always assume everything will run smoothly. Even if it did take forty years for those vapour trails to stop appearing in the sky it did eventually happen and nobody really gave it much thought before it did.
