As an aside, for a "don't print much" point of view, 12,000 pages is a long time (I, for example, print about 100 or so pages a year, which would give me a lot of time with my hypothetical Brother printer).

It's:

A) A way of getting people over that "How much for an official replacement cart‽" hump, which often causes them to buy 'fake' ahem carts, or a new printer

B) A way of getting people who "don't think they need a printer" to get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front.

A system that addresses one point is still capable of addressing a second - extracting a maximum 'value' from their customers.

> get a printer knowing what their costs will actually be up front

I'm sorry, but a company that changes the price of the contract is the complete - ideologically and practically - opposite of "knowing [your] costs up front".

I agree that I can't predict the costs exactly - but ballpark is good enough. Like cutting the cord. You don't know how your cable price might change, Netflix prices might increase, your provider might shift cost to your broadband to compensate - but for now it works out and presuming nothing major changes, you'll be fine with incremental stuff and maybe make another bold decision in a few years.

Not when it's at the cost of a customer's rights. Between abusing the DMCA to restrict what ink cartridges can be used and actively changing a "free" ink program after advertising that it's for the lifetime of the printer.

There's absolutely nothing we should be praising HP for here.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang

Programming ligatures are one thing. Your IDE manages them silently and transparently. They are client-side tech, not part of the actual data exchange. Teammates who find that they hurt code readability, rather than help it, are free to not use them in their own IDE.

But going out of one's way with escape codes or whatever, to insert a poorly-legible replacement for "?!", is simply awful.

I put it in my post, as I quite like the interrobang and will never pass up the chance to use it.

It's entirely legible, just uncommon - and "?!"?! just seems insert new character that represents gipping.

Is it "?!" or "!?" or "!?!" to indicate outrage, query and analysis, resulting in heightened outrage. Why not just add an f'in emoticon (shaped by you gurning at your iphone) seethes :)

Other countries and languages (Japanese, in particular) give the exclamation point the priority.

As a side note, I can't recall ever seeing the ligature of ?! before today. It feels like one of those typesetting relics we're better off not using.

I don't see anything wrong with the interrobang, although I don't think I'd go out of my way to use it, simply because it calls rather undue attention to itself. I wouldn't say that about most other ligatures, even some relatively uncommon ones; I'm sure that most people read text in set in Chaparral, for instance, without ever noticing that "Th" is a ligature in that typeface, because it looks optically correct in the same way the near-universal "fi" and "fl" ligatures do.

For the record, I can't find any supporting evidence about the ordering of punctuation marks; both "?!" and "!?" are non-standard in formal English, and the advice I've seen online -- and in the Chicago Manual of Style I have on my bookshelf I just checked -- suggest that an "exclamatory question" just uses the exclamation point. It's just that "?!" is more common when it gets used. (A question mark comes after an ellipsis not because of punctuation priority, but simply because the "..." indicates elided words, but doesn't replace the terminating punctuation mark.)

That's a matter of font choice, which (for HN, which doesn't go out of its way to stomp on user defaults) is, like the use of programming ligatures you have tried to distinguish on this basis, a client-side user decision.

Which characters are acceptable then? Only ASCII?

You can type it in X11 (and Wayland too IIUC) with Compose, !, ? (or ?, !).

Not a glowing example of DDG there.

You can also search “!s ‽” and get this: https://startpage.com/do/metasearch.pl?query=%E2%80%BD, but then you have to click “More” to see the full first paragraph of the Wikipedia page, and only then will it reveal the link to the full article there. The rest of the page is just clutter to me.

My highly used $30 Canon printer is in its 4th year, and 3rd cartridge. I’m well ahead of where I would have been with the HP (I print about 3-4 pages a day, so I’d probably have had to shell out for the $5 or $12 plan).

Also, much like most subscription services, even if the math works out, it only does until the next change in the pricing plan.

1. Buy an inkjet and pray that it prints every time you need to use it.

2. Spend a little more for a lazer and never worry again.

I've been using cheap laser printers for many years and will never go back to inkjets! But my needs are very simple, not trying to print photos.

>

> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.

>

> At $1/mo, it's going to take the rest of your life for the price to work out in favor of the Brother.

What? At $1/mo, it is going to take under six years for the price to work out in favor of the Brother. Are you suggesting the person you're responding to has six years to live?

At that rate of printing, ink is going to dry up in the headers. Which would require running the cleaning procedures. Which use a lot of ink.

Ink printers are a really bad proposition.

Also, it comes with toner. Just a starter cartridge, granted, but if you're not printing much it will last years.

[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/product/B00NQ1CLTI

Thank you, that's exactly what I needed: a reliable compact duplex printer (to carry most of the burden of the old color MFP that now jams every second page ...)

Edit: Seems to have been replaced by the HL-L2310D, or HL-L2350DW with WiFi

I don't do any maintenance, and I don't worry about the ink drying out.

I wouldn't take a one-time payment of $70 in exchange for having to do regular printer ink maintenance for 6 years, so it makes sense to pay an extra $70 to avoid that. Paying the extra $70 makes even more sense if you factor in the fact that I'd actually have saved $72 in monthly payments over that time period.

https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/733081/Brother-Monoch...

I have not yet hit the drum-replacement point on my Brother color printer yet so we'll see where that goes.

$1/mo = $12/y

(7 * 12) + 30 = 114

Do you know something about the rest of my life that I need to know? How much time do I actually have left!?

6 years is not a very long time. I've had my Brother laser printer for a decade now, am as happy as the day I bought it, and can easily imagine using it for another decade or more.

We need to rid ourselves of the mindset that electronic devices are inherently short-lived.

That $30 HP isn't going to last forever either, and will need periodic replacement.

Those $30 printers either don't come with ink cartridges or they come with very small "starter" cartridges, good for a few dozen pages at the most.

> The cheapest Brother laser printer is $100 + ink.

Toner, actually. The $100 Brother printer does come with a "starter" cartridge but it prints 700 pages. So even if you threw the printer away after the starter cartridge ran out, you'd still be paying $0.17 per sheet as opposed to the $30 inkjet's initial cost of $1.25 per sheet for the first cartridge.

If we're talking refills then, I can buy an aftermarket toner cartridge for my laser printer for under $20 and that yields 2600 pages. ($0.008/sheet). Black HP 67XL ink (240 pages) works out to $0.10/sheet. The laser is an order of magnitude less in both scenarios.

The drum unit in mine did start going bad after 3-4 years. I bought a new drum on Amazon for $20, far less than what I originally paid for the printer. It has been going strong for a few years since.

Sure, I wouldn't print 500 pages of B&W text on instant ink, but when printing things that require color, it's not ridiculously expensive.

Their most cost effective $25/700 pages plan will cost you over $425 to print that much assuming you use up the entire quota each month.