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Comment Re:Compatibility is always going to be a problem.. (Score 2) 118

Simply stating: We Do Not Accept DOCx or XLSx formats, forces compliance. Since MS can produce ODF (allegedly), that's how you get compliance.

There's always going to be a few people who won't do it, mostly because they're afraid to upset some important customer. How you get around that isn't obvious. However, you can start by making it a requirement that anything that comes in that's in an MS format is sent back with some boilerplate added telling the sender why it's rejected and a list of acceptable formats. Making that automatic, so that the chicken droids can't ignore the policy may be all you need.

Comment Re:Non-lethal weapons must be tested on the promot (Score 2) 141

Back when I was in Boot Camp (USN) we were given gas masks one afternoon and herded into a sealed chamber to see for ourselves that they work. Once we'd had time to try them out, we were ordered to remove them, and find out for ourselves what a low-concentration of teal gas was like, followed by having us exit the chamber at double-time to help clear it out of our eyes. Some things you can try out for yourself, others are too hard hitting for that.

Comment Re:If no one is responsible, then CEO is responsib (Score 1) 78

Yes I was in the Navy. If the helmsman and the duty office stick the ship on a sandbar the Captain still gets the blame.

And now you know why the Captain spends so much time on the bridge at sea. BTW, every time the Captain comes on the Bridge or leaves it is logged in case it later becomes important. (I was in the Navy too.)

Comment Re:A script isn't an alibi (Score 1) 72

Yeah the cops need to take this one seriously.

You're making a common mistake here: the cops don't have any authority to prosecute criminals or to decide how, or even if the perps get punished. That's up to the court system and to what the local laws say. Yes, I agree that the perps here need to be punished, but let's be realistic about who gets to do it.

Comment Send in the devices (Score 2) 152

not sure how K12 works today considering I last worked for one in 2017 pre-COVID and only for one year, and I don't know how much of this if anything is funded by this plan, but I can attest that there is a ton of waste back then.

1) iPad's galore. Every other classroom had a cart with 30 iPads in them. Most of them filled with learning apps with dubious uses. They were a pain to administer and broke constantly because kids dropped them and even the rugged cases couldn't save them. Although I've heard they switched to Chromebooks because their cheaper and more rugged since then. Speaking of Chromebooks...

2) Chromebooks galore. My Cousin, at a different school, were given Chromebooks post-COVID. She literally has a pile of them in her room because she gets one every other year and the school doesn't want them back. Her mother gave them to me to figure out what to do with them since the school won't even take them to recycle. All of them were unregistered from the school org and I Powerwashed them with no ties back to the school org once I updated them and put them back online. All of them still have 2-5 years of support left. I know Chromebooks are relatively cheap especially when bought in bulk but this seems to be a massive waste to me.

3) Craptastic desktops. Back to the school I worked for. They had ancient desktops that were easily 10+ years old in 2017 and claimed they didn't have the money to replace them. I asked them at the time why don't they replace them with Chromeboxes (or use Cloudready, which Google eventually bought to make Chromebook Flex) since the school was a google shop (they were on the Google for Education system at the time) and their answer was because they needed MSOffice even though none of the kids used Office because they were on Google and were using Google Docs and Classroom for everything. They were too afraid that if they dropped MS that some software would come down the line that was Windows only, and they would be screwed. I can understand that at that time, but it was getting very clear that K12 across the board was going full web based and anything would be better than running Windows 10 on 2GB ram systems on low end Core 2 Duo's.

4) Wifi everywhere. Every single classroom had an AP. This makes sense considering the iPad's everywhere. It didn't make sense to me that it was used so inefficiently at the time. I remember having to run 4 network lines to a classroom 200 feet from the switch to temporarily hook up 3 computers and a phone for a room that already had wifi in it when wifi USB dongles were $20 each and the phones supported wifi connectivity. Students had access to them and would hook their phones to them to watch TikTok all day.

5) Smart boards everywhere. Every classroom had Promethean smart boards. There were projector based connected to a laptop the teacher had. Useful but were very expensive and failure prone. They constantly needed realigned and the projectors would "star-out" since they were all DLP projectors with that faulty TI chip.

6) Bandwidth Galore. The school system I worked for had a 1gbps link at the time which was symmetrical. The busiest we would see it was roughly 750mbps around 11AM to 2PM and vary rarely peaked beyond a minute or two. They were planning to up it to 2gbps but I left there before that happened. Keep in mind that most kids at that point did nothing but Youtube and Tiktok if you put a screen in front of them so even with that amount of Bandwidth usage it never seemed to be an issue. You would be amazed how much you can stretch 1gbps when you actively manage bandwidth correctly.

As for Cellular access points (Might make sense in some rural areas but would probably just put it in a Chromebook or tablet.) and Wifi on school buses (Why? So Billy can Doomscroll TikTok because he ran out of data?) can't comment on that since those weren't around when I worked in K12 (I'm guessing it was a COVID thing) but I don't see why you would need this overlap when there is the subsidized low income broadband initiatives already in place that's supposed to fill in these gaps.

Comment Re:They should migrate away from the internet (Score 2) 105

If these were highly remote locations and getting a human to them in time to fix a problem was going to be a challenge, then maybe remote controllability would be important. But this is a damn supermarket; there's going to be somewhere there or nearby constantly. Dear Lord.

There's no reason that there can't be a thermometer and controls built in, and only accessible from the back. Add on a clipboard with pages printed with lines for date, time, temperature, initials and you have a way to keep track of the temperature without outside access. Add on controls to adjust things and you've got everything you need.

Submission + - Margaret Hamilton Dies - Led Apollo Software Effort (mit.edu)

Veeru writes: Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA’s Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died. She was 90.

Comment Re:Countries that do not change clocks use ST (Score 1) 282

I remember reading a history book about the Battle of Midway (No, I don't remember the name any more.) that mentioned that the IJN ran on Tokyo Time no matter where they were. As the fleet included transports carrying soldiers to invade Midway after "dealing" with the USN, the soldiers, mostly poorly educated peasants, were left wondering why the sun was rising at 3 AM. Now, imagine what it would be like for children who never bothered to go to school if we try year-round DST again. That's not an argument against the idea, just an observation about one of the side effects of doing so.

Comment Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican) (Score 2) 63

if there's two issues I've found where Red and Blue agree. It's No Flock and No Datacenters.

Me personally, I don't have too many problems with Datacenters outside of where they put them and what they do with them.

1) Put them in Brownfields. In the US there's over 400000+ industrial classified brownfields with somewhere around 5-15 million acres depending on who you ask. Most of these brownfields have access to large amounts of electricity and water and since industries already make a lot of noise most communities next to brownfields will either not notice or care and would welcome any job growth even if it's small long term. Subsidizing datacenters on greenfields just sacrifices more farmland and forest for industrial expansion that will most likely be a brownfield within the next 20-30 years when the speculation money dries up.

2) Ban Mining Datacenters. China Banned them so all of the Yuan billionaires are building them here now. All they are are slot machines that eat wattage instead of money. They serve no constructive purpose and should be banned before they run out of control and waste energy and computing power that could be used for more constructive computing purposes.

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