The criticality of any given service is inversely proportional to how recently released was the technology that it runs on.

This, if you see some ancient machine sitting there humming, don’t even make eye contact with that mf, don’t even think about it. In fact, try to minimize your time in the same room so when it eventually goes tits up, you don’t get blamed.

I would watch the absolute fuck out of this to the point that my family would be so fucking sick of it.

Are you sure it isn’t just that he’s Dutch?

Been workshopping a Terminator 2 one-shot in Fate, might drop in there!

FUCKIN SICK

Yes, actually. I probably could have stepped up to be an admin, but tbh, my plate is already overfull.

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Just wanted to say that I took your advice, and posted an update to this thread. It turns out that moving to LibreOffice would have virtually no benefit in any regard whatever according to the city IT manager. Thanks for the advice!

Follow up: I called the IT dept and spoke with them. Apparently they already get the “low cost” licenses with Microsoft for users who don’t need access to office (which is the overwhelming majority of them) and just basically get them an email address. The cost increase is really down to the city having added more staff, which means more licenses, since they’ve got a fixed rate contract locked in with MS. It sounds like moving non-power-users into LibreOffice would have negligible benefit and cause more disruption than not. Ah, well, swing and a miss. Thanks for the support, everyone!

Oh, yikes, that’s problematic. I was afraid of that. It really doesn’t feel good to look at that and say “and therefore, sorry firefighters, we need to pay Microsoft half a million a year to let us have Excel”, but I guess I get it.

Nah, the cops are losing some positions too. Our council is pretty good compared to some others, (and, honestly, our PD is pretty good too. They’ve worked really hard to keep a good working relationship with the community) but they’re definitely hitting a bunch of stuff that nobody wants to see cut either. It’s pain across the board. I guess if we have to make cuts, that’s how to make them, but I’d like it if Microsoft took one for the team too, here.

Again, I specifically want to leave the power users alone, but my experience in business/industry is that 90% of folks with Excel on their machine don’t even know how to write a function. There’s no sense paying lavish amounts of cash for those particular people to have Excel when LibreOffice will likely suit their needs.

Those are great points, it’s almost always better to walk in the light. I think I got too attached to the validity of my idea. I’ll reach out to them and see if someone can have that discussion.

Is LibreOffice calc much worse? And, again, I feel that most users of office suite software are fairly basic users. I want to specifically leave MS Office power users alone, let them keep their licenses, but if people are just using the basic features, there’s no reason for us to be paying outrageous amounts for MS Office licenses for them. Yeah, I’m aware that this is going to increase the load on the IT dept, but I’m hoping that the targeted user base are basic enough users that they can be onboard with an orientation video for most cases.

Hey, guys, I know I’m too late to the party, but my city just announced that they spent half a million dollars of Microsoft office licenses last year. I think that’s nuts. I want to try to persuade them to switch non-power-users to LibreOffice suite and reduce their office licenses by over 90%. Do you have any advice, examples, or selling points that can help me persuade them to cut Microsoft office licenses instead of literal firefighters? And, seeing as this is late, I’d welcome anybody answering. Thanks!

At first, I came here to talk shit, but it turns out that the music companies are one of the few sectors more evil than telecoms. I’m pulling for Cox.

FTA: The user considered it was the unpaid volunteer coders’ “job” to take his AI submissions seriously. He even filed a code of conduct complaint with the project against the developers. This was not upheld. So he proclaimed the project corrupt. [GitHub; Seylaw, archive]

This is an actual comment that this user left on another project: [GitLab]

As a non-programmer, I have zero understanding of the code and the analysis and fully rely on AI and even reviewed that AI analysis with a different AI to get the best possible solution (which was not good enough in this case).

It really, really, really depends on numbers. You get obviously more people with long guns (not even brandishing, just having them sling over) than there are cops who firmly let them know that they should get scarce, then yeah, that’s exactly what will happen. Cops have been taught to “go home at the end of the day”, whatever it takes, and that typically means eight of them shooting one suspect 200 times. That math changes REAL quick when it’s an armed crowd.

Yeah, peaceful resistance will probably be handled a bit differently by the cops if everyone in the crowd has a shotgun over their shoulder. Without even brandishing or using them, just knowing that they’re there changes the equation a lot. Reminds me of that part of Winter on Fire (a documentary on the 2014 Maidan protests) when the protestors have had enough and declare that they’re going to march on the capitol building as armed protestors, and the president can choose to be there or not. After months of shooting and killing unarmed protestors, the cops fucking bailed immediately.