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Comment Re:Anything you can do Argon do better (Score 1) 60

Nitrogen is 300x cheaper than helium, so someone must really have thought about why they would need to use the latter.

Compared to the rest of the costs of the systems which use it, the helium cost is not a big problem. It's less than the labor cost of keeping the machine ready for use. An MRI uses over 100 MWh a year, the machine costs millions to start with, the personnel cost is hundreds per hour... The machine uses roughly 100-200 liters of helium, which is now $30-50/liter. So $3000 to $10000 for a full fill. Boil-off rates range from 0 to 0.2%/day. A refill occurs every 6-24 months. So we're looking at a max of about $20000/year for the helium, or about 33 1/3 days of personnel costs.

(These numbers were pulled from various obviously AI-authored pieces on MRI refill costs, so they might be fairly bullshit-ish, but since multiple articles were around the same numbers I've used them here anyway.)

Comment Re:It's funny (Score 1) 33

By the same token, management clearly either didn't understand or was unwilling to sign off on a meaningful replacement program. For that you don't just install and pray, you study what each department's users are actually doing on a daily basis and then you test the new software to determine a) whether it can actually do those things or not and b) how they are done if so. Part of that for example is to check all the templates being used to see if they will work, which they clearly didn't do here.

Office is literally designed to be hard to emulate, the so-called "standards" are bad jokes which aren't actually standards because you can't actually follow them and get an proper result. They're malicious. Not taking this into account when attempting migration is incompetent.

Comment Re:Sociopathic oligarchy doing it's thing (Score 1) 45

We're addicted for the simple reason plastic is a very versatile material. Try this, look around your life at all the plastics and ask yourself, what will I replace this with?

As I look around I see a mixture of things, some things which would be very difficult to replace, and some things which would be very easy to replace, and some things where they would still need some plastic but they could use a lot less. The rest could be made of wood or metal. Mostly I propose using aluminum because it's extremely recyclable.

Comment Re:Unprepared pilot project (Score 1) 33

Don't be obtuse, companies provide training for office applications through contracted training portals. I've "attended" video trainings on Excel and Word. If they changed to LO tomorrow I'd be fine, but I'd still have to figure out how to do those things again. And some users would not be fine.

Comment Re:Never will (Score 1) 33

There is no tool that fully replaces MS Office in standards and features.

Office doesn't do standards, really. Microsoft's standard OOXML contains numerous statements which basically say "do what Word does here" so the software Microsoft Word is basically part of the standard. In a sane world this would mean that Microsoft would be forced to open source it, but we don't live there.

Comment Re:Sociopathic oligarchy doing it's thing (Score 2) 45

The oil problem isn't one problem or one industry, it's our entire way of life.

When you make fuel you get other crap out that's not good for making fuel. We make plastic mostly out of that. So being addicted to oil is being addicted to plastic is being addicted to oil again.

In order to reduce our oil consumption we also have to reduce our use of plastic. The plastics industry is not interested in that. The oil industry is also not interested in that. Either has immense influence, together they are titan.

Comment Re:Unprepared pilot project (Score 1) 33

IME Scribus starts crashing when you get anywhere near book length. Like around 100 pages it started to explode for me. Their official answer was to carve your document up into smaller pieces. I went back to InDesign immediately.

TBF this was a little while ago so it might not be completely worthless now like it was then

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