The article is wrong. They stopped their miners and thus freed up electricity to be used in other more acutely important industries. Bitcoin mining is very predictable and can be turned on and off at a moments notice. It works great as a grid stabilizer.
By making agreements with miners ERCOT can sell electricity cheaply during times of excess (where energy simply just goes into the ground) and in situations like these, they ask the miners to turn off their machines, preventing large spikes in electricity prices due to lack of supply. The question that should be asked is how much electricity did ERCOT sell to the miners?
Absolutely brilliant way to incentivice the build-out of cheap energy sources (wind, solar), since you always have a "buyer of last resort" - the bitcoin miners.
I was always got a kick of out of the swimming sections simply being teleporters. Step on top of the water a get teleported to a room filled with water and then swim to the top of the room to get teleported back to the area around the pool.
This article is missing one of ChromeOS's main advantages. Ease of management (provisioning, updating, installing software, group policy like configuration, etc). If MS doesn't address that then this will flop as bad as RT and S.
I've seen Windows shops with entire teams dedicated to managing the Windows environment (not including break/fix) and I've seen environments with thousands of Chromebooks that are managed by one person (and that's not even a full time job).
MS is making some progress with Azue AD and InTune, but it's not there yet. Hopefully, by time this comes out they will have those other pieces better refined so it can all come together.
"Instead it’s rote learning some particular IDE without real understanding."
The reason for this is that very few of the people doing the teaching of computing concepts in high school understand themselves and all they can do is follow the script in the textbook. Teaching degrees focus more on the concept of teaching than the content of teaching. I have first hand seen teachers with years of experience "teaching Word" get lost and come to a full stop the second something doesn't line up exactly with the book.
Using a computer does not translate into understanding a computer. I know very intelligent teachers, some with advanced degrees (Master's and Doctorate's), that have trouble navigating to a website that doesn't start with www and are unable to distinguish between a url and an email address. All of the letters and symbols (real strange ones like :, /, ., or @) might as well be part of a magical incantation that teleports words, pictures, and videos to their screens.
At $189 for the computer they can afford to have a computer that is managed and always works and a bbc micro or raspberry pi for the student to hack on and tear up.
I believe blocking it is an option. Can't do developer mode if you're enrolled and they can force enrollment on a device so if you try to wipe it and access developer mode it refuses and forces you back to enrollment.
I hear some schools used to send students home with backpacks full of hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks even though they knew every book wasn't going to come back. It's called acceptable loss and is a cost of doing business. You can't deny all students access to resources just because there are a few bad apples.
The 11 is solid, but a little thick and chunky. The 13 is one of the nicest laptops I've used. I mean its no MacBook, but for $429 you get 12 hours of battery and a 1920x1080 screen.
I didn't see any mention of how they provided power back into the grid? Do they own their own power generation plant that they shared with ERCOT?