My point is that every company is a tech company.

It’s easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that’s not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.

Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.

It’s very much the Oracle model.

A long time ago, Oracle DB could handle workloads much, much larger than any of their competitors. If you needed Oracle, none of the others were even a possibility. There are even tales that it was a point of pride for some execs.

Then Oracle decided to put the screws to their customers. Since they had no competition, and their customers had deep pockets (otherwise they wouldn’t have had such large databases), they could gouge all they wanted. They even got new customers, because they had no competition.

Fast forward and there are now a number of meaningful competitors. But it’s not easy to switch to a different DB software, and there are a ton of experienced Oracle devs/DBAs out there. There are very few new projects built using Oracle, but the existing ones will live forever (think COBOL) and keep sucking down licensing fees.

VMware thinks they are similarly entrenched, and in some cases they’re right. But it’s not the simple hypervisor that everyone is talking about. That can easily be replaced by a dozen alternatives at the next refresh. Instead it’s the extended stack, the APIs and whatnot, that will require significant development work to switch to a new system.

Often there are contracts. Sometimes for a very long time, often multi-year. There are sometimes escape clauses (like a morality clause for a spokesperson), but these aren’t easy to invoke.

I suspect many of them are up for annual review/renewal, when they can be terminated without penalty. It might also just be an attempt to get better terms.

Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

Uber’s insurance is pretty bad. Many get the additional coverage from their regular insurer anyway because of this. That coverage also (usually) applies to this situation as well.

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

“handle” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The signs are already there that all of these edge cases will just be programmed as “safely pull over and stop until conditions change or a human takes control”. Which isn’t a small task in itself, but it’s a lot easier than figuring out to continue (e.g.) on ice.

Even at stores that have this feature, I rarely see people use it. It’s clearly not an experience that people flock to.

OTOH, on the rare occasion I’ve visited a Walmart in the past 10 years, I have a 100% rate of checkout taking an absurdly long time. Everyone there just seems to accept it like they have no choice.

As long as it’s advertised openly, I don’t see a big problem with it. It would probably be sold as a discount for shopping at slower times, though. It’s a tried-and-true method of smoothing congestion.

Assuming a store with 9a-9p hours (every day), a 9-5 worker can shop 44 hours in a week, vs 40 they cannot. But that doesn’t particularly line up with the busy hours. Around here, after 7 on weekdays and 5 on weekends tend to get pretty slow.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

https://www.aamc.org/news/press-releases/new-aamc-report-shows-continuing-projected-physician-shortage

As someone in IT, I can tell you that it is incredibly hard to fill most of our common sysadmin roles. We don’t even get applicants with the desired qualifications (SCCM, Azure, VMware, MS SQL, Power Shell, etc. Not in the same role, but these common skills). This is despite the fact that we’re competitive on pay, allow fully remote, and are a household name (fortune 100). I sincerely doubt that we’re alone on that.

As for your point about unemployed STEM grads, it’s entirely possible that they are in an area that has a surplus. But it’s also possible they are inexperienced (most employers want experience), or they don’t know how to connect with the employers looking for their skill set.

I’m not saying that I’m sold on the idea. Just that it’s not entirely clear what the impact would be, nor that it would be a net negative.

I’m not sure I agree with your last point. While skilled foreign labor (H1B or similar) certainly drives down wages, part of that is because of the restrictions on employment. If you need to be sponsored, it is very hard to get the prevailing local wage for your skills. Green cards open that up and allow proper competition.

The biggest argument is that foreign-born workers are willing to accept lower wages for the same work and the same conditions. This is exactly what happened during the days of “No Irish Need Apply”. The big difference here is that it would only apply to college graduates. But is it actually wrong to do? It’s similar to a bad union, where people feel entitled to the higher pay simply because they were here first.

While it would still be better to encourage and grow our own people to develop the skills needed, this is a much more complicated proposal. We have a distinct lack of skilled workers, and in a variety of types/areas. This could help with that need.

I fully agree on the rest though. Fuck Trump and everyone around him.

Will this help users on Bing with their number 1 desired search destination, Google?

Or their 7th most common destination, Bing?

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/1/22703263/google-lawyer-argues-bing-used-find-google-top-search-defaults

Not necessarily. They could split the video in advance, assuming the ads will always be at the same point. Even if not, they could still use the direct, unaltered source with a range. The big challenge would be keeping it all synced, which I think is safe to say that they will get right.

But even if it did need to be transcoded, YouTube automatically transcodes every single video uploaded, multiple times. They are clearly not afraid of it.

I said nothing of the sort, and have no idea where you got that idea. All I said was that marketing claims are separate from the contract.

However, this thread is clearly not interested in any actual exchange of ideas or information, so I will no longer be taking part. Go ahead and downvote.

1. False advertising has nothing to do with breach of contract. Completely separate sections of law.

2. Nothing offered in perpetuity will stand up in court. You can argue about reasonable terms, but it can never be forever.

3. Marketing gets you into the contract. The contract holds the actual terms that both (or all) parties are bound to.

I would be surprised if this goes anywhere meaningful. Those were marketing promises, not contract terms. I noticed the promotion ended just over 2 years before the price hike, indicating that everyone had completed their contract. Once the contract is over, either side can walk away, or renegotiate terms.

It negates the point of a contract. What kind of contract even has a term of length without a set price?

“Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.