What switches does it have? Are they lubed? Are the stabilisers modded? Does it have case foam or other case mods? What type of mount is it? What about the plate? Swing weight and force curve? Linear, clicky or tactile? Silent, oring, ball bearing mod?

There are so many different variables and that’s before you even get to layout changes it’s perfectly possible to build your own keyboard that is perfect or close to it for you.

I have keyboards with different layouts and typing feel that I pick for how I want my typing to feel on any given day. It’s no different from a guitarist having multiple different guitars chasing a different feel and sound.

Not everyone is going to appreciate it and that’s perfectly fine, but there are significant differences with the right changes during a build.

They used it to give away Teams to existing customers then force through price rises later by adding functionality behind additional licenses. They also leveraged Teams to sell a significant amount of conference room equipment that was running Skype Teams. Its likely Microsoft will start to use the embedded Teams usage to push up prices of their core M365 licenses, E3 and E5.

Its also heavily tied into Entra, Exchange, and SharePoint Online as its really three raccoons in a trench coat so its hard to fully use Teams without using those products, which must also be licensed, usually via a E3 or E5.

The timing of it being coincidentally when COVID hit meant everyone wanted a chat and meeting product, so good fortune paid a part as well. Also a lot of organizations wanted off Skype right around this period, so really fortunate timing.

Please tell me she is on course to lose her seat

Pretty sure he pays cash or close to it rather than a traditional leveraged buy out. He normally only buys struggling or collapsed brands he can get cheap like Wiggle.

Ashley wants two main things out of his purchases, the brand name to slap on a web store with any head start it can give into running a business in that sector, and the retail space. Any decent retail space he wants to flip into residential property while stripping any fixtures and fittings of any value, anything else will be gone or rebooted into the lowest common denominator for that area.

Exactly

While I like the ideas with screens, and fixed buttons even more so, they haven’t gone with them despite the tech being available for a considerable time. I do wonder if its mostly down to how people use them rather than a limitation of the tech itself. Watch how many people nearly swipe or even do scrape exit parking machines, even simple parking meters stop working, people struggle to use the ones inside, then add in weather damage/proofing and vandalism and I would guess thats a big part of it. As its often a closed queue system any problem becomes a major issue almost instantly.

Renault tried leasing the batteries in EV in an effort to lower the initial cost of the car while increasing their tail for future owners. They abandoned it only a few years in as it was a disaster for their used market that got worse the older the car got as nobody wanted the ongoing cost. Only the initial owner saved money, and only if they managed to use PCP finance with a balloon set before Renault realised that the battery leased cars would be worth significantly less.

Renault also did not like that with older cars they would be liable for the battery replacement far sooner than they planned as they (initially) had a higher percentage unusable before they had to do a free replacement vs. a normal battery warranty, made worse as a leased battery has a warranty as long as you are paying the lease.

Renault could repossess the car if you stopped paying the battery lease and refused to buy it out. Its like any car finance that puts a lien or similar on the car, you do not own it till its gone.

Lots of their drive thrus use a person to take the order, and at a busy drive thru this becomes a dedicated person or persons just to take orders. If they can flip it to AI then they could open more lanes and reduce staff. Problem is that a skilled person is going to be better than AI over a shitty audio system, look at how Alexa and Siri struggle even when they have an optimized reception setup than the crappy setup you have at a drive thru with the person sitting inside their car, with music on and so on.

You can offer shares to employees to supplement salary, its very common. It could be used to attract or retain staff by offering less salary but a larger overall package than their rivals and tie in the employees for a period of time till the shares vest.

Only downside with teams is that you can’t accept direct teams calls while in a meeting and they can see you are in a meeting. You always get the odd person who dials before asking via chat if you are available so you don’t get the chance to close your meeting first.

UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It’s as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that’s more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.

While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don’t have it installed with data for that journey. They’d also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.

Worst part of these is that it’s expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.

Musk banning Apple devices with how popular iPhones are to use twitter would hurt Musk more than it would hurt either Apple or OpenAI so it just sounds like a win win.

However with their examples you don’t need to write a script, you can solve them that way but you really don’t need to for these examples. This is some basic search refinement skills (Outlook would even help you build this unlike say a Google search with refinement filters) and either a small spreadsheet or a calculator app to max out at their level 3.

Scripting this I would put at a level 4, but I would be interested where the authors of the paper would fit that in as its their research and what sort of percentage would fit into that skill set.

If he was any good as a CEO he’d have a senior role at his in laws company that has a market cap of $75bn as he’d be able to generate billions for them of extra revenue. The fact that he doesn’t speaks volumes about his ability.

And again, I don’t see that it applies at all to what is a parts tracking system, its not a maintenance plan, a direct safety system, operational guidelines for engineers or anything else you are falsely trying to make it.

You keep describing the maintenance schedule, which is again, irrelevant to tracking the history of parts. Age of the system is also irrelevant to the problem here, a system outside or inside its operational life span can still have shitty black market parts fitted to it making it more unsafe than using the correct part.

The airline industry in particular has been hit with a number of planes being fitted with bogus parts, this is despite all of the things you talk about, they have not worked for tracking parts and proving their provenance. Hence, a more robust system is needed.

I am intentionally not accounting for it, as its irrelevant to an end to end parts tracking system.

Your difference is only really relevant to the standards that the part is made, the safety systems the vehicle needs to have including redundancy, and the frequency and depth of the maintenance schedule.

Both need to be able to prove that shoddy third party parts haven’t been fitted, that the parts have been replaced on schedule, even if the quality of the parts and the frequency of replacement is completely different.

While parts don’t need to be made to the same standard nor do you need the same depth of safety components, I completely disagree that we should not be applying the same hygiene to part province and maintenance schedules. Obviously this should apply to track side components such as signalling, the track etc. as well, just like it should for the parts of an airport that a plane will interact with.

Avoiding utter maintenance shit shows like the train crash in India that killed 300 people seem just as attractive to fix as they do with planes. Or the toxic spills that America has had that may not have killed as many people but are still expensive and hugely disrupting.

Part of getting maintenance schedules followed properly and using quality parts is right to repair, part availability, and being able to prove part provenance and quality. A method to audit a part is essential for this, if we do whats needed by allowing 3rd parties to make parts to original spec for a reasonable cost, like we should to lower cost. Lower cost, more chance companies will avoid cutting corners, particularly if there is a proper audit trail for the part and you can actually prove that it is the *part *as well.

The article is about right to repair, third party parts, and systems designed to block both of them, which I applied to an existing problem that applies to planes for certain and almost certainly other forms of public transport. Even a shit idea can be repurposed to improving the common good.

Agree with you about the level of standards, there needs to be some for train and bus parts but not to aircraft standards.

I also agree any part manufacturer to be audited to which level they are working at and prove a chain of custody for that part. They grey and black markets need to be squeezed out as much as possible, obviously you have to give the end customer, airlines, rolling stock owners, etc. a cost incentive with right to repair to honor the system. As any system can be hacked or broken with enough of a cash incentive.

I think the OEM having to license, at a reasonable cost, the exact spec and design for a part to third parties is an important part of any right to repair. You cannot self repair if you cannot get replacement parts for a reasonable cost.