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.

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

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.

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.

Its bound by Solas regulations that are legally enforceable. Ships must have two way AIS and its logged, so they know if you were in range similar to the tracking for planes. Boats under a certain size do not need AIS and often only have one way AIS, but I expect thats not the case with DiCaprios boat.

Solas was bought in because of the Titanic sinking as other boats declined the help due to the risk of Icebergs, so thats a further link to DiCaprio.

Is this the UK? As (company) private schemes in the UK allow you to jump the queue, pushing people who cant or wont pay further back down the queue.

Its also significantly cheaper than the actual cost of a fully privatised solution because its subsidised by the NHS.

Majority of Doctors and Nurses who do private work spend the bulk of their working week for the NHS, and a large percentage of them were trained by the NHS.

Do I blame people who go private because they do not want to wait? No, but its also not a good argument for further privatisation as further expansion of this system reduces capacity of the NHS.

This wouldn’t be quite as bad if they didn’t keep pegging when you can take your private pension off the state pension retirement age, this would up it from 57 to 61 assuming they keep the same difference, but lock stepping private pensions with state pensions is a dick move designed to trap people working.

It just shows up how pathetic their pretence at wanting free speech and preventing deplatforming is. Really what they want is their lies and hate mongering to be unchallenged and their challengers to be shut up.