Depends on which version of each respective OS we're talking about (especially on the Windows side), and on your system specs, and also on what software you're running; but mostly, yes. Especially these days.

If they really want to save battery life and improve performance, they should start by fixing the Windows Updates system so it doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory whenever it's downloading updates, because that results in a *lot* of swapping; and relatedly they should rip out the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem and replace it with something that occasionally swaps out a page that is NOT going to be the very next one needed. Even the NT vm system that Seven had, was better, and that is pretty dire. (This happens to be an area where Linux does pretty well, at least in my experience, although of course no vm system will ever be as good as just having enough physical RAM to hold everything.)

Oh, and they need to add an API for third-party installers to call to say "here is the URL to check for a list of updates in this publicly documented format", so their new Windows Updates subsystem that they need to rewrite from scratch anyway, can also handle updates for third-party web browsers and PDF viewers and so on and so forth, so there aren't a dozen different update services running in the background all the time.

Oh, I am sure it will be fine. Nothing can possibly go wrong. When has a California state government policy ever caused any problems at all?

Honestly, it'll probably even be entertaining to watch. For those of us living elsewhere. Such as here in the Midwest, for instance. If we have a sufficiently dark sense of humor.

This isn't _entirely_ unique to the tech sector, although the fundamental nature of software does make it a little different...

I mean, let's step away from tech for a second and talk about, I don't know, fast food, for example. Why does everybody have a drive-through window? Because whoever introduced it first, was making a lot of money from it. Why do they all offer meal-deal options on their menu, where you get a main dish and a side dish and a beverage for one price? It was a money maker for whoever introduced it first, and everyone copied it. Why do nearly all pizza chains deliver? Same reason. When your direct competitor introduces something that's wildly popular and makes a ton of money, you do something like that too, in order to stay competitive. That's the nature of business, and it's *mostly* a good thing, most of the time.

There's a reason you can't copyright ideas, only specific expressions thereof.

With all of that said, I said the nature of software does make it a little different, and what I mean is this: the cost of implementing a software feature is the same whether you're rolling it out to fifty users or fifty million users, so you spend the same amount, but you get more benefit if you're larger. This does somewhat amplify the advantages of being a large company.

But yeah, all businesses that are any good at business, copy their competitors' best ideas. Otherwise they eventually go out of business. Why did Sears, once a quite major company, shrivel and die? Because they were badly run and didn't keep up. Amazon exists, and you think people are going to wait for your *quarterly* catalog to arrive in the mail, and order from that? Sorry, no, you lose. (It isn't just Amazon, of course. Their brick and mortar business could have survived the arrival of online ordering, but then they would have had to figure out how to compete with Wal-Mart and Target. They didn't.)

The thing I don't quite understand, is what support an office suite would have for any particular currency, other than the inclusion of the currency symbol in the character list, which these days is handled by the Unicode people and whoever makes your fonts. What else is there for the office suite to do, to support a currency? Maybe the currency symbol needs to be on a list of currency symbols that can be recognized as currency symbols so the spreadsheet knows to treat things like $700 as a number rather than a string? Can't that just be handled with format strings in the cell properties? I mean, what if I'm creating a spreadsheet of NetHack shop prices and I want to list them in zorkmids (so, like, 200zm)? Shouldn't there just be a general-purpose way to do that sort of thing without the software developers needing to hardcode every single individual currency?

I mean, if you're just now noticing for the first time that most people have terrible taste, you must have been living in a cave, or under a rock, or on a three-square-yard island with two palm trees, ever since you were a small child.

But as for the AI-generated music, probably most of the people "listening" to it aren't actually listening; they've turned on background music, and probably also a television that they aren't actually watching, to create ambient noise so they don't have to hear themselves think while they go about working or playing or cooking or cleaning or gardening or changing diapers or doom-scrolling social media or doing whatever else it is they're doing. A non-trivial portion of the population does this all the time. It's the same people drink caffeine to calm themselves down, because their brain chemistry is wired upside-down and backwards compared to the rest of us.

My assumption is that most of those million plays happened when somebody who likes ambient noise and hates silence (which is surprisingly common for people with a significant attention deficit), had Spotify playing music in the background, while they were doing other unrelated stuff. A lot of them probably also had a television running, at the same time as the music. You think I'm kidding? I personally know people who do this. They aren't actually listening to the music, so as long as it sounds vaguely similar to music, that's good enough. It doesn't have to stand up to close scrutiny.

And honestly, if they're not listening to it closely enough to notice that it's AI-generated garbage, then it really doesn't *matter* that it's AI-generated garbage. It's doing what they want it to do: preventing them from getting distracted by the unwanted ability to hear themselves think. Frankly, somebody should probably start a music service that *only* plays AI-generated garbage, because it would be cheap to run.

Do *I* want to listen to that? Well, no, but I'm picky about what I listen to (not so much in terms of genre; my tastes are relatively eclectic in that regard; but in terms of quality), because I actually *listen* to it.

A phone SIM card does not execute Java (or any other) software.
People keep mixing that up with "Java Cards"

Almost 4 years after the very publicly well known CVE was out there.
That vulnerability only works for "inside jobs", and even then it is complicated enough to set up that there is no known case, that it ever got exploited.

The college degree loan thing was already becoming a problem when I was an undergrad over 20 years ago. It was fine when one might be borrowing $5000 per year as even entry-level college grad jobs that actually used degrees paid enough to make repayment of those loans doable, but the trouble was that far too many truly entry-level jobs started preferring college degrees when they didn't really contribute, so more and more demand for college degrees among people drove up prices for the limited seats. Which led to a balloon in both traditional colleges increasing their programs and their tuition, and for-profit colleges springing up to try to get in on the act.

Funny, I got a good job in the late nineties doing just that. I was cold-calling and I got hired onto the quality assurance team for a specialized software product. Unfortunately despite the company not being a dotcom they were in investment-building mode and the investor got cold feet so they went under anyway, but it was a good job and the people who hired me did so based on or technical conversations when I cold-called.

My current job I got by having experience with this team when I was at a different employer. They liked me enough they asked me to interview when a prior teammate retired.

There was a crude joke back in the day, that Java was great because it worked on all computers exactly the same way that anal sex was great because it worked on all genders.

Little did we know exactly how prescient that crude joke was going to be as Oracle hadn't yet taken over.

I've seen some temp jobs work out well, but I've seen others where it was not so good.

Temp-to-hire where the employer actually really does intend to hire-on, and uses the temp-process to get to know candidates before making offers is fine. It's actually not a bad idea if basically everyone is on the same page. Temp agency needs to be ready to move people around if various employers do or don't like candidates, and temp-employees need to understand that there could be periods of downtime, and might themselves need to ask the agency for alternate placement if they don't like where they're temping.

On the other hand I've seen temps that were abused very heavily, because regular employees didn't want to do shit-jobs or didn't really want to work at all, with no intent on actually hiring. I've also seen rather odd people working as temps because even in a temp-to-hire arrangement the business didn't like some of the temps but still needed work to be done so kept them around for longer than normal just to complete the task before releasing them.

That's all well and good to say, but that neither addresses what actually changes, versus how some changes have proven harmful and should be avoided if possible even if they're common.

...that a business whose name evokes a movie scene where a hostile alien entity forcibly envelops and implants its offspring into an unsuspecting space merchant-marine doctor would host nonconsensual sexual content?

Java has not really anything to do with Oracle.
Unless you buy a Java version from them.