The in-network exemptions (issuer-is-network) were exclusively carved out for Senator Durbin, as Discover Financial Services (a part of Cap1) is an Illinois company that employs 6,000+ people in the state. Discover getting a debit interchange carveout made them more competitive.

The problem is now that it exists, other large banks are looking at a swipe fee advantage now that Cap1 acquired Discover and that Dick Durbin is now on the verge of retirement unlikely to buck his prior law, the other large banks are realizing under the current administration, such a move of a megabank acquiring major debit networks is likely to escape unscathed from regulators...

The Ellison family are friends of the administration, hence the Paramount/Skydance merger being allowed through when it's clearly anticompetitive. Oracle gov deals getting trimmed in any meaningful sense was never in the cards.

I love how nowadays whenever you want to "right size" an organization, you can just say the cuts were due to AI, and usually the stock price doesn't react too negatively. Eventually the market sees the true story.

Oracle's stock is now down 14% in the last year as the S&P is 25% higher. Same article, free cash flow is -$1.87B, having burned $23.7B USD in the last year. They have $43B in debt and equity and are desperate for more - potentially raising just as much in the next year.

So why the layoffs, really? Beyond "AI layoffs are good and generally don't make the stock decline."

Oracle is heavily overextended in the debt for building the datacenters AI companies use. Their credit rating is a triple B (still investment grade, but only two steps above junk status). If the AI boom crashes, Oracle is fucked. They're left holding the bag on all the datacenter debt while the AI companies purchase less. Meanwhile, they're already financially strained. So taking the layoffs now creates a major free cash flow. The $1.84B severance payment is peanuts compared to the $8B-$10B in free cash flow it frees up. Of course, the $8B-$10B is not going to cover the huge amounts of debt they have taken on and will continue to take on... and reports I've heard are the layoffs were so wide and blind Oracle is having to hire some of them back.

Expect it to get worse at Oracle, unless somehow instead of LLMs getting progressively barely better for way more spend they magically achieve AGI and humans are displaced from most white collar jobs (not going to happen anytime soon).

Asking honestly, what cancel-rebook sites is the OP talking about? If they're defunct due to changes in hotel cancellation policies, then name them historically.

This entire article stinks of hotel cancellation policy being more consumer hostile being excused as "we didn't want to make it worse for travelers but some really shitty underhanded people made us do it..." to launder the reputation of major hotel chains as good rather than taking maximum possible advantage of industry consolidation in the last decade.

Same way that hotel elite benefits for 3TA commissionable rates went to the way of the dodo as hotel chains consolidated... the hotel industry consolidated had the cards. Or is there going to be some other article explaining about how this was gamesmanship/taking advantage too?

Because Boeing kept wanting to push the 737.

When Bombardier designed the CSeries (now the Airbus A220 series) Boeing filed lawsuits over it it and said that the 737 competed with the CS100 even though the Cseries had far fewer seats and was much easier to achieve a better cost per passenger mile on routes which could not support enough people to nearly fill or fill the smallest 737 model.

"Why innovate when you can litigate?" in essence.

Bombardier ended up giving a majority to Airbus because they could deal with Boeing on the legal level and now airlines like Delta are buying them to replace 717s and economically fill routes that have more demand than a CRJ-900 or Embraer E-190 can fill, but not pax enough for an A319 or smaller 737 MAX 8 that fit ~140 passengers in a multiple class config. Pure hubris on Boeing's part when they could have designed a 717 successor...

Microsoft doesn't give a shit about Enterprises switching some employee computers to Macs anymore because they still have O365 and Azure AD (Entra ID whatever the hell they're calling it now). Hell, when Satya Nadella took over from Steve Ballmer, he cut the QA:developer ratio from 2:1 employees to 1:1. Firing half the QA people, and leaving consumers/businesses not rich enough to afford using the Win10+ LTSB/LTSC as the equivalent of QA testers on the updates.

Mac enterprise users can still use MS cloud enterprise services such as O365, Sharepoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook the MS other Office apps, etc... Azure in general for enterprise cloud compute.

The desktop is no longer as glamorous as it was. Of course, through enterprise licensing, Microsoft will still milk that market for as much as it is worth. They're just not as concerned about maintaining dominance, or making the user experience worse on other platforms deliberately to maintain Windows marketshare.

No, no, you see, productive work only happens in an office building, and they'll rent a local office in India, so somehow that magically makes the Microsoft Teams call more productive or something.

The explanation is that they gave Zucc's glasses a private server to handle the requests. Then routed every single set of glasses in the building through it. And the "chef" on camera's request for it verbally triggered all of them, on a single server, that was only designed to handle Mark Zuckerberg's glasses request had hundreds of glasses respond and the thing crashed because of improper config. I think this is a privacy invasive product, but the explanation of how a live demo failed does scan. All devices listened for a wake word, then shit the bed when they effectively DDoSed the private server instance.

As a Macbook owner, the HDMI port is extremely useful. Tons of business conference rooms still have HDMI in the table. Eventually that will go away but I don't want massive inconveniences or a shitload of dongles all the time (and yes, I do have dongles for ethernet, displayport, generally more USB-A, but I generally don't need them.)

They want to layoff workers without the headlines that they've laid off X,XXX employees or paying severance.

That's it. That's the rationale. Any other explanation given is bullshit.

Pretending that Chrome its position fair and square is so absolutely insane it borders on lunacy.

Google used to pay freeware installers (Adobe Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner, etc.) and the like up to $1 per install. If you didn't uncheck the box while installing these programs, then Chrome installed as the default browser importing all the important bits (passwords history etc). If you didn't install Chrome in that way, Google Search, YouTube, etc. all heavily promoted Chrome installations.

You can argue on whether or not what Google did was for the overall benefit of the web (and certainly it was better than IE being where it was), but it was most definitely not "fair and square". Now we have the opposite, artificially slows down Firefox to drive Firefox users to Chrome solely based on the user agent (meaning it's an artificial distinction and not based on any actual browser performance difference.)

Perpetual licensing and software maintenance (particularly in enterprise software) have never been the same thing. You can take the Windows 95 or Windows XP Pro license you bought decades ago and you have the right to perpetually use the software, even today (and some places still do due to niche incompatible hardware/software), and the EULA you have with Microsoft gives you that right. But Microsoft is not developing new security patches for Win95/XP today.

You are not automatically entitled to support/maintenance (stability fixes, legal changes, new features, and even security fixes) on enterprise software. Most enterprise software (until more recent subscription/cloud sales) was sold as a big perpetual license purchase up front, then some much lesser percentage amount for maintenance/support.

The problem is Broadcom came in too greedy with trying to twist the knife on licensing after acquiring VMWare, so they scrambled to make promises to keep customers from fleeing due to the massively increased costs in the "simplified" licensing model. One of them was that they would start providing customers security patches (for versions within support window) even if the customer was not paying support fees to Broadcom.

And that's where Broadcom now has made a commitment most enterprise software vendors have not, and they have to honor it. If Broadcom had not made the promise that customers would receive security fixes on their current perpetual versions that are within support (if nothing else) even outside of paying support fees, many customers chose to not migrate to another option. Not providing security patches as promised puts their customers at risk of being breached. Broadcom owes their customers that much.

But that's different than software being sold for perpetual license and that being a promise of indefinite support/security patches of that version in perpetuity. I am not aware of a single piece of enterprise software that promises this...

The original ruling in the Microsoft antitrust was that Microsoft was an abusive monopoly and needed to be split into two companies: one that made the OS, and one that made other application software. Microsoft successfully appealed because the Judge was found to have improperly discussed the case with media, reversing the ordered breakup and stating that traditional antitrust law was not suited for browser tying. Other actions were remanded back to the lower court.

The DoJ then negotiated a much lesser antitrust settlement with MS rather than risking taking it to court again.

Without the judge having talked to the media while the case was in process, it's very likely the original ruling would have survived the appeal, and Microsoft would have been broken in two.

First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet

. No, it 100% did not. Let's take the Ruby founder taking some technical appreciation for the improvements of Chrome (despite other issues).

Beyond Google and Google services heavily positioning Chrome installs, other freeware like Flash, Shockwave, Java, CCleaner would promote Chrome, because you'd get paid up to $1 per install. Software that did this would sometimes alternate based on either existing install or keeping other people on their toes installing other software like the Ask.com toolbar or "McAfee Security Scan Plus". This helped convert technically illiterate users who were pushed into what their trusted site told them was the best, or what they either trusted or clicked through on a shrinkwrap installer.

Secondly, Google has a history of using Chrome specific quirks to make other browsers behave worse. Like using deprecated Shadow DOM v0 calls only ever implemented in Chrome/Chromium derivatives that loaded 5x worse in alternative browsers like Firefox that weren't Chrome based.

Google now lets to define the web standards that succeed or fail by overwhelming marketshare. It is the same behavior that led the Justice Department to declare IE monopolistic, even though the origin market differed by company (Microsoft by desktop OS, Google by internet advertising/services), the end result of the tying is the same - one monopoly supporting the other to the detriment of the entire web.

The ManifestV3 force and Manifest V2 deprecation that deprecates much more effective privacy/ad blockers used under ManifestV2 is a prime example of Google using their dominant browser position to preserve their ad business.

For Zigbee extenders, I don't have an answer for you.

For voice, Home Assistant has a voice device in preview that's all local. Arstechnica did a review of it.