I've also noticed that attitudes towards the homeless are completely different between those who walk and those who drive. I'm personally willing to pay whatever it takes in extra taxes to get them shelter and deal with the current crisis in my city, but I've noticed that people who drive are often far less willing to support action here.
I think I understand a lot more about UCEPROTECT now that I've read the message you linked. This is pretty extraordinarily sexist and unprofessional, and you can really get a sense of how much the author despises anyone who criticizes him.
At this point IBM is only around because it takes a while to die. IBM's leadership are truly incompetent and I do not expect to see them around in another 10 years. It's a pity that they acquired RedHat, as it will now be driven into the ground like everything else IBM touches.
I'm sympathetic to the view that "IBM is failing" lacks evidence, but trying to look at the evidence objectively, IBM doesn't seem to be doing well relative to the tech industry broadly. Their stock price is flat since 2000, while the SPY is up 5x. Their revenue is flat/decreasing since 2005 (as far back as I can find).
It's possible IBM never dies, or even never shrinks, but stays the same as the world grows around it. That seems like the same thing.
IBM fulfills a particular niche: when you need to have a contract with a company the will take the fall contractually.
There are plenty of too-big-to-fail companies that at the end of the day don't care if the project succeeds, just that if somethings goes wrong you have some definition of legal recourse. You buy IBM because you write in your contract "we agree to buy the necessary computers systems and software as require per our vender (IBM) and the vender will be responsible for ensuring compliance."
Sounds great to both parties, except the loophole doesn't say that the requirements need to be correct. If things go great, fine. If things go wrong, customer gets to argue with IBM. Good luck with that. IBM isn't known for their hardware and software in the computer world, they're known for their lawyers.
Operating in a Too-Big-To-Fail world is more about deferring liability than succeeding. If you fail, you get to keep your job, but if you fail you get fired. If you succeed you get to keep your job, and maybe a bit more, but not equal to the negative of job loss.
These projects are so expensive, but also the most impactful I would argue. This intensity of investigation can solve truly horrendous and well-hidden crimes.
I remember having a class "competition" my freshman year of college to implement the fastest autocomplete system. It had to be Java, so I used JNI to call into a well-optimized set of C routines for constructing and querying a trie. I ended up winning by a lot - no one else even implemented a trie. I spent a lot of time making sure that I would have the fastest trie implementation, but that wasn't even necessary.
I'd guess not, as anything that would store these new words is probably storing longer text strings, and thus already would need to be dealing with escapes properly. Unlike names, these words won't be keys terribly often.
It's interesting to watch languages evolve around this issue. I can't help but contrast this and other debates by native speakers with the obnoxious spread of "LatinX", a term which makes no sense if you speak Spanish (I prefer Latine as a gender-neutral term).
Reorganizing these roles to Redmond would make a great deal of sense financially, although I wonder how many of these roles will move, and how many will disappear.
It seems like a smart financial move with offices sitting empty and workers wanting to wfh as well. Wondering if this will be a trend to see more companies offloading their prime location commercial real estate.
