I know of a couple of rather fancy, proprietary 2-way radio trunking systems products that use local MS SQL on the back end, to keep track of configs for individual subscriber radios and system configurations for the radio repeaters.
(What's that? Well, if you ever walk into a place like a gigantic oil refinery, you'll see a bunch of people working there. If you look long enough, you'll notice that each of them have an expensive-looking radio ("walkie talkie") on their hip. Some of those radios may be my fault -- and of those that are, there's an MS SQL database that knows exactly how it was programmed. But I didn't pick it; that's just how the system operates.)
I don't mind Radio Management, per se. It's a nice idea. It just feels broken and internally-disjointed when it isn't falling flat on its face.
We almost got into bits of the P25 side to help service $giant_government_entity's system, but the GTR 8000 training was complete ass. Mostly what we got out of it was long periods of the dude fretting about the clutch job that his Hyundai was in the shop for and talking on the phone about that, interspersed with a repeated slogan of "I was a Navy man. I don't know what makes sense to you, but I do things by memorizing steps instead of understanding how they work."
Sometimes, he'd get around to mentioning some of those steps.
Much waste, very disappoint.
We all very thoroughly failed the test at the end of that week.
Yep. Cabinet Vision as of 3 years ago required installing both SQL Server 2016 and 2019, plus 2010-vintage Microsoft Jet database, plus Powershell 2.0, plus .NET 3.5.
It’s completely dominant in its industry and has no real competition. Pricing starts at $200 a month for the most basic, single user setup and goes up (way up) from there.
Yep, there is plenty of that type of software, industry niche software that doesn't have market cap to interest competitors, that will require MSSQL and Windows so Microsoft will continue to sell it/develop it.
I assumed that the grocers would want to offer bags. Making it more easy to drop in and buy something is going to be significantly more money than the cost of bags per a customer.
What percent of the overall purchase profit is 10 cents, and how much does it reduce in sales by adding friction? Surely there must be data on this, has nobody looked into it in public?
Also, it’s been awhile but don’t plastic bags make it easier to carry more things at once because the handles are so thin and flexible? And I don’t remember handles ever ripping on plastic grocery bags.
If the math works out in favor of charging for bags it would imply that the margin is incredibly thin in the literal sense of the word incredible. Like the average purchase has so little profit that 10 cents per bag is meaningful? What is the average profit on a bag of items or on an average purchase? Surely more than 10 cents, no? Like I know grocery stores are notoriously low margin, but that’s among businesses it’s not almost 0 in an absolute sense.
What happened to $1000 used pieces of crap as a first car? Are they gone, or do Zoomers have unrealistic expectations?
If they end up merely being the third richest generation of humans to ever live, is it really the end of the world? Did we think things would just always get better forever, without some force dragging us upward beyond fulfillment of our own basal desires?
I drove cheap pieces of crap when I was living with my mother.
What changed when I had kids myself was that there have been noticeable safety improvements in cars, which didn't use to happen often. There's stability control (2007), tire pressure monitoring system (2008), backup cameras (2018), and automatic emergency braking (2022). Other tech that's not required is adaptive cruise control, pedestrian detection, lane departure warning and lane keeping, etc.
Before that it was 3-point seat belts (1973), third rear brake lights (1985), and front-seat shoulder belts required & airbags common (1987).
The only change from 1987 to 2007 was the introduction of five-star safety ratings in 1993.
We handed down our 2015 Mazda CX-5 to our son and he would be driving it today except that somebody else's drunk son hit our car while it was parked and totaled it. So we got him a 2024 vehicle that had all the safety features we could find. It helped that we have more money than my folks did, of course.
GM Marketing is absolutely concerned with secondary markets, as they prop up the initial buyers. Force every car owner to hold that car until it is scrapped and see what the demand for GM vehicles is. A small dip in interest from secondary buyers and all of a sudden lease rates shoot up, because that willingness of secondary buyers to get the car is the sole determinant of the single largest lease cost -- depreciation.
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