For a tech-adjacent example of an acquisition of an entrenched supplier, look at Tekelec, a telecom hardware and software vendor which Oracle purchased in 2013[1].

Tekelec had a number of products but Oracle really cared about one: the EAGLE family, which is a suite of hardware and software for handling network signaling and routing over SS7. For any customer, EAGLE sits at the core of their networks and it is why your calls actually get connected and billed correctly.

EAGLE had a customer base that included nearly all of the important global telecom carriers. From the press release:

> Tekelec’s technology enables service providers to deliver, control and monetize innovative and personalized communications services and is utilized by more than 300 service providers in over 100 countries.

Verizon[2][3] runs EAGLE STP in their core, as does AT&T[4] (f/k/a SBC). Old business win press releases from Tekelec mean Bell Canada and Rogers still likely do. Based on job postings, Vodafone and Virgin Mobile use EAGLE STP for exchanging SS7 messages to/from roaming partners. And from public RFPs, the US Department of Defense[5] runs their own private phone networks, with EAGLE STP at the core.

Given how prevalent EAGLE deployments were in the early 2000s, how SS7 is needed to make the phone network functional, and how STPs are fixtures that do NOT get swapped out often, I feel very confident in saying that Oracle has had a supporting hand in most, if not all, of the phone calls and text messages you've placed since 2013.

1: https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/oracle-buys-te...

2: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2025-03-07...

3: https://www.verizon.com/business/content/dam/business-market...

4: https://www.lightreading.com/business-management/tekelec-win...

5: https://sam.gov/opp/2227eac9a05f7c33f25b19a6ed5ab634/view

Roughly three decades ago, that *was* the norm. One of the more popular tools for achieving that was Crystal Reports[1].

In the late 90s, it was almost routine for software vendors to bundle Crystal Reports with their software (very similar to how the MSSQL installer gets invoked by products), then configure an ODBC data source which connected to the appropriate database.

In my opinion, the primary stumbling block of this approach was the lack of a shared SQL query repository. So if you weren’t intimately aware with the data model you wanted to work with, you’d lose hours trying to figure it out on your own or rely on your colleagues sharing it via sneakernet or email.

Crystal Reports has since been acquired by SAP, and I haven’t touched it since the early ‘00s so I don’t know what it looks or functions like today.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Reports

https://youtu.be/ROFblZ_-9q4

For example, my M4 Max running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (built, not poured) takes 19.73MB of RAM to launch the REPL (running `python3` at a prompt).

The same Python version launched on the same system with a single invocation for `time.sleep()`[1] takes 11.70MB.

My Intel Mac running Python 3.14.2 from Homebrew (poured) takes 37.22MB of RAM to launch the REPL and 9.48MB for `time.sleep`.

My number for "how much memory it's using" comes from running `ps auxw | grep python`, taking the value of the resident set size (RSS column), and dividing by 1,024.

1: python3 -c 'from time import sleep; sleep(100)'

The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.

Hypothetically.

The giant nested YAML you come across is the input (pre-deserialization)/output (post-serialization) for the declared types:

https://github.com/kubernetes/api/blob/master/core/v1/types....

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I am the only person that finds humor in this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

Ollama + CodeGPT IntelliJ plugin. It allows you to point at a local instance.

May 7, 7:50pm-12:15am

$20

    [X] Weeks in advance
    [ ] Middle of the night

So while it's useless noise to you, it's likely triggered by being on the receiving end of communications like "Hey, my boss is asking if $PROJECT is vulnerable because of a terrible article he read in $MAINSTREAM_MEDIA_PROPERTY?" times however many bosses are harassing their reports.

"I don't want to craft an email reply to every single person, just put up the no-op blog post and be done with it."

The submitted reports show it stretched from Fairfield County, Connecticut to New Castle County, Delaware.

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/at00sbh3yv...

You get a giant .sh file that displays a license, asks you to accept, then upon acceptance, cats itself, pipes through head/tail, into cpio to extract the actual assets.

    bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz has three Streams in it. The first and third
    streams are valid xz Streams. The middle Stream has a correct Stream
    Header, Block Header, Index and Stream Footer. Only the LZMA2 data
    is corrupt. This file should decompress if --single-stream is used.

    $ cat tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz | xz -d --single-stream
    ####Hello####

And lastly, they act as a marker that can be used by a later regex to locate the file _without_ referencing it by name directly nor using the actual Hello and World strings.

    $ gl_am_configmake=`grep -aErls "#{4}[[:alnum:]]{5}#{4}$" $srcdir/ 2>/dev/null`
    $ echo $gl_am_configmake
    ./tests/files/bad-3-corrupt_lzma2.xz

In 1996, Bell Labs, Western Electric, and AT&T Technologies were spun out to create Lucent.

Lucent merged with Alcatel to form Alcatel-Lucent in 2006.

Alcatel-Lucent was purchased by Nokia in 2016.

AT&T Wireless was purchased by Cingular in 2004 (joint venture between BellSouth and SBC).

The original AT&T was purchased by SBC in 2005.

The new AT&T (SBC) bought BellSouth in 2006.

Think of it as a private SWIFT vendor.

They were acquired by UHC, which is why you see the Optum name. But this is not specific to UHC/Optum patients.

Providers (hospitals, doctors, software vendors) interface with CH’s REST+JSON APIs and in turn CH emits EDI records to the insurance company backends (and translate the responses from EDI to JSON/XML/etc).

This affects general healthcare EDI messages (claims, benefits eligibility verification, ACH notices, etc).

The people impacted do not have direct EDI implementations with the insurance companies. If they did, they could side step this.

Or even a different clearinghouse.

Edit: clarified some ambiguous terms

Not spend very large sums of money on things piloted by 1-2 people that can end wars relatively quickly.

Aphyr recently provided a limited window[1] into the level of dysfunction that happens with one of these behemoths that are the result of 100+ mergers, acquisitions, spinoffs, and joint ventures.

I feel terrible for the providers who have to try to navigate these antics.

In my opinion, all of this contributes to two primary “bad” things: 1) increased rates of retirement from older physicians who don’t want to deal with this anymore (despite wanting to continue practicing for 5-10 more years), and 2) consolidation of physician practices into larger entities as a way of coping which inevitably leads to the entity being acquired by a hospital and absorbed into another behemoth of an organization.

Both make it hard for individuals to receive consistent, quality care.

1: https://aphyr.com/posts/368-how-to-replace-your-cpap-in-only...