abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

What am I missing?

The patent in question, if it's valid, would have expired several years ago. The fact that it's everyday technology today is pretty normal considering how fast technology advances. Ordinary toilet rolls were also a patented invention and there's nothing in the law that says a patent has to a complicated solution to a problem.

iTunes was the first shipping product that ever actually did what's described in the patent... and the person who ran the iTunes department that "invented" this feature was previously a subcontractor working for the guy who holds the patent - he was literally paid to implement what the patent described and then Apple poached him and he continued the work at his new job without any patent license.

I don't support patents and never will, but if there was ever a case for clear infringement then this is it. It's already been to court and apple was found guilty of patent infringement... only to have an appeals court overturn the decision in pretty questionable circumstances.

Government tends to be ahead of the curve.

I dunno what world you're living in, but I live in a world where police still do nearly all their work with pencil and paper and if you want to talk to a police officer, no you can't talk to them on the phone or send an email. You'll have to have a meeting face to face.

Work on The Voice referendum started in 2007, and despite decades of work it was a complete failure.

The idea that something meaningful can be done in months, where decades failed, is pretty ridiculous. Yes, we need to be working on it. But it's going to take a very long time.

The biggest problem was the LNP backing out and refusing to support it, even though this was a bipartisan effort all along (and actually started when LNP was in government). There's lots of talk about what Labor is going to do next, but it's really not up to them. Clearly what they want is what they tried (and failed) to actually achieve, and the real question is what can they achieve now?

Realistically what they can achieve is whatever LNP will support. Dutton promised to bring a legislated version of The Voice to parliament, so lets see what he actually meant by that. Presumably if it's a step in the right direction it's going to have bipartisan support. It needs to come from LNP - they need to tell us what they will support.

Unfortunately, actions speak louder than words, and what LNP are actually doing is very different to what they said on the campaign trail. It seems pretty clear that they won't support anything at all that will lead to reconciliation.

You can look up Smartflash v. Apple to find plenty of coverage. There's a lot more to this story than just a patent fight.

Racz made his fortune inventing a method of mixing hot and cold water - he created a global company selling taps all over the world and eventually sold it (the patent expired a long time ago, and AFAIK it's now the standard technology used by all tap companies). Perfect example of patents actually working as intended. His next invention and business was supposed to be in the music industry, and he partnered with a company called Gemplus to fill in gaps in his expertise - especially software R&D.

The head of R&D at Gemplus left the company and started working for Apple. Where he built all of the same stuff that he had been working on with Racz. We're talking really fundamental technology here - such as DRM to keep the record labels happy which was obviously required otherwise the whole business wouldn't work at all. Racz had lined up partnerships with major record labels and some of the biggest pop stars in the world and it all collapsed when iTunes came along with all the same stuff.

You know DDG is just a wrapper around Bing right? No point comparing the two.

It seems there is an arms race between search engines and content creators

No. It's an arms race between content creators and spam.

Anyone who creates genuine good content has a healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with Google.

10 minutes ago I wanted to find out what the hell a float needle is. I couldn’t.

Huh? The top result for "float needle" in Google seems like a great description to me.

??? … shorting the stock of the company that adopts this.

Screw that I'm going to invest... how do you think Elon Musk got so rich? He did it with sloppy engineering.

To get a first mover advantage, you have to be first. You don't get there by being a perfectionist.

there’s an entire branch of object-oriented language design without classes!

That's not OOP anymore. There's definitely a lot of OOP code out there (especially in the Java world) that goes way too far with inheritance and class structures, and good OOP code relies a lot less on classes - but they are still used and a critical component of the style of programming.

Object-oriented design is about message-passing;

I'd argue that's an implementation detail rather than part of OOP. Also it's rarely used in modern OOP languages because it's just too slow*. Unfortunately when you take it away some patterns are lost, but the trade off is generally worth it.

(* when I used to work in Objective-C, message sending was often slower than all of the rest of my code combined and in tight loops I'd often rewrite my OOP code as procedural C code in order to have acceptable performance. Never need to do that in Swift, which doesn't do messages)

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that these are competing strategies.

Just like walking doesn't really compete, like at all, with flying in an aircraft, Functional and Object Oriented Programming are at their best when you use whichever approach makes sense for a given situation and in any reasonably complex software that means your code should be full of both.

OOP is really good at the high level structure of your software as well as efficiently storing data. FP is really good at business logic and algorithms.

Also, I take issue with the claim that OOP is all about "objects". It's also about classes. In fact I'd argue classes are more important than objects.

There’s no extra gate or dedicated staff member in my store only whoever’s at the till and if the self-checkout is busy they’re too busy to watch them.

The difference is other countries have much larger stores... probably because we have a more car centric culture.

My local store has about 40 checkouts - half of them self checkout. And there's a competing store literally door (in the same building, with ain internal wall separating them), which sells all the same stuff and is the same size. In the middle of the day about half the checkouts are open and in the evenings all of them are open.

We do have smaller stores like yours, but almost nobody shops at those and even at peak hour a single checkout is enough.

Sales so slow at my local small store the checkout staff will literally check your bread for mould when they scan the barcode... They're more expensive and the food is worse.

Business owners are told it will save them money

Which translates into the customer paying less, assuming you have proper competition where the customer can choose the store next door (all shopping centres in my city have that - two competing stores that sell exactly the same products - so they have to compete on price).

they’re told that customers love it.

A lot of customers do love it. The ones that don't can still use regular checkout. Or just ask for help at the self checkout.

It's really not that hard, scan barcode, put in bag. Occasionally put an item on the scales and select from tomato or red apple on the touch screen. What's difficult about that?

Also having one employee for 8 machines doesn’t sound like a failure

It's more like 1 employee for 20 machines at my local supermarket. They've been increasing the size of the self checkout area as more customers use them.

a queue of people, waiting to use a self-checkout kiosk

That's not how it works with the stores I frequent. Usually about half the self-checkout kiosks don't have anyone at them.

I'd shop somewhere else if they took self checkout away. It's so much faster.

Half of the US is over a hundred million people. The rumours are Apple has supply constraints that will limit global sales to about a million devices for now.

This can't possibly be a mass market device - it's just not possible right now to manufacture that many. The tiny screens are 3,400 DPI and 5000 nits (that's about 10x brighter than a typical TV or computer screen). It's going to be a while before tech like that can be mass produced.

They named it Vision "Pro" which in Apple marketing speak basically means "the really expensive one". Their "Pro" desktop PC tower has a baseline price of $7k and fully upgraded it comes in at almost $13k which is actually cheaper than they were when they used Intel Xeons a couple years ago (those could hit something like $80k).

There will probably be a non-pro equivalent one day, which will be far cheaper.

There was a time, on Android custom roms, if you had pirated apps installed, they were uninstalled automatically. I see something similar happening here.

I'm sure Apple will do malware scans on third party apps, like they do on the Mac. But if they start uninstalling legitimate third party apps, that's going to be treated as "no allowing third party app stores" and the maximum EU fine for that is high enough to bankrupt Apple. They won't do it.

You kind of are forced to use it app store aside.

In the EU at least, that restriction will be gone in a couple months.

You can not use iMessage without an apple ID but you could use RCS without a Google account.

You can use SMS without an Apple ID, and iMessage falls back gracefully to SMS. Photos will be lower quality and sending messages to international phone numbers will be expensive... but it will work and RCS support is coming to iPhone later this year which should fix both of those.

Another bigger drawback to not using an Apple ID is backing up is going to be an absolute pain.

Not really. You just plug it into a PC with a USB cable, and it automatically does a backup. You could just do that every night to charge your phone.

Because you can’t access the file system on iOS, for things like photos and contacts or messages, your only options would be iCloud as far as I know (I could be wrong) or I guess if you have a Macbook as well Airdrop?

Yeah you're wrong. The "Files" app on iOS, which is also embedded in various apps as a file open/save/import/export/share/etc option, has a plugin architecture where third party apps can provide all the same file storage as iCloud. You can use Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Dropbox, Bit Torrent Sync, an Git server, etc, etc by simply installing a third party apps.

In fact, Apple charges monthly fee to use iCloud in the files app (assuming you want to store a reasonable amount of data in the cloud). As far as I know, most iPhone users don't pay and a lot of those people would be using third party file apps.

Access to photos/contacts/calendar/etc is also fully available via an API, though I'd encourage you not to let apps access that data. There's quite a long history of it being used for some really creepy levels of tracking — for example, most photos have metadata including date/time/location and face recognition is trivial these days. You're handing over a detailed location history for both yourself and anyone you've ever photographed by giving access to your data, and third party apps have been caught using this for malicious purposes. Sometimes unwittingly, as part of a third party library. Obviously it depends on the app - if you want Flickr to be your cloud storage/backup for your photo library, that's probably safe (and Flickr does have that feature).

Connecting an iPhone to an Apple ID is entirely optional. The only requirement is a quick check on first run wether or not the device has been reported as stolen. The App Store is the only essential functionality that requires an account with Apple even that is technically optional (you can sideload enterprise/school/work related apps for example as well as if you're a developer you can sideload your own apps, and you can do all of that without an Apple ID on the device (the developer/enterprise/school/etc will need an account).

Tech illiterate Windows users seem to have no problems removing replacing Edge/Bing with Chrome/Google (which, if you've ever tried recently, is quite a painful process - though I suspect it's a lot less painful in the EU where the dark patterns would land them in hot water).

I think the App Store will only be able to maintain it's dominance in Europe if it's a better experience, for both users and developers, than any of the alternatives.

The improvements Apple will make to the store to protect their dominant position will be significant.

The ones you've seen are probably just simple markers to help low flying aircraft (crop dusters, helicopters, etc) see the power lines.

WA has a... unique energy grid. AFAIK you've basically only got a proper grid for the south west quarter of your state, which is not even connected to most (by area, not population) of WA, let alone part of the national grid. Most of Australia, even Tasmania, is on a national grid which transmits power over very long distances and that's where power line management becomes especially important.

The WA grid also doesn't actually need to transmit much power, since virtually all of the power consumption is in Perth which has several local redundant power supplies. It's really only small towns that would ever need to get their power from any significant distance.

I dunno about you, but I would love to get a notification on my watch when the machine has finished it's cycle. The stupid high pinched repeated beeping noise sucks... especially when it's the next door neighbour's washing machine and they're not even home, so it goes on and on for fucking hours. And I'd like to see proper error descriptions on my phone, instead of just "UE" on the timer LCD. WTF is a "UE" error?

If we're going to get really fancy... I'd love to be able to load the machine in the morning, but tell it to actually start running several hours later while I'm at work. I obviously don't want clean wet clothes going mouldy in the washing machine all day... but I don't really want to run the washing machine when I'm home either, because it's noisy.

Remote activation would also be better for the environment and also better for my clothes - I'd use the the slow gentle economy cycle every time if I could remotely trigger it at 3pm on a weekday. I'm definitely not going to use that on the evenings (when I'll be asleep in 3 hours) or on weekends (when I don't know if I'll be home in 3 hours time).

A wifi connected washing machine sounds like a great feature to me, and I'd happily pay for it (with dollars, not with an invasion of privacy). I guess that means I won't be buying an LG.

Fair use covers research, but creating a training database for your commercial product is distinctly different from research. They’re not publishing scientific papers, along with their data, which others can verify;

Since when is there a legal requirement to publish the results of your research?

They use other peoples’ work to profit. They should pay for it.

Sorry but that's just not how the world works. A big part of it is just plain practicality - how could you possibly find out who to pay? If I wanted to pay you one cent for the right to learn from things you've written on the fediverse, how would I even contact you? Or even find out who you are since I assume TWeaK isn't your real name. And how would I get the money to you?

Like it or not, a lot of value created doesn't get paid for. That's just the way the world works... and among other things, Fair Use codifies that fact into law.

Facebook steals the data of individuals. They should pay for that, too. We don’t exchange our data for access to their website (or for access to some 3rd party Facebook pays to put a pixel on)

Facebook isn't "stealing" that data. Third party websites voluntarily and put tracking pixels on their site with full awareness that visitors are going to be tracked. That's why they do it - the website operator is given access to all of the data facebook picks up. If you have a complaint, it should primarily be with the website operator especially if they don't ask the user for permission first (a lot of sites ask these days, I always say no personally. And run a browser extension that blocks it on sites that don't ask).