auxio

Wow, the Capitalism vs Socialism analysis in this thread is laughable.  I must have missed the sections of the philosophy, social science, and political science courses where they discussed regulating products.

To me, socialism is all about trying to give everyone access to things which are essential to having a decent life: a good education, health care, affordable housing, food security, and the like.  Capitalism is all about assuming everyone is greedy by nature (ala Thomas Hobbes), and trying to provide a framework where that greed is guided by the invisible hand of the market (ala Adam Smith).

Aside from maybe internet access, technology itself isn't essential, so the interest socialist states would have in it would simply to ensure that tech companies and employees are paying their fair share of taxes to help fund the essentials for everyone.  What the EU is doing is more along the lines of trying to guide "the invisible hand" to ensure the market is healthy.  But I'd argue that this "guidance" is often being driven by the greed of other companies who want a piece of the pie without putting in the hard work to be competitive.  Nothing to do with socialism at all IMO.

shamino said:

Beats said:

It’s insane how much work Apple has to do to invent the first iPhone. Swiping, scrolling and pinch-to-zoom were insanely great innovations.

Apple may have been the first to deploy these technologies on a consumer device, but they didn't invent it.

Before there was any iPad/iPhone, we were all fascinated by multitouch UI demos produced by Jeff Han (researcher at NYU and founder of Perceptive Pixel, which was since acquired by Microsoft).  For example:

• Jeff Han's NYU homepage (not changed since 2006)
• His demo reel from 2006 no longer embeds in the web page (the required plugins stopped working in web browsers a long time ago), but you can download the MPEG video here: https://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/multitouchreel.mpg
  
• Jeff Han's TED Talk demo, from 2007

I don't think Apple ever used Jeff Han's code, and modern multitouch display panels use a completely different technology from what Han was using, but I can guarantee that lots of important people there (like the rest of us) saw these videos and drew inspiration from them.  Including swiping, scrolling and pinch-to-zoom operations.

Check out FingerWorks, whose work predates Jeff Han by a decade and is who Apple purchased to gain multitouch expertise and patents.  They did it the right way, unlike Google who continuously takes the clone and own route to avoid paying for licensing.

gatorguy said:

Beats said:

“It would make texting more secure too”???

What a sick company. Apple should sue them for lying and make a big media circus about it. 

Oh, no doubt in my mind that Google hasn't always been 100% upfront (aka dishonest) in some past instances. Every big company "fluffs" the facts IMO.
But they aren't lying about RCS being way more secure than SMS.

That Apple chooses not to replace SMS in iMessage plainly indicates it's only refusing for competition reasons, which ignores the security benefits of using RCS instead. Apple users would benefit. Apple themselves perhaps not. 

No need to be obtuse, we all understand the business models of each company: Google uses technology as a vehicle to fuel their main business (advertising), Apple sells technology as their main product.

Google sells themselves as "free and open" to those naïve enough in the tech industry to believe that they're altruistic, when in reality any technology they come across which requires licensing, they'll clone and own it (i.e. make/buy their own copy which is just different enough to not be sued) and release it for free, undercutting the original company who made it.  It happened with Sun/Oracle (Java), font foundries (free metric compatible clones of major fonts), MPEG-LA (VP8), and more.

Tech companies who love to get everything for free will cheer Google's openness right up until the point where whatever technology they create is undercut by them.  Though most companies have just come to the realization by now that they need to be in the data harvesting/advertising business too since there's no way to compete with free.  The devaluation of software as a product.

But yes, let's keep the narrative going and hope that Apple one day is forced to give their technology away for free and become yet another data harvesting/advertising company.

dk49 said:

Google basically looked at the Apple Watch and asked, "how can we copy it's design without being obvious?" And their answer was "oh let's just make a round Apple watch"!

They know the Pixel devices are simply reference models for other manufacturers who use Android, and they don't make their money off hardware, so it's not surprising they spend as little as possible on hardware design.

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Here are two predictions based on this news:
1. Blender will render at around 1/10th the speed on the top end Mac Studio compared to a top end GPU.
2. Apple fans will blame Blender's developers because they don't know how to use Metal correctly.

Did you read the article?  Or are you just paid to post negative comments?

The addition of a Metal GPU backend, which was contributed by Apple

Apple themselves wrote the Metal backend for Blender.

Having actually written shaders in both GLSL and MSL, I can say that Metal is an absolute pleasure to work with by comparison (passing data from CPU to GPU is much easier).  The performance in my experience was about the same on equivalent GPU hardware, but then I wasn't writing a full blown 3D design application.  I'll be interested to see a comparison for Blender.