FileMakerFeller

I used to have a beef with Lewis because he was always trying to garner support just for himself rather than for the team (remember the "Team LH" days?) and I couldn't understand why Toto Wolff put up with it. Some years later, he's been more publicly supportive of his team and I have seen that Toto's approach allowed for the utter dominance of Mercedes for the past 8 years. When Lewis used his personal influence to raise awareness of Black Lives Matter, and stories leaked about his contract negotiations revolving more around getting Mercedes to support the causes he found important rather than getting more money for himself, I've found my respect of the man growing.

You can accuse Lewis of a lot of things, but one thing that needs to be universally acknowledged is that he is a great man. His abilities and his actions have elevated him above the general population; he may only have achieved World Champion status because of the technical capability of the car and the Mercedes team, but he has still always gotten the absolute most out of any car he drove. He is now starting to show the world that he is not only one of the greatest sportspeople of all time but one of the great human beings who will shape our society for decades to come.

Listen to Apple's "Here's to the crazy ones" speech again. I can see Lewis Hamilton in that pantheon.

So... iPod Socks?

Oh, the joy of being a software developer, systems administrator, etc. The ubiquity of Java makes this a problem for everyone in my line of work. I have at least three business critical systems that involve log4j THAT I KNOW OF. Naturally, all of them use different versions, will need to be tested with fixes/updates, and are subject to change management procedures. Luckily this hit before the CM freeze that gets applied over the Christmas break.

Australia is more than Sydney and Melbourne, Apple. Still, as long as it's a first step and not the only step...

MplsP said:

For those that have a hard time comprehending this - companies like Apple make hardware and also sell services. All this bill is doing is saying there has to be a modicum of separation between the two. It's not saying they can't offer their service, it's just saying they have to give other services an equal opportunity. Not sure what's so bad about that.

This whole situation feels like a clash of assumptions.

Apple is claiming, with justification, that because they make the whole widget and that is their unique selling point, forcing the company to allow others into the process as "equal" partners will damage their business. Apple works hard to integrate everything they do into a seamless, safe and secure experience for their customers, so they don't see what they provide as being able to be divided up into sets of functionality: Apple products are "more than the sum of their parts."

The legal system does not accept this concept as workable (hence the drama around the iPhone patents). Instead, everything is simply constructed from modular pieces, and these pieces eventually become commoditised. From the government's point of view, they are simply applying this concept to regulation because history shows that commoditisation of modular pieces results in purchase prices coming down, which is viewed as prima facie good for the consumer. Without a methodology for determining the price of the benefit gained by retaining an integrated system, there is no data to support that choice, which makes it more likely to be challenged, which means more effort to support it.

And it's a little murkier when you add in Apps and Services. These are clearly separate from the devices – extensions to the Apple ecosystem – so Apple's argument gets weaker here. But the App Store is a key part of the ecosystem, yet it is also separate from the devices. Who knows the full extent of the integration between Apple's devices, software, and systems? Who can therefore accurately predict the outcome of forcing a separation between them?

And the same applies to Microsoft, and Google: they claim to offer modular systems with interchangeable pieces, but isn't it funny how all the Office/Google Apps work so well together but aren't designed to work equally well with apps from other developers? And yet the Google Apps are "free" (big asterisk, mumble mumble data harvesting and analysis mumble advertising cough). Android is also "free" but, oh, guess what manufacturer, if you want it to be "real" Android then you have to have the Google Play Store and that costs money, plus you cannot then sell Android Open Source Project devices.

This is a nuanced issue, and governments have not, historically, dealt well with nuance - especially in the technology space.