OctoMonkey

avon b7 said:

genovelle said:

DAalseth said:

I have to admit that I’ve changed my mind on Right to Repair. Common things, phone screens and batteries, for example, should be easy and fairly inexpensive. I understand if a particular component needs to be factory replaced for security, a touch ID button for example. But how often do those break. Common repairs though should not be tough or expensive. 

All of these things are tied together. Even Apple with trained techs have issues dealing with the batteries in phones. If handled improperly they go into a runaway thermal reaction event that can be deadly. It has happened at Apple stores in the repair departments. The difference is they are trained to handle this and have containment devices designed to minimize risk. 

They are also performing proper testing. The other side to this is random 3rd parties can claim they know what they are doing, perform a substandard repair that fails weeks later and know the customer’s family will attempt to sue Apple because of the resulting death of their loved one. 

Uncertified 3rd parties can also claim to use genuine Apple parts, but then turn around and use cheap knockoffs and then blame Apple when the customer has issues down the road. 

This is not a car. When Honda sells their Hydrogen car there are only a few places to service it. The reason is there is more to repairing it then just connecting some parts together. 

That is where 'design for repair' comes in.

A battery in a smartphone should not be anymore of a health hazard to a technician than a pair of scissors. 

I can see it now...  Public service messages warning against running while holding a battery.  HAH!

mike1 said:

Whether or not the patents have merit is completely separate from suing a retailer of a possibly infringing product.

As somebody mentioned earlier, they should just issue cease and desist letters to all the retailers. But that, of course, would not have even a remote chance of generating a payday. This will probably be dismissed with prejudice.

Or perhaps, if we are lucky, the lawsuit will be deemed frivolous and the plaintiff charged with all costs (court and defendant).

Some of these suits baffle me.  My memory of patent law is ideas cannot be patented, only the specific implementation of an idea.  Dolby labs patented their method of tape noise reduction, but could not patent the basic idea of noise reduction.  dbx reduction used a completely different approach and therefor did not infringe on Dolby's patents.

It seems the US patent world has lost its way.

I am more inclined to require full manufacturer support for a minimum of 10 years - much like automobile manufacturers.  This would be both hardware and software / firmware.  If a company decides to go with some proprietary interface, they should be required to provide support for 15 years minimum.  If companies don't like the idea of providing support for that long, just require them to release any and all information required to allow the aftermarket to provide the support.  I am all for technological innovation, but I do get weary of forced obsolescence.

StrangeDays said:

I got myself a Synology DS220+ which is similar as the 2-bay, $299. I love the thing. Time Machine, Plex, a dropbox-like syncing app (with shareable links the way I wish iCloud would do), CCTV…it’s a sweet device. I sync a portion of my data back to my Mac where Backblaze picks it up and stores a couple in the cloud. 

I am still running an Xserve with an external fibre array.  The Xserve does everything I need (mostly Plex & backups) and the external array offers more storage than these smaller devices (currently 128TB).  It works well, but I have been considering switching to a larger (QNAP) SAN box.  Improved performance per watt (and lower overall power consumption) and more up to date applications in a single device all appeal to me.  A big factor holding me back is my investment in hardware.  Two Xserves (primary and backup) along with a test Xserve and three fibre arrays (not counting my old Xserve RAID which does not offer enough storage).  It seems to me I would need to get two SAN boxes so I would have a backup and the larger (12+ drive) SAS SANs are not cheap.