Isn’t that the case already for most devices? I can pay £80 and have a guy show up in a van and replace the battery in my iPhone in his van in 30 minutes or so.
The guy has trained himself to replace iPhone batteries and carries special tools for each model of iPhone in his van because it's not a simple process. The new law says he should only need a screwdriver set (roughly).
Yes, and a lot of that happened in preparation for this specific EU directive.
This happens a lot, see Samsung and Apple announcing more years of security updates and feature updates, Apple announcing the switch to USB-C for the iPhone.
Once it's clear the EU will not budge, some big companies will just switch over in advance, other companies will lag.
Were they waterproof? I certainly don’t remember my Nokia 3210 being even splash resistant.
> I have no idea why we can’t do this now
For better worse I think the answer is quite simple - a combo of ease of manufacturing, a long term trend of slimmer devices that is broadly supported by customer behaviour, and an extra place to suggest a device upgrade instead of a repair. You’re more than able to get pretty much any smartphone battery replaced with a manufacturer similar spec these days, and people still choose not to do so.
Waterproof phones with replaceable batteries existed, but they used more rubber and other tricks to pull it off. This had the advantage of making it a lot easier to close the phone again and still keep the water resistant properties.
Having replaced the battery in my old phone, I sure understand why people don't "choose" to do so. The battery itself is worth maybe 20 bucks but the labour and tools required to replace it cost much, much more.
Compared to spending 30 bucks on a secondary battery back in the day, things sure have gone downhill since the days of user-replaceable batteries.
Please name these waterproof phones with replaceable batteries. None of my Motorolas or Treos were waterproof. I believe that harden phones may have existed but were not available to normal consumers. Maybe I’m wrong which is why I want to learn what phones you’re talking about.
The G'zOne made headlines being the first water resistant phone and it had a replaceable battery from the very start. The Fujitsu F-02D was another good example, with a fully-featured touch UI while still boasting something other than the slab-of-glass designs of today.
These phones weren't very popular in the west (Japan in particular had a large waterproof phone market, allegedly because people were taking them with them into the shower), but they have existed for a years, before the first Androids or iPhones became water resistant.
Phones like the Samsung XCover (the Android 2.3 one from 2011) were sold worldwide and featured a hotswappable battery. Over time these became bulkier and frankly uglier as they doubled down on how "rugged" they were, but the technology was clearly there.
Almost everything is splash resistant for some definition of a splash. I bet any modern smartphone does better than any dumbphone with buttons, because water can't permeate either of the big flat sides. If the water doesn't get inside, it can't cause damage.
> will it cost me more to comply, or more to ignore?
Is an (unfortunately) American view of things. The vast majority of European businesses I’ve worked with attempt to comply with the _spirit_ of the laws, while my experience with most American companies is they try to skirt the letter of the law to do whatever the hell they want.
I’m not saying one is better, or that all companies in both places are like that. But it rings true in my experience.
Also Americans try to comply with the _letter_ of European laws which leads to some absurdities like the recent HN threads of people claiming it's impossible to sell goods to Europe because you have to register your packaging in every European country.
I mean, I agree. But it also has some drawbacks. Uber is a perfect example of this - they completed ignored the existing taxi and private hire laws, ate the penalties left right and centre and while they still suck they dragged taxis kicking and screaming into the 21st century in the UK. The days of being overcharged by a driver who takes a notion and a new route, or finding out the card machine isn’t working at your destination are gone, and that’s because Uber forced them to stop acting like an actual Cartel.
I would have preferred the old ways if that means upholding the rule of law. American MBAs are pure evil and toxic for a society's social fabric, and they should be kept away as much as possible, even if that means putting up with some guild-like behaviour.
> but every EU member has a clear agency for consumer complaint, and I don't buy it that it is hard for consumers to report violations,
The problem is the response is toothless. I reported Amazon for a violation to ICO in February 2019, received an automated email a month later asking for a swathe of information, replied to that, and 3 months later got an update that it would be assigned a Case Officer. That was the last time I heard from them on that matter.
Meanwhile, my local council will respond to pretty much _everything_ within 24-48 hours. I’ve reported all sorts of “small” things and when it comes up naturally friends are surprised that the council did anything. They’ve never actually tried reporting the issues, and assume it’s all fruitless.
The company that looks like a medieval food shop with meat warming in the sun and a big sign that says "caveat emptor" and manned by a slave with very dirty hands. The fact that it still operates in the EU is prove that more tough punishments are needed for corporations that push fraud, dangerous products, abuse of monopolistic position, etc. Amazon in a nutshell.
I’m a European who has contributed to the kernel (a single, pathetic patch but a patch nonetheless). That means at the very least it’s not 100% created by Linus
I should have been more specific about what “created” meant, but my point was just to emphasize how ridiculous it is to ascribe national provenance to a massive open source project like Linux.
> The current contracts are not good enough for anybody who wants them -
This is a recurring pattern across large changes to c++. Modules and coroutines both are great examples of this.
> but it is good enough that they can start figuring out the details of making all the different factions happy.
I don’t think there’s really a plan to make the factions happy, there’s a plan to get X in, say it’s in and then ignore any actual criticism in favor of “it was the best we could do” while pointing at the other groups for not accepting the massive flaws.
>> The current contracts are not good enough for anybody who wants them -
> This is a recurring pattern across large changes to c++. Modules and coroutines both are great examples of this.
Coroutines are ready since C++20, there is some stuff missing in the language (`for co_await` being the most obvious thing), but the feature is useful as is...
The only complaints I've heard about modules that is real is it took some time to be ready. Everything to use is from people who don't use C++ and want to pick on it.
I’ve written c++ every day for the last 15 years. The problem with modules is they’re the meeting point of a pile of decisions (or lack of). Modules have been talked about for longer than I have been programming and I still don’t know of a project that is using them that has seen a compile time improvement.
You might argue that modules aren’t the solution to compile times, but for a very long time they were. Now they’re a better way to structure code, except they’re not really backwards compatible. That dorsnt matter because the committee doesn’t consider that bit at the same time refuses other changes that may have similar impacts.
I think c++ is caught between a rock and a hard place. There’s a group that wants only existing behaviours standardised, and another that wants the language to be a force that brings the ecosystem with it. What we get is the latter group proposing changes that look like progress, but no (or limited) real change happening due to the first group, while the first group are forced to have the language change almost for the sake of it to placate the latter group.
Modules have just reached to the point where the tooling is all ready for people to adopt. Right now we are seeing the early adopters start to use modules. We are still waiting to see what they report. They are certainly a major change to how you program C++ and so adoption is going to be slow - retrofitting something new to an existing project is always hard. I still have some C++98 code that has naked new and delete. I'd love to get rid of it but it would be a long painful process to refactor and it's not worth it when the code has been stable for decades. I'm still hopeful that they're a useful thing for the various benefits they should provide, but only time will tell. People who claim that modules have failed because we haven't seen benefits yet are just ignoring the reality that change is going to be slow by nature.
It’s 150 comments of back and forth on a change which doesn’t have a concrete reason, the maintainers aren’t in agreement on what the right approach is wrt the field’s behaviour, and the person who submitted it is bouncing between saying he’s keeping it on topic and then adding scope where he believes it should be added.
I also personally disagree with the change, I think the OP has gone ahead and implemented what they wanted but not considered the actual ways it will be used. The PR shouldn’t be merged until the laws have made a bit more progress and it’s clear what they’re _actually_ implementing.
That's the facebookisation or redditisation of open source. Open source used to mean when you got the software you got the source code, but now it means a platform for arguing. And there's no doubt in my mind when people say they can't switch their project from GitHub to Forgejo because they'd lose "contributions", they mean this.
I don't understand your point. The phrase "when you got the software it got the source code" makes no sense. And arguments were just as common decades ago on forums, mailing lists, and IRC. What exactly are you trying to say?
I don’t think this is anything new. There’s been massive blow ups for as long as we’ve been doing this - NetBSD and OpenBSD was a massive, public falling out as was the gnome 3 release, or the python 3 release.
I would never look at a person's github account to evaluate them. The most important things people do will be proprietary, or if they contribute to serious projects will be in that project's gitlab/forgejo's instance.
I’ve posted this before. I was working on a website where we used a single cookie for an auth token, and we logged absolutely _everything_ on the server side (we didn’t sell it FWIW). When it came to publishing the site, we went to legal for our parent company and filled in their form. One question was “do you use cookies”, to which we answered truthfully. That site has a cookie banner, and absolutely 0 mention of the piles of telemetry we gathered.
The ePrivacy directive is a waste of time, money, attention and resources and I wish we spent that effort on complying with GDPR instead which is much much better.
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