Apple takes a 30% cut? If gamers stop playing addictive games with microtransactions then they would lose quite a bit. Same with showing ads. Or everything else in their software section of revenue
Hey, author here, only a subset of VB6 language is implemented, I also didn't implement all properties and events, i.e. the Click event on labels. Updated the website with all basic events.
Considering how much response this project got, I might improve the VB6 interpreter :)
Hey, author here, I didn't implement all the properties and events, i.e. the Click event on labels was missing. Updated the website with all the basic events.
Maybe you need to explicitly capture the errors to view the error number and/or message in a message box or something? I have no idea, just guessing based on some prior VBA work I did.
I've got a friend who claims to have sued dozens of companies in the equivalent in the UK; he called it "Small Claims Court", but perhaps it has a more specific technical name. Here's an example:
I don't think the courts really matter, what does matter are the legal guarantees. In the EU it is an explicit two years, so I think a situation like this, where a 9 year old appliances is being repaired under threat of legal action, simply won't arise as the customer has no legal basis for his claim.
2 years is the EU-wide minimum, individual countries can raise that bar. The Netherlands for example has the same reasonable expectation rule as discussed in the article. You absolutely will win a similar court case here (I know people who've done it).
A not often discussed problem with the EU guarantee is that in the first 6 months, every defect is presumed to have been present at the time it was bought. After 6 months it is on the consumer to prove it, and for most things it is just not worth it to pay for an expert opinion.
So in practice the iron clad guarantee is only 6 months for most consumer
products.
At least that's the interpretation of the law in the UK.
edit: small claims courts are quite accessible in the UK, so often the threat of small claims can get thing moving.
> A not often discussed problem with the EU guarantee is that in the first 6 months, every defect is presumed to have been present at the time it was bought. After 6 months it is on the consumer to prove it, and for most things it is just not worth it to pay for an expert opinion.
That's just the summary. If you follow the link to "EU Directive on the sale of consumer goods and associated guarantees" [1], Article 5.3 states:
"3. Unless proved otherwise, any lack of conformity which becomes apparent within six months of delivery of the goods shall be presumed to have existed at the time of delivery unless this presumption is incompatible with the nature of the goods or the nature of the lack of conformity."
A sibling comment states that this might have increased to one year though.
The term at which burden of proof shifts from the retailer to the consumer has been raised to 1 year in the EU (maybe not in the UK due to Brexit). As this is a matter of civil law, the standard of proof is also "more likely than not" proof, not "beyond reasonable doubt". You don't necessarily need an expert opinion, it _can_ be sufficient to collect a bunch of reports of similar failures.
I mean, there are normal consumer protection rules. But it's actually commonplace for a lot of appliances at least in Germany and Japan to have a 10 year operational guarantee. I don't really how you can enforce it in either place, but it does seem to me that at least the big traditional companies to stick to these periods for bigger appliances such as air conditioning, fridges, washing machines etc. Interestingly for smaller more modern devices, like say, a table top dishwasher, you're lucky if these things last a year and you'll have a hard time enforcing the 2 year warranty even with the help of the consumer protection agency.
>But it's actually commonplace for a lot of appliances at least in Germany and Japan to have a 10 year operational guarantee.
But these are a voluntary guarantee from the manufacturer, which naturally are much harder to enforce legally. As you are not arguing the law, but the manufacturers wording of his guarantee.
I don't know about Sweden particularly but in Norway "Forbrukerkjøpsloven" [0] gives you up to a 5 year warranty on any items which are obviously meant to last for at least that long. For instance, shoes have a two years warranty, but a laptop or most kitchen appliances have an automatic 5 year warranty which cannot be waived.
I'm not that knowledgeable about all the details here, but I've done it once for a PSU which stopped working after four years.
5 years feels pretty long for a laptop warranty to be honest. (I'm typing this on a 2019 Intel MBPro, but it's getting pretty long in the tooth, and if it had died already or last year, I would not have felt like I got an unreasonably short lifespan out of it.)
Do I expect a laptop to last 5 year? Yes, most of them. Do I think it's inherently problematic or that consumers were "cheated" if say 25% of laptops only last 4 years instead of 5? I do not.
I don't think it's actually what you meant to ask (I think you are actually interested in legally mandated warranties rather than the courts where they're enforced) but I think most countries have something equivalent to "small claims court" to make low-stakes suits viable.
I have successfully used exactly the same technique of "get a court date, wait for your opponent to contact you and resolve the issue, cancel the court date" in the past to challenge an illegal rent increase in Switzerland. The court for that here is called the Schlichtungsbehörde.
It seems like we have 2 year legally enforced warranty (which I knew about), and some sort of small claims court (which I did not know about).
I think I would have heard about legally mandated warranties that extended beyond the 2 years I knew about. The Australian system seems quite reasonable, I wonder why we don't have something like that? 2 years for everything seems pretty weird.
In the EU there are 2 years warranty for pretty much anything (not services), so the reverse bathtub descent is bit more than that.
As for courts - there is a customer protection commission/service in most (all) EU member states. However, they won't do anything if the item is out of legal claim for 'free' (any) repairs.
My personal issue is not the warranty/courts, though. While I can repair all kinds of stuff (from laptops board repair to gas lawn mowers), the fact you get a piece of junk that serves no purpose until repaired, is damning. A story may make a decent material for a blog post, but in real life you generally don't have luxury to pursue a slow process for repair/replacement, if it's an important piece of equipment.
It's kinda same here in Thailand; with much more bureaucrat issue though.
Although we didn't explicitly have a consumer court, we have a court department in both municipal and Provincial Courts. (ศาลจังหวัด/ศาลแขวง... แผนกคดีผู้บริโภค)
People can file a complaint themselves both in-person or via e-Filing system. Although very tedious to do so, at least in my opinion, it still workable.
Same as the blog's author, any plaintiff I've help with, need some patient and times on both evidence collecting and consulting with the court's appointed lawyer to draft the complaint. But, for the case against big company at least, it mostly worked out for them.
Check Swedish law; there are no EU-wide laws like the Australian one, but some member states di have extra laws similar to the Australian one. I don't know about Sweden specifically.
The law in the UK is a bit more complex than that. It has to be of what used to be called merchantable quality (they changed the term I think) which means that if something breaks because of something like a manufacturing flaw or design defect you are covered for the reasonable life of the product (so could be a very long time for something like an oven).
This is old law (common law, although now redefined in legislation). EU law added some protections on top of this, and non-EU UK law added more. I am not up to date with the details, but there are plenty of readable guides out there to anyone who needs them.
Also being able to ask it to use the formal vs. informal is very helpful for romance languages. I could never get Google translate to do that (although sometimes adding ", sir" to the end of a sentence would trick it into using the formal).
I wish there was a clear way of sending you feedback though, there are some details that annoy me a lot.
I'm transcribing some recorded sound, and after I have had it transcribed and I am editing it, every time I tab away from the browser the cursor position gets lost. The focus on the textarea is also lost, and when I click it, it doesn't insert the cursor where I click but at the start of the document so I even loose my scroll position.
As a paying customer I'd hope to have a way to give you this kind of feedback. It should be fairly easy to make this a much better experience.
Really cool product all in all though! I don't often subscribe to stuff.
I really enjoyed reading this, and felt excited when the author promised to explain viscosity at a particle level. But there was just a short presentation about two colliding molecules and I didn't understand the connection to viscosity. It's like a section is missing or something..?
viscosity has very interesting units - stress (force / area) divided by rate (1 / time). viscosity is measured (a field known as rheology) by, in some way, moving a thing through a fluid at increasingly fast accelerations, or equivalently, at increasingly high frequencies. that is, imagine moving your hand back and forth in a fluid - the faster you do so (the number of back and forth motions per second), the more resistance you will feel from the fluid. for newtonian fluids, the resistance you feel (measured in force / area, ie the area of your hand), is proportional to the frequency of your hand moving back and forth in the liquid, so, the graph is a line. non newtonion fluids do not have a linear relationship between shear stress and shear rate. air is also a fluid - all gasses are, and thus possess rheological properties. air, however, at stp, is essentially an ideal gas, that is, it is non-interactive, and thus, has 0 viscosity. the point here, is that viscosity is a consequence of the interactions of particles. as gases become denser, their viscosity increases. liquids, for comparison, is ~1000x as dense as air. the details of how molecular interactions lead to viscosity is actually quite complicated.
Thank you. I seem to have trouble using rate as a concept, especially dividing by it :)
But I think I get it when I add a virtual distance into what you are saying.
You are saying (force / area) / (1 / time). I add two distances that cancel out: (distance * force / area) / (distance * 1 / time) and get (energy / area) / speed, which is energy used per area and speed. I can feel that, and it seems to be what you are saying, right?
Not really a full answer for you, but one thing that this page clarified for me:
I had generally previously thought of viscosity as "how slow" a fluid is. High viscosity means high "thickness," which means it flows slowly (like molasses vs. water).
But as presented on this page, viscosity is actually a measure of "how fast" — how fast the effects on one molecule can spread out from there to neighboring molecules. Perhaps you could think of sounds waves moving through a substance — a "thick" substance like solid metal propagates those waves quickly (on a molecular level), while with a "thin" substance like air it's much slower. In the more precise language from the article: "viscosity controls the diffusion of momentum..."
So, because this diffusion happens quickly in a high-viscosity situation, little whorls of turbulence are inhibited, because the forces governing those whorls get spread out/diffused quickly.
Perhaps you missed the part of the article talking about diffusion, or did not see the connection? The link between that and viscosity was not immediately apparent to me, either.
Though I don't think I missed a part of the article, I feel more like the author did ;)
What I still don't get is what the difference between high and low viscosity looks like on a particle level. I don't understand why he introduced the collision between two molecules and then never explained that.. :)
Offline is still miles and miles better than patchy Internet. If spotify thinks you have Internet it calls the server to ask for the contents of every context menu, waiting for a response for seconds before sometimes giving up showing a menu and sometimes falling back to what would have been instant if it was in offline mode.
I really loathe their player.
Not only that, there are many apps with no online aspect to them that have facebook sdk or some other spyware that does a blocking call on app startup and the app won't start without it succeeding, unless you are completely offline.
Especially annoying when one is using dns based filtering.
Access to fetch at 'https://europe-west1-nextjs-yak.cloudfunctions.net/updateProficiency' from origin 'https://chat.univerbal.app' has been blocked by CORS policy: Response to preflight request doesn't pass access control check: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. If an opaque response serves your needs, set the request's mode to 'no-cors' to fetch the resource with CORS disabled.
Yeah, we should probably clean up the logs. However, I was unable to reproduce the issue. Can you send a recording to me and then I'll investigate philipp@univerbal.app
I've looked around for something like this also, and I found https://lettucemeet.com which I often use for this.
It doesn't require signing in, and it allows adding what times you are available.
It's a bit unintuitive in where the buttons are placed so some people sometimes struggle to figure out how to add their availability, but generally I like it.
That's great! It has a similar selection UI to https://www.when2meet.com/, but has much better mobile support. It'd be nice to have a mode for scheduling weekdays in the abstract (e.g. I'm free on Thursdays at noon), but it's always possible to use a random week as an example.
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