Apple knows how to make friends too.

-

Sony has presented itself during the last years as a company that has no problem suing their own clients and fans. Several lawsuits against hackers that unlocked previously existing features on some Sony products were dragged to court. I do not think this is a smart move.

Corporations need to understand that customers are a blessing and not a curse. Even if they do not plan on using the product they are buying the way the corporation wants them too. I do not think a company would be offended if I am buying a TV set just to use it as a door step. But even if the are, they can keep that feeling to themselves as they are keeping my money too. Business is more about making money and less about exerting power over your user base.

Apple has been involved in several lawsuits recently to prevent other corporations (i.e: Amazon, Microsoft) to use the term "App Store". It is unclear whether the term is too generic to be protected or not, but it does not look good for Apple at the moment.

But what really pisses me off is that now Apple is bullying the start-up of a friend of mine, Amahi, not to use the term App Store too. On one hand I guess my friend should be proud for his company to be put in the same basket as Microsoft or Amazon but I am pretty sure his company's revenue is just peanuts compared to the others. But on the other hand I think it is the wrong PR movement. You do not get popular by suing kids or small firms. And while a C&D is not a lawsuit, it is the last warning before the elephant jumps on top of your company. I think it is better to compete in terms of how good your technology is.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

VFD control with Arduino using RS485 link

-
Image
Variable Frequency Drives ( VFD ) allow the control of spindles so speed can accurately be controlled and a detailed acceleration profile for the spindle and reverse rotation can all be handled. In essence a VFD is an three phase inverter for three-phase AC motor. I am using a popular (I mean cheap) Chinese VFD and though the reference manual is not great, I could see there is a built-in RS-485 port. I usually control the start, stop and speed selection using the keyboard on the unit but I thought it will be more useful if I could control everything from the same Arduino is doing our CNC table control. Some cheap RS-485 off eBay and some lines of code later, I can start, stop and change the speed from an Arduino. What a cool thing to have! Some configuration of your VFD are needed before you can use it like that.  You need to set PD163=1 (I am using address 1 in the code). PD=164=1 (for setting serial to 9600bps) and PD165=0 (for using ASCII and 8N1 character format)
Read more

How to get sinusoidal s-curve for a stepper motor

-
Image
After some experimentation, and delving a bit into the math of motion, I realized there can be a significant difference on the motion of a machine by just making small changes. A common and popular approach to smooth one axis of motion is to use a trapezoidal speed pattern, where acceleration and deceleration are uniformly accelerated movements (aka constant acceleration motion) separated by a portion happening at cruising speed. The problem comes with the fact that, while that approach is simple to understand and to code, it does contain sudden changes in the acceleration, that show as spikes on the acceleration derivative, called jerk. These sudden changes in the acceleration translate into undesired vibration in our machines. Most of that can be eliminated by selecting a motion pattern that does not contain sudden changes of acceleration. If we chose a mathematical function for our speed whose second derivative is continuous, then we reduce system vibration quite a lot. One ma
Read more

Importing OpenSCAD designs into Onshape

-
Image
After using Onshape CAD software for a while I am really fond of it. So one natural thing to do, specially once they have released the Instructor's kit is to start using it in the classroom too. But one thing I was not so sure how to do was to use old designs I made using OpenSCAD. It does not mean I am completely quitting using OpenSCAD but suddenly I can see I can do assemblies in Onshape that will look quite nice for showing and documentation purposes if only I could easily import from OpenSCAD. I am glad to report that the route OpenSCAD --> FreeCAD --> Onshape worked brilliantly. Even more when a few tricks were applied. While some people suggest to import CSG files from OpenSCAD to FreeCAD, I have had more success by directly importing SCAD files into FreeCAD. One trick that worked well for me was to get rid of $fn references, so now circles become real circles (or cylinders) in FreeCAD. If a part keeps some $fn references then your cylinders or circles wi
Read more