Redditor explains why Apple power cables break frequently : “As with any company, Apple consists of many divisions (Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, etc.) THE most powerful division at Apple is Industrial Design. For those of you unfamiliar with the term industrial design, this is the division that makes the decisions about the overall look and feel of Apple’s products. And when I say “the most powerful”, I mean that their decisions trump the decisions of any other division at Apple, including Engineering and Customer Service. Now it just so happens that the Industrial Design department HATES how a strain relief looks on a power adapter. They would much prefer to have a nice clean transition between the cable and the plug. Aesthetically, this does look nicer, but from an engineering point of view, it’s pretty much committing reliability suicide. Because there is no strain relief, the cables fail at a very high rate because they get bent at very harsh angles. I’m sure that the Engineering division gave every reason in the world why a strain relief should be on an adapter cable, and Customer Service said how bad the customer experience would be if tons of adapters failed, but if industrial design doesn’t like a strain relief, guess what, it gets removed.”
(tags: apple cables design industrial-design power-cables funny)France To Launch a National Patent Troll : ‘The operation, called “France Brevets” will buy up patents from small operation and put the French government in charge of […] shaking down companies for money.’ I think the word is: incroyable
(tags: france fail omgwtfbbq patent-trolls swpats patents government innovation software europe)The first Irish case on defamation via autocomplete : Google Instant has picked up people searching for ‘Ballymascanlon hotel receivership’ and is now offering this as an autocomplete option — cue defamation lawsuit. Defamation via machine learning
(tags: machine-learning defamation google google-instant search ballymascanlon hotels autocomplete law-enforcement)