There are (non-shady) firms that do exactly this for other areas (flight compensation, most notably).
There are some issues with contingency fees in German legal professional law. However, it can be argued that suing for these 5,000 EUR is just "collections", so it may be allowed.
The risk lies elsewhere: As I outlined in another comment, there is reason to believe that this may not stand on appeal, or at least that other courts in other parts of Germany may decide differently. As a result, it takes a lot of capital to keep all of these lawsuits going until the Federal Court of Justice or the ECJ have decided and there is legal certainty.
It should be noted that this may not stand on appeal. The full decision is not yet available. All we know is from the press statement.
For example, the court ruled that the plaintiff is entitled to these damages without even hearing them personally on what kind of injury they sustained. This is an interesting direction, and we will see how it is argued in the decision itself. I would assume this could be something that Meta challenges on appeal.
Another way to go would be to argue that this lawsuit involves unresolved questions of EU law that need to be addressed by the ECJ.
In either case, this verdict will create some legal uncertainty in the short term, and I assume many people will sue---but we shall see what happens on appeal and perhaps at the ECJ, which will perhaps be a couple of years out.
What I don't understand is the responsibility of Facebook vs the operator of the website where the tracking takes place. I thought that under GDPR it was the responsibility of the website to get consent from users before passing on data to ad networks.
What do you mean by website as a "place"? I'm not so sure the GDPR mentions tracking. Here's what the court said was relevant:
"Meta, Betreiberin der sozialen Netzwerke Instagram und Facebook, hat Business Tools entwickelt, die von zahlreichen Betreibern auf ihren Webseiten und Apps eingebunden werden und die Daten der Nutzer von Instagram und Facebook an Meta senden. Jeder Nutzer ist für Meta zu jeder Zeit individuell erkennbar, sobald er sich auf den Dritt-Webseiten bewegt oder eine App benutzt hat, auch wenn er sich nicht über den Account von Instagram und Facebook angemeldet hat. Die Daten sendet Meta Ireland ausnahmslos weltweit in Drittstaaten, insbesondere in die USA. Dort wertet sie die Daten in für den Nutzer unbekanntem Maß aus."
I mean that under GDPR, website owners as data controllers must get user consent before embedding third party tracking technologies on their websites to pass on data to Facebook.
It doesn't matter whether GDPR mentions any specific word. What matters is what the technologies referred to by the word "tracking" actually do. And what they do clearly requires consent under GDPR.
The paragraph you posted implies (but does not explicitly state) that Facebook's ability to identify individual users would still be noncompliant even if the website has received consent from the user to embed Facebook's technology. Or does the court blame the website's noncompliance on Facebook?
I think there is opportunity for a more design-oriented tool in this space. I tried pitch.com a while back and was a heavy Google Slides user for a while, but, like the author, I keep coming back to Keynote.
What drives me nuts, however, is the lacking vector workflow in Keynote. The only way to export vector graphics is by exporting as a PDF. Import is similarly difficult. I wonder how this is done internally at Apple, but I would assume that everything we see these days in the keynotes is done using Motion anyways.
I've been drag-dropping pdf figures into slides since Keynote first came out. For charts it was such a relief from the crappy pixelated stuff that you still need to use for Powerpoint.
Given that most of our civilization is run using these tools, it boggles the mind how they are still so limited.
Why is there a limit of nine levels of headings in Word? Why does it feel less usable on my i9 with 32GB of RAM once you hit 200+ pages? Why is the "collaborative mode" still way, way, way behind Google Docs functionality circa 2012? I feel like the core functionality has stagnated since Office 2003.
To my surprise, what used to be called iWork has been my main "Office" replacement for years now. It's good enough, and it's free. I have switched over most of the non-technical people in my life to it, and they have no issues using it (except if they email a .pages document to a Windows user).
I especially enjoy Numbers and the way you can arrange multiple tables on a page. It's a different paradigm coming from Google Sheets or Excel and takes some getting used to, but to me it now makes more sense.
Of course, if I need something "done right", I'll drop down to Affinity, LaTeX, or InDesign. But I rarely have these needs nowadays.
A similar argument could be made for going all in on Google Docs/Sheets/Slides, but I feel queasy knowing that all of my data is in a free Google account, after reading some of the stories here about reaching Google support if something goes sideways.
I tried using Numbers across my Mac and iPad. It has some show stopping sync bugs there which result in it completely destroying documents. Then when you try and recover previous versions you get a lesson in Apple's commitment to things other than the facade on the front of their stuff: not a lot. The document versions thing sometimes doesn't even work and if it does it's so slow it's unusable. Probably backed with some low tier S3 stuff. Also the formula editor is painful at best.
Yeah. I was using numbers and it's not serious software.
I needed "true" or "false" in certain cells. When typing in a cell, sometimes it would capitalize it to TRUE and you would need to type "'true" to avoid that; and sometimes it randomly would accept typing "true". I simply couldn't figure out which would happen at any time.
The whole program is riddled with things like that.
I have run into similar issues and I agree, it’s not without flaws. The formula editor is another example, as others have pointed out.
A good solution I have found to your particular problem is to use checkboxes in the cells. You can select them as a cell type and it converts from Boolean value text to checkbox. I also prefer that, as a user, to typing True/False.
Another common problem with Numbers is the low performance as row count grow and calculations complexity rise.
It can make some very pretty sheets but don't count on it if you have needs for something like pivot tables (which it doesn't have natively).
I think Apple is fucking everyone with those apps. They are not good enough for serious work but decent enough that people will use them; all to get a built-in lock in because of course it only runs on Macs...
I sometimes wish Claris Works 5 was still around. It was small and fast, did everything I actually needed when writing documents or letters and nothing I didn't need, and had a clean, uncluttered UI that made sense.
I also like the Pages/Numbers/Keynote suite. Of course, I'm not a heavy user of office apps at home, so large or complex documents aren't something I'm encountering day-to-day. If I needed to build such a beast, I would probably lean on the 'old standbys' like LaTeX and the like. LibreOffice is still a great platform and one I reach for if an oddly formatted document comes to me, but it's not something I'm using for crafting from scratch.
I would argue it is not just good enough but better than Office for normal consumers. For 99% of my usage and SMEs, Page is insanely better at layout. Numbers are much better for simple chat, formulas and comparison. Keynote.... well i haven't touched powerpoint for 20+ years so I dont know.
The only thing Office is better is when you need slightly complex formulas in Excel or some enterprise that has been using Excel for so long you need to use it to guarantee absolute 100% compatibility. For business Excel usage is still king. And will continue to be for at least another 10 - 15 years if not more.
Does it still has this fatal flaw of ignoring the format of the currently-opened file when you press ⌘S (which should be a common occurrence)? I work with OpenDocument formats and I hated iWork products for that behavior.
Have used Pages/Numbers/Keynote for years, alongside MS Word/Excel/Powerpoint, and always found the former to have better or nicer workflows for most tasks, and especially for page layouts. (Excel is however superior for very large or complex spreadsheets.) Highly underrated software.
I also use the iWork suite because that's what I have, and I despise Numbers
Pages and Keynote are fine but I can't for the life of me figure out how to do anything with Numbers. It looks beautiful and I want to like it but as you say it's (too) different from Excel, at least for me.
They update the Studio to M3 Ultra now, so M4 Ultra can presumably go directly into the Mac Pro at WWDC? Interesting timing. Maybe they'll change the form factor of the Mac Pro, too?
Additionally, I would assume this is a very low-volume product, so it being on N3B isn't a dealbreaker. At the same time, these chips must be very expensive to make, so tying them with luxury-priced RAM makes some kind of sense.
Interestingly, Apple apparently confirmed to a French website that M4 lacks the interconnect required to make an "Ultra" [0][1], so contrary to what I originally thought, they maybe won't make this after all? I'll take this report with a grain of salt, but apparently it's coming directly from Apple.
Makes it even more puzzling what they are doing with the M2 Mac Pro.
My understanding was that Apple wanted to figure out how to build systems with multi-SOCs to replace the Ultra chips. The way it is currently done means that the Max chips need to be designed around the interconnect. Theoretically speaking, a multi-SOC setup could also scale beyond two chips and into a wider set of products.
I'm not sure if multi-SoC is possible because having 2 GPUs together such that the OS sees it as one big GPU is not very possible if the SoCs are separated.
Honestly I don't think we'll see the M4 Ultra at all this year. That they introduced the Studio with an M3 Ultra tells me M4 Ultras are too costly or they don't have capacity to build them.
And anyway, I think the M2 Mac Pro was Apple asking customers "hey, can you do anything interesting with these PCIe slots? because we can't think of anything outside of connectivity expansion really"
RIP Mac Pro unless they redesign Apple Silicon to allow for upgradeable GPUs.
> Maybe they'll change the form factor of the Mac Pro, too?
Either that or kill the Mac Pro altogether, the current iteration is such a half-assed design and blatantly terrible value compared to the Studio that it feels like an end-of-the-road product just meant to tide PCIe users over until they can migrate everything to Thunderbolt.
They recycled a design meant to accommodate multiple beefy GPUs even though GPUs are no longer supported, so most of the cooling and power delivery is vestigial. Plus the PCIe expansion was quietly downgraded, Apple Silicon doesn't have a ton of PCIe lanes so the slots are heavily oversubscribed with PCIe switches.
I agree. Nonetheless, I agree with Siracusa that the Mac Pro makes sense as a "halo car" in the Mac lineup.
I just find it interesting that you can currently buy a M2 Ultra Mac Pro that is weaker than the Mac Studio (for a comparable config) at a higher price. I guess it "remains a product in their lineup" and we'll hear more about it later.
Additionally: If they wanted to scrap it down the road, why would they do this now?
Isn't the Mac Studio the new trash can? I can't think of how a non-expandable Mac Pro could be meaningfully different to the Studio unless they introduce an even bigger chip above the Ultra.
Indeed, and tbh it really commits even more to the non-expandability that the Trashcan's designers seemed to be going for. After all, the Trashcan at least had replaceable RAM and storage. The Mac Studio has proprietary storage modules for no reason aside from Apple's convenience/profits (and of course the 'integrated' RAM which I'll charitably assume was done for altruistic reasons because of how it's "shared.")
The difference is that today users are accepting modern Macs where they rejected the Trashcan. I think it's because Apple's practices have become more widespread anyway*, and certain parts of the strategy like the RAM thing at least have upsides. That, and the thermals are better because the Trashcan's thermal design was not fit for purpose.
* I was trying to fix a friend's nice Lenovo laptop recently -- it turned out to just have some bad RAM, but when we opened it up we found it was soldered :(
IMO they had plans for a Mac Pro chip that didn’t work out, so they released the M2 version to let their Mac Pro customers know that they’re still committed to the product in the Apple Silicon era.
Could be. I'm not sure if this current incarnation of the Mac Pro signals a commitment to the product though. Same performance as the Mac Studio but 2-3x the price just to get PCI slots.
The Mac Pro could exist as a PCIe expansion slot storage case that accepts a logic board from the frequently updated consumer models. Or multiple Mac Studio logic boards all in one case with your expansion cards all working together.
This kind of thing has been done for a couple of years now, if I understand the Vodafone offer correctly. Binge On in the U.S. (or StreamOn in Germany) by T-Mobile is the same thing, and the Deutsche Telekom used to offer a plan where you get free Spotify streaming, no matter the state of your data plan.
But then again: Does this kind of marketing touch the _core_ problem of net neutrality? You could argue that--as long as the user's high-speed data is intact--all of these services operate at the same speed.
Of course, this is an incentive to users to choose Spotify or WhatsApp over some competitor, but you could argue that _because_ they're giving you the same speed for everything as long as you still have data, it's not as bad as other approaches (not that I think it's a good thing).
Then again, it probably is a really slippery slope.
I learned OpenCV using the O'Reilly book by Bradski and Kaehler (back when it was OpenCV 2). I found it well-structured and it worked for me. They have an updated version for OpenCV 3.
However, I can't tell you if OpenCV is still the framework of choice and/or widely used in the field you want to go into.
Chiming in to agree. I like how you can customize certain characters (like `*' being at the top or in the middle of text, `g' being one or two stories, `0' having a slash or dot).
This looks cool, I especially like the lower-case characters (with the possible exception of the descender on the g). Also, the idea of using a monospaced font as a display font rather than a font for restricted environments (terminals) is new to me.
This may be a tangent, but speaking of mono fonts sponsored by big SV firms: Am I the only one who would like to see Apple's San Francisco Mono (which they stealthily debuted at WWDC) released properly (i.e. as an independent font file)? It's currently in the Xcode preview, but you can't use it anywhere else.
There are some issues with contingency fees in German legal professional law. However, it can be argued that suing for these 5,000 EUR is just "collections", so it may be allowed.
The risk lies elsewhere: As I outlined in another comment, there is reason to believe that this may not stand on appeal, or at least that other courts in other parts of Germany may decide differently. As a result, it takes a lot of capital to keep all of these lawsuits going until the Federal Court of Justice or the ECJ have decided and there is legal certainty.