For more than a hundred years people were able to make ice cream with no code involved at all. I wonder how they were able to do it. It’s a real mystery.
Posted on 11/04/2024 8:58:00 AM PST by BenLurkin
Before this week, most of the McDonald's ice cream makers could only be fixed through the machine’s manufacturer. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which protects the code embedded in the ice cream machines, made it illegal for third parties, like McDonald’s employees and franchisee owners, to break the digital locks installed by manufacturers.
The new rule, which went into effect on Monday, allows outside vendors to fix “retail-level commercial food preparation equipment.” That includes McDonald’s ice cream machines, as 404 media journalist Jason Koebler explained to NPR’s Weekend Edition.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
“upcoming controls on our travel (speed, total distance, max distance from home, number of trips, amount of gasoline burned, etc). “
Have an older car around for trips you want kept secret, but on those trips don’t bring your phone along.
Exactly, Taylor was making more money off service than selling the machines. Dairy Queen has similar machines and they are up 24/7/365.
For more than a hundred years people were able to make ice cream with no code involved at all. I wonder how they were able to do it. It’s a real mystery.
What is Anti-free market about, "you bought it, you own it, you can do what you want with it?"
I’m so old I remember when ice cream was better than today. And you didn’t need a computer to make the soft serve machine work. Dairy Queen had this nailed down solid in the 50s and 60s.
Then they charge you just to read the CODE of what is wrong with THEIR product.
It is the same way with an automobile. At least you can go to the auto parts store and have them read the code.
Some guy on YouTube did an indepth investigation into McDonalds ice cream machines. Eye opening...basically they were screwing over the franchise owners. It’s still on youtube.com.
Exactly. Dairy Queen doesn’t have this issue. Whoever heard of a computerized ice cream machine.
Full Disclosure: I am a professional software developer.
With that out of the way, I think the primary reason embedded code is used in virtually everything these days is to lower cost, reduce time to market, and make things much simpler and easier to repair.
Remember when cars used to have an ignition consisting of points and a distributor cap ?
Today your car can often warn you when it has an issue, and take measures to prevent catastrophic damage.
However, companies often abuse the DCMA in order to gouge their customers, but this is no different that using proprietary parts , bad companies will always behave like this if they can.
IMHO, the real problem is when the founder loses control of a company, and the new CEO only cares about making a quick buck for themselves at the cost of the long term viability of the company.
President Donald Trump beats the Machine, with help from Joe Bite’em. See, Trump can work to fix what’s wrong.
I was a professional software developer for thirty years. I can’t think of a single reason that an ice cream machine needs a microcontroller. It’s overkill. It doesn’t do anything more complicated that couldn’t be done with a 555 timer and a bit of TTL logic — even if you wanted it to send a 5V signal somewhere that it needs more ice cream. Are they networked for some stupid reason?
It’s not the computerization, it’s a business decision by Taylor, and idiotic copyright law. My toaster is computerized. It is not maliciously programmed. Ray Kroc had a handshake agreement with Taylor granting them a monopoly on ice cream machines. Taylor cashed in.
I agree. The corporate scum shouldn’t be able to hold your equipment hostage from thousands of miles away.
I read that 25% of Taylor’s revenue came from service calls on the ice cream machines they made for McDonalds. They made a different machine for another fast food joint that didn’t have that problem. Seems they were in bed with McDonalds.
This thing overkills overkill!
I have a White Mountain hand crank. Hasn’t seen much use. I made gelato last year.
” For most things, no code needs to be involved.”
For most things, code enhances their operation and makes them cheaper and more efficient.
I am curious which items you think that have code that is not needed.
McDonalds cut a deal with a manufacturer giving them sole right to maintain the milkshake machines and that supplier took a reliable machine and intentionally put software locks in that would make it shut down and require a maintenance call when nothing was wrong and the only way to reset the code: call the supplier and wait hours, even days for him to show up, login and then charge then $400. Franchises tried to work around this and McDonalds came down hard on them for it. This isn’t a win for McDonalds corporate, they’re half of the problem. It’s a win for franchisees who were getting extorted by McDonalds and disreputable supplier.
Silly me — I thought 555 meant “read, write” all the way across. (I’ve been off UNIX for a while...666 was read, write, execute all the way across.)
Ever since Trump went to work for McDonalds, they have been making huge improvements.
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