Sure, it’s perfectly technically possible to create an end-to-end encrypted chat service. But you’re a fool if you think Twitter and co. are doing any of that implicitly, when their entire shtick is public message exchange. And even DMs are just "Direct", nobody said anything about Private.
[...] With iMiser(TM) disabled, your iPhone may unexpectedly turn off when you receive important phone calls or are trying a take a video of your kids.
I agree that a warning dialog might've prevented some drama here. OTOH, there are a ton of issues associated with any sort of warning dialog too, and such a thing may in fact create drama on a regular basis. Support costs would increase with more people walking in with phones showing "some weird error message". Or the error message would be ignored, as most error messages are, and nothing would change. At the scale of iPhones, such things matter. There is no easy silver bullet.
Apple tries to make its products as free of error popups as possible and "just have them work"; unfortunately they fell on the wrong side this time.
If the media wants to find a 'gate, they'll find a 'gate. There's nothing Apple coulda done to prevent it besides BEING PERFECT IN ALL REGARDS AND CREATE PERFECT EVERLASTING PRODUCTS.
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
The previous version of the OS won't boot from APFS. So instead of being able to surgically excise enough of the OS to let you reinstall the previous OS (IIRC, this minimally amounts to turning off system integrity protection, booting from an external drive or recovery partition, and 'rm'ing a handful of files, but I usually nuke all of/System plus about a dozen files at the root level), you have to:
have a full backup from before you upgraded
Having a full backup (Time Machine) has always been the only supported and recommended option to begin with. If you even know what dd and rm is, you're so far advanced beyond the typical user that you're entirely on your own and that you can find ways to downgrade if you absolutely have to. Downgrading is a rare occurrence in the first place, and it's even rarer for someone to attempt it the way you do. This is not a realistic concern for enough people to worry about.
And how is this any different from software breaking for any other reason? Would the same TFA be posted with "Deprecation of library Foobar not optional"? That's one common reason why something breaks after a system upgrade. Why make such a big fuss about the file system in particular, which is probably one of the least intrusive changes since it works at an opaque level to most application code?
I don't know, did it cause problems for anyone? If it didn't affect anyone, I doubt anyone cared. If it caused problems, I'm sure that people cared even without understanding the underlying reason why.
It caused some hiccups for developer tools, but those were ironed out in no time flat. Nobody. Else. Noticed. It's going to be the same with the filesystem. Millions of iOS users already didn't notice. And the few edge case people who work so close to the filesystem as to notice, they'll find solutions to whatever issues they'll face.
Indeed, it's probably going to stay an option for non-boot drives forever (technology "forever", meaning until the next major platform shift or so). It's basically "done", they just need to keep compiling the modules in.
Yup, it's been silently deployed to millions of devices already, people have been hammering on it in private and public betas for months, and you are free not to upgrade to High Sierra on the first day. Same procedure as every year.
FWIW, AFP has been on the way out for a while now. Apple is moving towards standardising on SMB. The writing was on the wall that something would break eventually, and everyone who's concerned about that has had time to consider it.
Being forced to agree to what? If I don't want change, I'm not going to upgrade to High Sierra. If I'm going to upgrade, I'll take it as it comes and not pick the system apart for things I like and don't like. Ooh, I want the new foobard system process, but ergh, I don't like that libbaz moved from/usr to/System. Uuh, I like the new instant snapshot backups but ergh, I do not want that new file system....really?
Yep, that's pretty much the argument. Do you think any end user cared when/usr was locked down a couple of years ago?
The people who need to know (developers) have long since known that this transition is going to happen and they've had a while to prepare for it if they needed to. What good does it do to allow anyone to opt out at this point? APFS is going to happen eventually, no two ways about it. If not this year, then when is it convenient for you to do the transition? It's a lot simpler for everyone involved to get it over with and have a clear technical base, instead of complicating the possible configurations.
If you've been sticking to behaviour Apple has been telegraphing for a couple of years now, you're not going to notice a thing. If you've been homebrewing stuff close to the file system on your own disregarding all advice or you have some very specific use case... well, this is your last chance. Your option to opt out at this point is to not upgrade to High Sierra.
If you need a random Windows analogy, Microsoft forced everyone to get their shit together with regards to filename handling by including a space in the "Program Files" folder. Stuff like this happens in technology every so often.
What gives you the idea APFS is "two months old"? It's been announced in June 2016, at which point it must have been pretty darn complete already, and it's been running on millions of iOS devices for the past half year with virtually no incident whatsoever.
And nobody's forcing you to upgrade to High Sierra, unlike Microsoft's extremely aggressive Windows upgrade push. That would be a comparable point, if Apple did a virtually automatic upgrade without your consent. Including a new file system in a major system upgrade is a far cry from that.
Which end user is truly concerned about the file system? Which end user even knows what that is? As far as most users go, this is exactly the same as any other OS X update in the past: you either update or you don't; if you update, the system either works or it doesn't. It hardly matters why exactly the system may give you issues after an upgrade; in the past there have always been slight incompatibilities here and there after a major upgrade which have been ironed out by affected 3rd parties rather quickly. It makes no sense to be able to selectively opt out of those kind of system changes, and it makes little sense to opt out of this either.
If you can't run High Sierra for whatever reason right now (including concerns about the file system), stick with Sierra.
Fair enough, but not enough of a reason not to upgrade. HFS+ must go at some point, you need to get it over with eventually. It's been widely known that this change was coming for quite a while, any external tooling has had enough time to migrate where necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, it’s perfectly technically possible to create an end-to-end encrypted chat service. But you’re a fool if you think Twitter and co. are doing any of that implicitly, when their entire shtick is public message exchange. And even DMs are just "Direct", nobody said anything about Private.
If anyone thinks any communication on Twitter or Facebook or anything like it is private in this sense, they need to reevaluate their head.
Is the data on their servers? Do they have access to their own servers? Ergo, they have Trump's toots and could hand them over.
I'm shocked, SHOCKED, that anybody is shocked about this.
Oh, you mean the ones with the Eternal Battery(TM)(R)(C) from Acme Corp. Well then, nobody's keeping you from buying one of those instead.
[...] With iMiser(TM) disabled, your iPhone may unexpectedly turn off when you receive important phone calls or are trying a take a video of your kids.
FTFY
Indeed, all other phones are always slow, not just after their second or so year. Brilliant tactic.
And all other batteries last forever too, obviously.
I agree that a warning dialog might've prevented some drama here. OTOH, there are a ton of issues associated with any sort of warning dialog too, and such a thing may in fact create drama on a regular basis. Support costs would increase with more people walking in with phones showing "some weird error message". Or the error message would be ignored, as most error messages are, and nothing would change. At the scale of iPhones, such things matter. There is no easy silver bullet.
Apple tries to make its products as free of error popups as possible and "just have them work"; unfortunately they fell on the wrong side this time.
If the media wants to find a 'gate, they'll find a 'gate. There's nothing Apple coulda done to prevent it besides BEING PERFECT IN ALL REGARDS AND CREATE PERFECT EVERLASTING PRODUCTS.
a) Not dunnit in the first place (device slowdown as battery degrades). That was a crappy thing to do and serves to highlight the "mandatory 18 month upgrade" that's so much a part of the Apple business model.
You'd really prefer the random crashes instead of the degraded performance, ya?
Do you request the same thing of executives at CPU manufactures who decided to throttle your CPU when it's about to overheat?
*crashing phones or no crashing phones, FTFY.
The previous version of the OS won't boot from APFS. So instead of being able to surgically excise enough of the OS to let you reinstall the previous OS (IIRC, this minimally amounts to turning off system integrity protection, booting from an external drive or recovery partition, and 'rm'ing a handful of files, but I usually nuke all of /System plus about a dozen files at the root level), you have to:
Having a full backup (Time Machine) has always been the only supported and recommended option to begin with. If you even know what dd and rm is, you're so far advanced beyond the typical user that you're entirely on your own and that you can find ways to downgrade if you absolutely have to. Downgrading is a rare occurrence in the first place, and it's even rarer for someone to attempt it the way you do. This is not a realistic concern for enough people to worry about.
And how is this any different from software breaking for any other reason? Would the same TFA be posted with "Deprecation of library Foobar not optional"? That's one common reason why something breaks after a system upgrade. Why make such a big fuss about the file system in particular, which is probably one of the least intrusive changes since it works at an opaque level to most application code?
Your point being? Do you believe a FAT32 USB stick will silently be converted to APFS when you plug it into a Mac? Errrrrrrr... no.
I don't know, did it cause problems for anyone? If it didn't affect anyone, I doubt anyone cared. If it caused problems, I'm sure that people cared even without understanding the underlying reason why.
It caused some hiccups for developer tools, but those were ironed out in no time flat. Nobody. Else. Noticed. It's going to be the same with the filesystem. Millions of iOS users already didn't notice. And the few edge case people who work so close to the filesystem as to notice, they'll find solutions to whatever issues they'll face.
Indeed, it's probably going to stay an option for non-boot drives forever (technology "forever", meaning until the next major platform shift or so). It's basically "done", they just need to keep compiling the modules in.
Yup, it's been silently deployed to millions of devices already, people have been hammering on it in private and public betas for months, and you are free not to upgrade to High Sierra on the first day. Same procedure as every year.
FWIW, AFP has been on the way out for a while now. Apple is moving towards standardising on SMB. The writing was on the wall that something would break eventually, and everyone who's concerned about that has had time to consider it.
Being forced to agree to what? If I don't want change, I'm not going to upgrade to High Sierra. If I'm going to upgrade, I'll take it as it comes and not pick the system apart for things I like and don't like. Ooh, I want the new foobard system process, but ergh, I don't like that libbaz moved from /usr to /System. Uuh, I like the new instant snapshot backups but ergh, I do not want that new file system. ...really?
Yep, that's pretty much the argument. Do you think any end user cared when /usr was locked down a couple of years ago?
The people who need to know (developers) have long since known that this transition is going to happen and they've had a while to prepare for it if they needed to. What good does it do to allow anyone to opt out at this point? APFS is going to happen eventually, no two ways about it. If not this year, then when is it convenient for you to do the transition? It's a lot simpler for everyone involved to get it over with and have a clear technical base, instead of complicating the possible configurations.
If you've been sticking to behaviour Apple has been telegraphing for a couple of years now, you're not going to notice a thing. If you've been homebrewing stuff close to the file system on your own disregarding all advice or you have some very specific use case... well, this is your last chance. Your option to opt out at this point is to not upgrade to High Sierra.
If you need a random Windows analogy, Microsoft forced everyone to get their shit together with regards to filename handling by including a space in the "Program Files" folder. Stuff like this happens in technology every so often.
What gives you the idea APFS is "two months old"? It's been announced in June 2016, at which point it must have been pretty darn complete already, and it's been running on millions of iOS devices for the past half year with virtually no incident whatsoever.
And nobody's forcing you to upgrade to High Sierra, unlike Microsoft's extremely aggressive Windows upgrade push. That would be a comparable point, if Apple did a virtually automatic upgrade without your consent. Including a new file system in a major system upgrade is a far cry from that.
Which end user is truly concerned about the file system? Which end user even knows what that is? As far as most users go, this is exactly the same as any other OS X update in the past: you either update or you don't; if you update, the system either works or it doesn't. It hardly matters why exactly the system may give you issues after an upgrade; in the past there have always been slight incompatibilities here and there after a major upgrade which have been ironed out by affected 3rd parties rather quickly. It makes no sense to be able to selectively opt out of those kind of system changes, and it makes little sense to opt out of this either.
If you can't run High Sierra for whatever reason right now (including concerns about the file system), stick with Sierra.
Fair enough, but not enough of a reason not to upgrade. HFS+ must go at some point, you need to get it over with eventually. It's been widely known that this change was coming for quite a while, any external tooling has had enough time to migrate where necessary.
You're right, let's stick with HFS+ then.
I think you're comparing Apples to Windows here...
*ba-dum ching!*