The real problem isn't the space the OS takes up, but the "Other" usage that seems to accumulate irrevocably over time. It's been a known problem for years and has never been addressed or officially confirmed. It can quickly consume even the highest capacity devices, and unless you're savvy to the problem the only solution appears to be to buy a larger device next time because you somehow messed up your phone.
The other problem is high capacity devices themselves, which command a large up front premium but also require a monthly fee to back up since Apple only provides a small amount of iCloud backup space for free. You might say that it's obvious that a company should charge more for more backup space, but then why is the first 5 GB free? When you're paying an inflated price for additional capacity up front, shouldn't that also cover backing up that capacity, especially with the collapsing cost of transit bandwidth and server storage?
There are reasons one could bring a suit against Apple, but small percentages of additional OS usage don't seem like a compelling one.
The real news here is that Slashdot articles continue to decline in quality. Hacktivism sounds exciting, but these guys are just script kiddies with a No War sig. Yesterday alone they defaced 296 sites, none of which had any political significance. They happened to find an old PHP application on a backwater NASA website (the Aura Validation Data Center), and they took the opportunity to step up their normal text sig to include a graphic picture.
The only reason that this is newsworthy is because Slashdot made it newsworthy. The greatest impact came not from the script kiddies or their vaguely political scribbles, but the deluge of the Slashdot effect on some poor iMac in Alaska.
With OpenDarwin shutting down not too long after Apple closed down OSx86, Apple execs selling Apple shares all over the place, and the exodus of two former NeXT gurus, it isn't hard to see what path Apple and OS X are heading down.
While the rest of your post is informative, you deserve a troll mod for your last comment. No one wants to see good people leave, but their departure will hardly affect MacOS as a platform. Execs selling stock might be a sign that they feel the price is inflated, but its hardly the end of a company. I know that people don't expect intelligent debate in Slashdot articles, but you would sound more intelligent and respectable if you didn't include the wild speculation at the end of your post. People have been forecasting the end of Apple for thirty years, and they all look stupid when nothing happens.
Instead concentrate on the points of improvement:
Apple needs to focus their product. No one wants to pay for BSD, and Apple shouldn't be funding a proprietary fork. This needs to be an Open Source collaboration.
They also need to manage the underlying OS differently than products. Steve's desire for secrecy interferes with the Open Source community.
Over time, more APIs will have to go Open Source as they become commodities that people aren't going to pay for.
But lets not forget that Apple is a company, and they are responsible for every line of code in their product. It should be obvious why they won't simply accept every patch that gets sent their way. Sure, a number of companies are experimenting with this, but it isn't an accepted business practice quite yet. From a customer point of view, its okay if their Debian installation gets updates every day, and is sometimes broken, and sometimes changes drastically. None of these are acceptible to MacOS users. The other side of the coin is RedHat, who spends a lot of time validating the software quality of thousands of packages. Apple just doesn't have the time for this. On top of these, they have some self-serving interests, such as resticting code from running on beige boxes. No one likes that, but its key to their current business plan.
Apple's open source projects can't be viewed from the perspective of traditional open sourcers. Linux/GNU users have a certain set of expectations that are fundamentally different from Windows/Mac users. Open Source code from Apple is not the improvement playground of Linux, but a utilitarian structure that is only changed when necessary, and only by Apple. Its the same as any corporation that uses open source - they find a system that works and freeze a snapshot. I'm not sure how you build a community in that environment, but I can be certain that Apple is the tip of an enormous corporate-opensource iceberg, and learning to integreate the two cultures will be fundamentally more important than helping a single computer company.
I recently wrote a KML (Google Earth) export script for Blender.org. Blender is certainly less intuitive than SketchUp, but its undeniably more powerful, as well as open source. It supports importing and exporting a number of other industry standards, so you could use it to transform models you already have.
Another Case of Poor Slashdot Journalism
on
WinXP on a Mac, Hoax?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Turn of events:
1) someone posts some (blurry) pictures (4) of a WinXP install screen on an iMac to flickr
2) forums world-wide respond with "d00d! its a total fake! look at those pixels!" and "why can't a guy who knows how to do this use a camera? fake!" and "OMFG hwd u do that? cant be done - fake!"
which results in this fine slashdot news story, based entirely on blurry photos and forum jockeys. seriously guys, we'll know someone's done it when the pot is claimed - until then, it just isn't news... daveschroeder posted a better written, more informative piece than the article he was replying to.
Luke got the same uninformed forum jockey BS when he bootstrapped linux on the Treo 650.
If a man steals money and gives it away, does that make him more generous than the conservative legitimate business man? The Robin Hood image might be romantic as a fairy tale, but I don't think it is in reality. Does the computer industry consider Steve Jobs and Apple to be a bully who detracts from the productivity and success of the rest of the market? What about Bill Gates and Microsoft? Does the money that a monopoly makes balance the damage that a monopoly does to a market? I don't think so - but even if this were the case, then donations to charity would only balance the equasion and make the monopolist no more humanitarian than someone who had done no business at all. After all, to apply the Robin Hood image to Bill Gates is to call him someone who takes from some rich, more well off, and many poor, and gives to the poor.
I would always side with Steve Jobs, because his work has always increased the wealth of everyone. Apple is not a monopoly, neither was NeXT, and yet people did wonderful things using the products of these companies. People also do great things using Windows, but the good only succeeds in factoring out the damaging monopolistic policies of Microsoft. So Jobs made himself rich by making others rich, and Gates made himself rich by destroying the works of others.
Its been suggested in these comments that the best of all must be RMS and Torvalds. I have to agree - these people have taking nothing from anyone, and have increased the wealth of us all. While they might not make generous monetary donations to any particular charity, they have given small amounts to the millions or people who uses their products worldwide.
Slashdot Mirror
"Researching zero days"
The real problem isn't the space the OS takes up, but the "Other" usage that seems to accumulate irrevocably over time. It's been a known problem for years and has never been addressed or officially confirmed. It can quickly consume even the highest capacity devices, and unless you're savvy to the problem the only solution appears to be to buy a larger device next time because you somehow messed up your phone.
The other problem is high capacity devices themselves, which command a large up front premium but also require a monthly fee to back up since Apple only provides a small amount of iCloud backup space for free. You might say that it's obvious that a company should charge more for more backup space, but then why is the first 5 GB free? When you're paying an inflated price for additional capacity up front, shouldn't that also cover backing up that capacity, especially with the collapsing cost of transit bandwidth and server storage?
There are reasons one could bring a suit against Apple, but small percentages of additional OS usage don't seem like a compelling one.
The real news here is that Slashdot articles continue to decline in quality. Hacktivism sounds exciting, but these guys are just script kiddies with a No War sig. Yesterday alone they defaced 296 sites, none of which had any political significance. They happened to find an old PHP application on a backwater NASA website (the Aura Validation Data Center), and they took the opportunity to step up their normal text sig to include a graphic picture.
The only reason that this is newsworthy is because Slashdot made it newsworthy. The greatest impact came not from the script kiddies or their vaguely political scribbles, but the deluge of the Slashdot effect on some poor iMac in Alaska.
While the rest of your post is informative, you deserve a troll mod for your last comment. No one wants to see good people leave, but their departure will hardly affect MacOS as a platform. Execs selling stock might be a sign that they feel the price is inflated, but its hardly the end of a company. I know that people don't expect intelligent debate in Slashdot articles, but you would sound more intelligent and respectable if you didn't include the wild speculation at the end of your post. People have been forecasting the end of Apple for thirty years, and they all look stupid when nothing happens.
Instead concentrate on the points of improvement:
But lets not forget that Apple is a company, and they are responsible for every line of code in their product. It should be obvious why they won't simply accept every patch that gets sent their way. Sure, a number of companies are experimenting with this, but it isn't an accepted business practice quite yet. From a customer point of view, its okay if their Debian installation gets updates every day, and is sometimes broken, and sometimes changes drastically. None of these are acceptible to MacOS users. The other side of the coin is RedHat, who spends a lot of time validating the software quality of thousands of packages. Apple just doesn't have the time for this. On top of these, they have some self-serving interests, such as resticting code from running on beige boxes. No one likes that, but its key to their current business plan.
Apple's open source projects can't be viewed from the perspective of traditional open sourcers. Linux/GNU users have a certain set of expectations that are fundamentally different from Windows/Mac users. Open Source code from Apple is not the improvement playground of Linux, but a utilitarian structure that is only changed when necessary, and only by Apple. Its the same as any corporation that uses open source - they find a system that works and freeze a snapshot. I'm not sure how you build a community in that environment, but I can be certain that Apple is the tip of an enormous corporate-opensource iceberg, and learning to integreate the two cultures will be fundamentally more important than helping a single computer company.
I recently wrote a KML (Google Earth) export script for Blender.org. Blender is certainly less intuitive than SketchUp, but its undeniably more powerful, as well as open source. It supports importing and exporting a number of other industry standards, so you could use it to transform models you already have.
Blender KML Export
Blender.org
Turn of events: 1) someone posts some (blurry) pictures (4) of a WinXP install screen on an iMac to flickr 2) forums world-wide respond with "d00d! its a total fake! look at those pixels!" and "why can't a guy who knows how to do this use a camera? fake!" and "OMFG hwd u do that? cant be done - fake!" which results in this fine slashdot news story, based entirely on blurry photos and forum jockeys. seriously guys, we'll know someone's done it when the pot is claimed - until then, it just isn't news... daveschroeder posted a better written, more informative piece than the article he was replying to. Luke got the same uninformed forum jockey BS when he bootstrapped linux on the Treo 650.
If a man steals money and gives it away, does that make him more generous than the conservative legitimate business man? The Robin Hood image might be romantic as a fairy tale, but I don't think it is in reality. Does the computer industry consider Steve Jobs and Apple to be a bully who detracts from the productivity and success of the rest of the market? What about Bill Gates and Microsoft? Does the money that a monopoly makes balance the damage that a monopoly does to a market? I don't think so - but even if this were the case, then donations to charity would only balance the equasion and make the monopolist no more humanitarian than someone who had done no business at all. After all, to apply the Robin Hood image to Bill Gates is to call him someone who takes from some rich, more well off, and many poor, and gives to the poor. I would always side with Steve Jobs, because his work has always increased the wealth of everyone. Apple is not a monopoly, neither was NeXT, and yet people did wonderful things using the products of these companies. People also do great things using Windows, but the good only succeeds in factoring out the damaging monopolistic policies of Microsoft. So Jobs made himself rich by making others rich, and Gates made himself rich by destroying the works of others. Its been suggested in these comments that the best of all must be RMS and Torvalds. I have to agree - these people have taking nothing from anyone, and have increased the wealth of us all. While they might not make generous monetary donations to any particular charity, they have given small amounts to the millions or people who uses their products worldwide.