OMG! It's deceptions!!!!!
I was wondering if any of the fanboys have ever shared files between a Windows machine and a Mac. Over a network or via removable media. Microsoft came up with the CIFS protocol. They came up with FAT32. Would you be cool with it if you were unable to share files with Windows machines? Or couldn't take files off a digital camera card? (they almost universally use FAT32) What if they dropped Office for Mac completely and then kept changing the file formats so that every time someone sent you a doc or ppt file you couldn't open it? Well why should they let you open it anyway? You have another program pretending to be office! OMG! It's deceptions!!!!!1
Beautiful analogies, but of course the fanbois won't understand them.
I don't know which is sadder - Apple acting like a spoiled child, or the blind defense of the fans.
This bumper sticker seems relevant:
Pushing a specific update to destroy teh competition is not only digusting but also quite damaging for the consumer (of iTunes). Shameful
Apple is turning into "The Man." Breaking tethering, breaking Pre syncing, blocking iPhone apps that compete with theirs.
Agree - this isn't cool, and Apple depends so much on being "cool".
What if this pre/tethering crap destroys the "Apple is cool" facade? People will buy Zunes, or at least throw away the tacky white plastic earbuds so that people won't know that they're uncool enough to buy an Ipod. At Starbucks, the posers will be in the corners, with the glowing Apple on their Powerbooks covered with duck tape (yes,
duck tape).
This is why open source software is the only alternative, so we're not a the whim of some company that does not appreciate its customers.
My experience with open source is that OSS does not provide the kind of long term assurance of support that commercial software provides. The legions of volunteer programmers want to work on the latest and greatest - not support legacy things that might be important to the non-paying "customers".
My Excel 2007 gives me the choice of saving a file in "Excel 5.0" format, so that people who haven't upgraded since 1993 can read my files. With Linux, I find that scripts that I wrote a month ago break on an update - since the unpaid legions decided to change the spelling of a keyword and didn't even have the courtesy to alias the old spelling.
OSS is only as good as the passion of the unpaid programmers. They'll make sure that all the video files of old porn that you've downloaded are still viewable, but anything else is a crap shoot.