Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 19th Oct 2012 20:07 UTC
Interesting little tidbit from the Reddit AMA session with Microsoft's Surface team. One Redditor wondered just how much disk space Windows RT takes up - in other words, if you buy the 32GB Surface RT tablet, how much space is left for your stuff? It turns out that while Windows 8 RT is considerably smaller than its Windows 7 x86 predecessor, it's still huge by mobile standards.
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RE[2]: Comment by kurkosdr
by kurkosdr on Mon 22nd Oct 2012 12:55
in reply to "RE: Comment by kurkosdr"
Member since:2011-04-11
We had the kind of filesystem layout like you're "advocating" on things called Floppy Disks and you were really and totally screwed when your OS system files got trashed in one fashion or another.
There's a reason they got moved into their own partitions, and it looks like losers like yourself are going to have to learn *THAT* lesson all over again.
There's a reason they got moved into their own partitions, and it looks like losers like yourself are going to have to learn *THAT* lesson all over again.
If the system files are on a different folder, with different permissions (exactly like Linux does it), then nothing can be "trashed", unless it's the OS itself doing the trashing (due to a bug or something), which in that case having a separate partition won't help, because the OS could as well trash the filesystem in that partition.
I don't know why I am answering this, as you are obviously either an old-school Unix neckbeard that has already reached the conclusion that Unix always did everything perfectly and working backwards from there to find "reasons" why Unix did things the way it did (even for things it doesn't do anymore), or a troll. The rude way you talk can be attributed to either of the two.
This means that while the latter's mounted for use via USB, it's inaccessible to the OS itself, which is why system and apps were partitioned off separately. In 4.0 and up MTP is supported which means this kind of separation is no longer necessary, e.g. on my Galaxy Nexus all of the on-board flash storage is available for apps and data (minus the overhead of the OS install).
Many thanks for the answer. Having to split the storage space into pieces sucks, so I am glad Android doesn't need it anymore.
Edited 2012-10-22 12:57 UTC
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2011-08-18
So, OEMs have a balance of ying and yang to do, with the more space they give to apps, the less is available for photos, vids and the like. This is back to the dark ages of Unix partitions, even linux doesn't require a seperate partition for system anymore. It uses folders. My dad's Xperia U has only 4GB of it's 8GB available for user data *sigh*
PS: Yes I know most apps can install most of their stuff to /sdcard, but Android's partitions are stiil brain damaged, and OEMs still give huge sizes to the other partitions, thinking they are doing the user a service.
And you think that there's actually something wrong with this? If you do, then more fool you.
We had the kind of filesystem layout like you're "advocating" on things called Floppy Disks and you were really and totally screwed when your OS system files got trashed in one fashion or another.
There's a reason they got moved into their own partitions, and it looks like losers like yourself are going to have to learn *THAT* lesson all over again.