Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 31st Jul 2008 22:03 UTC
There are probably lots and lots of lawsuits going on every day in the technology world, and generally, they are quite uninteresting to all of us. Exceptions exist, of course, and the case of Apple and PsyStar is definitely one of them. It's a lawsuit that could test one of the most debated issues in the world of software: the EULA issue. To refresh your memory: PsyStar started offering Macintosh clones earlier this year, which caused quite the uproar in the Mac community. Apple was silent on the issue at first, but a few weeks ago the company decided to take legal action against PsyStar, claiming PsyStar violated Apple's copyright and license agreements (EULAs), and motivated others to do the same. While several legal experts agree that Apple's EULA will stand the test of court in The Netherlands, the situation in the US might be completely different. PsyStar seems prepared for the worst, as they have hired lawyers from Carr & Ferrell LLP, a firm who successfully fought Apple in court over IP issues before. I'm breaking out the popcorn, because this is hopefully going to be a big one.
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RE[3]: Comment by Gryzor
by archer75 on Sun 3rd Aug 2008 15:42
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by Gryzor"
Member since:2005-10-17
People would still buy apple hardware because of it's reliability and form. It's pricing isn't too far out of line compared to other hardware.
Lot's of companies sell only hardware and do fine. Others sell only software and do great. Apple can simply do both. They sell tons more copies of OSX as well as their other software and would continue to sell hardware.
RE[3]: Comment by Gryzor
by zombie process on Sun 3rd Aug 2008 15:54
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by Gryzor"
Member since:2005-07-08
OK, but making the reasonable assumption that none of the people who are buying clones would be buying Apple's hardware in any event, I still fail to see how it harms Apple. I am, of course, speaking of people who have bought and paid for the OS not unbridled piracy.
As far as price goes, Leopard is for sale on Amazon for $120 while vista ultimate upgrade is $185. Vista home premium upgrade is $95. I chose upgrade prices since we are discussing a situation where that is the equivalent since if you have apple hardware by definition you must have purchased their OS as well. If you want to discuss OEM prices, the ones on newegg are similar to these prices. An Ubuntu ship-it cd is $0.00. In any event, given these prices, the idea that Apple is giving their OS away for a song while the competition is bankrupting their customers is obviously bogus.
Now, all this said, I don't have an agenda here at all. I was just interested in discussion that wasn't knee-jerk level "PYSTAR FTW!!!" or "APPLE FTW!!!" w/o some discourse.
Member since:2006-10-12
OK, but making the reasonable assumption that none of the people who are buying clones would be buying Apple's hardware in any event, I still fail to see how it harms Apple. I am, of course, speaking of people who have bought and paid for the OS not unbridled piracy.
That's a pretty big assumption to make; maybe they would have bought a Mac, but saw the clone was cheaper. The clone market is tiny right now, but if it became legitimised it's possible it could grow to be reasonably large—large enough to be problematic for Apple. Remember what the clones did to IBM, after all?
Personally, I consider my copies of Mac OS X to be subsidised in part by the hardware, and in practice retail copies are “Upgrade” versions, because every Mac sold similarly at retail already ships with a licensed version, and the license tells me I can't install it on anything else (I have, but the user experience and hassle of installing it on a Dell laptop was so poor I ended up re-installing XP on it and letting my Macs be the ones to run Mac OS X). Whether this is true, right now, in legal terms or not, I don't know. It's possible that Apple missed a trick, but they can always change the license terms to require that you must have a previously-licensed full version of Mac OS X in order to install retail copies and never actually sell them (or sell them at a much higher cost to cover the lost hardware sales).
Despite what some think, I can't for the life of me see why it's possibly in Apple's interests to “go mainstream” with Mac OS X: ask anybody who's done low-level hacking on an operating system kernel how much of a pain in the ass differing hardware configurations are; Apple already supports a fair number of its own, without having to deal with the multitude of unknown combinations customers might throw at it. There's a misapprehension that Apple clearly wants to have Mac OS X running on every desktop it can—perhaps it does, but not if the hardware isn't made by Apple; that route just isn't profitable (and frankly, Apple's business decisions haven't exactly done its shareholders a disservice since Jobs got back to the helm and put a stop to the Mac clones the first time around).
News
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 22:43 UTC
The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/20/13 21:50 UTC
PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:15 UTC
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/19/13 23:11 UTC, submitted by Drumhellar
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 21:06 UTC
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/18/13 7:37 UTC
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Linked by fran on 05/18/13 1:38 UTC
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 23:35 UTC, submitted by kragil
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
Linked by MOS6510 on 05/17/13 22:22 UTC
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 05/17/13 22:15 UTC, submitted by Tom
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.More News »
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Member since:
2007-02-17
I'll take this one. It harms Apple because Apple is a hardware company, the software they do develop they sell dirt cheap compared to their competition in the same market to entice users to buy their hardware. Being able to run other OS is a selling point of their hardware, it does not harm Apple in any way in-fact it helps sell their system. Hacking OSX and then selling to run on commodity hardware harms Apple because they already sell their software far lower than their competition in certain areas and if everyone can run OSX, why would they buy Apple hardware, how will Apple recoup their investment?