Slashdot Mirror
Apple Threatens Open Source Theme Project
cloudscout writes "Macworld UK is reporting that Apple is threatening the Mac Themes Project for creating a theme editor. Apple accuses them of contributing to trademark infringement by enabling people to copy Apple's graphics. They've issued a cease-and-desist order insisting that MTP remove their theme editor from all webservers under their control, "including any hyperlink to other locations where the material may be available". They're even trying to invoke a shaky clause in their OS licenses which prohibit reverse-engineering the operating system since the theme editor utilizes unpublished specs. Apple is famous for its unfriendly attitude toward developers and tech media, but this is just ridiculous. How could they possibly suffer any damage by MTP's efforts? " I'm seriously disappointed to see this. Apple's lawyers are their own worst enemy: they've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this. Its just so dumb I don't know how to respond.
Too bad nobody actually asks their PR people before bombing their fans. Perhaps they should read http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/05/lega l/ (deals with domain names & trademarks, but still very very relevant)
Have you seen Apple's Program? You don't even have to pay for the compiler as you require with VC. Downloads are free, you don't need to be an MSDN robot subscriber. Microsoft has the WORST developer program and information structure there is. If I want one piece of info I have to surf through two hours of Microsoft crap propaganda and proprietary MFC shit.
Yeah MS is smarter... they let you code and THEN steal youre stuff.
This isn't a news for me. Apple has dissapointed me a LONG LONG time ago back in ~1996. Apple killed inovation since that year, with the return of Steve Jobs as tmp-CEO. Gil Amelio really got a clue about bussiness but maybe it's apple corporate culture (& loyal stupid fans) that love to see an Andy Warhol friend as CEO. Let me provide some facts to support my affirmations:
-Apple killed PowerPC. No, Its true. Back in 1995-96 IBM, Motorola and Apple formed a comitee for making a open mobo stantard called CHRP (Common Hardware Reference Plataform) for the PowerPC. IBM and Mot were very suppotive to the standard for abpur a year Apple had no clear position and when the decisive time came up apple didn't support the standard arguing non-sense technical stuff. what they really wanted whas the big bucks revenues for the propietary mobo desing, thus affecting the longterm PowerPC roadmap. Mot has refocused the PowerPC future generations to the appliance market so, in some years we wont see it for the desktop or anykind of server.
-Apple killed MACclones. ~1995 we got the choice of clones. Umax, Mot, Power Computing just to name the big cloners. in few months they were very competitive wuth apple outperforming their boxes at a very competitive price. As always apple hoped that cloner would follow their internal policies (and not making competitive products). apple wanted to colonize pc market share with clones but not to compete with 'em. they coulnd allow such a "disloyalty" and killed clones, thanks to a some restrictives clauses in their clone licenses. Umax, Mot and all the other cloners lost BIG BUCKS thanks to that. BTW eye candy boxes were in the mind of clonners. MacWorld proposed a very inovative box based un CHRP, Firewire, USB, desingned by BullFrog desing. Mot was interested in this eye-candy desing. But before that happend apple killed clones. You could have something like your iMac back in ~1996, when No-1 was even think that as a possibility. and you applauded apple iMac when it got out? Apple killed inovation.
-could talk about copland and the other failed OS projects but failures are too many to list.
-For the future. I think that if apple doesnt stop be so revenue hungry for they "all-might-alien-technology", Firewire may not end as a mainstream stantard. so far I know apple wanted a dollar por every port in a pc o device. that's quite a lot. As I said PowerPc may not be a desktop/server cpu in the future, apple might be forced to move to x86 cpus, but DONT expect their Holy OS to run in your PC, they'll sell you a propietary mobo packed in an eye candy box, of course.
All said above is IMHO.
Low_IQ
Apple used open source and leveraged it. And they got what they wanted. And you cannot pull that away from them, no matter how hard you try.
Their third party lifeblood is still Adobe and MS products, both closed works. They aren't going to lose that.
In fact, in light that they *are* defending their own (and imo, wholly justified) copyrighted work, there will be MORE individuals likely to give *quality* code for the new OS. Remember, only Darwin, the underpinnings, is open source. The underlying parts certainly are not. As a developer thinking about moving one of my programs to OS X, this is actually encouraging news. No, I don't like that Apple is spending resources pursuing what is noticeably a dead end and something that will not hurt them, but the fact that they are willing to defend their work makes it likely that my work will flourish, thank you very much.
It was written for 8.5, and was included in most of the early betas of the OS. It was removed due to a decision by Apple's management at the last minute. This was probably an aesthetic decision, not a technical one. They probably wanted a "consistent look and feel" accross their platform. This is probably the same reason there are so few customization options in X.
I think it's highly unlikely that they're planning their own theme editor. The Theme feature is dead, and since 9.1 is likely the last version of classic Mac OS ever, I don't see any way they'd re-introduce it in the future. Even if they theme OS X, it'll likely be a completely different format.
So I have no idea what Apple's motivation is. They probably just want to kill off the theme feature to make tech support and stuff easier. But if that's true, then they would have disabled the theming feature in OS 9, which they did not do. So I don't understand this decision either.
have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS
You realise that the Mac OS X box includes a copy of the Mac OS 9 CD as well? You can buy two copies if you want, but it's not a requirement...
-dair
Not only boost the popularity of the project itself, but boost the number of people lashing out at apple itself (ie: my email to my fellow geeks at work entitled "why apple is dumb" and referencing this).
Of course, they wouldn't get the negative PR if they didn't do such incrediably-fscking-stupid things!
Geeks are prone to lash back at things they object to, sometimese rightly, and sometimes wrongly (insert reference to the linux advocacy howto here). However, I think that in this case we are completely right to lash out at apple, or their lawyers, as they are finishing off with their own feet and turning the shotgun around to point at their own heads.
We have a geek mailing list at work, and while I wouldn't say "essay" I would say "minor rant" :)
I'm not crazy!
I'm not crazy!
Bullshit. Ali sued precisely because the ads ran without permission.
I'm not trying to see guns get banned. But that *particular* argument doesn't work very well. There are better ones. I don't want to see the very valid complaint against Apple here get painted with the same brush as the gun lobby's arguments, because that will cause too many people to just throw it out. The primary purpose of a handgun is to be a weapon. They weren't invented for the sake of target practice or picking off squirrels. Those uses came to be later on. Let's not try to pretend that's not the case. Sure, you can use just about anything you want as an improvised weapon. You can run someone over with a car, you can whack someone with a wrench, but those are tools who's dangerous power is totally incedental to their primary reason to exist. Stick to the *good* arguments for gun ownership, like the fact that the government can run rampant when citizens are weak and powerless, or the fact that dependancy on the police doesn't work since they won't arrive until the deed is done, or the fact that it isn't even possible to take the criminal's guns away anyway, and the war on guns would be about as effective as the war on drugs has been (nil).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
It's a silly argument, and it's detrimental to bring it up when there are far better arguments for keeping gun ownership legal, like keeping the government honest.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm perfectly willing to say that guns not fired were "used" in self defence if you are willing to say that the US used its nukes against the USSR.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
screwdriver: primary purpose - turning screws.
theme editor: primary purpose - making own themes.
gun: primary purpose - throwing a bullet at dangerous speed through the air.
See the difference?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Bologna.
KDE finally brought UNIX to the desktop. GNOME quickly followed.
Heck, there's probably more KDE users than there are Mac OS X users.
Inventing the Lisa Interface to see that the Lisa GUI predates contact with PARC.
in fact, it' has all kinds of cool stuff about Lisa.
hawk, one of about 6
hawk
Nope. No obligation at all. The simple fact of the matter is that, under certain circumstances, it makes economic sense for a corporation to use an open source model for the "generic" portions of their product--development and maintenance costs may simply be less than the market opportunities sacrificed. In other words, Apple's and IBM's open source activities are driven by economics, not ideology.
I'm working on a paper on this right now, hopefully available in the late summer or fall.
o.b. gratuitious plug: grad students in economics with a background in the public goods literature may feel free to contact me about co-authoring the paper
hawk
while I'm at it, a lot of it predates the Star--to a significant extent, Lisa and Mac were implementations of Raskin's master's thesis from the 60's . . .
i
hawk
What, so anarchy is a better alternative?
You do realize that in this society, your rights end where another person's (organization's) begin, don't you? It's the least worst alternative from the extremes of totalitarianism and anarchy.. instead of a central authority telling what you can & cannot do, we tell each other that, based on the ground rules set by the government.
We've evolved towards this system over centuries. Do you honestly have a better (workable) idea, beyond "screw the man"?
-Stu
I'm amazed that anyone is surprised by this. Apple has never been a White Hat. They are as black as M$, just in different ways.
Apple has never been the friend of the programmer. their recent release of Darwin should be seen for what it is, a commercial enterprise trying to shorten their development time by using Open Source products. Nothing particularly wrong with that but it's not a great leap forward on their part.
Aside from that, they have been as antagonistic as any company and more so in many cases. (Themese.org has yet to see C&D letters from M$.)
Apple is as evil as M$. The difference is M$ is more widespread.
My $.02,
Cal
If you wanted me to agree with you, you shouldn't have given me Mod points.
Time to add a new moderation category:
Non-sequitur
"avi tevanian: hey steve, look! some guys are doing kaleidoscope for os X!"
You paint a convincing scene, but I should point out that the Mac Themes project has nothing to do with OS X: it's about theming OS 8.5 and its descendents through the Appearance Manager. Here's what they say about OS X support on their web site:
Well, if we're going to be picky, wasn't it Phoenix that reverse engineered the BIOS, which in turn allowed Compaq to make the first PC clone?
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
They are not selling the dev tools with every version of Mac OS X. Just this "sort of beta version" that they reciently released.
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
Let's try rephrasing this:
This version of MacOSX will come with dev tools. It's is "quasi-beta" which means it's MS-quality release code (*snicker*).
Future versions/releases will *not* come with the dev tools CD.
Yeah, some will always be available at the website, but not everything you got with this version.
Ciao!
The Doctor What (KF6VNC)
Anytime you have a closed-source proprietary system with the bullshit 'intellectual property' laws we have, they can change the rules on you any time they want to.
I haven't looked at Darwin's license directly (I avoid anything made by Apple -- they are even worse at pretending to be interested in their customers' welfare than is Microsoft) -- but I'd read the fine print most carefully.
Legally, corporations are a single person. But in practice, you can't assume that a corporation will behave with the consistency that a person does. It is made of many people, some of whom are likely to be assholes. That is why contracts exist: they are protection against the (possibly numerous) assholes at a given company, who will have a harder time screwing you over in the presence of a written agreement. You will also have more recourse if they do.
The license that comes with most software these days ('In exchange for the use of our valuable Intellectual Property, we own your firstborn child and your left testicle/ovary, and if our product doesn't work we still get them') has no anti-asshole protection at all.
That is why GPL and the Artistic licenses are so important. In the case of the GPL, it even attempts to pre-emptively prevent assholishness.
It's hard for me to imagine that, over the long term (10 to 20 years), commercial software companies will be able to continue their predatory licensing methods, when free alternatives continue to develop. People expected Microsoft to instantly disappear. That won't happen. But, gradually, the assholes in the software world will choke themselves into extinction.
In a way, you should be grateful to them. They are one of the driving forces behind all the great free software you can get nowadays.
Yes, but you are exposed to 'new interpretations' of a contract. And while you may not personally have a problem with staying with a version of an OS that had a license you liked (say, Win95 or Win 3.1) indefinitely, that is not an option for many of us. It's especially bad for corporations, which are often forced to install new versions of OSes on computers they buy because the old ones simply are no longer available. For instance, you simply cannot get Win95 anymore through legit sources, nor can you get Office 95. You can get copies but they are almost certainly counterfeit. Microsoft no longer sells them.
And I assure you that the license terms on 2000 versions of these aren't nearly as liberal as the old ones were. If you doubt this, go back and examine both licenses. This is how Microsoft (and presumably Apple) will extract more and more money from the same number of customers.
re: licenses -- that was a form of expression you may be unfamiliar with. It's called humor. It's a strange custom in which the author often exaggerates wildly or makes blatantly false assertions. You might look into it.
And I have personally spent nearly as much on Red Hat software as I have Microsoft, even though I didn't have to. Depressed stock prices for many tech companies are indeed a result of poor business models, but RH is not one of them. They will likely have cashflow trouble for awhile yet, but I have every expectation that they will be a nicely profitable business.
Now, they will probably never get to the extraordinary level of monopoly profits enjoyed by Microsoft, but make no mistake -- Microsoft is rich because you are poorer. RH will settle for making less money, which is the same as handing you cash if you use their software.
Also, we are coming off a stock market mania. Commonsense rules didn't apply on the way up and they're not going to apply on the way back down. It went irrationally high and it's going to go irrationally low. (it's not even close yet.) Don't be one of the sheeple -- the fact that stock prices were high didn't make Internet companies 'good', any more than the fact that their stock prices are lower now makes them 'bad'. There is obviously going to be a long term correlation there, but in the short run it's essentially meaningless.
So in other words, what you're saying is that if Apple were a person they'd be my ex-girlfriend.
Time to throw away my G4.
pw:secret
blah im a loser
pw:secret
Check out how cool you are on this streamin radio station.
pw:secret
>MacOS is also more stable than Win9x.
So what? The San Andreas fault line is more stable than Win9x. That's not a fair comparison.
I think you mean You're an idiot. I am no idiot, but I do try to reduce the amount of shit that flies around this forum.
If it is not being infringed then they developer can go tell Apple to take a hike, however the article in question (I am guessing that 1% of the posters actually read the 200 or so words of it), is claiming that it is infringing under some "Lanham Act". I doubt that anyone here understands the "Lanham Act", and what it means to trademarks, and the defense of them.
And MacCentral/Macworld: >http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0104/17.theme . shtmlI D=2773
>
>So much for keeping it in the family...
>
>Brian
>
>
>On 4/17/01 8:13 AM, Mathew White wrote:
>
> From the MacWorld.co.uk daily email news letter:
>
> 2) Apple lawyers target Mac Themes Project
> Apple has issued a cease and desist order against Mac Themes Project for
> creating a theme editor.
> > http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/main_news.cfm?News
Although it's not my job, I'm wanting to post a news article on our website that states we are not going to talk to the public about any legal issues, and are ashamed that such a leak has occurred to tell the general public of this, when all that were involved in the project were told specifically NOT to inform anybody. When our dealings with Apple are over, we will post what has happened and the results in our news, and do not appreciate the speculation and assumptions that have gone into this from the public at this time. This is a legal issue that Apple had to raise to cover its collective rear, and now we must make the case that we are legal and negotiate with Apple what is to happen. yadda yadda woo woo...anybody with better wording and such than me that wants to state that we acknowledge that we recieved the e-mail, but still don't reply to it publicly, etc...please let me and/or smitty know so that we can post something. Remember, PUBLICLY we want to be friendly towards Apple. I still would like to personally kill whoever leaked this information to the press, but I think our best response is to be friendly to Apple in a post on our website at this time, still showing that good faith in Apple that we mention in the letter we're sending to them in reply.
Let me know your thoughts,
-SPOOF P.S.- If anything else reaches the press before we or Apple post to our website or they hold some PR or something on it, I *WILL* find whoever leaked it. So it looks like this is NO NEWS, just Apple making sure that it's Trademarks are safe.
Considering the Themes project people themselves have come out and said, A) Apple is simply covering their asses, they had to do this, B) they are currently negotiating with Apple so that everyone is happy, C) the "Letter" was a legal formality. I would say this is simply a trademark issue which is not understood by anyone, other than the parties involved. The funniest thing here is this was a rumour of a cease and desist letter, and everyone went ballistic. Did Slashdot editors try to contact members of the Themes Project? For that matter did Macworld UK? This is shotty journalism at it's worst. If you want to change the world, you have to do your homework.
Why did they fund MkLinux in 95 or 96? Long before funding open source projects created any hype. Corperations exist to make profits, by the law of the land (If they don't maximize profits, then shareholders can sue them for fucking up.) Apple believes that funding open source helps their bottom line. any corperation that funds open source projects can only do so if they believe it will help their bottom line. Apple seemed to "Get it" years ago, long before Linux was on the radar of hype. I am guessing that you where still watching the Smurfs in 95 so you are excused for being so ignorant of the facts. Anyway this seems to be a trademark case, and those are somewhat scary, as Trademarks are required to be defended, or else they can be lost. That facts should be more clear before accusations are bandied about.
I guess you can't read either. This is a TRADEMARK case, TRADEMARKS are required to be defended (Xerox, Photocopy), PATENTS are not.
There are several charges Apple's lawyers are alleging, and they're quite different.
The one about infringing the Lanham act sounds pretty bogus to me. The theme editor in question is no more responsible for a trademark infringement a user of it may choose to commit than a camera manufacturer is if I choose to take photographs of someone's trademarked logo and use it myself. There is to my knowledge no history of camera firms, photocopier manufacturers etc. being held partly responsible for trademark infringement using their products.
Copyright infringement is a very grey area around things like this -- sometimes the makers of tools that can be used to circumvent copyright are liable, sometimes not. However, the theme editor is capable of substantial noninfringing use, which strengthens its case.
The final argument is that, because the API for doing things like this is not documented anywhere, the only way the writers of this tool could have found out how to do it is by reverse engineering Apple's OS, which is prohibited by their click-thru license.
It's a possible infringement, but it would be an uphill task for Apple to prove. Firstly, the authors could have discovered the API through other means. If Apple have told ANYONE about them, then it could have been disclosed through that third party. If, say, Apple told a third party software developer how to do these things, and THEIR license agreement didn't have a 'don't reverse engineer' clause, then the theme editor programmers are in the clear.
Then there's the problem of proving in court that the authors of the editor actually agreed to that click-thru agreement. If they got their hands on the Apple OS second-hand, for example. Sure, the license probably says that if you sell the software, you have to make the buyer agree to the license first -- but what if someone didn't do that? They are liable, not the editor writers.
Then there's the issue as to whether the agreement had any legal binding whatsoever in the first place. The legality of click-thru licenses is somewhat suspect in most states.
Apple have something of a case, but in a fair trial they have no guarantee of victory. It's probably not a risk they want to take -- if I were Apple, I wouldn't want this to go to court. What if I got found against?
Apple are, I'm sure, hoping the editor guys fold before trial because they can't afford to defend themselves.
All the above is ignoring whether it's smart of Apple to do this. From a PR point of view it's a disaster -- Apple really can't afford to be alienating people who'd care about this. The people this hurts are the Apple evangelists and diehard users who are a large part of what keeps the company going.
I would guess that the PR angle was overridden by Apple's fear that, unless they're hyper vigilant, their interface is going to get stolen out from under them. Not by people playing with themes, but by a big player -- Microsoft, or someone else big -- who will use any failure by Apple to enforce their rights in order to get away with cloning the Apple interface.
It simply isn't as much fun supporting the underdog when they do stuff like this. Pity that Apple hasn't realized that...
shane
Well, they often are. Many work on free software projects because they enjoy it yet don't give ideology a second thought. However, on some deep level, they would agree with Stallman if they were really interested in philosophy. They're more interested in coding than talking about the freedom to code but this doesn't imply that they disagree with Stallman.
I'll close by pointing out that it was my favorite tech company that finally _really_ brought Unix to the desktop
I assume that you mean Apple. I'll just pick the nit that it was actually NeXT who did this. Apple simply acquired their technology and put an overwrought GUI on top of it.
while Slashdot's pick turned out a slow, bloated Explorer knockoff, and fired half their workers the day they finished it...
Yeah, Slashdot's pick. But don't forget that GNUstep is a GPL'd project, which Stallman is in support of.
Oh wait, I've been boycotting Apple ever since they killed the Apple IIgs in order to promote an underpowered piece of crap without sound or even color graphics called... was it 'Granny Smith' or 'Macintosh' or something?
Well, whatever. I'm really mad now.
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I've been able to 'fix' any number of machines by replacing dodgy RAM. Many random crashes and freezes are caused by RAM that's just slightly off. If you bought something that was out of spec: Deal with it. Either get it replaced by the dealer or slam your head in the door for violating point 4 above.
Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1992-1951
I rip CD's at 12x with a G4/450 Sawtooth single processor.
Let's see how well your fancy PIII/450 does it.
I can't understand how 'Rip, Mix, Burn' doesn't violate any copyright laws
Maybe you've forgotten because of all the propaganda surrounding the napster case and the RIAA, but there is a legal doctrine called "fair use". If you own a CD, it is within your legal rights to rip a few tracks from that disc and burn them onto a mix CD. It's no different from making mix tapes to listen to in a car without a CD player. As long as you're ripping from CDs you own, it's legal. Don't listen to the RIAA's 'all copying is piracy' line. They're full of sh*t.
0 1 - just my two bits
Apple touts 'revolution' but give them an inch and they'll be just as bad as Microsoft. And frankly, their ads suck! I can't understand how 'Rip, Mix, Burn' doesn't violate any copyright laws. And their think different ads are purely offensive. I mean Caesar Chavez fought the man and if he saw his face put on an ad to sell computers for the man, I'm sure he'd shit his pants. The worst was Ghandi tho. Granted he 'thought different' - but no different than millions of other Indians (he just acted) and using his likeness to sell products is just wrong.
Steve Jobs is an arrogant asshole and when the Mac community realizes that his only goal is to make Apple money and feed his ego, then I'm sure they'll 'think different' - or maybe not.
I do think different; I don't buy M$ or Apple stuff. Period.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/macthemes/
it was in the original story post.
I guess it sucks to be you.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
It's obvious you've not bothered to read anything Stallman says or you wouldn't say that.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
I don't know about Slashbots, but the FSF sided with Microsoft and put a ban down on porting GNU to Apple OSes. Which was unfortunate if you happened to be an A/UX user.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I don't want to be mean, but I also have a rev. A iMac with 96 MB of RAM. It runs Linux though, and it's blazing fast.
Never swaps and is extremely responsive, even when I run mozilla on it (okay, perhaps not THAT responsive in this case). And I'm also very excited about the possibilities of perl on Linux. (the dev tools also work fine.)
A fish and game warden comes upon a woman sitting along the river with a rod and reel.
He accuses her of fishing without a license, because she has the equipment.
She promptly accuses him of rape.
He's flabbergasted -- he's not even touched the woman.
The reply: "But you have the equipment."
Simply making a tool that people could use to violate Apple's trademarks/copyrights/IP and that has other uses is a reasonable thing to do, and, if Apple were reasonable, would not be a problem any more than IE, which allows you to copy Apple's graphics from their website and do with them what you will. I do notice that Apple's not suing Microsoft...
Dejaffa
There is no 'i' in team, but there is in fiasco...
They are unfriendly towards the people they depend on (programmers, etc.)
They are very reserved and secretive (there's a reason the PC s dominant over the Mac).
They are prone to lash out bizarrely (as witnessed here).
They invoke shaky claims to justify their behavior.
They are prone to grandiose statements.
Now which one of those doesn't apply to MS?
Let's have them BOTH committed!
DS
But in this case, their trademark isn't being infringed. They are attacking this software because it "enables trademark infringment". Not because this project is distributing (or even using, I didn't see one Apple or Mac logo on thier site ... not that I looked that hard) but that someone, somewhere might use this software and distribute a trademarked logo.
Furthermore, they are going after them for reverse engineering because they used OS hooks that aren't published.
This isn't a trademark case, this is an instance of a company trying to maintain complete control of it's software. It's a lot more like the MPAA and DeCSS then it is making themes.org take down themes that really did have the Apple logo on them (that was an honest trademark case).
agreed.
even more astounding is that they didn't file for this particular patent suite until may of 1999 (one of the dependents was first).
if i remember correctly, even OPEN SOURCE window managers were already using the (maybe even identical) methodology described in their claims by that time...
(so, yes, we agree it's an obvious method, but i do believe that this was in total common use by their file-date)
heck, the first beta version of litestep (the openstep-like replacement window manager/theme for windows 95, 98 & nt) went out to folks on:
December 14, 1997 (http://www.litestep.com/page-about.shtml)
a bad example, but one that totally readily popped into my head that i knew had a history on their about page...
just my 0.02
Peter
help steer me right here.
:)
in the article you linked, and i'll try to quote:
regarding the lisa, it was "First proposed in late 1978 by Steve Jobs..."
then, later, the discussion goes "When we started the Lisa project in late 1978..."
next, "The first Lisa application was a Forms Editor...(Figure 2 - 7/79)" (i'm going to assume that means july, 1979).
so, it seems here that we can infer that the interface design occurred between late 1978, and mid 1979. everything up to late 1978 was just concept inside apple per this documentation.
so, later we see "While consistent with the appearance of business equipment of 1979, the first Lisa interface was not very exciting to use" suggesting that they hadn't yet been satisfied that this was a sellable product. thus, it was still an R&D exercise.
good enough, makes sense.
now notice:
"The visit to Xerox was prompted after a number of people read papers published by Xerox about their Smalltalk environment [Goldberg 1978]."
interestingly enough, i can't find reference to anything published by adele goldberg while at PARC during 1978, but let's assume it is real.
if this is the case, that means that the majority of the thought that went into this paper occurred at WORST during the first half of 1978, or maybe the latter half of 1977 (they probably were NOT in any big rush to publish something here.. it was still pretty much an unknown how this would impact the world). this still places things at a half year, or so, out front apple. in reality, i think the collected thought behind the implementation of UI components in smalltalk actually predate 1977 by a few years per the documentation i'm finding at PARC on the topic.
now, all this would be fine & good, until you look at the history of "Star".
check here for that history.
one little snippet:
"When Star was first introduced in 1981, its bitmapped screen, windows, mouse-driven interface, and icons were unique in the marketplace...", and it should be noted that this was a SHIPPING PRODUCT.
seems to me that assuming that paper was published by goldberg when it was, and that the history of "Star" is as published in the linked document, the PARC researchers still deserve the vast majority of the credit for advancing the state of the art, while apple deserves the credit for popularizing it...
seems pretty cut and dry to me...
am i missing something?
is this history as documented inaccurate?
just curious
cheers.
Peter
When Apple's advertise on television and other means their iTunes software with "Rip, Mix, Burn", are they not contributing to copyright infringement by enabling people to pirate copyrighted music and other audio? How do you think they would feel if the RIAA issued a cease and desist order on them for this...If someone from Apple is reading this, tell the hierarchy to concentrate on the real "pirates"...
For what purpose?
Philosophy, ***, I removed Windows from my home computer because of license and security issues. It's true, I'd prefer a better word processor (wait a few months), but that's not enough reason to expose myself. Not with UCITA and DMCA roaming around.
As for Apple. I was interested, now I'm not. I still advise total newbies to go with the Mac, but if Linux gets better, and Apple continues to alienate me, perhaps I'll be willing to give enough support just so that I won't need to recommend them.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
But they were good enough to earn 10% of the market. I don't think they have that much advantage anymore. They're retreating to the same niche that Amiga retreated to.
The problem is, the graphic arts aren't that different from every other market. They demand slickness, and they pay a high margin, so if you have a slick enough product, you can retreat there for awhile. But they aren't a large enough niche to maintain a company. So you better have some strategy that will let you move out quickly. Or else you fade into the past as a reverred memory.
I think that the Mac has a potential way out based on System/X, Darwin, etc. But if they alienate the folk that they need as supporters, it won't work. And this last move has made friends with very few.
They may see it as protecting their short term profits. I see it as dynamiting their life-support system.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Probably. This kind of action causes me to despise both the company involved and the legal profession in general.
Just remember, over 90% (95%? 99%? I don't keep track.) of legislators are lawyers. So the legal profession as a group is directly responsible for the mess that we are in, as well as directly benefiting.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You left out the qualifier....
If you have enough money and time to defend yourself in multiple court actions and appeals.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Linux may have been developed for the PC computer, created by IBM, MS, and the Federal Justice department, but before then the S-100 bus systems were considerably more open.
MS was subsidized by IBM because the government was attempting to destroy IBM's monopoly over computer hardware. So IBM found so.meone else to create a PC OS for them.
Competition? MS lived on indirect government subsidy almost from the beginning! And the "openness" of the PC was because when MSDOS split from PCDOS, MS needed someone to manufacture the hardware. Even with the subsidy they were too small, and IBM didn't dare compete directly (and didn't think it too important, and didn't want to cannibalize their mainframe business). So Compaq and Zenith and Packard and Bell etc. got into the hardware business with the MSDOS operating system. And since IBM had the dominant position, most of the new 16 bit programs were written to run on the PC, and MS new the internals of PCDOS, so they used inside knowledge in creating MSDOS so that the same programs would run on them.
Fair competition. Yeah! Maybe once, but the more I look, the more it looks like a myth. Insiders making sharp deals is more like it, and certainly much more common, no matter what the laws say.
(Or so it seems to me.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
What does it say about slashdot moderators that this comment -- straight from the mouth of a member of the team working on the project, and the guy who actually got the cease and desist -- is moderated to a "3" and random rants against what a stupid decision apple made are up at "5"?
Granted, it's a stupid decision by Apple. But how much obsessing about it do we need? Especially more than this?
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Tweet, tweet.
If you can create your own themes, isn't this the opposite of trademark infringement? After all, this means you're replaceing the Apple trademarked graphics with something else. Something else you or someone else homebrewed.
There's only two reasons I can think Apple be upset about this.
1) Fear of having their interface diluted. They don't want the MacOS associated with joe phearsum's 1337-7h3m3. Or maybe even joe graphic designer's luscious theme. It's worse if they throw in apple graphics.
2) They feel like they're legally bound to defend trademarks.
Of course, given the fact that most of their customers are fairly loyal, asking people nicely not to use apple graphics in their own themes would probably work....
'course, now that they've lost goodwill....
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Tweet, tweet.
Actually, gun manufacturers are up next. Mostly, it's gun dealers that get sued. Not the ones selling stolen guns out of their trunks, (boots for our European readers), but the licensed and legal dealers selling to law-abiding citizens. Colt has stopped selling to non-government customers to try and avoid their turn on the freedom rapers hit list. Remember, this is America, where going after criminals is too hard. Going after the tool-maker is easier, since they aren't running and hiding.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Just don't bolt a handle from an old car door to the top of it, then glue all your mouse buttons together to form one "super" button.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
First of all, Compaq could reverse engineer because they had the reverse engineering done by people who never agreed to the licence agreement. The ones who were "polluted" (wrote the spec based on the copywritten BOIS) couldn't reverse engineer.
Secondly, MS did NOT reverse engineer J++. They licenced Java from Sun, and then willfully tried to get around the licence and refused to implement parts of the Java spec. Sun doesn't care if you provide additional non-Sun APIs to work with Java, even ones that interact with native code (Apple has developed many over time with nary a lawsuit). Sun did care that MS violated a licence agreement.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Apple put the Theme system in back in 1994 or 1995. It was part of Copland and their idea of a scalable user interface. There were three Themes shown: Platinum, Gizmo, and High Tech. Apple even hired one of the guys who works on Kaleidiscope (a third-party Theme switcher for the Mac).
When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he killed Themes. The official reason was that it made tech support too hard: people would call up and it was impossible to know what and where widgets would be on their screen.
Personally, I think it was just Jobs' control-freak personality showing through. The Apple engineers implemented Aqua as a Theme in OS X (in older versions of Mac OS X, you could remove the Aqua Theme files and you get a Platinum look and feel. I don't know if this still works.), so there's some support for the concept inside the company. It's just crazy Steve Jobs again...
The bigger question is if Apple is going to try to squish any shareware developer who writes UI widgets to fix the awful problems in Mac OS X. Aqua is pretty enough, but there is such a huge usability problem with OS X, I find my WinNT box at work easier to use than OS X at home. I've been booting back into OS 9 and realizing how _simple_ and _fast_ everything used to be...
-jon
Remember Amalek.
If you don't run classic you could get away with 64. If you're a masochist with a fast hard drive for swapping, you could prolly get away with 32.
It will run ok with 96, but launching apps (esp classic) will be slow. X is very happy with 192 megs or more of memory (but so are most other os's).
The Rev A. doesn't use PC100, my bad. So it'd be about $42 for 128, again off of pricewatch.
:)
lso for the average mac user (cringes at opening their computer) upgrading the memory in a tray loading iMac is an extremely hard chore
Its not that bad. Anyone who's ever built a lego set could install it. BTW, the factory's ram goes underneath the processor, so you can just use the top slot. Now installing the Gamewizard, that was a bitch. After pulling the motherboard rack out of the case, you have to unscrew it, remove the hard drive and cdrom, squeez the custom voodoo 2 card into a very small space, then put everthing back together.
This theme editor stuff sounds pretty lame, but to make a rebuttal to the rest of your post:
First, they promised this OS for years, and have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS.
OS 9.1 (what you need to run classic apps) is included in the OS X box. You don't need to purchase it seperatly.
Not to mention that the average Apple sold in the last few years is a DIMM or two short of the requisite 128mb of RAM.
If you select the cheap option, sure. Other OEM's do the same thing.
I priced upgrading my Rev. A iMac a week or two ago because of how everyone on Slashdot raves about OS X. I'm looking at probably $500 in software and memory just to make sure I don't lose a lot more than I gain.
Only if you pay Apple's exorborant markups for memory. Just walk over to pricewatch, buy a 256 meg stick of PC100 for $45, slap it in your iMac and go nuts.
o apparently "Think Different" doesn't mean "Different" except in terms of "Make sure different people have the money in your wallet". For $500 I can buy a whole new Wintel box
Or you could do a couple seconds worth of research on Apple's products and shop around for a better deal on add-on hardware. But then you'd miss out on all the cheap karma from the Apple-hating moderators on Slashdot.
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
If Apple were a person, I'd think of them as a creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge.
Certainly lashing out at the Themes editor is crazy . . .
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Apple is threatening the American Mathematical Society for creating the number 3, which when combined with the 'Apple' and 'Shift' keys takes a desktop screenshot, enabling people to copy Apple's graphics. They've issued a cease-and-desist order that AMS remove the number 3 from all webservers under their control, "including any hyperlink to other locations where the number 3 may be available".
The letter also included a post script to the order, stating "All your 3 are belong to us," however the comment was scribbled out before delivery, when Apple executives realized it was no longer funny.
Due to licensing of the OS, nobody anywhere is allowed to ever write anything for MacOS using anything but the API's Apple publishes? Yeah.. like that'll stick. That's worse than Microsoft!
What.. are they jealous because they didn't include a theme editor?
This is what will kill OS-X. I said over and over again to friends, OS-X is cool, I think it's *really* cool, but I just have this feeling Apple will fuck it up.
Looks like they're on their way.
How is 'copying a grapic file' reverse engineering?
I'm sorry... talking about the power of your OS, then forbidding anyone to develop for it without purchasing a developer kit & license is rediculous. What this effectively means is that if you 'figure out' how to do anything not documented, you can't share it with anyone, as you reverse engineered it.
So much for apple.
I believe Mach is under the BSD license. The BSD license will allow you to keep your modifications proprietary and closed.
Informative IMHO
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nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
I nominate this to be a Unix fortune.
Apple is the penulitmate closed OS. Not only will they not publish the source code (understandable for a corporate effort), but they don't want you developing for it unless you only use what they give you, which seems to be less than even MS does.
First off, they have opensourced everything but the GUI of OS X.
Second, _every_ copy of Mac OS X comes with a copy of the latest version of the development tools that NeXT used to sell for thousands of dollars. Not only that, but the IDE is just a GUI sitting on top of Jam and GCC (currently 2.95, but they just got 3.0 building & have been submitting their changes back to the FSF).
Seems to me that they have gotten VERY developer friendly lately.
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
They are not selling the dev tools with every version of Mac OS X. Just this "sort of beta version" that they reciently released.
Man, I must have gotten really lucky!! My retail version of OS X had the developer CD in it! Must have been an accident! Man, it's happened to thousands of other people as well! Apple must have really screwed that one up!
Check out DRM-free movies at http://www.bside.com
Your right, there are probably more KDE and GNOME users than OSX users out there, but if you have used OSX you would realize that they are two completely different worlds of usability.
Though technically KDE and Gnome did bring A desktop to UNIX, I have a rough time comparing a window manager/development framework to a true desktop computing environment.
I have been using OSX for about 5 weeks for development and administration. I don't even turn on my x86 box anymore. With the headstart that OSX already has on KDE/Gnome and the speed that it's moving.. I have a hard time believing that even KDE will catch up to it.
the problem isn't KDE but the fragmentation of the linux community. The only chance that KDE maybe has to Linux Standards project. Until then I am still fighting with not only administrating our servers but my own workstation, no thanks. OSX is here to stay for me.
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Would you like a Python based alternative to PHP/ASP/JSP?
I always thought that Apple had to release their kernel source in some form, since it was based on "Open" Projects (Mach and BSD).
The source code to Darwin is available for download via anonymous CVS and you can browse it via CVSWeb. The details are at Apple's Open Source web page. There are also lots of other sub-projects and source for related tools available there as well. Another place to keep up with developments in Darwin is Darwinfo.org
Their open source web page is actually at:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/
Sorry about that.
I upgraded my rev A iMacs, but it is not good.
Even without classic it swaps it brains out with 96M of memory. Well, its ok until you start running applications, I assume you wanted to run something rather than just look at the dock.
Be very careful getting upgrade memory for your iMac rev A. The RAM vendors have forgetten these machines and "works in non-slotloading iMacs" does NOT mean rev A. revA has the little key tab in a different spot on the SODIMM. I'm still looking for a big revA SODIMM. (And returning very nice but incompatible RAM.)
Michael Angelo, Picasso and all those other painters sued Italian paintbrush makers in their day.
"How can an artist expect to make a living when our paintings and styles are so easily copied by these young upstarts? Everyone who is able to afford a brush considers himself and artist," one notable but whiney famous artist was quoted as saying in a poor rendition of an Italian accent.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
I don't know where you went to price out upgrading your iMac, but when I did, I found I could upgrade it to 256Mb for $99.
Not to mention the fact that when you buy OS X, there's a copy of OS 9.1 in the box, so there's no need to buy it too.
I think spending $200 on a 3 year old budged-oriented computer is reasonable to be able to run the latest OS.
Let's see you spend $200 on your 3 year old low-end wintel box and run WinXP.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Except you forgot to buy WinXP.
Ask me how the Heisenberg Principle may or may not have saved my life.
Ah, apparently I just haven't been looking hard enough. Thanks for pointing that out. It's a bit more than I can justify spending right now, but I'm glad to know that something like it is finally available.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Why do you think the official .pdf viewer is free (as beer), but the complete Acrobat package costs 245usd?
It's the same reason Photoshop costs as much as it does, even though you can work in the open formats it supports with other free tools. Acrobat is the best package for authoring PDF files. It costs that much because people are willing to pay it. You could write your own PDF authoring solution if you wanted to, but people would still probably use Acrobat because of its brand recognition and because Adobe keeps adding new plugins to Acrobat Reader that Acrobat can take advantage of.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Quite possibly. Are you referring to attempts to port X Windows to Darwin, which has some use in Mac OS X itself, or are you perhaps referring to a rekindling of GNUStep efforts, which are attempting to clone Mac OS X?
I don't think a new GUI would have any real point to it, and I don't think that Darwin can stand on its own as a UNIX variant with just X Windows since there are already better, more mature solutions out there. Of course, perhaps, that's just my opinion.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
None of Aqua is based on Adobe's software anymore. The primary motivation for moving from Display PS to Aqua's PDF-based system was to completely avoid licensing fees from Adobe. These fees were one reason that NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were so expensive. PDF, however, is an open format.
Also, rewriting a GUI for Darwin would be pointless, since the Aqua GUI and the Carbon & Cocoa APIs are foundation of every reason to buy Mac OS X. They define the user experience. Using Darwin on it's own just gets you a version of BSD/Mach with a weird filesystem layout and native support for HFS & HFS+ volumes.
Also, the "theming engine" referred to is simply the Appearance Manager. It was originally intended to support multiple Mac OS interfaces, but Jobs ironically decided that allowing users to drastically change the interface would be confusing. (Poor, poor Kaleidoscope users. They must be so confused.) This product is simply a tool to create native Mac OS 8.1+ themes for use in the Appearance manager. I don't really understand what Apple's problem is with it.
Otherwise, your points are all valid, especially the point about jumping up and down and shouting at Apple.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You don't honestly think the clone market was doing anything other than cannibalizing the Mac market, do you? Most post-mortem analyses of the Mac clone market I've seen point to less than 10% of clones being purchased by people who had never owned a Mac before. Of course, it wasn't long after Apple killed the clone market, including Motorola's own line of clones, that Motorola began phasing out Macs in use in their own business.
If you read Motorola's website, it's quite clear that they don't care about the desktop market at all. All their documentation and marketing for PowerPC processors (which is all tucked away from their main products) advocates their use in embedded systems. You'll find nary a mention of Apple as a successful customer. The fact is that Motorla doesn't give a damn about Apple.
As much as I like the technical merits of PowerPC processor family, I've been pushed over the past year into the firm belief that Apple should once again make the move to a different processor family or to begin designing a strategy that can continue to fund OS development without depending on hardware sales. I'm convinced that the failed AIM alliance is nothing but an albatross around Apple's neck. Maybe if Exponential's technology hadn't have been inferior to the PPC 750, we'd have a company dedicated to the Mac for survival right now that could keep Apple going.
In the end, the G4 fiasco was a sign that Apple has tied its destiny to the whims of two companies who are content to let them die. Motorola will fiddle while Cupertino burns, and that great titan IBM, will simply shrug.
(Is that enough pointless and melodramatic literary references for you all? <g>)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'll take this one.
I remember this clearly because I was looking to purchasing my PowerMac G4 around that time. Originally, the first PowerMac G4s were going to be shipped with 400, 450, and 500 MHz processors. However, the thrice-damned Motorola was well into the swing of giving Moore's Law the finger, and they couldn't produce enough 500 MHz processors to meet the demand. Apple made a move that many, including myself, considered ill-advised at the time. Since they couldn't sell 500 MHz PMG4's, they retroactively adjusted the entire line -50 MHz for the same price. 400 MHz machines became 350 MHz machines for the exact same price. They simply waved their hand over all orders and changed them. I think I remember them giving special condolance offers to people who already had orders in the system, but everyone afterwards had to pay the same for less. It was a total rip-off.
I ended up with a 400 MHz (middle-of-the-line) machine, with the intention to upgrade it with a dual-processor card (which has yet to materialize), but I feel a little upset in that I could've gotten that processor for cheaper before the change.
Anyway, that's what he was talking about.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
4: Or maybe how they claim PowerPC processors kick the crap out of x86 processors. Remember how they used to say the G4/450 was double the speed of a Pentium III/450? Somebody explain to me how a G4/733 (with an extended pipeline as the P4 has) can be double the speed of Pentium 4 1.5 ghz if that was the case. Do the math people....
Well, you're kind of off-base about the pipeline.
MPC7400 -- 4-stage pipeline (Fetch, decode, execute, and writeback)
MPC7410 -- 4-stage pipeline (Ditto...)
MPC7450 -- 7-stage pipeline (Didn't find the names)
All this information can be found on Motorola's website in their technical specs for the processors. I'm very unhappy about them moving to a 7-stage pipeline, since that small, simple pipeline has been a key to competing with x86 processors. However, to say that they are just as over-extended as the Pentium IV is ridiculous. The Pentium IV has a 20-stage pipeline! That can be a 20-cycle gap in execution when you have a branch mispredicition. Sure, it can dispatch 6 instructions at once, compared to the MPC74XX's 3 at once, but when 50% of your instructions are memory-bound load/store operations, it doesn't really help that much in the average case. This why even the Athlon doesn't bother with more than 3 even with its 15-stage pipeline.
Granted, Apple is exaggerating by saying that just because certain operations (all SIMD-heavy Photoshop filter) complete at half the time of a top-of-the-line Pentium system, that the PowerMac G4 is always going to be twice as fast. However, the fact remains that for those operations, a chip clocked at half the speed does perform twice as fast. It does go to show that MHz as a rating of performance is just an imaginary figure used to blow magical marketing smoke. Apple just decided to Blow Smoke Different.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Well, since Apple created it, the authority is theirs.
Just like the FSF's authority to place emacs under the GPL and forbid anyone else to distribute derived works under anything but the GPL comes from the fact that the FSF owns the code to emacs.
Dude.
DUDE!
That was !!WAY!! Funny. Thanks for the laugh....
and the insight.
Really. F**k Apple.
If only this were the first time they'd done something like this...
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... thank you.
Jobs is an odd guy. He's got a true love of technology; he likes doing things the right way, not the easy way. That's good. But he thinks his way is the only way, especially anything that has to do with design. That's bad.
This worked for 16 years because Mac OS was obscure enough that there wasn't a critical mass of hacking for it. With OS X now there's a whole new class of hackers interested in modding the OS. I fear we'll see Apple playing Whack-A-Mole with these kinds of projects for some time to come. Let's just hope they wise up sooner rather than later and realize this kind of project is exactly what will give the platform enough appeal to prosper.
But what they are doing is *not* copying th look and feel of Macintosh for other environments. They are providing a tool that allows users to change the appearance of the classic MacOS environment from the default Platinum look. A lot like Kaleidoscope for Macs, but intrudes further into the depths of the system than Apple likes. I don't see how this project in any possible way could hurt Apple's bottom line. It is a product that offers a nice feature *only* to Mac systems. You would almost think that this was a case of completely clueless IP lawyers seeing the words "mac" and "theme" in a free project and lump it together will all the other stupid theme related stuff they have been going after. I still am of the opinion that it will take more than different window decorations to make me shell out a few thousand for a new computer, and that all this stuff does nothing but hurt apple. I wonder if they would be as eager to toss around cease and desist orders at people who actually had enough money to defend themselves, and not just at people who they know lack the money to go to court to defend themselves.. Seems somhow cowardly to me..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Quicktime doesn't have to use sorenston, it just happens to be the default.
:-)
I'm preferenced to cinepak myself
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Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
I can't see a single post commenting that - as usual - companies sometimes threaten suit for trademark infringement because they are legally obliged to.[1] Don't forget that if you don't defend your trademark, then it becomes something anyone can use. This would be worse for apple than letting the themes site continue.
I don't think anyone gains out of this but the lawyers. If Mr MacThemes managed to engineer his software such that it couldn't copy images tagged as apple's trademark[2], then I think the suite would disappear like snow off a dyke, since as everyone is pointing out, this hurts Apple too.
-Baz
[1] IANAL
[2] And why not? It would be trivial for apple to put 'Registered Trademark of Apple Corp' in a tEXt chunk of a PNG or whatever.
Show me the court case. Really, I'm interested---not flamebaiting.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Classic isn't pretty with anything less than 128 MB. After all, you have to consider that you're basically running MacOS 9.1 as an application, PLUS also running your classic applications in the same memory space, and then running all of that on top of MacOS X. MacOS X itself will get along with as little as 64MB of RAM. Course it'll be slow, but its still quite usable.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
The ads ran with the permission of the estate/family of the person featured in the ad.
Apple didn't make Caesar Chavez a sell out. His family did.
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Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
If I remember correctly, Apple once pressed charges for "look and feel" copyright violation. This resultet in a boycott against Apple that seems to have hurt them pretty hard.
It would be kind of sad to launch another boycott against them, now when they have produced the OS X.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
It is not a copyright issue. ...And all the blubbering slashbots</i>
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<BR>
The article says: "improperly copying Apple's copyrighted software code and graphic files".
<BR><BR>
<I>
<BR><BR>
You don't agree with someone (but didn't even bother to read the article), so you unsult them? Real mature.
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<i> Someday they will grow up and work in the real world, and find out that things don't always break down to "us vs. them".</i>
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Who said anything about "us vs. them"? People don't like Apple Corp's actions, so they get decide to do something about it - would you rather they just sit there and let major corporations steamroller individual rights and freedoms? Well, given all your talk about the "real world", probably - for you, the "real world" is one where people don't have ideals, hopes, dreams. Well, that's certainly not the real world I know. One day, you'll realize how artificial your "real world" is - I just hope you don't fuck up too many lives before then.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Settle down. Apple is not "steamrollering" over anybody's rights. They are protecting their rights, specifically, their trademark rights, from those who they believe are violating them.
Their lawyers ought to know better - this couldn't *possibly* be a trademark violation. Yes, I understand the nature of trademark law. Do you?
Your attitude is exactly what I was talking about. You hear about one company suing one group and start shouting bloody murder at the top of your lungs, instantly insisting that Apple is an evil emprire out to destroy your freedom.
Your mention of "one company" is a total red herring - that company is Apple. I never said that Apple is an evil empire - I said that they did something which is wrong, and which infringes on my freedom of speech. Why should I not complain when something like this happens?
I would bet $100 that you never even used Themes... you probably have not even heard of them before today, and more than likely are not even a Mac user...
So, we must be entirely self-interested bastards? We can't stand up for principles?
yet you are among those complaining the loudest
I would hardly call a post to Slashdot a loud complaint.
because you make the knee-jerk, yes "us vs. them", assumption that any big company that sues a small group must be out to ruin democracy.
It's hardly an assumption - I read the fucking article, and the quote from the letter *tells* me what they're doing. They are abusing their power, and attacking people who have done nothing wrong - again, this isn't an assumption, it's what their letter said.
Count to ten, think calmly.
Given that I actually read the article, clearly I'm thinking more calmly than a troll like you who rushes off to post before learning what the letter said.
You might come to realize that while Apple may be wrong about the extent of their trademark rights, they very well might credibly believe that they needed to press this case in order to protect their trademarks.
If you had actually read my post or the article, you would know that the only thing Apple said was about copyrights, *not* trademarks. Macworld said things about trademarks - but there's no *real* evidence that this is a trademark case. I don't see how it could possibly be - and if you knew anything at all about IP law, you would agree.
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Considering the Themes project people themselves have come out and said, A) Apple is simply covering their asses, they had to do this, B) they are currently negotiating with Apple so that everyone is happy, C) the "Letter" was a legal formality.
OK, now I've read their list archives, and I can say that this is totally wrong. Especially the copyright stuff, but also the TM stuff (See below)
I would say this is simply a trademark issue which is not understood by anyone, other than the parties involved.
Not understood by you, maybe - but I can (now) read the letter that Apple sent. I can understand the issues - they claim contributory infringement under the copyright, trademark, and trade dress acts, as well as licence violation. Well, there's no such thing (at least in Title 15 ch. 22) as contributory TM infringement... So, they have no need to cover their asses (copyrights don't require that). They *know* exactly what they're doing - and it's *wrong*.
The funniest thing here is this was a rumour of a cease and desist letter, and everyone went ballistic.
A news report is not a rumor.
Did Slashdot editors try to contact members of the Themes Project? For that matter did Macworld UK?
Presumably, MWUK was contacted by one of the members - they *did* have copies of the letters. Or, maybe they didn't - but the mailing list archives were and are publicly available.
This is shotty journalism at it's worst. If you want to change the world, you have to do your homework.
I looked up the applicable laws - what did you do?
Become a FSF associate member before the low #s are used
Is like comparing Apples and Oranges. They're both fruit, but. For the same processor speed the ppc does perform operations significantly faster (though not 2x) than the x86. Different architectures between the same families. Actually, I think that the x86, at the same processor speed, is slower than alphas and sparcs.
Best Slashdot Co
http://www.macthemes.org
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
As I noted in my story submision, the website proper at http:/www.macthemes.org hasn't ben up-dated since 20 March and still has all the files available for d/l, unlike, AFAICT the Sourceforge site.
Wiliam
--
Lettering Art in Modern Use
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
But the perrenial comeback: What if you 1) do not see the license or 2) do not agree with it? Just because it's there doesn't mean you have to agree to it. If you bought a book that had a piece of plastic on it that said "By reading this book you agree to give us your firstborn child", would you really put any credit in it? A contract is only good when BOTH parties agree on it. Now if they had you sign some legal paper *at the time of purchase* that would be another issue...but then they'd deservedly lose many many customers.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
"By clicking I Agree and continuing to install the software"
There are many (legitimate) ways to install or use software without going through a clickwrap installer. If the company suspects all it's customers then it really should be having them sign agreements at time of purchase. Once I own (have in my physical control) a piece of software, they have already given up their rights. They can only hope that I will read their instructions, play nice, jump through their hoops, and rescind rights I already have when I leave the store.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
A few people have said that KDE and GNOME brought Unix to the desktop. What is the obsession with KDE and GNOME? Am I the only one who thinks they are both too bloated to ever become a desktop standard? Sure, they're flashy, but they're both slow and almost unusable (practically speaking) on a 486. Even on faster machines, WindowMaker with fspanel is *much* faster, and therefore more usable.
So I ask: you who use KDE/GNOME: what kind of machines do you have? Have you tried WindowMaker?
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I do it all the time. Try grabbing the bottom left or right corners.
No easy way to get a 'taskbar' - most of my apps appear as the default WM icon, which is extremely unhelpful I suppose i could go and assign a bitmap to each app, but i'd rather just have a taskbar, not some giant square brick with an unrecognisable glyph on it.
fspanel should suit your needs there.
I agree WindowMaker is lacking in some respects, but given my options, I would (and do) choose it over anything else currently available.
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With that house of cards they're foisting, they'd better have the world's best developer support program. NObody's going to write windoze code for fun!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
...but I suppose that since Apple effectively didn't exist to the slashdot crew until MOSX, it is to some people. This sort of journalistic bias is going to foster the wrong impression, which is the last thing Apple- or any company- really needs. Here's the deal:
MOS 8.5 shipped with the Appearance Manager and a "platinum theme" installed. There were three others in the mix, that were not included (and later leaked out) - "hi tech", "drawing board" and "gizmo", all of which are effectively complete, system-level replacements for Platinum.
Creating tools to edit the appearance manager and the appearance theme files is a Bad Thing- you aren't skinning the UI with the appearance manager, you're completely altering it. Apple doesn't support or promote anything beyond the Platinum theme for various reasons, chief among them the trademark "look and feel" of it and the fact that in many respects, the other Appearance Themes are more system intensive, crash-prone, and not as complete.
This does NOT include Kaleidescope [http://www.kaleidoscope.net/] , however- an add-on for MOS that enables you to skin your UI however you like. Kaleidescope pretty much sits on top of Platinum or whatever your theme is and rides side-saddle. It's a third party add-on that you should pay for [it's shareware], and was developed without hacking, altering, or hooking into the themes element of the Appearance Manager. As such, it's free from the Legal Hammer of Apple Legal.
If *anyone* had bothered to read the actual thingy on sourceforge, they would have noticed that this *is* a theme editor for MOS 8.5-9.1, and has nothing to do with X [with possible exception to Classic]. This has nothing to do with X, or Darwin- it has to do with hacking Pre-MOSX, closed source, classic architecture. Treat it accordingly.
The initial problem when Appearance first came out was that few applications supported it. It wasn't a significant problem with the Platinum theme, as Platinum was relatively close to the traditional Mac OS look. But when what happened when non Appearance conforming apps appeared with the wilder themes like Gizmo and High Tech was a nightmarish mess even worse than the clash of Classic applications with the Aqua on the DP versions of OS X. Similarly, Apple is still working on finetuning the aesthetic and functionality aspects of Aqua and really does not want anyone tinkering with the window underpinnings, particurlarly if they plan on making changes later. It's similar to Apple's warining on developers to not explore the mezz slot in the early iMacs. Sure enough by the time the Rev D's came out, the mezzanaine slot was history, taking the upstart market with it.
Probably because there isn't such a built-in function in the BSD core or NeXTStep, you need to use the included Grab program for screen caps. It's not as elegant or functional as the built-in MacOS function but it'll get the job done.
Microsoft pays licensing tribute to Xerox, just as Apple, SGI, Commedore in the Amiga days, and everyone else who's does the GUI thing.
For it's own part, Xerox never imagined they could put out a GUI based workstation for under 70 grand, so it's hard to cast them as losers in a race they refused to enter. Considering how big they still are, they seem to be doing all right despite never entering the personal slavestation market.
Well, we all know Compaq reverse engineered the first PC clones, and that was legal. Microsoft created J++ in a clean room environment which was legal reverse engineering. But now the DMCA is out which says it is illegal to reverse engineer. So I don't know. Precedent says yes its is legal to reverse engineer, but DMCA says no. Personally, I think people should be able to reverse engineer. I guess we'll see.
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Sure i've tried WindowMaker, but it kind of sucks compared to GNOME/Sawfish.
I actually do use Windowmaker on my server, since i haven't bothered to install GNOME on it, and it is fast.
What is annoying are the little things, like not being able to resize windows by dragging out their corners - i.e you can only resize horizontally or vertically
No easy way to get a 'taskbar' - most of my apps appear as the default WM icon, which is extremely unhelpful I suppose i could go and assign a bitmap to each app, but i'd rather just have a taskbar, not some giant square brick with an unrecognisable glyph on it.
I do like the 'slide-up' menus, but you can't fix the menu in place, which makes it too easy to shift it around, and the 'sliding' behaviour seems erratic when run remotely, even with animations turned off.
There seems to be 2 icons produced for each app - whats up with that?
I used to use enlightenment (which was, arguably, the project that got linux noticed on the desktop) till i found sawfish, and now i wouldn't use anything else on my workstations.
I would like to see a hybrid between the GNUStep style of 'dock' and GNOME desktop functionality.. i.e. get rid of the 'panel' and replace it with a WindowMaker 'dock'.
Wmaker sliding, tearable menus are neat, and a great idea, but they need to be dockable, and you should be free to use a window manager that doesn't limit you like the WM default one does.
Thats just my 2c. I certainly agree that a full GNOME/KDE setup is pretty slow and bloated, and i'd like to see more of Window Makers good ideas adopted into a stripped-down GNOME subset for those of us who don't run linux on 1GHz monsters.
Maybe i just need to hack about with this stuff some more....
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
We're pretty far off on a tangent here- no need for +1 Bonus (I can't stand when people use the bonus for stupid comments)
-bugg
My rule (which isn't too far from the law) is that if the intent in creating the product was to enable people to commit a crime, then it shouldn't be allowed. Obviously there's plenty of shades of grey in cases like this- but this specific case, it seems very clear to me that this is fair use.
-bugg
Remember the whole G4 fiasco? I wonder how many people actually bought one of those 350 mhz G4 processors....
Huh?
Huh yourself. Here's an excerpt from www.apple-history.com.
There were extreme supply issues with the G4 initially, due largely to Motorola's inability to deliver the 7400 chips in adequate supply. This was further compounded by an "errata" in the initial revision of the 7400 that effectively lowered the ceiling of the chip to 450Mhz. As a result, all models of the G4 were "speed dumped" in October. The PowerMac G4 PCI was decreased in speed to 350 Mhz, for the same $1599 price tag. Existing orders for the G4 PCI/400 were largely honored.
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
You can get RAM for your iMac at 30 cents a MB from any number of places. Also, OSX comes with OS9.1 so you dont have to "upgrade" to OS 9 first.
Russian Revolution promises to empower the people, delivers totalitarian regime.
...
People's Revolution in China promises to empower the people, delivers totalitarian regime.
Apple Macintosh promises to empower the people, delivers
Is anybody really surprised? If Apple spent as much time and money on R&D as they do on lawyers, they might really have a revolutionary operating system, instead of a 1984 operating system with color.
Tell them to stick it where their cute semi-transparent cases are irrelevant.
the purpose of sex is reproduction
Just because you don't have sex for recreation doesn't mean no one else does.
***
The pleasurable aspect is just a side effect to encourage the continuation of the species
I disagree. There's more to human sexuality than a biological urge. There are psychological factors to consider. It's perfectly natural for humans and other species to have sex for recreational reasons -- ever hear of the Bonobo?
***
Liberals are all tax and spend until it comes to their own finances where they behaive like Franco. Apple Computer Inc. is the same deal. On their face their are a bunch of crunchy tech-friendlies, all open-source, warm and fuzzy. But in their backrooms the're nothing more than hypocrytical laywers and marketeers. At least Microsoft is honest about their intentions to screw you.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I've never seen an API that was well completely documented. If using "undocumented" api calls violates Apple's license agreement, then why develop for their OS. You just run the risk of them calling out their lawyers and having all your work go to waste. Just don't develop any software for their platform and let them shrivel up and die. A consumer OS is no better than the applications that are available for it. If Apple is stupid enough to drive off developers, then they go out of business.
This crap is all legal stuff. No intelligent person in Apple outside of legal would really believe that this is good for the company. Any idiot can look at the situation and see that this is done for one reason - allowing the lawyers to rack up more billable hours.
Eventually Apple will get with it an throw the bastards out. It might take a while, but eventually they will realize the same thing that AOL/Time-Warner did during the Harry Potter legal mess: YOU DO NOT MAKE, NOR SAVE MONEY, BY ATTACKING PAYING CUSTOMERS.
Years ago, Apple and microsoft got in a bitter dispute over look and feel copying interfaces. Although different, it seems to me that there isn't much difference between making one interface look like another and making an existing one look different.
/.'ers like apple and shun m$ when apple always seems to like so much control over their systems.
Anyway, this is a silly control issue. I am always surprised at how much
-Moondog
Q. How many Apple employees does it take to change a light globe?
A. Three. One to change the light globe. One to patent the look-and-feel of the method of changing the light globe. And one to sue anyone who tries to use the same method.
It's sad that after all this time, Apple still sees such lawyering as a core component of its business.
Must we put up with this IP crap before we engineer an invitation-only VPN on top of the net to give us a buffer from the corporate assholes? Kick 'em all off the net if you ask me.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And that's why OSX is based on FreeBSD then, genius ! Microsoft may be an evil company, but Apple is definitely a stupid one. Well guess that's why they're dying, you get what you deserve after all.
"Naughty, naughty, naughty, you filthy old soomka !"
(Note that the RAM requirements will hopefully drop in future releases of the software.)
Just out of curiosity, when was the last time you recall a mainstream commercial operating system shrink between releases???
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
I agree that Apple should fire (or at least muzzle) their law firm, but overall it's not that bad of a company.
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There will be a copy in the Censored Archive as soon as I'm finished downloading it.
.sig.
Link is in my
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Apple is a hardware company, NOT a software company. To open their hardware would be rediculous. Remember when apple began licensing their ROMS?...
-- mikeDOTd
True, but... you can defend your trademark without being an asshole. There was an excellent article in Webtechniqes about this very topic, written by an intellectual property lawyer. A few crucial quotes:
Perhaps if some people would read the article you would realize that part of the problem is that this fighting-for-all-that-is-just-open-source-company reversed engineered apple code, apple specifically says this is a no-no, but they shouldn't have to follow those rules right? They're an open source company! They can do no wrong! Bah.
For your information their is a company called kalidescope that allows you to change the gui on the macintosh. Apple hasn't shut them down. Why? Because they probably didn't do anything that was expressly forbidden by apple like said open-source company.
Gee, a company that is trying to protect their software license. How dare they. Since, it's obvious that the troves of open-source freedom fighters don't actually go read the story, let me point out the things that made apple angry.
I'm sorry if this comes off as a troll, but sometimes I really can't stand blind faith.
a l 3 r n 0 n
You're using a bad analogy. It's more along the lines of, "So should a teacher flunk a students term paper because he ripped two chapters out of the illiad and called it his own. This is completely different than how you're viewing it.
This battle has been fought out in court by others and it has been decided its legal to reverse engineer software. It doesn't matter if some group of Nazi's has authorized you.
Apple specifically says you can't do it in it's software liscense when you buy the product. That is what makes it illegal.
Obviously there is a whole lot of history that you are completely blind to.
I'm sure there is. Just like I'm sure alot of people are ignoring and twisting the facts in this to conform to their simplified politics.
corporations bad. Open source good.
I don't buy it.
I understand all that stuff, but here's the bottom line. They *will* eventually have people using their technology to copy DVDs. How? Same way people started using modchips in playstations, and other various hacked hardware. Apple may not intend for this to happen, but anyway... but we're just getting off topic here. My point is, they encourage the freedom of inovation, freedom of "thinking different", etc. Just look at Darwin, for the most part. When they try to go after people for making themes that "look alike" when compared to theirs, they go balistic. Something's not right here...
Apple is allowing people to "copy" DVDs with their new Macs, and THAT's ok. The minute someone tries to write open source software allowing their users to edit Mac OS X themes, that's suddenly a crime against THEIR copyrights and intellectual property?!?!?!? Apple - BITE ME.
Think different than the open source philosphy that made OSX possible...
Think different than computer business practices that work...
Think different that helping developers help you by creating software that enhances your systems capability and credibility...
Anyone else think Apple is being run as a tax shelter for Jobs & Co?
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
DOS is dead, and no one cares...
If there's a Bourne Shell, I'll see you there
Well, seems like you just want to bash apple. a: you can delete 10 files without using your mouse, just select them and hit command-delete, like magic they move to the trash! b: you say "hopefully MacOS X will have a UNIX shell..." well, it does! Do the research before spewing crap. thanks.
I've heard that every operating system delivered has a secret back door that allows the copying of trademarked material. Its called the file system.
t
"Apple is a company. Heaven forbid they would want to make money and defend themselves...oh my, can't have that."
:)
Defend themselves? They are attacking their own fans. This is not defense, this is one more in a long series of unprovoked attacks.
As for making money, Apple ain't too good at that either.
"You guys always bitch about how everyone should respect Linus's IP by not violating his product's license, why not show the same respect for Apple? Oops, I forgot, IP rights only apply to GPLed material..."
You have overgeneralized. I think it would be wonderful if someone violated Linux's license. Linux could use some fair, skilled competition from people who wanted to build a better OS, not just make lots of money. Of course there's always BSD, but I don't know much about that yet. Will learn, as soon as I have time.
Don't get me wrong: I love Linux and Linus, I just don't like the GPL.
Open source? Maybe the GPL needs two of those, but open source doesn't and free software doesn't. They just need open channels of communication.
Personally, I see no difference between rule of law and rule of force. It is part of the curse of living under human rule that we are doomed to suffer both. Not that I'm ungrateful for what we have now, but the people in charge in the US got there by force and they maintain their power by force.
"Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness."
That was IBM, not MS. Even IBM didn't want to build an open system, they were forced into because Apple already had such a lead that IBM didn't have time to design a closed system. When clonemakers reverse-engineered the PC, IBM sued them and lost.
Microsoft was never for openness, and neither was IBM. The US courts and IBM clonemakers were responsible for cheap, open PCs.
"Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace."
Intel created the modern microcomputer industry. IBM helped them with the software side. The competitive marketplace, again, existed because of the PC clonemakers and the US courts, in spite of IBM. Microsoft never even entered the picture.
"It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS."
Coincidence? That was Linus' personal decision: beacuse the 386 was fairly cheap and fairly capable. Because Intel made a good, cheap chip. Not because of MS.
"Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it."
MS is an anticompetitive cartel. They use anything from copyright law to patent law to contract law to undocumented features to make sure their competition does not have a chance.
car: primary purpose - accelerating a ton of metal at dangerous speed (on the ground, which is where small children play)
We wouldn't have interstate crime much if it weren't for cars. Every time a person is carried off in a car by a serial killer or kidnapper, you might expect to see the car maker sued as an "enabler". But you don't see that.
You don't see that because people understand that cars are much more often used for buying groceries than for carrying off victims. No jury will buy this "enabler" nonsense.
And the same thing turns out to be true of guns. Well over 99% of all guns never hurt any human being; they are used for target shooting, self-defense, simple collecting, etc. Thousands of guns are used each year for bad things, but there are millions of guns in the country. The problem is that you can get juries to buy this "enabler" nonsense because many folks these days don't own or even understand guns.
I'm sure it is possible for the theme editor to be used to infringe Apple copyrights, but the same thing is true of any screenshot utility. Will Apple go after those folks as "enablers" next?
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I think I need some coffee... I read, "a fish and game warden comes upon a woman..." and pictured a game warden and a fish walking along a riverbank. As I read on I was waiting to hear what the fish had to say about the situation.
Oddly enough, apple has included a screen grabber in their OS for ages. The Classic MacOS allows you to take a simple snapshot of the screen and MacOS X includes a relatively robust "Grab" application that lets you do much more.
By Apple's own logic, iTunes is just as bad. It enables users to copy protected works as well.
You should probably read up on the project before making comments like this. The Mac Themes Project has a theme creator so you can make themes FOR YOUR MAC! This isn't a program to make other operating systems look like the MacOS, this is a program to let you tweak the MacOS to look however you want it to, similar to Kaleidoscope under the Classic MacOS.
MacOS X includes a full version of OS 9.1 in the box with it. Users do not need to, as you suggest, spend an extra $100 to upgrade "to OS 9.something in order to run their 'Classic' applications". If they purchase MacOS X, they automatically get the software required for Classic compatibility.
First, this almost completely unknown software is now making headlines on all of the trade websites. This is going to instantly boost the popularity of the project.
Second, open source contributors are going to be less likely to develop software for MacOS X if they're going to be expected to clear all of their development plans with Apple's legal department first. It's hard to be creative and "Think Different" under these kinds of restrictions.
Right foot. *BLAM* Left foot. *BLAM*
Why do you attack you fans? Why do you embarass us? Why do you make all of us that defend you feel stupid? Why?
Who cares about lousy Themes? Why must you guys always come across as jerks?
Put someone in charge of the legal department from PR, ask not if you can win the case, but ask if this action helps Apple.
Why?
FU Apple. I am so damn sick of corporations telling me what I can or cannot do. to hell with their gad damn licenses. I can reverse engineer anything I want. This is beginning to get out of hand.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
... that's ridiculous. What's next? I know I'll hit you with a wrench and you can sue Craftsman. Whatta load.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Apple: You have a blue background and a white cursor.
User:Yeah so?
Apple:That's not a mac.
User:So what?
Apple:You can only use a blue background and a white mouse on Apple computers, we have trademark right. Here is your cease and desist order, prepare to be taken to court for damages.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Back to the guns though. Throwing bullets at dangerous speeds through the air for what? Killing animals, self defense. Regardless of how you put it its dumb. It's only dangerous when it's ill used. It's the responsibility of the operator, not the manufacturer.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Yes that's the best part about the world today. You know I don't see other enablers getting sued. Otherwise gun manufacturers would be gone in a week. You cannot prosecute the tool creator. It's the end user who puts it to use in whatever way they see fit(that's from my department of redundancy department). It makes me sick.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
Apple accuses them of contributing to trademark infringement by enabling people to copy Apple's graphics.
By this logic, then gun retailers are responsible for committing murder with a weapon? Both are debatable I guess (not meant to be a troll, really.)
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
They have screen grabber, so probably they will or
a) sue themselves, or
b) remove it from distribution to avoid a)
c) modifiy software that it will include legal string under screen shot itself, under every bited apple and other "apple" graphic on snapshot, and add legal stuff under word "apple" itself if it on screen shot.
but overall, it is getting worse every year, don't you think ?
tandr.
ps. Oh, and to avoid c) -- "This message in any media format (text, picture etc) cannot be modified by adding or removing any or all words."
hmm... I am not a lawer, looks like...
You obviously didn't delve too far within their website... They have at least five different downloads on their website. Just because they're not using the CVS or download sections of sourceforge doesn't mean they're dormant.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
The Recording Industry Association of America is pleased to announce they are suing Apple Computer for copyright infringement. RIAA head Hilary Rosen was quoted as saying "Apple's rediculous advertising campaign "Rip, Mix, Burn" is a shocking example of encouraging theft of intellectual property. The application "iTunes" is as outrageous as Napster in terms of its potential to destroy the American Way of Life."
(Apple) Rosen claims the editor enables third parties to copy its copyrighted (trademark themes) music by "improperly copying (Apple's) the music industry's copyrighted (software code and graphic files) music".
Stealing is okay if it's not for profit? Bah.
Or is turnabout always fair play in the GUI world? After all, GNOME stole from Windows stole from MacOS stole from PARC, maybe that's just the way things are supposed to be... but Apple puts a lot of work into its slick UI, and to have some themes lusers rip it off?? That sucks. (And it's called the "Mac Themes Project" for God's sake, they aren't even pretending to not rip Apple off.) You guys always bitch about how everyone should respect Linus's IP by not violating his product's license, why not show the same respect for Apple? Oops, I forgot, IP rights only apply to GPLed material...
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I like to watch.
You missed the point didn't you?
The editor enables third parties to "improperly copy Apple's copyrighted software code and graphic files.
So we should stop making word processors because someone might write something that is a copy of something copyrighted?
unauthorized reverse-engineering of its software.
This battle has been fought out in court by others and it has been decided its legal to reverse engineer software. It doesn't matter if some group of Nazi's has authorized you.
Obviously there is a whole lot of history that you are completely blind to. I just thought I'd make these points before other someone starts to agree with you.
Just out of curiosity, why is that acceptable? The "el cheapo" parts worked, did they not? Is the lower price of the parts an acceptable reason for making modifications that break a system that already works? (I'll bet that the 3rd party modules you refer to track the price that Apple charges pretty closely...) Is this any different than Microsoft's "embrace, extend, and extinguish" policy towards free software that we complain so bitterly about?
Just had to get that rant off my chest...
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Ok, that was entertaining. So basically, the Firmware update rejects chips that claim to be able to run in CL3 mode with 8ns access times but can't because their controllers are programmed wrong? Interesting...p?
--Fesh
--Fesh
Kill -9 'em all, let root@localhost sort 'em out.
Reverse engineering of software is probably legal under the US Constitution, but we will have to wait for a victim with very deep pockets before the issue goes all the way to the supreme court.
In the mean time, whe have arrogant slobs at Apple selling molded plastic and pretty pictures. Look hard: this is a house of cards.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
OS X is open source. look at it all you want.
Darwin, the kernel of Mac OS X, is almost-free software. The theme editor lies squarely in Apple's proprietary domain (Quartz/Aqua/Carbon technologies). If you want themes on Mac OS X, run GNOME or KDE with XFree86.
Will I retire or break 10K?
(1) reverse engineer our software,
(2) and say unkind things about our products and companies, both of which are clear violations of the licensing agreement and the digital millenium copyright act.
That cannot have been the cause. Firmware updates require first the user stage of uploading the update into RAM and then a reboot while *holding down* the programmer's button (interrupt) in order to signal the boot ROM to perform the update. It cannot happen automatically. Software Update can download it from the server for you, even run the userland program, but it requires someone present to actually perform the update.
I just upgraded my G4 with that update (and my RAM survived; you get what you pay for: transintl.com) and this is exactly what I had to do to make it work.
ramseeker.com has a list of which vendors will replace 'hidden' RAM and which will not.
I also bought RAM for my dual G4 from Crucial... it works just fine with the latest firmware. However, I bought the RAM that was specifically labelled for G4 PowerMacs, which was like $10 more than the generic PC one (for a 256MB DIMM).
It was hard to believe the DOS world would ever catch up to the all-graphical interface of the Macintosh.
OSX is going to need to be pretty damn compelling to displace inferior but "good enough" solutions that cost less.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Excuse me but hasn't the Kaleidoscope already done this for years, like since OS 7? I remember using it on a Mac Color Classic for crying out loud. It even works on OS 8 and 9.
Warning! Keep Out of Eyes! Wash Out with Water! Don't Drink Soap! Dilute! Dilute!
Next thing they'll be suing people who develop free screen capture utilities for "enabling people to steal apple graphics".
Sheesh.
To the days when companies tried to get the people to embrace their product?
The days when the Apple founders were part of User Groups all along the Bay Area.
The days when "Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery"?
It's a good thing the Yugo car company didn't have a EULA like that of Apple. Otherwise anyone who buys a butt ugly car, or whose car becomes butt ugly due to aging, would have to pay them royalties.
I've pretty much given up on following all of Apple's "desist from this" orders. It just goes to show how Apple is all about "style" (i.e. iMac, the "cube", the goofball colored laptops, even the 'i' infront of everthing for that matter) and is scared to death to compete on the acutal quality and usefullness of its products. Maybe they should quit touting their translucent-color ease-of-use marketing crap and make a OS where I can delete 10 files with out moving my one-button mouse a quarter of a mile. I've used the MacOS and quite frankly it's no better, and probably slightly worse than win95 (both to work with and at crashing!) Hopefully MacOS X will have a UNIX shell so Mac users can actually get something done! I suspect most slashdotters hate marketing types anyway... well just who do you think is in charge at apple?
You all need to calm down. The first thing to consider about Apple is that it is indeed a large corporation. This means that it has many parts that are not on the whole aware of one another. Apple Legal is always pulling crap like this. No one likes it, but the great thing about Apple is that they do stupid things and then fix them.
I remember there was a firmware update that, whether or not intentionally, made it impossible to upgrade a G3 to a G4. Remember that? So everyone complained. And they fixed it. Apple nixed the Apple Menu, and everyone complained, so they fixed it. It's life with Apple. One part of Apple messes something up, and then the shit hits the fan, and it is fixed. It's the nature of a beastly large corp. "Apple" doesn't have an opinion on Open Source. I'm sure lots of people at Apple love open source, and lots hate it.
As for Steve Jobs, the man is CEO of two large corporations. He's busy. Despite his tendancy to micro-manage, if you think this was his idea, you're wrong. He's got better things to do, like convince people that Desktop Video really is the next thing. (I ALMOST might believe it.) Steve Jobs is not a devil. Apple is not evil. I'll take a guess. Legal did something on their own. The upper brass wil now find out, say "How incredibly stupid of the legal department!", chide them vigorously, and try to fix things a bit.
Boy, sometimes I feel like most slashdotters must think I'm a complete moron for not bowing down to the alter of open source. And it has been mentioned before, ut oh well. There are lots of themes for Mac OS and OS X already, and Apple lets them go. So this is not an attack themes. It's protection of copyrighted material. You might think it's wrong. But that's the issue, not interface customization, not Apple being evil, not open source. It's about copyright, so debate the right topic.
And we don't care. Millions of people use AOL everyday, and yet I feel no need to use that despite it's obviously bigger market share. McDonald's sells god-knows-how-many burgers every day, and still Burger King users continue in their own little incompatible world.
Conform, conform, conform, conform, conform, conform...
Why do so many lawyers seem to excel at initiating action which does absolutely nothing in the long run except shoot their employer/client in the proverbial foot?
'Nuff said.
All the world's an analog stage, and digital circuits play only bit parts.
Wait a minute, let me fire up [Office 2001,IE,Outlook Express, Cisco VPN, Adaptec Toast, Napster, etc] and switch between them all, adding in big hitters like PageMaker and Photoshop, and I hardly ever crash. I wouldn't call that doing nothing. For years I've said that there may be more software for Wintel PCs, but for every genre (with the exception of games) you can find at least a best of breed offering for the mac, or a (usually better) offering from a smaller company. If macintosh software were not profitible, would Microsloth still be developing Office for MacOS? I've heard it's the third most profitable product line, after WinX, and Office for Windows. Not too shabby in my book.
-- Charles A. Plater
FWIW, MS does not keep Apple afloat, they have enough cash reserves to do that :)
-- Charles A. Plater
Anyway, as I said, I've got them all mirrored in case Apple gets C&D-happy.
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TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
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TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
About all Apple has to stand on here is the reverse-engineering clause in the EULA. I don't think stopping reverse-engineering for personal use is such a great idea. Nor do I agree with the shady nature of EULAs in the first place. Apple will gain nothing from this except a lot of venom from OSS/FS advocates. Letting end-users change their themes doesn't seem like a horrible loss of revenue for Apple. So bashing enthusiasts over the head with legal threats is probably a pretty bone-headed thing to do.
The vanishing RAM thing isn't a huge conspiracy. Read all about it here. Most RAM vendors are apparently replacing "missing" RAM with parts that have proper Mac specs.
Also, someone has written a utility to test and repair DIMMs.
You had RAM with barely adequate tolerances. OSX is more picky, hence the firmware update locks out out-of-spec memory, which can cause OSX to behave erratically.
For more info & links refer to my other post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=01/04/17/16
But also call your RAM vendor and try to get a replacement.
Why do so many clients ask their lawyers to do stupid things on their behalf? You are *the* jackass of jackasses.
Well there's a sure way to encourage innovation... or is microsoft the only one that's supposed to do that? I forget...
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NO TOUCH MONKEY!
as if either of these corporations don't have hordes of programmers at their disposal anyway. Do you think they really give a damn about or trust the code that any Random J Hacker from the Internet is going to submit to them?
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NO TOUCH MONKEY!
Perhaps the most disheartening thing about the modern legal climate is that even unequivocal prior decisions don't seem to stop corporate lawyers. The idea that it's illegal to allow users to change the look and feel of their computer devices should have died out with the Nintendo v. Game Genie decision, but corporations (and companies, and in some cases individuals) will continue to file these "just in case" suits. Maybe the defendant won't want the hassle of defending itself, and will settle.
Warning: Overstated Analogy Ahead
It's as if Radio Shack decided to have everyone who comes into the store just to browse arrested for shoplifting, on the off chance that one of them actually is a shoplifter, and to encourage people to purchase something so they don't have to empty their pockets in front of the security guards.
If you don't want my koalas, baby, don't shake my eucalyptus tree.
please post links to the file. I make a habit of downloading things just to have them in "safe keeping" if corporations try to litigate them off the internet...
I would be VERY appreciative if someone could post a link to where I can get a copy of this soon-to-be-gone app.
Well, if you are going to pigeonhole, let me tell you about a few of the Linux, BSD, and OS/2 users that I've met...
Every platform, including the most pathetic (Windows ME and [DR|MS]-DOS), has it's share of loser advocates. However if you get out and about, you'll find that most Mac users are just plain old ordinary lusers that bought a Mac because somebody told them they could get e-mail with less of a hassle.
The OS is just something that's necessary for you to accomplish something with a computer. Anyone who takes it more seriously than that is suspect.
When I hear the word 'innovation', I reach for my pistol.
They have been "about to go out of business soon" for nearly 20 years now.
They have probably posted more profitable quarters than any failing company in history.
I wish I had started a company that's obviously doomed the way Apple is. It would be awesome to experience the kind of poverty that Steve Jobs lives in.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Woz's version of that story differs from yours rather dramatically.
As an economist once told me
You can stop right there. Nobody is interested in what an economist has to say. You might as well have said "as an astrologer once told me..."
Luck alone is not enough to keep a company like Apple going as long as they have. You just call it luck because you can't explain their successes any other way without altering your world-view.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Actually, it's political hatred. I confess to really really hating totalitarian dictatorships, which is exactly what China is. If you think I am wrong, tell it to that student that was facing down a tank in Tieneman Square a few years ago.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
As for the Stross book... if it were posted on slashdot when I was moderating, it would not get (+1, Insightful), it would get (-1, Redundant). There are literally dozens of "experts" who have written books to deconstruct what they see as Apple's failures with the benifit of hindsight, and Stross adds nothing new. The fact is, Apple's history a classic example of a really poorly run company that stayed afloat anyway on the strength of their product. I don't think any proprietary OS could ever stand a chance of being anything other than a niche player... but Apple is the single largest niche player in the computer business. Every year, their sales figures are in or near the top five among computer makers, and their profit margins are better. Check out the fincancial pages this week... they posted yet another profitable quarter, one that beat the street predictions for them. While most other tech companies have been getting a haircut this year, Apple just keeps on churning out silly-looking iMacs and making money. I wish I could fail like that.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Their motivation is this:
It is not a copyright issue. It is a trademark issue, and as has been said here many times before, trademarks exist on an "enforce it or lose it" basis. If they want to retain the right to spank people in the future for ripping off their trademarks, they must remain agressive about enforcing them agains everybody, all the time.
That's all that is happening here. Their lawyers are over-reacting a little to protect Apple's trademarks.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
They may be wrong, but that's what we have the courts for.
Your attitude is exactly what I was talking about. You hear about one company suing one group and start shouting bloody murder at the top of your lungs, instantly insisting that Apple is an evil emprire out to destroy your freedom. I would bet $100 that you never even used Themes... you probably have not even heard of them before today, and more than likely are not even a Mac user... yet you are among those complaining the loudest, because you make the knee-jerk, yes "us vs. them", assumption that any big company that sues a small group must be out to ruin democracy.
Count to ten, think calmly. You might come to realize that while Apple may be wrong about the extent of their trademark rights, they very well might credibly believe that they needed to press this case in order to protect their trademarks. Things are not always as simple as the Big Bad Corp trying to squish the Little Guy.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Sure, except we are talking about two completely different products here.
The MacOS 8.1 (which is what this lawsuit concerns) is an old product that the probably would rather not spend legal resources licensing out to other people. It's a lot cheaper to just send people letters saying "quit ripping us off" than it is to establish a policy for pricing and distribution of licenses to every tiny shop of GUI hackers that wants to play with it.
The good news is that Apple eventually treats their old OS releases as Abandonware. You can download System 7.5.3 for free from their website and monkey with it all you want. I suspect that they will eventually do the same with OS 8.0 - 9.1... probably a few months after they have migrated the vast majority of users and apps to OS X.
OS X, on the other hand, is built on open source code, with open source licensing. You can hack the shit out of "Darwin" all you want. Write a totally new GUI for it, port it to run on a Sparc, whatever trips your trigger. Apple can't open up Aqua, because a lot of the tech involved is owned by another company (Adobe). Nor can they open up Quicktime, which is built on a closed codec that they don't own... but the open kernel and BSD layer is clearly their future direction. Apple is slowly being transformed into the company that NeXT could have been if it didn't lack the resources and market force. As a developer, even if you don't like Apple as a company, this is a Good Thing. NextStep was easy to write for, and if the trickle of new apps already coming in is anything to go by, it looks like developers are having a pretty good time with OS X, too. I suspect that we are going to see some pretty cool ideas emerge out of all this.
Opening up a company like Apple is like opening up China. Sure you can shout at them and try to freeze them out, but that will just make them shut their doors to all of your ideas. By working with them, you can gradually introduce your philosphies into their worldview. Peaceful transformation is slower than confrontation, but it is also far less painful.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
The culprit, of course, is the new firmware update Apple unceremoniously dropped onto Mac owners, the one that makes RAM that doesn't adhere to their "stability standards" appear unreadable. I purposely decided not to install the firmware update but, surprise, surprise, Mac OS X decided to install it in an automatic software upgrade. Great feature, but losing my RAM in the middle of the night was not something I bargained for.
Fortunately I read up online how to reverse the "upgrade", but Mac-users beware. This was just about the last straw before I suggested trashing this machine and getting a 3rd PC running Win2K/Redhat 7. (Mac owners, for more information you should read this document).
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
I would be creating a Rotten Apple theme right now.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
Cults, according to ex-cult.org, are groups which display the attributes of Totalism. Here is their definition, does it sound like most "Mac People" you know?
-- 'Loading the language' -- redefinition of language, with an emphasis on moral polarization, and thought terminating cliches.
Located within ex-cult.org
Totalism is defined by psychiatrist Robert Lifton as the tendency to view the world in terms of 'all or nothing' alignments. Lifton details 8 'psychological themes' that can be found in totalist groups:
-- A 'sacred science' -- an ideology that is held to be true for all people at all times. This ideology generally claims to be inspired and scientific at the same time.
-- 'Milieu control,' the control of human communication, not only over our communications with others, but also with ourselves.
-- 'Mystical manipulation' -- including deception and 'planned spontaneity' which seeks to limit self-expression and independent action.
-- The demand for purity, the notion that absolute purity exists, and that anything done in the name of this purity is ultimately moral.
-- 'The cult of confession' -- "There is the demand that one confess to crimes one has not committed, to sinfulness that artificially induced, in the name of a cure that arbitrarily imposed." (Lifton, _Thought_Reform_and_the_Psychology_of_Totalism")
-- 'Doctrine over person' -- the subordination of personal experiences to the doctrines of the sacred science.
-- 'Dispensing of existance' -- the doctrine that the group can decide who has the right to exist, and who does not.
So much of this applies to OS X and to this situation that it scares me.
people still continue to buy and use Apple products....(Albeit its about as many people still running netware.)
Why must they always be a bully? -- even now when they hold about as much clout in the IT industry as my high school art teacher did in the art industry.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
By that logic, if I "choose" to take a shower at the gym, and contract athlete's foot, I have no right to try to get rid of the athlete's foot, because my body is owned both by myself, and the fungus.
Nope, because you haven't given consent to the fungus to have ownership of your body. A woman gives consent by having sex.
[not to mention that there is a little bit of a value difference between a human life and a fungus...]
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I chose to go take a shower at the gym, knowing full well I might get athlete's foot. See?
The purpose of a shower is not to gain athlete's foot, but the purpose of sex is reproduction. Therefore, if you have sex, then the primary consequence of that action is to possibly create a new life. The process of creating a new life is to have sex, followed by that new life using a host body for the first nine months of growth. In a biological sense, you can't separate the two phases of the process; that's why having sex is giving implicit consent to the utilization of the body.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Just because you don't have sex for recreation doesn't mean no one else does.
Read what I wrote: "The purpose of sex is reproduction." The pleasurable aspect is just a side effect to encourage the continuation of the species. That you can do it recreationally is irrelevent to the point.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Only in your troll world is the purpose of sex only reproduction.
The purpose of sex is reproduction. I never said that one couldn't have sex for recreation, but the purpose of the function is continuation of the species. The fact that it's pleasurable is a side effect to encourage the activity.
By the way, any time you have to call someone a "troll" because you can't refute their argument means you have automatically lost.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Well, I hate to break it to you, but people get to make up their own minds about what sex is for. You don't get to decide for them.
People can decide for themselves whether the earth is flat or round as well, but that doesn't change the reality.
Other people owning your body is called slavery, and is outlawed where I live. Two people cannot own the same persons body.
Funny you should bring up slavery. People used to argue that black people weren't really human. The arguments of the time sounded exactly the arguments that people use that fetuses aren't really human.
If a woman doesn't want to give joint ownership of her body, then fine. Don't get pregnant. But once she is, then too bad. Her body is no longer just hers, because there is another person that is using it in a way it was intended, and that's the key point. It's irrelevent what you or anyone thinks, because it's simply how biology works.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's perfectly natural for humans and other species to have sex for recreational reasons
I didn't say it wasn't "natural" or anything else. The purpose of sex is reproduction. I mean, duh. What do you think it's for? Why do you think it's pleasurable? Why do you think it dominates every part of our psychology and actions? Because if it didn't, then the species probably would have died out long ago.
Or do you think evolution just gave us a gift and metaphorically said, "Here you go, guys, here's something that's really fun! Yeah, you also do it to reproduce, but that's a side effect of the fact that it's fun! I just thought it would be a good idea to give you something to do."
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Apple has done things in their history that Microsoft never dreamed of. They are absolutely the worst company in the history of the industry in terms of screwing their customers, as well as the rest of the industry.
Why does Apple get such a pass from a lot of people? Can you imagine what the world would look like if Apple had won and not Microsoft? We would all be running proprietary hardware that costs $20,000 (and probably still without a hard drive like Steve wanted). Fortunately, Apple was too incompetent to truly become a monopoly.
The irony is that I actually am kind of excited about OS/X. I've wanted a desktop operating system based on Unix for 20 years. But I will NEVER, EVER buy proprietary hardware from Apple. It will only encourage them.
Our only hope is to finally drive the last nail into Apple's coffin, and hope whoever buys the assets has the good sense to finally open up Apple hardware, and fire all the arrogant SOBs that still think Apple's manure doesn't stink.
Sorry about the rant, but it's incidents like this that just reinforce my opinion of Apple's arrogance and stupidity.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
In theory, programs are just utilities to help you accomplish a given task, cars are just physical transportation devices, the web is a means of providing information, and sex is just a means of perpetuating the species.
In practice, you've got entire stores devoted to computer games, you've got sports cars, and you've got online porn.
There's a commercial on the radio about Jekyll and Hyde buying a car, one wants safety and security, the other power and thrills. They see the same car and cheer, for a moment seeing a bit of themselves in each other. A wonderful quote, in one of the best radio commercials I've ever heard. However, I feel it's a bit like Steve Jobs looking in the mirror and seeing Bill Gates. It's hard to cheer on an underdog under such circumstances.
Really? What particular brand of car was it? What model?
And the big kicker: did you go buy a car from them?
If you answered no to the last question, it was not a good ad. You might have found it entertaining, but it was not a good ad.
Huh? Gun manufacturers are getting sued all the time. Just do a quick Google search, or -- for something current -- take a look at this recent article at the Washington Post web site.
Taco, maybe you could respond by giving Apple a lot less credit for a change. Just because they used some old Unix kernel as the basis for their new OS does not mean they are the good guys suddenly. First, they promised this OS for years, and have finally delivered a product that requires a person to upgrade for $100 to OS 9.something in order to run their "Classic" applications, then spend $100 on the new OS. Not to mention that the average Apple sold in the last few years is a DIMM or two short of the requisite 128mb of RAM. I priced upgrading my Rev. A iMac a week or two ago because of how everyone on Slashdot raves about OS X. I'm looking at probably $500 in software and memory just to make sure I don't lose a lot more than I gain. So apparently "Think Different" doesn't mean "Different" except in terms of "Make sure different people have the money in your wallet". For $500 I can buy a whole new Wintel box, and not have to worry which three peripherals have drivers, or install maintstream Linux if I want. Why should I help fund Apple's marketing department, let alone their legal team?
I do not have a signature
MTP has been given a second C&D order, this one with a deadline for removal of the software. They were trying to keep stuff out of the media so they could negotiate with Apple, but so much for that...
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
NO - you cannot use the apple machines to copy DVDs.
1. The media is too small... it only holds 1/2 of the data of an average DVD.
2. You can't make a bit for bit copy because the drive won't write to certain areas of the disk.
(Ok, so this is a little off topic)
CP/M was NOT derived from the Bourne shell, or any other Unix shell. CP/M was strictly a set of I/O interface routines, a file system, a command shell with virtually NO intelligence (it could launch a program and pass it a command line), and a set of utility routines most reminiscent of various flavors of operating systems that ran on the PDP-11 (and quite probably earlier DEC machines, though I've only seen e.g. PDP-8 running FOCAL or BASIC), including an assembler and linker. Most tellingly was the PIP program (Peripheral Interchange Program, IIRC), which was sort of a combination of cat, dd and a few other utilities. Also, 8.3 filenames and the .COM extension for a COMmand were inherited.
Small programs could execute in the memory left over by the "command shell" (loaded into high memory, just below the operating system). If they wanted to use more memory, they had to clear a word in low memory that pointed to the shell, so that the OS would reload it when the program terminated. This allowed small commands (like DIR) to execute relatively quickly. Programs were linked to an absolute location (octal 100, I think), but the command shell was relocatable (had a relocation block), so it could load high regardless of how much memory was available (typically, 32K less the size of the OS).
The BIOS in CP/M was part of the loaded operating system, not part of any firmware, and had to be modified for the specific machine (the DOS itself was provided as a relocatable object file, with a dispatch vector at a given location); I remember adding the print routines for a Daisywheel printer so that sending output to LPR: would work transparently. Wordstar still had its own print driver for the Daisywheel so it could do overstriking/bold/superscripts/etc.
What trademark rights do you think Apple is protecting? I thought trademark only protected using a specific mark to identify a product. If someone were to use a theme editor, on a Mac, to make the Mac look as if it was produced by Apple ... umm, where's the trademark violation?
Maybe it should be Microsoft doing the suing, as the theme editor might be used to make a Mac look like it was using the far superior Windows look-n-feel (I don't do smileys; imagine your own). Or maybe Apple should be suing a theme editor for Linux or Windows, as it could be used to falsely mark a non-Apple product with Apple trademarks. That would at least have a glimmer of being a legitimate concern, even if they should still lose such a case, IMO.
The only case I can see them having is IF they somehow have the right to prevent you from changing the way their product looks, even after you've bought it; but in that case, presumably they could also prohibit you from running LinuxPPC, since that would also change the look of their product.
Open source needed developers had a need that no one else was meeting. Now Apple is wants to decide what need and how. Why would I give any of my precious time and skill to a company that will only attack me for making their product better. Apple wants to be the creative persons computer, as long as you do what they want.
By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more. - Albert Camus
Look, Apple's IP is not threatened here at all. I mean, saying that "it can be used for copyright violations" is like saying that you can use a paint program for copyright violations, and thus it shouldn't be allowed -- bullshit. This current idealogy sponsored by evil corporations that "anything that can be used to violate IP is bad and should be gotten rid of" is bullshit, and it's an extremist solution, which puts our nation on the slippery slope down to *1984*.
Here's what it comes down to -- the consumer's rights to fair use. A consumer has the right to do any damn thing he wants to to a product he buys(aside from use it to harm ppl). As a WinME user, I have the god damned right to download a program that allows me to skin my WinME GUI to look like MacOSX if I want to. MacOS users have the god damned right to download a program that allows them to change the way their GUI looks. As a result of our right to customize our personal copy of our OS to our liking, other's also have the right to release tools that aid/assist in this customization at any level. Also, @pple and other evil corporations such as M$ do not have the right to determine what software should and shouldn't be distributed. We allow people to buy guns, despite the fact that it's possible to use them to harm others; it is also reasonable that I should be able to distribute any kind of software I want to, despite the fact that it may/can be used for illegal purposes.
I think Apple also have to wake up and stop being so arrogant. They are full of shit regarding "their IP." Take their new MacOSX OS, and it's Aqua GUI, with transparent windows, and gradiated glassy styles. Transparent windows were first used in the *nix world, and are a feature of almost every *nix skinning util: in fact, there was even a Windows skinning tool that allowed for transparent windows before Mac ever started work on Aqua. As for the gradiated glassy styles of title-bars and buttons: do you really think that someone at theme.org didn't already have that sort of thing in their own skin? Come on. Anything that Apple could possible do with their GUI was already done -- at least in part -- on the Open Sourced world or with skinning programs. They probably browsed through themes.org looking for ideas, and now that they're commercializing them, they want to turn around and sue people for "stealing their IP," which they stole from themes.org.
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
one of the reasons why Apple/Mac never gain wide acceptance as a desktop computing platform. Why do they have to see it like "Oh they're copying our desktop appearance! Lets stop them right away!" .. instead of "Oh look they're using our themes" and be proud of it, or even encourage it.
IMO Apple could gain popularity if other platforms' OSes use their themes. Besides they have nothing to lose. If this act is true then its a real shame. It shows that themes/look-&-feel matter the most to Apple and are the best feature of the OS. (But hey! maybe they ARE the best feature, the rest are just crappy).
=Spike=
I think these are just legal scare tactics. They wouldn't waste their time, but hey, if you can scare them off with a letter, might as well try it. (as the lawyer thinking goes)
And it seems like Macworld is a little hard-up for news... if this is the kind of stuff they are reporting on. Now if some legal action was in fact taken there might be something for all ze slashdotters to be fired up and taking to the streets over.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Point taken, but it's not as if that type of fuck-up is limited to Apple/Motorola.
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You are a fucking moron.
They overcharge their customers for what is otherwise standard equipment that you can get for half the price on the PC side
That's completely false.
Let's take the top-of-the-line Power Mac G4.
Off the shelf you get:
Base price:$3499.00
Okay, now let's look at what Gateway has to offer:
Base price: $2799.00
So, let's customize it to try & match the Mac.
Adjusted price: $3332
Hmmm...that's a difference of $167, and you still don't have FireWire, DVD-R, or gigabit ethernet.
Remember the whole G4 fiasco? I wonder how many people actually bought one of those 350 mhz G4 processors....
Huh?
Do the math people....
You do the math, moron.
Apple is a business. Grow up.
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You are a fucking moron.
On one hand, Apple wishes to leverage the power of open source development, and on the other they want control over their intellectual property. There is no doubt that this causes internal conflicts at Apple. They *should* be very careful on how they handle this situation.
First off, if they alienate open source developers, they lose a significant portion of their developer support. I'm not sure if they care at this point, because they have a working, published product. This is still dangerous for them though because they are scaring away potential open source help for future projects.
Second, Darwin/OSX can be viewed as something of a ground breaking experiment in alternative development methodologies. As with many past projects, they are really setting future corporate development trends here. Other companies wishing to apply this development method will doubtless follow the trend Apple has already set. If these companies proceed without any notion of what an open source developer sees as right and wrong, the trend is sure to die quickly.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
Unless of course your .sig is merely debunking one of the arguments for the pro-choice camp, but you youself are not necessarily anti-choice.
If I read you correctly (by no means a certainty), you point out that, if it has a purpose at all, the purpose of sex is reproduction. The argument launched against that is that sex also serves the purpose of pleasure, if indeed that is a purpose. You say it is a side-effect. I do not disagree, but I am in favor of the side-effects without the purpose.
It would seem, however, taking your .sig without any mitigating factors, that you think that any sex undertaken consentually should result in procreation, and that that procreation should not be interrupted by any means available to man. Does that also mean that it should not be assisted by any means available to man? If the use of technology for one result should be outlawed, why not the other? Certainly, moderm medicine has decreased the pregnancy failure rate dramatcially. If it can effect evolution in one direction (increasing the birth rate), why not the other? Because it is immoral? Fine, then let us examine the differences in morality that exist in the same country that has enabled so many marginal pregnancies to come to term. Let us also examine a 200 year history resplendent with the freedom to choose, to speak, to write what we will (with caveats, yes murder being one of them - if you want to talk murder in the name of choice or life, you're welcome to open that can of worms).
There is a grey area here, of course. But look at it this way: if all the pro-choicers abort and all the pro-lifers carry to term, evolution will take care of bringing everyone into line with the pro-life ideology. Then, of course, some horrendous potato virus (perhaps athelete's foot) will scythe the earth clean of such a homogenous population.
Do not touch -Willie
Quick, where's my gun? I think I can see my foot.
Apple - Think Differnt
- - - If the sun is a star, why can't I see it at night?
Got friends?
With all due respect to KDE (to which I've made some minor contributions and which is now prgressing at a tremendous pace) and GNOME (pieces of which are superior to anything on any platform) -- try MacOS X and you'll realize how empty most of the recent boasting from the Linux world has been. It's just on a whole new level.
This all may seem off-topic, by the way, but I'm trying to give a sense of why some of us continue to have positive feelings towards Apple no matter how many butt-stupid, self-destructive things they do. They do things, both brilliant and idiotic, that no other company would dream of attempting.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Meanwhile, I'll comment that Rob's statement:
[T]hey've tried so hard to make Darwin open and gain acceptance, and then to pull crap like this.
makes the asumption that's central to the Slashdot mystique: that contributing to free software development and buying into Stallmanesque ideology are necessarily intertwined. The reality is that most of the individuals making significant contributions to free software, including Darwin, have little no to interest in the 2600 wannabe mentality that has come to dominate Slashdot and very few of the IP complainers will ever contribute to any project.
No, the real problem here is that Apple continues to alienate the early adopters, tweakers and hobbyists who are the core of the companies user base and who are the ones who kept it afloat.
I'll close by pointing out that it was my favorite tech company that finally _really_ brought Unix to the desktop, while Slashdot's pick turned out a slow, bloated Explorer knockoff, and fired half their workers the day they finished it...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
>Microsoft has always been open and competitive.
>They encourage competition and thrive on it.
Thrive on it? They EAT IT UP! Literally.
Hmmmm... Tasty competition.
Pretty typical of Apple! It's things like this, and worse, that drove me years ago from being a devout Macintosh fan and developer to abandoning the platform completely.
I no longer have the least interest nor respect for Apple and it's products. Not because the products are or aren't good (although their hardware is the least reliable of everything I've had), but because the company keeps alienating the people who help it survive, past and present. While my Intel Solaris desktop and Win2K/Linux laptop run essentially 24/7, my PowerMac 9600 sits idle and probably will so until I decide to wipe it clean and turn it into a Linux server or get rid of it otherwise. May Apple choke on its skid-marked legal briefs.
Dean WetteSomewhat like an effort I've contributed to, in my own small way, by protesting an unscrupulous company by making a logo of one of the products. They've threatened others for displaying the logo, but have yet to contact me. I figure I'd tell em to not get me angry, because I could be much more creative and harmful if angered. (i.e. much more insulting logos, pages, etc.)
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Would the OS license still apply if I bought a Mac with MacOS preinstalled from someone? In that case, I never agreed to a license agreement, so I can't be bound by it, can I?
If they don't, they (again) they've just gone crazy.
Apple's lawyers have recently began issuing cease-and-desist orders to anyone running the MacOS X operating system. Apple claims that using the operating system may lead to an understanding of how it works and could lead to intellectual property infringment.
Seems Slashdots manta is if its on the internet, it must be true. This project has an activity of 0% with no released files in 6 months and out of the blue Apple tries to shutdown what appears to be an already inactive project. Did you bother verifing this report?
Burn Hollywood Burn
Is this what you are trying to say?
God has laws
Breaking God's laws leads to damnation
Being gay is against God's law
Therefore being gay leads to damnation
I am aware of only ten commandments, none of these say it is wrong to be gay. I'll agree that these commandments are not all of God's law, if you'll agree that in enumarating these commandments God is indicating that they are the most important of his laws.
There is no commandment 'Thou shall not be gay.' Given this, wouldn't it make more sense to target groups of people who are violating God's 10 most important laws. Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on the Hindu agenda, or the Muslim agenda, or the Buddhist agenda? All of those people are facing "ceratain" damnation, and, unlike gays,are recruiting other people to face "certain" damnation.
If you believe in God, which I am led to doubt, you would be moving for intolerance of the commandment breakers first, and gays second. It disgusts me when a godless commie red wolf like yourself sneaks into the Shepherd's flock wearing the sheepskin of false morallity.
My other sig is extremely clever...
I was quickly becoming an Apple fan when the whole MacOS X thing began. "Yes, Darwin is open source! We're thinking forward. Here, have our source!" It didn't take long to realize that this was all nonsense. Their motivations are the same as any other large corporate entity: they want to have things their way and they are not going to give an inch.
they are trying to be profitable. if weve learnt anything from linux, its that the philosophy is a very different thing from whats needed to run a profitable company (no, breaking even once doesnt count). even redhat must sell something to survive. apple sells its gui
if pure oss philosophy is important to you, use linux (and secretly dualboot windows). if you want a commercial operating system, apple makes a very fine one
the animal doesnt even have opposable thumbs, focker!
I always thought that Apple had to release their kernel source in some form, since it was based on "Open" Projects (Mach and BSD). I'm not up on the technical aspects of the licenses for those projects, but I'll bet they allow for Apple to "Open" up the source for the Kernel while keeping the source for the GUI closed. It's an "Open" Kernel, but not an "Open" OS.
They were never trying for OSS acceptance because they were probably just satisfying the contractual obligations of their licenses by releasing the Darwin source as "Open" (as opposed to Open, without quotes, which Mr. Raymond apparently has some say in...)
They never tried, that is, until it started generating negative P.R.
You would think they would shy away from this latest stunt out of fear of negative P.R. also, but I guess their lawyers put a higher priority on "protecting" the GUI than on pissing off potential developers.
For the USPTO page on Apple's theme engine patent see: U.S. Patent # 6,104,391
Apple has at least one other theme related patent from around the same time, IIRC.
For the USPTO page on Apple's theme engine patent see: U.S. Patent # 6,104,391
Apple has at least one other theme related patent from around the same time, IIRC, and this cease and desist letter may a defense of that patent as well. As always, it's important to know the details before lobbing verbal hand grenades.
hey dude,
Check out the moderators FAQ at:
http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml
I would have emailed you this, but I don't think you have entered an email address on your slashdot profile.
Sorry - I moderated your comment down.
Tartley
jonathanhartley@hotmail.com
Find the public relations info for your country and do a little "public feedback." I will be doing so shortly. I am an Apple diehard. I have loved their products for a long time, but it makes me ill every time their spineless legal people need to justify their existence by picking on harmless projects that will only serve to heighten interest in what Apple has to offer. It's a little more than tiresome.
--Rick
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
>Its just so dumb I don't know how to respond. Gee, why don't you just create a Job's Borg icon to replace that cute little Apple. Or is this behavior not sufficiently MSFT like to warrent such drastic action.
They should. Third party developers are the life blood of an operating system - especially an operating system made by a company that doesn't have a monopoly on the applications market.
Witness Microsoft. It costs a bit to buy VS6, but if a developer can get it, he has all kinds of information and help at his disposal. And he doesn't have to worry about being attacked by Microsoft's lawyers, either. If he's good, Microsoft may even buy his product! What a deal!
You and I may not like all the stupid shareware and freeware applications - heck, some of them are downright useless. But this is spurring on developer interest and mindshare, and that's what an operating system needs in the long run to survive.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
creative individual with schizophrenic tendancies marked with delusions of grandeur and persecution and a possible self-destructive urge
I'm platform agnostic, but spent a great while in the company of Mac-users and this is true for just about every one I've ever met.
The sysadmin at the college where I was a volunteer webmaster? He would constantly go on and on about how great 'his' platform was and how superior it was over Wintel, and then in the next breath complain of all the conspiracies Microsoft was involved in to make sure that he and other Mac users were never able to play the good games or use any of the popular apps. Then he'd turn around and try to see how much warez he could upload to public servers without getting caught.
The graphic designer I worked with?
He would spend hours ranting about how our company's PC-using tech support area would abuse him because he was a Mac user, but then go on and on about the hardware superiority of the G3 over the eqivalent Pentium-II's at the time. Then he would fire off incindiary emails to the company president.
I *could* go on, but I think you get the point.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I can't wait till Apple see the Aqua-like screenshots of Win XP on the Microsoft website...
Just think - the worlds larges collection on copy-right infringement whiners verses the defense might of Microsoft.
Almost makes you want both sides to lose.
On second thought "Go Microsoft, Go!".
Not to mention the fact that a large number of the early kernel hackers were MS-DOS coders. Linux is, in a very large sense, the MS-DOS of the Unix world, IMHO (and I don;t think that's a bad thing).
In other words, they are working so hard to prevent their past mistakes that they are causing new ones.
I know a lot of people will say this same thing, but I really mean it:
I have been seriously considering getting a Mac. Mainly to educate myself and see where that leads. I was trying to make up my mind between Sun and Apple. Why not go with the Mac? Several really nice web browsers. All the multimedia software you could want ('ooohhhh, a legal DVD player you say?') and it's certanly got all of the features I miss about Window$ (Quicktime, Media Player, Macromedia, etc). It just seemed like the no-brainer choice for a desktop to replace Windows and compliment Linux.
After hearing this bull going on constantly... cripling opensource programers left and right, I'm going to steer clear of Apple. Not only that, I'm not going to venture into SUN territory either. I've learned my lesson but good this time! Never trust a company for your software. Be them Apple, Micro$oft, or RedHat. I get a Bare OS and I make it into the OS I want it to be.
We don't need anything OpenSource doesn't have to offer! Once there's an opensource clone of RealPlayer I'll be set. What else do we really need? If you can think of anything needed not available in OpenSource, le me know. Either I'll point you to it, or work on it myself!
Many Unix users still use Windows or Macs, claiming they have no choice because of program Z. There are always alternatives for us, and we need not look back to the EvilEmpire any more. People need to cut the cord and free themselves of propriety. Free Speech tastes better than free Beer, and a person willing to trade one for the other, doesn't deserve either. Once I settled on XFce as my desktop I've had no urge to use anything else.
If Apple wants to screw over developers, fine. I'll be in the promised land while others all complain about what is done, and little will be accomplished. Enjoy your strugles, I've seen the end of the rainbow, and it leads right back where we already have been.
Frankly, I'm baffled by this. Apple seems hell-bent on reserving the exclusive right to theme their OS. They even went so far as to patent GUI theme engines. So why the hell don't they release their own themes? Aqua's pretty and all, but if you're running OS X that's your only option. This "I'm not playing, but I won't let you play either" attitude is just frustrating.
This
Most people here are computer literate enough to build thier own system and save them selves hundreds of dollars over a prebuilt PC. Then rember macs for equivilent performace in anything other the Photoshop cost about 5 times a PC. So most people here would never think of buying a Mac.
Sometimes the enablers do get screwed by bigger companies.
This is a desperate act made out of fear by a company that knows they have no reason to still be in business. Apple pissed away it's technological lead, it's customers' good will, the good will of developers and any advantages they had over Windoze. Except for a few "tricks", Apple has nothing left to offer the market.
I'm sorry guys, but it looks like the Macintosh is going to be following the same road the Amiga took. A technologically good product with great potential driven into the ground by clueless, incompetent and maliciously arrogant management.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
That's some mighty strong strawman arguments if I ever saw one.
That's because they are two very different companies. Apple is a hardware company; Microsoft is pure software. Apple saw what happened to IBM when the PC hardware was comoditized, and they were too afraid to let that happen to them.
Microsoft's software is not a commodity. No one can produce a WinAPI clone without Redmond unleashing their hounds of lawyers. Can you produce a Microsoft Office clone that can read and write proprietary Office formats perfectly? With the DMCA, you can't even reverse engineer the file formats anymore.
So Microsoft has created a proprietary software model built upon a commoditized hardware. The hardware situation was largely out of Bill Gates's hands; he just took advantage of it because his company only made software. Apple is, and always was, a hardware company. There were Apple clones out there, but Apple pursued them and hounded them out of business. Why? Because Apple made money on hardware; software was a loss-leader.
Now true, Microsoft has always encouraged lots of people to adopt their technology, while Apple seems to have been beating people with a stick to stay out of their yard, but that's like saying Hitler's Facsism still allowed private businesses while Stalin's Fascism made it all state owned. They're just two similar monsters grinning at each other from Redmond and Cuppertino.
Personal computer hardware would have existed with or without Bill. It's a simple fact. True, Microsoft has ensured there's a common box in every home to run their proprietary software. They've encouraged people to develop software for this box as long as Microsoft doesn't want to cash in on the market. When they do, they bludgeon the competition out of the way and take over that market. It's not as open and competitive as you think. It's a vaguely benign mobster waiting until you develop a market then they move in on you.
I've always imagined it was like America's relationship with the Soviet Union during WWII. The enemy of your enemy kind of thing.
How do you figure Microsoft gives you the freedom to do what you want? You do realise Microsoft doesn't allow you to reverse engineer, tinker with or modify their OS, right? (read the EULA for Windows sometime) In theory, you don't actually own the Windows software installed on your computer.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
Subject says it all.
Well, you really have to look at the issue somewhat differently. The employees who work on the stuff want OSS acceptance for their work. The lawyers want to protect Apple's IP. These two groups probably never meet, in any real sense, and are frequently going at cross purposes.
GUI != OS...or is this the only thing that really makes Mac OS distinctive? If you were to change the interface in Mac OS, would it still be Mac OS? These aren't rhetorical questions. I'm actually curious about what advantages the Mac OS offers beyond the interface.
It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS.
The common factor here is the PC, not MS.
I watched all you sworn Open-Source slashdotters get all cozy with Apple and Jobs because he wears jeans instead of a three-piece suit and spoke the open-source buzzwords. OS-X is a failure, Apple is a failure, and Apple Legal is just as bad as M$ Legal. Get over it. Quit wasting cycles on these corporations and get back to supporting real open-source. When Windows XP and the licencing attached to it finally start hitting home machines, Linux will be THE thing. Don't lose focus again.
"Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect."- Steven Wright
Did anyone notice that the Macworld article said that "Mac OS 8.5 and above" was protected? Now, I may be reading too much into this, but isn't OS X a totally different system from the previous OSs? Therefore, OS X is not included? Of course, I may be wrong, but no where in the article or the commentary was "open source"(except in the title to provoke responses), "Darwin", or "OS X" mentioned specifically.
The MacThemes link posts a page explaining what the themes projects is. Nary a mention of any problems with Apple (banner says Open Magazine > Question Exchange > Slashdot.Org). So where is their supposed greivance?
Once again, a bunch of crap verbage without any evidence.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Yup,a rifle manufacturer should be blamed when someone takes that rifle (created for the sport of hunting deer, or are you anti-hunting, also?)and somehow (accidentally or purposefully) kills someone? Of course, the inanimate object had a willfull desire to eliminate a life, correct? No. "Oh my (insert whatever deity), that weapon just killed my best friend!" Or is it, "Oh my (same), that person took that chair and drove it through my friend's skull!" Where is the difference? That's right, in the first example an inanimate object happened to kill a person; in the second example a person deliberately did a harmful action to another person. So, do guns perform these harmfull actions all by themselves, or do they need a human component to fire the bullet? When did you hear of a gun spontaneously firing and killing someone? Ah, never? How about someone (kid, adult, monkey) playing with a (illegally) loaded gun and hurting/killing someone?;
I feel fit to use my illegal fully automatic machine gun to chew your family to little tiny bits. Must be the manufacture's fault, right? Cool, I'll be out of jail in about 9 years (average jail sentanence for murderers).
Very nice I can blame someone besides me for pulling the trigger... so, where do you and your family live?
(For legal reasons, I must state the following... all of the above is stated for an educational excercise in responsibility management. All comments are not meant in a literal respect, but rather as a thought excercise.)
To comment on the above- our society has now reached the point where free speech is so restricted that we no longer have free speech. Constitutionally, we have the right to say pretty much anything, but the legal fees involved when protecting that speech when it annoys a large corporation is so large as to effectively squash the dissenting party.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
When Apple lawyers aren't busy sueing 16-year-olds, they are sueing people who make things look like their OS.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
I would assume that any sane person in either of the latter groups would se this as a Pyrrhic victory at best, and tell Legal to drop it.
Unfortunately, I wonder if all of the recent talk about copyright infringement (both here on /., and in the rest of the world) has made the lawyers hypersensitive to anything that might come close to perverting Apple's brand.
Still, if I ever met any of these lawyers at a party (probably not very likely), I wouldn't be able to decide if I should ask him to build me a rocket, or pull a friggin' tumor out of my frontal lobe. They seem to be a little short on common sense.
I was hoping to keep this out of the press until we had more time to prepare, but since someone leaked it already
Apple has two complaints against the software, Theme Machine, which allows users to create themes for the Mac OS. First:
So their complaint is not that we are infringing on Apple's trademarks, but that we contribute to other users ability to do so. I can't imagine that argument holding up in any court. Because I did not help to write the program, I cannot speak authoritatively about the methods used to develop it. However, preliminary research indicated that those methods were appropriate via the fair use doctrine established in Sega v Accolade under the Ninth Circuit Court Of Appeals.Of course, all of this is moot, because we are just a few random guys who have never met face to face, and have neither the funding nor the desire for a protracted legal battle with Apple. Ironically, we've been doing this for more than two years, and the Editor doesn't even work with Mac OS X. I'll be pulling it shortly, but if you'd like to get involved with the Mac Themes neXt project, please contact me
Well, I don't know a whole lot about OSX or this theme tool. But I believe that this theme tool is open source, right? And it's using some of Apples unpublished API's right?
I don't think it's the fact that you can make other themes for your mac that they object to but rather that the themes project is, with it's open source, in effect publishing API's that Apple doesn't want published.
.sig? Get your own damn
You Get what you pay for. Apple hardware is high quality. Not some cheap OEM crap that Dell spits out.
The 3rd party memory that now doesn't work under the latest firmware was memory that did not match the specs that the machines should have had in the first place. There is still plenty of 3rd party modules that did work. Those people that got bit by this were the ones who went for the el cheapo sticks.
Yes please do the math. There is more to the processor than just the Mhz ratings! A 733Mhz G4 will beat a 1.5Ghz P4 in some tests (just like the P4 will beat the G4 for in other specs).
Apple is a company. Heaven forbid they would want to make money and defend themselves...oh my, can't have that. Open source this...open source that. Screw open source! Just give me quality software and I'll pay for it.
"The Funeral Procession"
Oh yeah...they've been saying that for years...sing a different tune the repetition is boring.
go to Apple's feedback page, click the 'Management' radio button and let them know how you feel. If you are delaying or changing your mind about purchasing their products, let them know that too.
I've seen a lot of disparaging comments about Apple's lawyers here, and thought I'd throw out a few tidbits.
First of all, let's get early business taken care of. We're talking about lawyers. Praticing lawyers are almost invariably scum (I'm not including people who become lawyers for the education or other purposes besides actual practice). We all know that. Those of us who have ever dealt with lawyers hate them, unless you're a lawyer too. Even then, you probably still hate lawyers. Especially yourself.
With that in mind, Apple's lawyers are not doing this for fun, and they're not doing it to justify their jobs, etc. Rhetoric aside, they're probably doing it because they are obliged to defend Apple's trademarks or risk losing the ability to control their use. Should they not defend their trademarks, even in "stupid" cases, they could lose their ability to stop people from using their trademarks without permission. They are duty-bound to do what they're doing. I think someone posted something to this effect, and I'm confirming the truth of it. That's not to say that Apple wouldn't defend their trademark in this manner regardless of the law...
I've seen some attacks on the quality, etc., of Apples lawyers in this discussion. It's easy to say such things in the heat of anger. It's foolish, however, to think they're lame in any sense (other than perhaps a PR sense). These are the cream of the crop. Why would you expect anything less from a large, powerful company like Apple? I've dealt personally with their legal dept as an outsider, and they are nothing short of scary good. In one instance I saw them get a special form processed by a notorious government agency in a couple of hours with only a few calls; a form which takes any normal mortal *months* to get processed. These people are good, they are powerful, and they don't need to pull stupid stunts to make themselves look good to the bossman. More than likely they're proving themselves on a daily basis.
Though I hate lawyers, even my own, it's Jobs & friends you should be slamming first and foremost. There are all sorts of creative things they could do to preserve their trademarks, yet not stomp all over the Themes Project. But they're not doing any of those things.
I taped a Tupperware bowl to the back of my monitor.
Perhaps the correct conclusion is that they are drug dealers?
"How could they possibly suffer any damage by MTP's efforts"
;)
Eh? No, research a new GUI look for tens of millions of dollars and then having people copying so that it doesn't generate revenue it is of cause great business!
Damn right!
"Anytime you have a closed-source proprietary system with the bullshit 'intellectual property' laws we have, they can change the rules on you any time they want to. "
No, they cant. The license you accept is what you accept, nothing else.
"The license that comes with most software these days ('In exchange for the use of our valuable Intellectual Property, we own your firstborn child and your left testicle/ovary, and if our product doesn't work we still get them') has no anti-asshole protection at all. "
Show me such a license please...
"That is why GPL and the Artistic licenses are so important. In the case of the GPL, it even attempts to pre-emptively prevent assholishness. "
Hehe, yeah, sure! Red hat and other capitalist's sells other peoples work and are getting rich without compensating the workers AT ALL. If that isn't assholishness, nothing is.
And...
If you check out the tech-stocks you will notice that they are dropping. What do you think this means? It means they don't make enough money and has to make more, it certainly doesn't mean they make too much.
GPL doesn't pay bills.
"such as his belief in the Free Market -- are not"
Give away peoples work does NOT make a free market.
I have read all RMS has wrote and he is simply wrong.
It seems as if you want Apple to play fair? M$ never does! I beg to differ about Apple's own worst enemy. You should not look to the lawyers but JOBS and Gil Amelio! Throughout history, megalomaniac CEOs have limited the profit, innovation and marketability of their companies! Check out the price of the early Macintoshes, $5k-$10k when other computers were much less and just as powerful!
you can't use pc133 memory with a p4 motherboard. You have to use that Rambus shit and that's really expensive.
how does this whole scores thing work. Is someone actually reading every post. How do they post the score immediately after the comment is sent. Isn't there a delay while it is read. How does this all work? And if I get score one out of the blue for this I'll scream.
avi tevanian: hey steve, look! some guys are doing kaleidoscope for os X!
steve jobs: cool!
AT: shame they can't get any publicity for it...
SJ: i know! let's sue their asses! sure, it'll make us look bad, but it'll give their project the attention it deserves!
AT: hey, great idea!
SJ: i'll get onto it right away!
AT: yes, but don't stop slamming my dick in the door yet!
SJ: as if!
sfx: Slam!
AT: oooh!
sfx: Slam!
AT: ooohh!
etc etc.
Um...oh forget it. *sigh*
Please. Insults are the recourse of a simplistic mind. Besides, the Smurfs rock so shut your hole.
Anyway this seems to be a trademark case, and those are somewhat scary, as Trademarks are required to be defended, or else they can be lost. That facts should be more clear before accusations are bandied about.
This is my whole point! They took up patents on theming related concepts! Give me a break. These kinds of patents are the bane of OSS and if Apple was willing to take out such nonsense patents, they're clearly out to take and not give. Look at what they did to the FreeType project. How is it that a company that supposedly supports OSS attacks a very important OSS project?
My original point stands and is correct. They don't want acceptance, they just want to attract attention. It's very simple. The problem is they don't want to play fair, which is what Open is all about.
Why bother.
i said settle down beavis
Why bother.
I was quickly becoming an Apple fan when the whole MacOS X thing began. "Yes, Darwin is open source! We're thinking forward. Here, have our source!" It didn't take long to realize that this was all nonsense. Their motivations are the same as any other large corporate entity: they want to have things their way and they are not going to give an inch.
And here they are, stomping their feet and pouting. "We don't want anyone to change our interface! It's our interface, leave it alone! *pouting* Oh, and themes were our idea!" Is it any surprise?
This is simply marketing hype.
Why bother.
I did, and i can tell ya I'm not going to wait for that stupid kiddie interface to do whatever it does before i can read my freakin directory structure.
This OS is weak. I personaly never saw something as slow for basic ops as this OS. Hey you want a demo, open your config and try to change the background (This ain't a basic op btw). You can benchmark the time it takes to open the necessary panels, but i know from my point of view it's too freakin slow.
Who needs benchmarks anyway ?
If this is part of Apple's new strategy, well you can count the apple out.
MACOSX = KiddieOS X (That's a better name for it.)
So my point is Apple has a lot to do before even thinking about stupid copyrigth laws.This OS really needs a couple of patches and the likes before it can be accepted as a good OS.
As for Apple's Lawyers, they seem to have a lot of spare time for justifying their jobs.
Evolving with the fastest, not the slowest.
Maybe protecting IP wasn't the purpose here. Could it be that some joe 6-pack's theme offended the aesthetic karma of apple's staff colorists?
If your market share had been dwindled down to "irrelevant" by cheap knock-offs (Windows) you might be nervous about people again trying to copy your stuff, too. If you had spent millions of dollars and a decade in development for your new OS, you might not want a cheap copy on the market the next week either. I can't blame Apple too much for wanting to protect the uniqueness of their massive investment for a month before someone copies it and gives it away for free. Give the Apple programmers a chance to enjoy the credit they deserve.
On the other hand, that makes things easy when you're working in a cold room wearing mittens.
--
Most of the people I know who use Macs are bright and creative people. MacOS is still the platform of choice in the professional audio profession. In my experience, Macintosh hardware is, in general, of a higher quality than most intel systems. Since I switched to Intel, I've had to replace a piece of hardware about every 3 or 4 months. MacOS is also more stable than Win9x.
"because gateway, dell, compaq and the like use the cheapest parts they can get their mits on, they gotta compete in a competitive market. build yourself a decent system without using those $10 bestbuy modems and soundcards & youll have a decent system." Did that. Now my PC costs as much as an off-the-shelf Macintosh. "this common mistake comes from the fact that win9x acutally has software available for it. of course macos never crashes! its never doing anything!" What USEFUL software does the PC have that the Mac doesn't? "thanks for proving to us once again that people who use macs only do so because they dont know any better" FYI, my desktop PC dual boots Win98 and Win2000. My laptop dual boots linux and Win98. I also have a SparcStation running Solaris 8.
Wozniak has spent the last twenty years not doing tech.
Do you seriously think he could cobble together the new G4 machine with a handful of TTL gates?
The computer business has evolved far past anything that Woz could handle.
You poision the truth in your arguement. The 'open source' community should be thankful that Microsoft plowed their field for them, encouraging the hardware industry to produce a large amount of fairly open hardware, years after IBM, who pioneered in that area (producing an open-buss machine based on off-the shelf LSI chips, etc.), had slammed the door shut (OS/2, the PS/2 and Microchannel was IBM's failed effort to recapture the market they'd lost control over.)
Ultimately, of course, it's Microsoft's loss that is 'open sources' benefit. Every machine that the latest version of Windows NT/2000 won't run on is fertle ground for a Freenix (although Xfree itself is starting to 'roll forward' in the same way with their abandonment of, for instance, support for S3/Trio64 graphics cards).
Apple's going to die pretty soon anyway. It's losing too much money. The nature of their product will kill them. Only Apple can produce Apple hardware, so in time their high hardware costs will drive them out of business anyway. I hope to see them die sooner as they do more things like this. Punishing people who would have liked them... tsk tsk, bad for any company. It just goes to show you that their flashy graphics are all that is keeping them barely afloat. I can either get an imac for 1500 bucks or its IBM-PC clone equivalent for $500 or less (in most cases)... with the floppy. ;)
I seem to have it more and more these days: A sudden instant of strange clarity as I try to figure out what Zope is, or as I download a .wav file of Guido van Rossum squawking about "Vooty Vootpecker".
It's brief, but highly concentrated: The scales fall from my eyes, and I say to myself: "I don't give a rat's ass about this bullshit. Hooray for those that do, but I just don't." So, I close the browser window and find something interesting to spend my time on.
You know what? It just happened again.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
I am always surprised at how much /.'ers like apple and shun m$ when apple always seems to like so much control over their systems.
Odd, isn't it? Most Slashbots claim to support the free market, but when the rubber hits the road, they'll always break bread with its enemies.
Microsoft clobbered Apple -- and the rest of the industry -- with openness. They were always open to developers writing for their platforms, and they always relied on open commodity hardware, in sharp contrast to Apple's obsession with closed proprietary hardware.
Linux itself exists only because Microsoft created the modern microcomputer industry, where standardized, fully-documented hardware was available at reasonable prices dictated by a competitive marketplace. It's no coincidence that Linux was first developed for the same hardware platform as DOS.
Microsoft has always been open and competitive. They encourage competition and thrive on it. They have always traded freely in the marketplace of ideas. Apple never did, and never will.
The "open-source" "community"'s affection for Apple is indicative of its real motives and underlying beliefs. If they really cared about freedom -- real freedom, the freedom to do as one chooses with one's own property -- they'd have been supporting Microsoft all along.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
. . . the FSF sided with Microsoft and put a ban down on porting GNU to Apple OSes.
This comes as no surprise.
Richard Stallman is a man of firm principle and unshakable conviction. Some of his convictions are clearly insane, but others -- such as his belief in the Free Market -- are not. In any case, I feel a great kinship with a man who will not under any circumstances compromise his principles.
The "Open Source" movement, by contrast, is purely pragmatic. Pragmatism is dangerous: By definition, the pragmatist believes that the end justifies the means. This is the moral and intellectual pit that the "Open Source" "movement" has fallen into. This is why they support Apple and IBM: It's convenient. It seems momentarily advantageous.
You can't trust amoral people. A man with his eye only on the main chance will sell out his supporters in a heartbeat.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
"Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive" -- hey, that's me!
Who gives a shit.
Daddy would you like some sausage?
Here we are again with companies going after the enablers rather than the people committing the crime:
Apple claims the editor enables third parties to copy its copyrighted trademark themes
I claim MS paint enables me to copy Apple's copyrighted trademarks. Just as DeCSS is a possible enabler to a crime, this program and thousands of other utilities can "enable" crime.
How can they possibly hope to have this stand up in court? Or are they hoping someone will just crumble rather than fight?
Smart is smart and Woz is smart. Only the details of the technology have changed.
Obviously he wouldn't use TTL today, the same way he didn't use vacuum tubes back then.
Somebody explain to me how a G4/733 (with an extended pipeline as the P4 has) can be double the speed of Pentium 4 1.5 ghz if that was the case
Perhaps they'd claim to be the equal of that P4/1.5 instead? The G4 probably doesn't have the same architectural weaknesses as the P4 (like a choked decoder or second ALU that is never used), seeing as it wasn't rushed out the door.
Reboot macht Frei.
[Defend or losit it for trademarks]
The same is true of patent law
No it's not. I can patent something, say a method for encoding images (gif), and ignore infringements for years, then suddenly start suing left and right when it's firmly entrenched.
Reboot macht Frei.
By constantly pissing on developers or anyone else who tries to do something innovative with their computers, Apple is just making it harder for themselves in the hostile tech market. This kind of mentality is what made me sell my Apple IIGS and forget it.
No, it's not Shitsack. It's me. I'm a new troll here. So please die. Thanks.
guk is gay
But it beats trolling as an AC, and I'm certainly a better troll than you are. So shut up.
guk is gay
You know, I'd much rather use it on someone worth insulting instead of your lame sorry crab-infested ass. Besides, I'm a real troll unlike you who just seems to infect Slashdot with your gayness. Fuck off.
guk is gay
So, who do you like in the game tonight? Blues or Sharks?
guk is gay
So Apple's lawyers are doing their job. What's the point of throwing a fit? Lawyers quibble about minutia, especially with regrard to intellectual property.
While I think this theme thing is overboard and unnecessary, it has nothing to do with Apple's other employees, such as those working on Darwin and other open source projects.
And as for Apple "taking and not receiving" from the open source community, please help define what Apple has taken. Here is what they've given:
1) Support (pre-Darwin) toward the open development of Mk based linux on their hardware AND i386. Commercial benefit to Apple: marginal; academic goodwill.
2) Darwin in general: open, real and both PPC and i386. Benefits developers working on low level MacOS X projects like VPC or drivers and such. Commercial benefit to Apple: marginal; happier developers, goodwill.
3) netInfo. Apple handed its NIS++ technology directly to developers for free. They stand to gain little commercially.
4) QSS. Apple commercial benefit: they lose some PPC hardware sales to Linux servers and dedicated network gear.
5) OpenPlay/NetSprockets. Perfect example of technology a company sits on, and should open up for others to use. Apple did. Their commercial benefit: Hay.
If you've contributed anything at all to the Darwin project, I'd like to know about it. Otherwise, shut up already.
Tondog
The Treasure Island Experiment
http://www.tiexp.com
reality based entertainment