Slashdot Mirror
Psystar Crushed In Court
We've been following the case of Mac cloner Psystar for some time now. Apple was just handed a summary judgement over Psystar, and as usual Groklaw has the scoop. Here is the order (PDF), though PJ supplies it in text form at the link above. "Psystar just got what's coming to them in the California case. ... It's a total massacre. Psystar's first-sale defense went down in flames. Apple's motion for summary judgment on copyright infringement and DMCA violation is granted. Apple prevailed also on its motion to seal. Psystar's motion for summary judgment on trademark infringement and trade dress is denied. So is its illusory motion for copyright misuse. ... So that means damages ahead for Psystar on the copyright issues just decided on summary judgment, at a minimum. The court asked for briefs on that subject. In short, Psystar is toast." Reader UnknowingFool adds, "There are still issues to be decided but they are only Apple's allegations: breach of contract, induced breach of contract, trademark infringement, trademark dilution; trade dress infringement, state unfair competition, and common law unfair competition. Even if Psystar wins all of them, it is unlikely to help them very much."
The only thing lamer than this verdict is reading PJ crowing over it at Groklaw. It was great when SCO, a genuine bad guy, was getting kicked around. However in this instance her smug self-righteous I-told-you-so BS is even more obnoxious than the triumph of the EULA.
Actually, you have to wonder if maybe it was Microsoft behind Psystar, and if this really was EXACTLY the outcome they wanted, I mean, Microsoft itself has a fairly draconian EULA, and they just might have wanted a test case to set precedent for affirming it, backing someone to get sued by Apple (and lose) seems slightly less absurd then sueing themselves.
I'm not sure what to say about your lack of faith in your child. Hand just about any consumer electronics device to just about any 5 year old, and they will be up and running with it with no help. Heck, my son INSTALLED Ubuntu a week after his second birthday. Put your kid in front of an XBox, Playstation, DS, Windows, Linux, you name it. She will likely do just fine.
The iPod isn't any easier to use than a hundred other devices. Apples reputation for being easier to use than everybody else is far more myth than reality.
I run mostly Linux, with the odd windows VM. What hole would OS X fill for me?
"I have known people who bought Macs not because they were fans of Apple, but because they were dissatisfied with PCs loaded with Windows. ...They found Macs to be a breath of fresh air not because they think Apple is "hip" and "cool" but because they found its GUI to be easy and intuitive and its underlying Unix system to be rock-solid stable and not prone to malware. They felt like they found something that "just worked" and felt like that is what they were paying a higher price for. I think of these folks as Apple's target audience."
Exactly, they found Macs to be "hip" and "cool".
Seriously, these specific users you talk about don't find Mac's GUI immediately "easy and intuitive" nor the underlying "Unix system" "rock-solid stable" nor do they even know. These are things Mac fanboys like to say, however.
There is an open and competitive market for PCs and PC components, keeping prices low and pushing innovation forward.
Which Apple also uses. Apple uses the same RAM PC's do. They use the same processors, the some motherboard components, the same video cards, the same hard drives, etc. etc. etc.
Apple users can basically upgrade about as much as PC users can, they just cannot easily build from scratch.
So to claim that only Windows is advantaged by innovations of the Windows hardware market is incorrect.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
whether you like apple or not - what psystar was doing was effectively taking all of apple's R&D, and selling it for peanuts having done very little actual work of their own.
OS X is not "on sale" for $29 for anyone to use on any hardware. The software license explicitly states:
Its pretty fucking clear about what you can and can't do with it. If you do not agree with the license, you are entitled to a full refund upon return of the software, from your place of purchase.
My bet is that Psystar were hoping that this license would make their CUSTOMERS accountable, as THEY would be the ones clicking through the license agreement and ignoring it. Good on the court for holding Psystar accountable, and not forcing apple to start going after hobbyist users who are running OS X on their PCs.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
The way they Psystar has been doing business, yes. But Psystar can legally make an such adaptations once ownership of the copy has been transferred to the end user, if the end user authorizes them to do so, as an "essential step" in utilizing the software on a machine. 17 USC 117(a)(1).
Imaging stations are probably out the window, metaphysical equivalence aside. Suppose you have an imaging station with a legitimate copy of Mac OS X on it. With the user's authorization, can you "copy" that exact same version from the DVD they now own, onto the imaging station, without performing an actual copy? Or do bits need to hit the wire somewhere?
It is very simple. Psystar sells machine, and legitimately acquired copy of Mac OS X to end user. End user authorizes Psystar to install the copy they now own on the computer they now own, as provided for in 17 USC 117(a).
That way Psystar never sells a derivative work at all, rather they simply sell the service of installing legitimate, end user owned copies of Mac OS X on Psystar branded computers. That is what 17 USC 117(a) specifically allows.
Sorry, Windows 95 was not better than Mac OS 8. For one thing, Mac OS 8 was a hell of a lot more stable, which is pretty disturbing because Mac OS 8 crashed quite a bit, and crashed hard (the whole machine would lock up, requiring a reboot). Windows 95 was worse. I could only use it reliably for about six hours at a time. It was plagued with security problems - I used to have a simple shell script that would crash the network stack of any Windows 95 machine just by entering its IP address.
Windows 95 supported 255-character filenames, but developers seemed afraid to use anything but 8.3, so trying to figure out what anything did was always a mess.
On Mac OS 8, if you installed something and it broke your system, you could bring up the Extensions Manager, find the offending extension or control panel, and temporarily disable it, saving your settings as extension sets that you could easily switch between. It was like Safe Mode done right. On previous versions of the Mac OS that didn't have the Extensions Manager, you could hold down the Option key while booting to get something equivalent to Safe Mode.
And if an application managed to break itself, most of the time you could easily fix it by tossing the preferences file and starting fresh. Of course there was a standard system-wide location for where these preferences files should go, and essentially all Mac software used it, naming the files with something resembling the name of the application they belonged to.
Apple's published Human Interface Guidelines helped application developers give their applications a consistent look and feel, so switching from one application to another felt pretty natural to users. These guidelines even specified details like how many pixels there should be between an "OK" button and a "Cancel" button, and explained why using descriptive button labels like these is far superior to the "Yes" and "No" that Windows applications still seem to prefer. Having one application ask "Would you like to save your document before exiting?" and another ask "Are you sure you'd like to exit without saving your document?" does not make for a good user experience. And I'm still baffled as to why (at least in locales that use left-to-right writing systems) although we typically put a "forward" button on the right side and a "back" button on the left side, dialog boxes on Windows always seem to put the button that continues forward to the left, and the button that cancels or goes back to the previous step to the right. Oh, and why do so many dialog boxes have both "Apply" and "OK" buttons? If you could add up the time people have wasted over the last decade by clicking both buttons (because somehow they've been lead to believe that they have to)...
Something I was always fond of: on the Mac, not only did the icons on my desktop always stay exactly where I left them, but so did all my folder windows. If I opened a folder window, it would open to the same position on the screen where it was when I closed it, and would have the same view settings (e.g. display in icon view or list view, sort by filename or by last modified date, etc.). On Windows 95, sometimes just launching certain applications was enough to make Explorer completely rearrange everything.
I could go on, but I'll spare you.
One other nitpick: you say IE4-6 had a brilliant run, but Microsoft is clueless with IE8. On the contrary, while IE4-6 may arguably have been better than Netscape 4 (which is also an unusable pile of crap by modern standards), with IE8 they're actually putting real effort into making a decent browser. It still sucks, but not because they've lost their way - on the contrary, they've finally found it again, and are genuinely trying to make a better browser. Of course, Mozilla was trying to make a better browser years ago, Apple tried to make an even better browser after that, and Google built a great browser on top of Apple's work (which was in turn built on KDE's work). Microsoft is years behind, and desperately tryin
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Wanting to use Mac OS X is just a preference. It is not a superior OS, as amply evidenced by:
1. Guest account bug that wipes ALL the user's data
2. All the bugs plaguing the system that should "just work" on a platform with a small known set of hardware. Very weak.
3. Vastly inferior library available of software compared to Windows
4. Lack of choice. Choice to run on any hardware you please. I have the choice to buy a machine that on average costs $1000 less than an Apple computer. I have the choice to go out and buy 2 ATI Radeon 5870's.
Most of the people on here rabidly decreeing that OS X is superior should stop the BS and just say it, that they like OS X because of personal preference. It is NOT superior software.