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Psystar Activation Servers Down?
An anonymous reader writes "I purchased Rebel EFI in support of Psystar's crusade back in October. Just 3 short months later, I have no support. I found this out when I upgraded my hard drive and installed Snow Leopard using Rebel EFI. The program can no longer 'phone home' to activate or download/install drivers. This is a direct contradiction to Psystar's promise posted on their website: 'Psystar will continue to support all of its existing customers of hardware and software through this transitional period. Warranties on hardware will continue to be honored as long the customer has a valid warranty. Rebel EFI support for existing customers, as always, will remain exclusively available through email and the built-in ticket interface.' Has anyone else run into this issue? It has been 9 days with no response from Psystar by e-mail or phone."
...to join a crusade.
Lots of people thought that the German National Socialist party was going to be able to turn the German economy around, restore Germany's relevance in the world, and ultimately defeat the countries that put them in that situation at the Treaty of Versailles.
Look, not every horse can place.
The whole idea that Psystar was using strong DRM to protect their code to strip the honor-system-level protections from OS X installs was mind-meltingly ironic in the first place. The fact that they're so quickly demonstrating why buying anything protected by strong DRM is a bad idea just adds salt to the dish.
This just in: Software that requires contacting a remote server doesn't work when the remote server suffers a total existance failure.
Up next: People die when they're killed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
thanks for the hashtag #slashdotisnottwitter
When Pystar first brought a machine on the market, it became quickly clear that their hardware was junk and they didn't know what they were doing. IIRC, one early reviewer bought a machine and found that it was unstable because they had OVERCLOCKED IT.
Having experimented (and failed) with overclocking myself, spending lots of time reading and dicussing on forums issues like Vdroop, Vgtl, Vdd, multiplier ratios, etc., etc., I can tell you that running a processor out of spec is challenging because you don't know where in that processor's performance bin you are, and your results are almost guaranteed to be different from someone else's, and Intel Quad cores are notoriously hard to overclock, and well it boils down to more of an art form of experimentation and testing than science because you can't get Intel to tell you the actual characteristics of the chip you bought. And moreover, you can run all the artificial tests you want and still end up with an unreliable system because memtest86 and prime95 don't test all the corner cases and enough combinations of scenarios. (I had run memory and processor tests for a week straight, and everything seemed fine, yet I would get kernel panics while parallel compiling Gentoo packages. I could just never manage to figure out the right combination of Vdd and Vgtl, and I could never for sure rule out the memory system being the source of the errors. So I just decided that I'd rather have a reliable system and longer life than 20% more throughput.)
It's irresponsible for vendors to sell you an overclocked system, because they can't guarantee that it's reliable. Rather, they are fooling you into thinking you're getting a better system than you are, ripping you off in the process. This is just one example of the many incompetent and/or highly questionable things that Pystar was doing that made me want to stay as far away from them as possible.
It would be one thing if this company tried to produce BETTER hardware than Apple. Trouble is, that would require intelligence and discerment, and people with that kind of smarts would also have been smart enough not to screw with Apple directly.
If I wanted to sell knock-off Apple hardware here's how I might go about it:
- Find a way to become an Apple reseller with minimal contractual obligations. This way, you can sell MacOS X discs without raising any major suspicions.
- Sell and support genuine Apple hardware.
- Also sell and support high quality Linux and Windows white-box PCs that just happen to have peripherals compatible with MacOS X.
- Add development support to an open source EFI project
- Let word of mouth get around that your systems are good for running MacOS
- But publically state that you do not provide OS support in this configuration because it may violate Apple's EULA.
- Get your lawyers to make sure you have plausible deniability every way you turn.
All of this requires forethought (or hindsight in my case). Pystar clearly did not have this. (I might not either. I might have just suggested a really bad plan.)
But like I say, the main thing that bothered me about them is that their hardware was crap. It's one thing to ride on Apple's shoulders. Directly supporting OSX but on GOOD hardware is arguably questionable, from a legal standpoint. It's entirely another matter to do incompetent things that could make them look bad. That'll REALLY get them chasing after you.
I've never really understood the whole hacking culture in the first place. People don't want to buy iPhones because they're not hackable enough. Ok, I support Free Software, so I can totally get on board with avoiding something that's proprietary and has DRM and all that. But even if the iPhone were 100% open source, it still would not interest me to hack it. I'm a professional chip designer. I like designing NEW hardware. I like being given an engineering challenge that requires that I create new functionality to serve a market need. I have no desire to confine myself to the spe
Err, what?! Apple "fanbois" pay money to Apple, abide by the EULA - why would Apple want to screw them over?! You're not thinking.
I adore the way people on your side are so "self righteous", let's look at the facts:
Psystar sold PCs, with some software derived from Open Source, with Apple's upgrade version of their OS, thumbing their nose at the EULA, and argued because you COULD do it, then it SHOULD be legal. How the heck they ever thought that was going to fly I'll never understand. And no it wasn't a "full version" of the OS - you obtain the right to run Mac OS X when you buy a Mac, and at no other time, so unless there was a Mac in the box too (wiped) I don't see how they ever thought it was going to be "OK".
You're right companies exist to make money, Apple "cares" about it's customers because it knows that doing this will mean they'll return to buy more product. Yes, they'll even be happy to pay a little more for it. This is a recipe for success that the rest of the industry seems to have forgotten, in their "race to the bottom" they've cut everything. You want a decent PC? You probably need to build it yourself, because you buy one prebuilt it'll have horrible build quality and more bloatware than any sane person can stand. You build it yourself, you get to choose the quality (maybe a keyboard that isn't totally horrible). I mean think about a new PC, what's the first thing you need to do? Burn a set of recovery disks - what the hell?! How much does not supplying a restore DVD actually save? You pay more for the blank media!
So let's not talk nonsense, if you know nothing about computers, don't want to build one, but actually want something nice - a Mac is probably your best bet. That horrible Psystar? No so much.
PC-EFI (an EFI emulation layer), FakeSMC, and other stuff based around boot-132; a lot of work from a guy named netkas but many people contributed to other drivers, etc. Rebel EFI included *at least* PC-EFI and boot-132-derived works; that also put them in direct violation of APSL, so they were screwed one way or another.
For the last time, PIN Number and ATM Machine are redundancies!