Please enlighten me: what peer-to-peer, hot-pluggable, high-speed peripheral bus preceeded FireWire? And please don't tell me that it's just a re-engineered, polished version of USB, because you'd be wrong.
The first time I heard the name "FireWire" was in an article in an issue of MacWEEK in '93 or '94. According to this, they started working on it even earlier than that. They just took their time and got it right, (and waited for the world to need that kind of throughput and versatility) before they put it into a computer in early 1999.
And yeah, ZeroConf is polished, existing technology. Polished, existing *Apple* technology. It's the grandson of AppleTalknetworking, circa 1985.
Sometimes I am not allowed to browse directories I know are there.
Such as? If you're talking about stuff like/usr,/sbin,/etc, those are hidden so as not to confuse newbies or become a target for people who stupidly delete things they think are cluttering up their hard drive without considering they might be important.
You can get to those directories by doing "Go to Folder..." from the Finder's "Go" menu, or make them visible by editing the.hidden file in the root directory of the hard drive.
Microsoft announces, then develops. Apple develops, then announces.
Just because Microsoft issues a press release or throws a press conference and says that the next version of Windows is going to have [feature], that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't already had [feature] under development/running in a lab somewhere for a year.
For example, the search capability in Tiger known as "Spotlight." Apple applied for a patent on the technology behind Spotlight (a patent that was granted in January of this year, BTW) when OS X 10.0* was still a year and two months away from public release. Which means they started working on it in 1999 if not sooner. Years before the name "Longhorn" was ever uttered by anyone at Microsoft.
*no one needs to have a product key* *this is the same for all apple produced software*
Wrong.
Apple server software has always required a serial number, since the AppleShare (pre-OS X) days, and OS X Server still does. Most if not all of the boxed OS X application software that Apple sells requires a serial number. I'm not sure about iLife, but iWork definitely needs one, so do things like Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro.
I don't see Apple adding a serial number to OS X for a while yet. They make most of their money from hardware sales, so if you're illegally copying their OS, they've already made some money from you. If they build their marketshare back up to double digits, however, then they might decide that the potential losses from illegal software copying are too great to ignore, and they'll crack down.
There was an implicit quid-pro-quo between Apple and Xerox. Xerox got to invest (pre-IPO) in Apple in exchange for the PARC tours and demos.
Read my previous post here for more info. The link in that post has since died, but there's more info on the deal here. Search for the text "open the kimono" on that page and start reading from the paragraph above it.
Nope, client also has to post his index to server.
Why? Isn't the idea that all data is stored on the server?
Also, posting a local machine's index to the server would have been asinine in OS 8.x. If any shared volume on any machine was indexed by Sherlock, you could use that index in a search simply by mounting the volume on your machine.
Yeah, and it was the first extension turned off. It was running up to 4 hours until canceled. No live results.
On a server, you scheduled it to run at midnight, and who gave a shit how long it took to run? That was only for the initial indexing, anyway-- subsequent updates of an existing index took much less time.
How do you compare this with WinFS, Spotlight, Beagle? It is completely different topic, accidentaly having the "SEARCH" word in common
It's not a completely different topic, it is exactly on topic-- you were trying to say that some aspects of WinFS were Microsoft's idea first, and I called you on it by showing that Apple did them in 1999. And yes, the way they did it had shortcomings, but that doesn't change the fact that they accomplished it 6 years ago. Now Apple is improving and reviving those features in OS X, while Microsoft has stricken WinFS from the feature list of their newest version of Windows, AGAIN.
I believe target disk mode is a feature of a machine's Open Firmware-- what OS is on the hard drive is irrelevant.
Not every Mac that has FireWire can do target disk mode-- pre-AGP Power Mac G4s (~350/400MHz) most notably cannot do it, and IIRC they can't be booted from an external FireWire drive, either.
Pretty much every Mac that shipped with a FireWire port after the Power Macs adopted AGP can do it, and certainly anything with a manufacture date from 2000 on.
It just means that every computer has to index network volumes for its self,
No it doesn't, it means the server creates the index of its volumes and the client machines have access to that index. As I said in another post in this thread, Apple was doing that back in 1999 with Sherlock, except the index was separate instead of part of the file system, and the indexing ran at intervals instead of happening in real time.
WinFS has nowhere near such little goals as Spotlight (remember Spotlight is desktop utility, while M$ is trying to make WinFS client/server capable).
M$ has promised this feature back in 2002 (if we forget Cairo failure).
Apple already had fast client/server search capability in 1999, with Mac OS 8.5. The old version of Sherlock running on an AppleShare file server could index the content of server volumes, and those indices could be used by the copy of Sherlock running on the client machines, if the user wanted the network volumes searched for something by content. The only difference is, the drive indexing did not occur in real time, it would have to be updated at intervals to remain useful.
This feature is not mentioned on either the OS X Client or OS X Server feature list page, but I would not be surprised to see it appear in a future point release of Tiger-- especially since the features pages says Spotlight in 10.4 can index and search a network home directory. Adding server volumes is the logical next step.
MUCH better! Speakeasy doesn't constantly port-scan you to make sure that you aren't doing anything that they say you shouldn't do.
But they do perform some acceptable network policing-- they look for mailservers and perform open relay testing on them. It's rather infrequent, I notice it in my mailserver's logs once every few months or so.
My mailserver is locked down tight, so I don't know what they do if they find an open relay on one of their IPs-- but I would guess that they attempt to contact the subscriber about it.
When my servers have been spammed or probed by other Speakeasy customer IPs and reported it, the response by Customer Service has been lighning fast.
Microsoft: "Check out these icons made from the *actual first page* of the document! AmAAAZziing huh?"
This has to be the biggest waste of CPU/GPU cycles Microsoft have exhibited since their "windows that can flap like a flag in the breeze" demo.
They were clearly trying to improve upon the informative aspect of some of OS X's Dock icons-- e.g. iCal's, which shows the current date when iCal is running; Mail.app's, which shows the number of new messages; or Activity Monitor's, which can put many different kinds of useful info into its Dock icon, to name three. As usual, though, they completely miss the point-- and in their zeal to copy while giving the appearance of innovating, they make laughable decisions-- like the ugly WinXP GUI, which was a blatant response to OS X's Aqua but turned out to be an ugly, Fisher-Price-looking mess that is the first thing I shut off on my Windows XP boxes at home and work, and any others I use regularly.
While Apple's "dynamic" icons are a practical means of gleaning often-wanted information at a quick dockward glance, who the hell is going to pick a document out of a directory by squinting at the iconized rendering of its first page rather than, oh I don't know, reading the filename? Furthermore, if search is going to be such a major part of Longhorn, why will anyone need an iconized representation of a document's content when they can instruct the computer to search for that content?
It was reported quite a while ago on one or more of the Mac news sites that with the advent of Tiger, Apple would be bumping the base RAM config of all their machines to 512MB, so no surprise there.
Surely they would have tested any activation scheme in the beta period, and even if it required a serial number or just had something in place to implement one when beta was over, some tester would have noticed and some rumor site would have publicized it.
Bottom line is, you can't run OS X unless you've bought a Mac, so Apple has made at least some money from you even if you illegally copy the OS. Right now I think Apple is more concerned with getting Macs on people's desks, and they'll worry about OS piracy at a much later time.
One thing I have noticed with newer machines, however, is that the OS X install discs seem to no longer be universal... the installer checks the hardware and refuses to install if the machine is not the type of computer that the disc was bundled with. I'm sure it's not hard for someone knowledgable to get around that limitation, but it will probably stop the casual user from buying a Mac mini with Tiger preloaded and using the bundled install discs to put Tiger on any other Macs he owns.
I have no problem believing that Best Buy has employees who are ignorant of the existence of $2 bills, but the arresting officer must be the dumbest dumbass on two feet.
Not only didn't he know that currency ink can indeed smear/rub off, but has also apparently never withdrawn money from a bank or bought anything at a store with cash. My local ATM is always giving me brand-new, sequentially-numbered $20 bills, and there have been plenty of times that the local convenience store has given me change in the form of brand-new, sequentially-numbered $1 bills. Furthermore, what counterfeiter in his right mind would fake a seldom-used denomination, AND use it to pay a debt to a merchant who had his contact information? The last thing counterfeiters want is to draw attention to themselves or leave a trail-- they want to spend their bills anonymously and with as little fanfare as possible, and vanish into the crowd.
Just a little bit of reasoning on the part of the cop would have turned this incident into a non-event.
I hope this guy sues the living shit out of Best Buy and the police department, and wins.
It was some time ago, and I believe it was the result of a "hack the server, get a prize" type contest.
I'm too lazy to Google it right now but IIRC, the server that was hacked was running the classic Mac OS, WebSTAR, and Lasso, a tool that lets you webify FileMaker databases. There was a vulnerability in Lasso that was used to, per the contest rules, successfully alter the contents of a certain page on the WebSTAR-hosted site.
The prize was awarded, the vulnerability was quickly fixed, and that's the first, last and only time I have ever heard of any server on a classic Mac OS based machine getting hacked.
for the past 20 years, having a virus checker was useless on a mac and only served to avoid passing along pc viruses.
Not true. In the olden days, there were a handful of Mac (Classic Mac OS) viruses. Some of them were even malicious, though those were extremely rare. The only ones I ever personally saw were benign, and easily eradicated by simply rebuilding the desktop file on the infected floppy.
From 1989 and well into the 90s (possibly even until 1998 when it was discontinued), the most popular Mac antivirus software was Disinfectant, a free utility written and maintained by one guy-- so that should tell you the non-severity of the Mac virus problem even then. The developer threw in the towel when cross-platform Word macro viruses hit the scene and quickly became too numerous to keep up with.
Since the time of Mac OS 8 or 9 until the present, however, I would agree with your sentiment that the only reason to use Mac antivirus software is as a courtesy to Windows users with whom you exchange files.
The trick to using Norton stuff successfully on the Mac was to not install anything, just boot from the Norton CD and run stuff from there when needed. The only exception to that rule was Filesaver, which I installed on pretty much any Mac I supported because it made recovering accidentally-deleted files a snap and would give you a heads-up if the machine needed certain maintenance.
In the pre-OS X days, my entire Mac troubleshooting kit was basically a copy of the latest version of Norton Utilities for the Mac, and a random paperback from my bookshelf at home-- to read between support calls and while NUM worked its magic.
As for their OS X software, I've never used anything but Norton Antivirus, and that only because some of my clients' internal IT departments insist that antivirus software must be present on every single machine on their LANs.
To ensure they maintain the high standards of English-language manuals produced by Asian manufacturing companies, they should translate Apple's manual into Chinese and then translate it back into English.
As you can see, it works really well:
[Reading from his book, "Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler," translated to Japanese and back again] Mr. James: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo... [pauses while turning page] Mr. James: dung.
By producing a nearly identical product to Apple's and giving it a nearly identical name, Luxpro is clearly trying to make consumers believe they are buying an Apple product. I mean, it's so blatant they're even ripping off the advertising.
Apple can, and will, go after them for trademark issues because of the product's name, and trade dress issues because of the appearance of the device.
If you're not familiar with it, trade dress is when two products "kind of look the same" enough (in the eyes of a court of law) that consumers could be fooled into thinking cheap knockoff B is actually name-brand product A. Trade dress infringement claims are how Apple killed off those cheesy all-in-one PCs with a blue and white/translucent color scheme that quickly appeared after the original iMac was released.
6079SmithW: Do you remember the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood? AntiSexJulia: He wasn't singing to us. He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing. 6079SmithW: We are the dead. AntiSexJulia: LOL! We are the dead. AOL System Msg: You are the dead.
But here's the key part that most fanbois don't get: Just because it uses an X86 doesn't mean it would run on a whitebox PC, or Dell, or Gateway. Apple should still use proprietary hardware, but the PPC line has never lived up to the potential. I'd rather see Apple switch their stuff to X86.
Trust me, buddy, I get it.
In your scenario:
Everyone who wanted to switch to the Mac would still have to purchase Apple hardware.The people screaming for OS X on x86 want it to run on off-the-shelf, commodity hardware that they already have. So they wouldn't be happy.
All the Mac software vendors would have to rewrite their applications for a new architecture, again (remember, they already did it once about 10 years ago when Apple shifted from 68k to PPC). This would cost them money-- if you think they could get by doing quickie ports of the Windows versions of those apps, just ask Microsoft how well-received Word 6.0 for the Mac was. So they wouldn't be happy.
This time it would likely be a much less graceful transition, since emulating the PPC on x86 and getting respectable performance is apparently pretty tough. That would probably mean that even existing Mac users would have to replace all their software in one fell swoop when they bought their first x86-based Mac. So they wouldn't be happy.
Please, explain to this poor, unimaginative fanboi how all that expense and effort would be worth it, just to switch to a CPU that offers a little more speed than we have now.
Looks like it's once again time to dust off my "why OS X on x86 won't ever happen" post:
---------- Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the then-available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Please enlighten me: what peer-to-peer, hot-pluggable, high-speed peripheral bus preceeded FireWire? And please don't tell me that it's just a re-engineered, polished version of USB, because you'd be wrong.
The first time I heard the name "FireWire" was in an article in an issue of MacWEEK in '93 or '94. According to this, they started working on it even earlier than that. They just took their time and got it right, (and waited for the world to need that kind of throughput and versatility) before they put it into a computer in early 1999.
And yeah, ZeroConf is polished, existing technology. Polished, existing *Apple* technology. It's the grandson of AppleTalk networking, circa 1985.
~Philly
Sometimes I am not allowed to browse directories I know are there.
/usr, /sbin, /etc, those are hidden so as not to confuse newbies or become a target for people who stupidly delete things they think are cluttering up their hard drive without considering they might be important.
.hidden file in the root directory of the hard drive.
Such as? If you're talking about stuff like
You can get to those directories by doing "Go to Folder..." from the Finder's "Go" menu, or make them visible by editing the
As for a link, check out macosxhints.com.
~Philly
Microsoft announces, then develops.
Apple develops, then announces.
Just because Microsoft issues a press release or throws a press conference and says that the next version of Windows is going to have [feature], that doesn't mean that Apple hasn't already had [feature] under development/running in a lab somewhere for a year.
For example, the search capability in Tiger known as "Spotlight." Apple applied for a patent on the technology behind Spotlight (a patent that was granted in January of this year, BTW) when OS X 10.0* was still a year and two months away from public release. Which means they started working on it in 1999 if not sooner. Years before the name "Longhorn" was ever uttered by anyone at Microsoft.
~Philly
*OS X 10.0 release date: 3/24/2001
*no one needs to have a product key*
*this is the same for all apple produced software*
Wrong.
Apple server software has always required a serial number, since the AppleShare (pre-OS X) days, and OS X Server still does. Most if not all of the boxed OS X application software that Apple sells requires a serial number. I'm not sure about iLife, but iWork definitely needs one, so do things like Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro.
I don't see Apple adding a serial number to OS X for a while yet. They make most of their money from hardware sales, so if you're illegally copying their OS, they've already made some money from you. If they build their marketshare back up to double digits, however, then they might decide that the potential losses from illegal software copying are too great to ignore, and they'll crack down.
~Philly
There was an implicit quid-pro-quo between Apple and Xerox. Xerox got to invest (pre-IPO) in Apple in exchange for the PARC tours and demos.
Read my previous post here for more info. The link in that post has since died, but there's more info on the deal here. Search for the text "open the kimono" on that page and start reading from the paragraph above it.
~Philly
What does that have to do with anything? Norton Utilities is not bundled with/part of the OS. Sherlock was.
And Norton Utilties for the Mac had existed in 1991 and had Fast Find as well, I had it on my first Mac back then.
~Philly
Nope, client also has to post his index to server.
Why? Isn't the idea that all data is stored on the server?
Also, posting a local machine's index to the server would have been asinine in OS 8.x. If any shared volume on any machine was indexed by Sherlock, you could use that index in a search simply by mounting the volume on your machine.
~Philly
Yeah, and it was the first extension turned off. It was running up to 4 hours until canceled. No live results.
On a server, you scheduled it to run at midnight, and who gave a shit how long it took to run? That was only for the initial indexing, anyway-- subsequent updates of an existing index took much less time.
How do you compare this with WinFS, Spotlight, Beagle? It is completely different topic, accidentaly having the "SEARCH" word in common
It's not a completely different topic, it is exactly on topic-- you were trying to say that some aspects of WinFS were Microsoft's idea first, and I called you on it by showing that Apple did them in 1999. And yes, the way they did it had shortcomings, but that doesn't change the fact that they accomplished it 6 years ago. Now Apple is improving and reviving those features in OS X, while Microsoft has stricken WinFS from the feature list of their newest version of Windows, AGAIN.
~Philly
I believe target disk mode is a feature of a machine's Open Firmware-- what OS is on the hard drive is irrelevant.
Not every Mac that has FireWire can do target disk mode-- pre-AGP Power Mac G4s (~350/400MHz) most notably cannot do it, and IIRC they can't be booted from an external FireWire drive, either.
Pretty much every Mac that shipped with a FireWire port after the Power Macs adopted AGP can do it, and certainly anything with a manufacture date from 2000 on.
~Philly
It just means that every computer has to index network volumes for its self,
No it doesn't, it means the server creates the index of its volumes and the client machines have access to that index. As I said in another post in this thread, Apple was doing that back in 1999 with Sherlock, except the index was separate instead of part of the file system, and the indexing ran at intervals instead of happening in real time.
~Philly
WinFS has nowhere near such little goals as Spotlight (remember Spotlight is desktop utility, while M$ is trying to make WinFS client/server capable).
M$ has promised this feature back in 2002 (if we forget Cairo failure).
Apple already had fast client/server search capability in 1999, with Mac OS 8.5. The old version of Sherlock running on an AppleShare file server could index the content of server volumes, and those indices could be used by the copy of Sherlock running on the client machines, if the user wanted the network volumes searched for something by content. The only difference is, the drive indexing did not occur in real time, it would have to be updated at intervals to remain useful.
This feature is not mentioned on either the OS X Client or OS X Server feature list page, but I would not be surprised to see it appear in a future point release of Tiger-- especially since the features pages says Spotlight in 10.4 can index and search a network home directory. Adding server volumes is the logical next step.
~Philly
MUCH better! Speakeasy doesn't constantly port-scan you to make sure that you aren't doing anything that they say you shouldn't do.
But they do perform some acceptable network policing-- they look for mailservers and perform open relay testing on them. It's rather infrequent, I notice it in my mailserver's logs once every few months or so.
My mailserver is locked down tight, so I don't know what they do if they find an open relay on one of their IPs-- but I would guess that they attempt to contact the subscriber about it.
When my servers have been spammed or probed by other Speakeasy customer IPs and reported it, the response by Customer Service has been lighning fast.
~Philly
Microsoft: "Check out these icons made from the *actual first page* of the document! AmAAAZziing huh?"
This has to be the biggest waste of CPU/GPU cycles Microsoft have exhibited since their "windows that can flap like a flag in the breeze" demo.
They were clearly trying to improve upon the informative aspect of some of OS X's Dock icons-- e.g. iCal's, which shows the current date when iCal is running; Mail.app's, which shows the number of new messages; or Activity Monitor's, which can put many different kinds of useful info into its Dock icon, to name three. As usual, though, they completely miss the point-- and in their zeal to copy while giving the appearance of innovating, they make laughable decisions-- like the ugly WinXP GUI, which was a blatant response to OS X's Aqua but turned out to be an ugly, Fisher-Price-looking mess that is the first thing I shut off on my Windows XP boxes at home and work, and any others I use regularly.
While Apple's "dynamic" icons are a practical means of gleaning often-wanted information at a quick dockward glance, who the hell is going to pick a document out of a directory by squinting at the iconized rendering of its first page rather than, oh I don't know, reading the filename? Furthermore, if search is going to be such a major part of Longhorn, why will anyone need an iconized representation of a document's content when they can instruct the computer to search for that content?
~Philly
It was reported quite a while ago on one or more of the Mac news sites that with the advent of Tiger, Apple would be bumping the base RAM config of all their machines to 512MB, so no surprise there.
~Philly
The Apple Store for Business
Scroll down to the bottom of the page. The link to volume licensing stuff is at the very bottom of the left sidebar.
Media is $15, and for the amount you need, licenses cost $119 each.
~Philly
I doubt it.
Surely they would have tested any activation scheme in the beta period, and even if it required a serial number or just had something in place to implement one when beta was over, some tester would have noticed and some rumor site would have publicized it.
Bottom line is, you can't run OS X unless you've bought a Mac, so Apple has made at least some money from you even if you illegally copy the OS. Right now I think Apple is more concerned with getting Macs on people's desks, and they'll worry about OS piracy at a much later time.
One thing I have noticed with newer machines, however, is that the OS X install discs seem to no longer be universal... the installer checks the hardware and refuses to install if the machine is not the type of computer that the disc was bundled with. I'm sure it's not hard for someone knowledgable to get around that limitation, but it will probably stop the casual user from buying a Mac mini with Tiger preloaded and using the bundled install discs to put Tiger on any other Macs he owns.
~Philly
I have no problem believing that Best Buy has employees who are ignorant of the existence of $2 bills, but the arresting officer must be the dumbest dumbass on two feet.
Not only didn't he know that currency ink can indeed smear/rub off, but has also apparently never withdrawn money from a bank or bought anything at a store with cash. My local ATM is always giving me brand-new, sequentially-numbered $20 bills, and there have been plenty of times that the local convenience store has given me change in the form of brand-new, sequentially-numbered $1 bills. Furthermore, what counterfeiter in his right mind would fake a seldom-used denomination, AND use it to pay a debt to a merchant who had his contact information? The last thing counterfeiters want is to draw attention to themselves or leave a trail-- they want to spend their bills anonymously and with as little fanfare as possible, and vanish into the crowd.
Just a little bit of reasoning on the part of the cop would have turned this incident into a non-event.
I hope this guy sues the living shit out of Best Buy and the police department, and wins.
~Philly
Actually, there was an exploit, once.
It was some time ago, and I believe it was the result of a "hack the server, get a prize" type contest.
I'm too lazy to Google it right now but IIRC, the server that was hacked was running the classic Mac OS, WebSTAR, and Lasso, a tool that lets you webify FileMaker databases. There was a vulnerability in Lasso that was used to, per the contest rules, successfully alter the contents of a certain page on the WebSTAR-hosted site.
The prize was awarded, the vulnerability was quickly fixed, and that's the first, last and only time I have ever heard of any server on a classic Mac OS based machine getting hacked.
~Philly
for the past 20 years, having a virus checker was useless on a mac and only served to avoid passing along pc viruses.
Not true. In the olden days, there were a handful of Mac (Classic Mac OS) viruses. Some of them were even malicious, though those were extremely rare. The only ones I ever personally saw were benign, and easily eradicated by simply rebuilding the desktop file on the infected floppy.
From 1989 and well into the 90s (possibly even until 1998 when it was discontinued), the most popular Mac antivirus software was Disinfectant, a free utility written and maintained by one guy-- so that should tell you the non-severity of the Mac virus problem even then. The developer threw in the towel when cross-platform Word macro viruses hit the scene and quickly became too numerous to keep up with.
Since the time of Mac OS 8 or 9 until the present, however, I would agree with your sentiment that the only reason to use Mac antivirus software is as a courtesy to Windows users with whom you exchange files.
~Philly
The trick to using Norton stuff successfully on the Mac was to not install anything, just boot from the Norton CD and run stuff from there when needed. The only exception to that rule was Filesaver, which I installed on pretty much any Mac I supported because it made recovering accidentally-deleted files a snap and would give you a heads-up if the machine needed certain maintenance.
In the pre-OS X days, my entire Mac troubleshooting kit was basically a copy of the latest version of Norton Utilities for the Mac, and a random paperback from my bookshelf at home-- to read between support calls and while NUM worked its magic.
As for their OS X software, I've never used anything but Norton Antivirus, and that only because some of my clients' internal IT departments insist that antivirus software must be present on every single machine on their LANs.
~Philly
To ensure they maintain the high standards of English-language manuals produced by Asian manufacturing companies, they should translate Apple's manual into Chinese and then translate it back into English.
As you can see, it works really well:
[Reading from his book, "Jimmy James: Macho Business Donkey Wrestler," translated to Japanese and back again]
Mr. James: I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business comes to my hut. Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute, for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo...
[pauses while turning page]
Mr. James: dung.
(Courtesy: IMDB)
~Philly
By producing a nearly identical product to Apple's and giving it a nearly identical name, Luxpro is clearly trying to make consumers believe they are buying an Apple product. I mean, it's so blatant they're even ripping off the advertising.
Apple can, and will, go after them for trademark issues because of the product's name, and trade dress issues because of the appearance of the device.
If you're not familiar with it, trade dress is when two products "kind of look the same" enough (in the eyes of a court of law) that consumers could be fooled into thinking cheap knockoff B is actually name-brand product A. Trade dress infringement claims are how Apple killed off those cheesy all-in-one PCs with a blue and white/translucent color scheme that quickly appeared after the original iMac was released.
~Philly
6079SmithW: Do you remember the thrush that sang to us, that first day, at the edge of the wood?
AntiSexJulia: He wasn't singing to us. He was singing to please himself. Not even that. He was just singing.
6079SmithW: We are the dead.
AntiSexJulia: LOL! We are the dead.
AOL System Msg: You are the dead.
~Philly
But here's the key part that most fanbois don't get:
Just because it uses an X86 doesn't mean it would run on a whitebox PC, or Dell, or Gateway.
Apple should still use proprietary hardware, but the PPC line has never lived up to the potential. I'd rather see Apple switch their stuff to X86.
Trust me, buddy, I get it.
In your scenario:
Everyone who wanted to switch to the Mac would still have to purchase Apple hardware.The people screaming for OS X on x86 want it to run on off-the-shelf, commodity hardware that they already have. So they wouldn't be happy.
All the Mac software vendors would have to rewrite their applications for a new architecture, again (remember, they already did it once about 10 years ago when Apple shifted from 68k to PPC). This would cost them money-- if you think they could get by doing quickie ports of the Windows versions of those apps, just ask Microsoft how well-received Word 6.0 for the Mac was. So they wouldn't be happy.
This time it would likely be a much less graceful transition, since emulating the PPC on x86 and getting respectable performance is apparently pretty tough. That would probably mean that even existing Mac users would have to replace all their software in one fell swoop when they bought their first x86-based Mac. So they wouldn't be happy.
Please, explain to this poor, unimaginative fanboi how all that expense and effort would be worth it, just to switch to a CPU that offers a little more speed than we have now.
~Philly
Looks like it's once again time to dust off my "why OS X on x86 won't ever happen" post:
/., or you'd pirate it-- either way, Apple would lose money on it.
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Look, you guys just can't get it through your heads that the reason why OS X works so well is because it runs on such a limited pool of hardware-- this allows the engineers coding OS X to make assumptions THAT CANNOT BE MADE in the x86 world, where a machine could be using one of thousands of motherboards, network cards, graphics cards, sound cards, etc. Windows developers have to code for the lowest common denominator. OS X developers code for specific hardware. Even the version of NeXTStep that ran on Intel hardware ran on a tiny subset of the then-available PC hardware. If your CD-ROM drive and motherboard weren't on the "supported hardware" list that came with NeXTStep, you were SOL.
That little fantasy you all have of buying "Mac OS X for x86", running it on some homebuilt shitbox you cobbled together from spare parts, and having it work as well as a G5 runs Panther today will NEVER come to pass. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold millions trying to achieve that goal, and they still have quite a way to go.
Do you think Jobs could just snap his fingers one day and a few months later have a product on the shelves that would run perfectly on every PC capable of running XP today? It's impossible. And even if it were possible, you wouldn't buy it. Why? Because Apple uses their software to sell their hardware, so a copy of OS X for x86 would have to be priced to ease the pain of a lost hardware sale-- you'd either do without it and bitterly bitch about the price here on
~Philly