All $399 gets you (or $999 for the "Pro" version) is a box full of generic PC components that are known to be more or less compatible with OSX. No monitor, no keyboard or mouse and *NO OPERATING SYSTEM*. An installed copy of OSX will cost you an extra $150. Since a genuine Apple Mac is really just a PC running OSX, it would make no sense for someone to buy a "Mac Clone" without OSX so I'm figuring that almost all the units Psystar sells will probably have OSX on them.
Does Psystar's installation of OSX violate Apple's EULA? Is Apple's EULA even legal? I have no idea, but Psystar is not the company who is going to spend millions slugging it out in court trying to get Apple's EULA declared invalid. This is a Fly-By-Night operation and Psystar's behaviour so far -- from the constantly changing addresses to the questionable background of its owners to the fact that they have built their entire business model on selling freely available OSX hacks -- tells me exactly what is going to happen next:
When Apple Apple sues -- and make no mistake, they will sue -- Psystar will fold and disappear. That's been the Psystar game plan all along. Take as many orders and collect as much money as possible before they get shut down. And if you happen to be one of the people waiting for delivery when Apple's lawyers attack, well, it sucks to be you.
TFA is a pointless contradictory rant.
First they say
But getting this far wasn't easy. With Windows Vista, what should have been 100 lines of code maximum ended up being a dozen times longer, split across two different processes, and requiring way too much man-hours to write the most minimalist and to-the-point piece of software we've released to date.
But then later they say
Any program that UAC blocks from starting up "for good security reasons" can be coded to work around these limitations with (relative) ease.
Well, which is it? Is it hard or easy? It can't be both.
More importantly, their "bypassing" of UAC requires the user to run an installer that requires admin privleges (and the UAC prompt that goes with it). WTF? How is that "bypassing" anything?
"ethanol demand in general is only adding to the worldwide food crisis."
Utter bullshit. Consuming crops that are grown entirely in the U.S. cannot create a "worldwide food crisis". Unless you believe that the U.S. is responsible for supplying food to people too lazy and stupid to grow their own.
"Their motto is 'Free for open source, everyone else pays.'"
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong.
What if Microsoft did this? They hold many thousands of patents -- what if they said "You can use our patents for free in closed proprietary applications, but open source must pay." People would be screaming bloody murder. Software patents are wrong and should be abolished. The fact that a patent is held by a "good" or "less evil" company doesn't make software patents any less wrong.
Divide your software into subsystems managed by a kernel. That's certainly guaranteed to make things more secure -- just look how well it worked for Windows.
Mod parent up!
For those who don't follow the links, the important bit in this story is that Microsoft is blocking third-party security software. They're breaking basically all anti-virus software that isn't Windows Defender and all firewall software that isn't Windows Firewall.
This is clearly monopoly abuse, and hopefully Microsoft will get smacked down for it. Not that I honestly expect that to happen, the current administration certainly won't and none of the current candidates would. But, hey, we can dream.
Utter bullshit. My AV program works just fine on Vista -- both the 32 and 64 bit versions. Microsoft did not deliberately break something just to screw AV vendors. That is total bullshit. What they did with Vista was make changes that prevented people from fucking with the kernel. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this it would have been considered a Good Thing(R).
The bottom line -- some companies were able to rewrite their programs so that they work on Vista and some weren't. Microsoft may be evil, but they aren't responsible for the incompetence of others.
Wow. The excuses keep getting more and more pathetic. A few months ago I came across an article blaming piracy for the failure of Linux to be more widely used. If only people couldn't get pirated copies of Windows, *THEN* everyone would be using Linux. Now, we're told that it's all about "perception". Utter rubbish.
But let's assume that this ridiculous argument about perception and "the curse of being free" is true. What about business? Companies love to cut costs. They are obsessed with cutting costs. The typical corporate executive would sell his mother to cut costs. So why isn't every business switching to Linux? I work for a very large company that just bought more than 20,000 new computers -- why didn't they save a few million dollars and get them without Windows?
Why? Because (a) Linux on the desktop is inferior and (b) there is no cost savings.
The only way that Linux is "free" or "cheaper than Windows" is if you install and support it yourself. Is the CEO of my company going to say to some IT guy -- "Why don't you download the latest Ubuntu ISO and install it on all 20,000 of our computers". Of course not. He's going to want support and that means something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs just as much as Windows and doesn't run any of the applications we use.
Ever wonder why companies hire so many contractors and consultants, when it would actually be much cheaper to let their own employees do the work? Accountability. If a contractor or consultant fucks up, you can go back to his company and demand that they fix the problem and/or pay you back for the fuck up -- or sue them if you don't get the fix you want. If one of your employees fucks up, the most you can do is fire him.
The same goes for software. If you want support, Linux costs just as much as Windows and doesn't give you anything that's better/faster/easier. At best, Linux is more or less the same as Windows so why change?
You're wrong. The store has to sell it for the price on the shelf. Most (all?) states have consumer protection laws in place where if the price differs at the register, you get the price on the shelf plus a bit extra (or if it is a small value item, it's free)
For example...
http://www.michigan.gov/ag/0,1607,7-164-34739_20942-134114--,00.html
Well, unfortunately, you didn't read the whole law. Here's the relevant portion from the Q&A section about the Michigan law (and I suspect that all states have a similar clause). Emphasis added is mine
What if an item is marked the wrong price and the clerk catches it before I pay; am I entitled to buy the item at the price marked?
This is a fact-specific question best answered by a court. A store may not knowingly charge or attempt to charge a price higher than the price marked on the item. MCL 445.354. Therefore, the consumer may have a claim if the store will not sell the item at the price marked. However, the consumer may face obstacles convincing a court that the store knowingly charged the higher price when the pricing mistake is not intentional and will result in an obvious windfall to the consumer.
"A customer who called to complain and request the CD set at the $31 price"
is an asshole.
Are you perfect? Have you ever made a mistake? Don't get me wrong -- I don't particularly like Amazon and I think that secretly cancelling orders is a really shitty way of doing business. Their overall lacking of honesty is why I rarely do business with them.
But demanding that someone sell you an item at a price that is obviously a mistake, is just being a jerk.
"The American RealID will collapse due to the lack of state support (14 refuse to implement, numerous states refuse to fund, not to mention the inevitable protests)."
What's funny and ironic about this is that the U.S. has had a National ID card for several decades. It's called a Social Security card. Just try to do something -- get a credit card, borrow money (any amount, any reason), get any form of insurance, get a job, get a driver's license -- without giving them your Social Security Number. In most cases it's impossible.
Over the past 3 months, Yahoo's stock has been dropping like a rock -- from $33 to $19. It jumped back up to $28 after the Microsoft takeover announcement, but that just means Microsoft will have to kick in another couple billion to get the deal through.
And it also means that Google would have to pay *EVEN MORE* than that in order to make a better offer than Microsoft. Why would Google spend $46+ Billion just to buy a competitor who is sinking fast? Just doesn't make sense. Google has a lot of money, but I doubt they're willing to spend *THAT MUCH* just to piss off Microsoft.
"While they are at it, they could ALSO try to not to cancel long operations just because of an error in a specific file...i.e. copy 500 files from one place to another, file number 219 fails and the operation is cancelled? 218 files copied, 287 files that COULD have been copied not copied, WTF?"
That happens with Windows XP (and yes it's really stupid and should have been fixed in a Service Pack) But they actually fixed it in Vista. With Vista if you are copying, moving, deleting. whatever, more than one file and an error occurs, you can skip that file and keep going. One of the few things they actually got right in Vista.
Well, sort of.
Unfortunately you still end up with the problem of selecting a few hundred files to copy, leaving, and when you come back your computer is sitting there waiting for your input in a dialog box because an error occurred with file number 11.
"used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag"
almost seems like a public service. If you are stupid enough to buy stock in a company, especially a foreign company, based on unsolicited e-mail you received, you deserve to get screwed.
"Another way to think about the results: about 47 percent of Americans didn't visit a library even once last year."
For those of us old enough to remember when the local library was pretty much the only large source of information, this is a bit sad. But, not necessarily bad, just another example of things changing. With all the information available on the internet, there is less need for me to go to a library. Also, when I was that age stores like Borders -- with a huge selection of books and chairs where you're welcome to sit and read -- didn't exist.
"record producers alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound."
Bullshit. The record companies are too lazy/cheap to spend extra time doing ANYTHING that requires any extra time or effort. That's why many CDs in the early days sounded lousy. They just took the original analog tapes and put them onto CD with no remixing or remastering. Recording engineers spent decades learning all sorts of tricks to make music sound good when transferred to a vinyl LP and didn't bother to unlearn them when working with an entirely different medium.
Yes, if you listen to songs that are in the Billboard top 20, they most likely have been severely compressed as part of the "loudness war". But, (a) a substantial percentage of the population doesn't listen to that crap (b) applying massive compression to everything is not "mixing", (3) if they actually did remix music to add more highs and lows to compensate for the alleged losses suffered by mp3, the music would sound horrible when played in any other format because the actual frequency loss is imperceptable to 99.9% of all people, and (d) there are still plenty of musicians who still care about musical quality and who don't do that sort of thing.
I have a very nice, expensive "audiophile" stereo system. 2 years ago I moved into a new house and the stereo system is still sitting in boxes. Now I only listen to music on my computer and mp3 player. A couple of years ago I would have considered this the ultimate blasphemy. But technology has changed. The sound card and speakers on my computer are now quite good. So is my mp3 player with some good (ie rather expensive) earbuds. My CDs (many of them from the late 80s/early 90s) sound just fine when ripped to mp3.
>>"Again, I wonder if you actually *used* 4.0x. I was one of the early adopters who grabbed 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, and maybe 4.04, and they were all slow and unstable (Windows 95 versions)."
Yes, some of the 4.0x versions sucked hard. But some of that may have been Windows 95 which was also a huge load of crap. By 4.7x Netscape was actually pretty decent.
Netscape 4.7x was the last decent version. Netscape 6 was a horrendous piece of crap and every version since then has just been a crappified version of the Mozilla Suite.
No, the solution to the "tasting" problem is to eliminate it. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for "domain tasting". None.
Why would registrars allow you to repeatedly register thousands of domain names and then cancel them. For free. This doesn't generate one penny of profit for the registrars and it makes absolutely no sense...... unless the registrars are in bed with the squatters/spammers.
""Wikipedians are up in arms at the revelations that respected administrators have been discussing blocking and banning editors on a secret mailing list."
"mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes"
You don't compress the audio on a CD. You compress the audio on the original master recording, which then gets transferred to the CD. There's nothing to stop them from doing it with vinyl. Just because they are going to vinyl instead of CD doesn't mean that the record companies will suddenly become honest and quality conscious.
"records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
And those "nuances" are completely obscured by the clicking, popping and noise generated by a needle being dragged across crappy low quality vinyl.
Frankly this sounds like marketing bullshit. CDs are ubiquitous. Sales are flat. They need a new gimmick. And there's an entire generation who has grown up without ever touching a vinyl LP.
"But others say Cupertino is well within its rights to control its own device."
Control its own device? So Apple takes your money but the phone is still theirs? Sorry but that's just plain wrong.
You give Apple money. They give you a phone. You lose ownership of the money -- it now belongs to Apple. Apple loses ownership of the phone -- it now belongs to you.
That's the fundamental basis of all commerce.
On the other hand, anyone stupid enough to pay hundreds of dollars for an over-priced over-hyped phone with ridiculous limitations deserves to get screwed. So I guess it isn't so bad after all.
Slashdot Mirror
All $399 gets you (or $999 for the "Pro" version) is a box full of generic PC components that are known to be more or less compatible with OSX. No monitor, no keyboard or mouse and *NO OPERATING SYSTEM*. An installed copy of OSX will cost you an extra $150. Since a genuine Apple Mac is really just a PC running OSX, it would make no sense for someone to buy a "Mac Clone" without OSX so I'm figuring that almost all the units Psystar sells will probably have OSX on them.
Does Psystar's installation of OSX violate Apple's EULA? Is Apple's EULA even legal? I have no idea, but Psystar is not the company who is going to spend millions slugging it out in court trying to get Apple's EULA declared invalid. This is a Fly-By-Night operation and Psystar's behaviour so far -- from the constantly changing addresses to the questionable background of its owners to the fact that they have built their entire business model on selling freely available OSX hacks -- tells me exactly what is going to happen next:
When Apple Apple sues -- and make no mistake, they will sue -- Psystar will fold and disappear. That's been the Psystar game plan all along. Take as many orders and collect as much money as possible before they get shut down. And if you happen to be one of the people waiting for delivery when Apple's lawyers attack, well, it sucks to be you.
"ethanol demand in general is only adding to the worldwide food crisis."
Utter bullshit. Consuming crops that are grown entirely in the U.S. cannot create a "worldwide food crisis". Unless you believe that the U.S. is responsible for supplying food to people too lazy and stupid to grow their own.
"Their motto is 'Free for open source, everyone else pays.'"
Sorry, but this is just plain wrong.
What if Microsoft did this? They hold many thousands of patents -- what if they said "You can use our patents for free in closed proprietary applications, but open source must pay." People would be screaming bloody murder. Software patents are wrong and should be abolished. The fact that a patent is held by a "good" or "less evil" company doesn't make software patents any less wrong.
.
Divide your software into subsystems managed by a kernel. That's certainly guaranteed to make things more secure -- just look how well it worked for Windows.
Utter bullshit. My AV program works just fine on Vista -- both the 32 and 64 bit versions. Microsoft did not deliberately break something just to screw AV vendors. That is total bullshit. What they did with Vista was make changes that prevented people from fucking with the kernel. If anyone other than Microsoft had done this it would have been considered a Good Thing(R).
The bottom line -- some companies were able to rewrite their programs so that they work on Vista and some weren't. Microsoft may be evil, but they aren't responsible for the incompetence of others.
Wow. The excuses keep getting more and more pathetic. A few months ago I came across an article blaming piracy for the failure of Linux to be more widely used. If only people couldn't get pirated copies of Windows, *THEN* everyone would be using Linux. Now, we're told that it's all about "perception". Utter rubbish.
But let's assume that this ridiculous argument about perception and "the curse of being free" is true. What about business? Companies love to cut costs. They are obsessed with cutting costs. The typical corporate executive would sell his mother to cut costs. So why isn't every business switching to Linux? I work for a very large company that just bought more than 20,000 new computers -- why didn't they save a few million dollars and get them without Windows?
Why? Because (a) Linux on the desktop is inferior and (b) there is no cost savings.
The only way that Linux is "free" or "cheaper than Windows" is if you install and support it yourself. Is the CEO of my company going to say to some IT guy -- "Why don't you download the latest Ubuntu ISO and install it on all 20,000 of our computers". Of course not. He's going to want support and that means something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux which costs just as much as Windows and doesn't run any of the applications we use.
Ever wonder why companies hire so many contractors and consultants, when it would actually be much cheaper to let their own employees do the work? Accountability. If a contractor or consultant fucks up, you can go back to his company and demand that they fix the problem and/or pay you back for the fuck up -- or sue them if you don't get the fix you want. If one of your employees fucks up, the most you can do is fire him.
The same goes for software. If you want support, Linux costs just as much as Windows and doesn't give you anything that's better/faster/easier. At best, Linux is more or less the same as Windows so why change?
What if an item is marked the wrong price and the clerk catches it before I pay; am I entitled to buy the item at the price marked?
This is a fact-specific question best answered by a court. A store may not knowingly charge or attempt to charge a price higher than the price marked on the item. MCL 445.354. Therefore, the consumer may have a claim if the store will not sell the item at the price marked. However, the consumer may face obstacles convincing a court that the store knowingly charged the higher price when the pricing mistake is not intentional and will result in an obvious windfall to the consumer.
"A customer who called to complain and request the CD set at the $31 price"
is an asshole.
Are you perfect? Have you ever made a mistake? Don't get me wrong -- I don't particularly like Amazon and I think that secretly cancelling orders is a really shitty way of doing business. Their overall lacking of honesty is why I rarely do business with them.
But demanding that someone sell you an item at a price that is obviously a mistake, is just being a jerk.
"The American RealID will collapse due to the lack of state support (14 refuse to implement, numerous states refuse to fund, not to mention the inevitable protests)."
What's funny and ironic about this is that the U.S. has had a National ID card for several decades. It's called a Social Security card. Just try to do something -- get a credit card, borrow money (any amount, any reason), get any form of insurance, get a job, get a driver's license -- without giving them your Social Security Number. In most cases it's impossible.
Over the past 3 months, Yahoo's stock has been dropping like a rock -- from $33 to $19. It jumped back up to $28 after the Microsoft takeover announcement, but that just means Microsoft will have to kick in another couple billion to get the deal through.
And it also means that Google would have to pay *EVEN MORE* than that in order to make a better offer than Microsoft. Why would Google spend $46+ Billion just to buy a competitor who is sinking fast? Just doesn't make sense. Google has a lot of money, but I doubt they're willing to spend *THAT MUCH* just to piss off Microsoft.
"While they are at it, they could ALSO try to not to cancel long operations just because of an error in a specific file...i.e. copy 500 files from one place to another, file number 219 fails and the operation is cancelled? 218 files copied, 287 files that COULD have been copied not copied, WTF?"
That happens with Windows XP (and yes it's really stupid and should have been fixed in a Service Pack) But they actually fixed it in Vista. With Vista if you are copying, moving, deleting. whatever, more than one file and an error occurs, you can skip that file and keep going. One of the few things they actually got right in Vista.
Well, sort of.
Unfortunately you still end up with the problem of selecting a few hundred files to copy, leaving, and when you come back your computer is sitting there waiting for your input in a dialog box because an error occurred with file number 11.
"but there are some quality hustlers out there."
There are no smart con-men. Just stupid, greedy, gullible victims.
.
I hate spammers as much as anyone, but,
"used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag"
almost seems like a public service. If you are stupid enough to buy stock in a company, especially a foreign company, based on unsolicited e-mail you received, you deserve to get screwed.
"Another way to think about the results: about 47 percent of Americans didn't visit a library even once last year."
For those of us old enough to remember when the local library was pretty much the only large source of information, this is a bit sad. But, not necessarily bad, just another example of things changing. With all the information available on the internet, there is less need for me to go to a library. Also, when I was that age stores like Borders -- with a huge selection of books and chairs where you're welcome to sit and read -- didn't exist.
"record producers alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound."
Bullshit. The record companies are too lazy/cheap to spend extra time doing ANYTHING that requires any extra time or effort. That's why many CDs in the early days sounded lousy. They just took the original analog tapes and put them onto CD with no remixing or remastering. Recording engineers spent decades learning all sorts of tricks to make music sound good when transferred to a vinyl LP and didn't bother to unlearn them when working with an entirely different medium.
Yes, if you listen to songs that are in the Billboard top 20, they most likely have been severely compressed as part of the "loudness war". But,
(a) a substantial percentage of the population doesn't listen to that crap
(b) applying massive compression to everything is not "mixing",
(3) if they actually did remix music to add more highs and lows to compensate for the alleged losses suffered by mp3, the music would sound horrible when played in any other format because the actual frequency loss is imperceptable to 99.9% of all people, and
(d) there are still plenty of musicians who still care about musical quality and who don't do that sort of thing.
I have a very nice, expensive "audiophile" stereo system. 2 years ago I moved into a new house and the stereo system is still sitting in boxes. Now I only listen to music on my computer and mp3 player. A couple of years ago I would have considered this the ultimate blasphemy. But technology has changed. The sound card and speakers on my computer are now quite good. So is my mp3 player with some good (ie rather expensive) earbuds. My CDs (many of them from the late 80s/early 90s) sound just fine when ripped to mp3.
.
>>"Again, I wonder if you actually *used* 4.0x. I was one of the early adopters who grabbed 4.0, 4.01, 4.02, 4.03, and maybe 4.04, and they were all slow and unstable (Windows 95 versions)."
Yes, some of the 4.0x versions sucked hard. But some of that may have been Windows 95 which was also a huge load of crap. By 4.7x Netscape was actually pretty decent.
.
Netscape died years ago.
Netscape 4.7x was the last decent version. Netscape 6 was a horrendous piece of crap and every version since then has just been a crappified version of the Mozilla Suite.
.
No, the solution to the "tasting" problem is to eliminate it. There is absolutely no legitimate reason for "domain tasting". None.
...... unless the registrars are in bed with the squatters/spammers.
Why would registrars allow you to repeatedly register thousands of domain names and then cancel them. For free. This doesn't generate one penny of profit for the registrars and it makes absolutely no sense
.
""Wikipedians are up in arms at the revelations that respected administrators have been discussing blocking and banning editors on a secret mailing list."
WTF?? Is this Junior High or something??
What a bunch of whiney faggots
.
"The idea of the company is to make money, not to make happy customers."
Too many people forget that without customers, there is no money and there is no company.
"mastering houses are often encouraged to compress the audio on CDs to make it as loud as possible: It's the so-called loudness war. Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes"
You don't compress the audio on a CD. You compress the audio on the original master recording, which then gets transferred to the CD. There's nothing to stop them from doing it with vinyl. Just because they are going to vinyl instead of CD doesn't mean that the record companies will suddenly become honest and quality conscious.
"records generally offer a more nuanced sound."
And those "nuances" are completely obscured by the clicking, popping and noise generated by a needle being dragged across crappy low quality vinyl.
Frankly this sounds like marketing bullshit. CDs are ubiquitous. Sales are flat. They need a new gimmick. And there's an entire generation who has grown up without ever touching a vinyl LP.
SQL injects YOU
Who is Simon Fagg?
"But others say Cupertino is well within its rights to control its own device."
Control its own device? So Apple takes your money but the phone is still theirs? Sorry but that's just plain wrong.
You give Apple money.
They give you a phone.
You lose ownership of the money -- it now belongs to Apple.
Apple loses ownership of the phone -- it now belongs to you.
That's the fundamental basis of all commerce.
On the other hand, anyone stupid enough to pay hundreds of dollars for an over-priced over-hyped phone with ridiculous limitations deserves to get screwed. So I guess it isn't so bad after all.