You can install the latest OS X on your Beige G3 by using XPostFacto, available here: http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto
I've used it. It works. Make sure you have lots of RAM.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and not at all a GNU/Linux person, but I see the point of view of the GPL developers. I think it's a red herring to get into whether GPL is "selfish" or not. As I understand it, GPL concretizes the values that existed in early hacker/coder culture -- namely, that source code (as a manifestation of knowledge) is a shared resource, and does not belong to any one individual, and it is for the overall good of the code (and, by extension, humanity) that it be that way. (My primary source for this understanding is Steven Levy's "Hackers," right or wrong.)
You may or may not agree, but that's the philosophy behind the GPL. In the world of the GPL, user=developer, and a developer can't very well "use" a program if the source code isn't readily at hand to modify. Thus the GPL enforces that the source code always be readily at hand, so that all developers can benefit from that code. The GPL enforces sharing of knowledge.
That's why I think it's a little meaningless to get hung up on whether BSD-style licenses or GPL licences are "selfish" or not. It depends upon your perception. A simple reading says GPL might be more selfish because it imposes more restrictions; the developer is expecting something in return for their effort. But to the GPL developer, the license promotes the greater development of humanity by requiring that knowledge be shared. That is a highly idealistic aim. You might not agree with it, but it's certainly unselfish in the mind of the GPL developer.
What about BSD (which I think the APSL derives from)? If BSD licenses are "here, enjoy," that's certainly unselfish at an individual level. But by permitting others to keep their knowledge to themselves, when it was derived from the knowledge they received, the GPL developer sees selfishness in the BSD license.
A counterargument would be that BSD, by being more corporate-friendly, actually get useful things into the hands of more people, e.g. NTFS filesystems. But then a countercounterargument comes down to a question of values, and in the GPL universe, there is no value higher than knowledge (made flesh in source code). Stuff is ephemeral, knowledge is eternal.
I admire the idealism of the GPL. It's idealistic and communistic (in a good way). I also have no problems with businesses wanting to make money from their intellectual property by keeping it secret. Therefore, I don't see either the ntfsprogs developers or Apple being in the wrong here -- they each have their own prerogatives, and Apple wanted to see if they'd be willing to change their license so that Apple could use their code for their own purposes. That's not unreasonable. The developers said no, and that's not unreasonable either.
Whether or not the sharing of knowledge is the most important thing about software development is the sort of thing that will be argued forever, but in the end, it's just that -- a question of values, and that's all it is.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
I'm saying it is an upgrade because it *requires* a computer that had Mac OS installed on it.
Technically, perhaps so, which was a point I granted you. However, from there you're making the leap to legally, and I don't see how you can do that if it's not in the EULA.
Why would the EULA discuss a non-existent situation?
Are you kidding? Lawyers don't leave things to inference, deduction and assumption. Legal documents discuss *every* kind of situation which might conceivably ever apply. If they legally wanted to require that you have a previous version of Mac OS, the EULA would clearly specify that, and I doubt many would disagree. And if they wanted to call it an upgrade, they'd do that too, as they have done with the upgrade discs I described earlier.
The current retail package is for PowerPC not Intel, and you don't have viable non-Apple hardware until Intel. So whether the machine now has a blank hard drive or not, the machine was sold with a Mac OS license.
And whether the machine was sold with a Mac OS license is completely irrelevant as far as the retail OS X is concerned, because the EULA says NOTHING about that license. You're making the inference (really assumption) that it does, because it requires Apple hardware. But you could assume a lot of things because it requires Apple hardware. You could assume that it means you have to have Open Firmware. You could assume that it means you have to have a one-button mouse. You could assume it means you have to have Apple decals that come in every box, or the box itself. After all, every Mac once came in a box...
If the EULA doesn't spell it out, it's not a requirement. I can't imagine why you would think otherwise, and you've said nothing to help me. And if there's no requirement, there's no upgrade. Simple as that.
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 1
The only way one could be engaging in "piracy" by using an upgrade as a full product is if that upgrade is labelled as such by the manufacturer, and ownership of the prior product is part of the license requirement for usage of the upgrade. Both of these conditions must be met.
What you are saying is you, personally, consider Mac OS X retail to be an upgrade, because it is installed on a computer that at one point had some other version of Mac OS on it. That's certainly your prerogative, but it's absurd. If Apple doesn't call it an upgrade, then it ain't an upgrade. Even if we grant you that the retail boxes are "technically" upgrades, that certainly doesn't make them legally upgrades, which is what they'd have to be in order for one to engage in the "piracy" of using an upgrade product as a full product. Piracy (generally) involves a legal violation in which you get something you didn't pay for, a variation of theft. No such thing happening here.
Nothing in Apple's EULA for the retail OS X (have you read it?) suggests that you need to own a copy of Mac OS. However, you do violate the EULA for OS X by installing on non-Apple hardware: "This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." So you might have no legal right (according to Apple) to install it on non-Apple hardware, but that doesn't mean you're pirating it, or are abusing an upgrade, because it ain't a friggin upgrade. Apple doesn't say you have to have Mac OS to use it. They just say you need a Mac, and you're inferring that because that Mac had Mac OS on it once, Apple is requiring something they're not to use the retail Mac OS X. It's a poor inference, it's not in the EULA (don't you think it would be?): it's not an upgrade. Your opinion/weak logic doesn't make it so.
On another note, doesn't it seem like one could legally run a retail Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware by affixing an Apple label to it, according to the EULA?
In some cases you may find that ignoring the Apple OSX EULA means you lose the legal right to install on up to five(?) other "family" computers (note, I'm not an OS X user myself - I've just heard some friends making reference to something like this)
What you're referring to is Apple's "family license." If you buy that version of the Mac OS X retail box, the EULA allows you to legally use what you bought to install Mac OS X on up to five machines in your home (not just any five machines). It costs $199 instead of $129 for the standard single-license version. As far as I know, the disc itself is identical to that in the single-license box, as Mac OS X has no licensing/authentication/activation/verification mechanism in the software. It's purely an honor system thing.
I don't know how many people buy it, but I kind of like the model: it's up to the user to comply with the EULA, rather than having user-hostile activation schemes to force you to do so. And they give you a pretty substantial price incentive ($70 for four licenses). Of course, I'd still like it better if they just used the family EULA in the regular $129 box, but as it is, I don't consider it unreasonable. (What IS unreasonable, however, is their refusal to offer some form of discounted upgrade pricing if you purchased the last retail verson, etc -- though their "full" price is cheaper than an XP Pro upgrade and around the same as an XP Home upgrade. Not as cheap as Linux, however.)
Re:The retail boxes are technically upgrades
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The retail boxes are technically upgrades. The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS. The GP is correct, if you are not running on a Mac it technically is piracy, you are using an upgrade as a full product.
100% false. The retail boxes are full installers that run on any supported Mac, whether or not that Mac has any OS installed.
The only "upgrade" CD's are those that are bundled with computers which have an earlier OS pre-installed because the new OS was recently released. Sometimes you have to pay them $19.95 to have them send it to you if it didn't come in the box. They say "upgrade" clearly on the CD label.
The upgrade CD is also a full installer, no different than the retail box, but it refuses to install if it can't first find a drive with the previous or current OS on it. However, the new OS doesn't have to be installed on the same drive as the existing OS, meaning if you've got any computer with the previous or current OS installed, you can put it into Target (FireWire) disk mode, plug it into the machine you want to install onto, and the upgrade CD will let you proceed as usual.
So the retail kits are neither technically nor legally upgrades. You may well be right that Apple doesn't want to sell retail copies of the OS to someone who hasn't also spent money on Apple hardware, but that hardly makes it piracy or even an abuse of an upgrade to do so. Of course, before Intel Macs existed, it was impossible (or at least highly implausible) to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, so it's conceivable that when they release a retail version of Intel OS X (which they very likely will with 10.5), the license agreement may specify that you may only run it on Apple-manufactured hardware, and then you'll be in violation if you do otherwise. But that still doesn't make it piracy, or misusing an upgrade. It just puts you in violation of the EULA, whoop de do.
Existing accessories that connect to the docking port of other iPods will probably work, including external speakers and FM transmitters. (There are a few exceptions, such as the Belkin flash card reader, because the nano doesn't support "camera-storage" like the larger iPods do.)
Any accessory which connects solely to the headphone port of other iPods should also work (e.g. FM transmitters with their own batteries, or external speakers which work with any portable device).
However, accessories which connect to the headphone port and the small connector next to it will NOT work, since the nano doesn't have that small connector (e.g. Griffin iTrip).
You mean Mbps, or Mb/s. That is, bits per second, not bytes per second, which is what MB/s indicates. Also, "high-speed" USB 1.1 is 12 Mbps, not 11. for what it's worth.
But to the shuffle -- you're really only getting 20 Mbps (2.5 MB/s) for transfers? Or are you actually getting 20 MB/s (160 Mbps), which would be more what I'd expect?
We need to think more logically and carefully about what the tech specs are saying. Too much assuming here.
From the system requirements, you're assuming that FireWire can't be used. That's an inaccurate assumption. The system requirements don't tell you anything about FireWire one way or the other. They are telling you what kind of Mac you need, not what kind of interface you need. (This is like whatever version of OS X (Panther I think) specifies Macs with USB ports in its system requirements.) There are no Mac systems that have FireWire but NOT USB, though there are some that have USB and not FireWire (e.g. iMacs 400 Mhz, PowerBook G3 "Lombard"). So therefore USB is a minimum requirement; if you've got USB and 10.3.4, you can use a nano. Nothing is said about whether FireWire will work or not.
Others are assuming that because there's a dock connector, and because all other iPods which have dock connectors work with FireWire, therefore the nano will work with FireWire as well. That's also a false assumption. A reasonable conclusion is that it is *likely* that it will work, but that's not the same thing as saying that it *definitely* will work, which you can't say since the nano is a new device and Apple has not said that FireWire will work.
Finally, some are assuming that because the "Connectivity" section of the tech specs (which lists USB as the only interface) doesn't specifically mention FireWire as unsupported, therefore FireWire *might* work. That's also a false assumption. Right in the next column, FireWire is explicitly listed as a supported interface for full-size iPods in addition to USB. Therefore, its omission in the "nano" column means it is obviously unsupported. There's nothing ambiguous about it.
Therefore, the correct and only conclusion to draw from what Apple has said is that that the nano can't be used with FireWire. That doesn't mean it doesn't, of course, and one reader here already claims that he's tried it and that it DOES work.
But Apple says it doesn't, and if it does, it's clearly unsupported.
Noway MDD has USB 2.0 onboard, and noway OS X wouldn't support it if it did. (I just checked the specs from Apple; no G4 desktop includes USB 2.0). However, it's trivial to add an off-the-shelf cheap USB 2.0 card and it should Just Work with OS X.
Ok, I'm dumb, but here reposted so that it's actually readable:
sizes given are depth of lowest-capacity model (single-platter drive) f: +3mm [0.12 in] (dual platter drive) (xx) previous model sold alongside revised models
Full size iPod: 1g: 19.9 mm [0.78 in] (moving wheel) 1.1: 5 [$399, 23-Oct-01] 1.2: (5)/10 [$399/499, 21-Mar-02]
G3 iMac and eMac: agree
laptop screens: agree
laptop single mouse button: indifferent (I'm used to ctrl-clicking)
laptop keyboard: somewhat agree, except for the current (aluminum) PowerBooks, which have the most outstanding laptop keyboard that I've ever used. It's really a pleasure to type on. (The iBook, G4 Titanium, and PowerBook G3 keyboards aren't nearly as nice.)
G5 tower: yup
mini: Slabs are cool, but what's wrong with the mini's form factor? In the age of LCD screens, you're not putting it on top of the computer anyway, and as designed the mini is much more portable and/or custom installable. Expansion blows, though...
It's amazing how much misguidedness there is in such a short post.
"I guess Power Computing folded": Actually, Apple bought Power Computing, and their tech docs are still in Apple's Knowledge Base.
"McMac thing was just one way they stifled the competition.": Stifling the competition is when you're Microsoft and you say "if you sell hardware with other operating systems, we won't let you sell ours" or "We're not going to produce Office for Mac if you don't bundle IE on every Mac." That is, exercising market strength to control the actions of independent competitors. What Apple did may have been uncool to Power, UMax, and MOT and their customers, but ultimately that's the chance they took when they tied their business to licensing something from a single source, especially a "beleaguered" one with a known history of proprietary behavior. It's Apple's prerogative, as it is any company's, to license or not license its technologies as it sees fit, when it chooses to, so long as they don't violate whatever licensing agreement was in place.
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted: Give me a break. The copyright is irrelevant. PC's have always been able to read 1.4 MB (and larger) Mac disks with third party software. Windows doesn't build in the ability for the same reason they don't bundle an AppleWorks file importer for Word on Windows. They're the big fish, Apple's the small fish, and the small fish has to cater to the needs of the big fish, not the other way around. And 400K and 800K Mac disks couldn't be read by Windows PC's because Apple used more expensive variable-speed floppy drives and GCR encoding on the disks, making 800K Mac disks physically unreadable by PC drives. By doing that, they squeezed more out of each disk -- remember that PC disks were 720K. They later switched to single-speed and MFM encoding for 1.4 MB disks, same as in the PC world, which is why those disks can be read.
This isn't to say that Apple hasn't been jerks to their customers, distributors, competitors and developers, but your particular examples don't hold water and make you sound pissy rather than well-reasoned.
The Riot came out nearly a year after the iPod. I'd argue with you about MMJB being as easy as iTunes but let's just say that it is. Even so, the Riot was still a brick compared with the iPod, on account of its laptop hard drive. You couldn't put it in your purse or pocket unless you wear ugly oversized pants which I'm guessing you do. So not only did the Riot not exist before the iPod, but still wasn't nearly as small or light, and isn't the whole point of a portable music player to be as portable (i.e. small and light) as possible? The iPod was like no player that came before it, whether you want to believe that, and for the most part it's like no player which came after it either (although finally some reasonable alternatives surfaced this year). So Apple didn't market it to cool people, it marketed it to people smart enough to choose the obviously superior product. Sorry you're not one of those.
"Apple didn't invent it, perfect the manufacture of it, or do anything spectacular with it other than the input (yawn) and the marketing..."
Not that this hasn't been said about thirty times in this thread alone, but I was keenly aware of the MP3 player options when the iPod was released, and I owned a few. No, Apple didn't invent the MP3 player. But it's totally untrue that they didn't do anything spectactular with it, even if the UI fails to impress you.
There were a number of flash players (I owned two), and IIRC two hard drive based players, the Creative Nomad (which I owned) and the Archos Jukebox. The flash players has 128MB tops, and the hard drive players were huge bricks with no battery life.
The iPod was the first device to get the advantages of both types of both flash (small, long battery) and hard drive (high capacity) together into one device -- a huge synergy. The MP3 player wasn't really a useful product for most until this marriage. Maybe someone else would have done it eventually, but Apple did it first, and did it very well from the outset.
But they didn't stop there -- they took the extra step of being the first to really think about how to intelligently manage music with both a desktop application and a portable device. The iTunes-iPod relationship was vastly superior to anything else available at the time -- all other desktop applications basically treated the player like a disk drive, rather than an portable extension of your desktop jukebox. (Later, they extended iTunes to allow music purchasing, and again there was no online music source that came close to that level of ease and integration.)
And, of course, they made the iPod look good and gave it a very usable interface, which may bore you, but IMO it was just the icing on the cake.
So they deserve credit for doing something spectacular with it, even if they didn't invent it. They made it a player people really liked. Furthermore, Apple gave their competitors *two and a half years* of lead time to catch up and improve on Apple's ideas, because the iPod didn't really start flying until the Windows version of iTunes was released. No one even came close to a device like an iPod in all that time, allowing Apple to run away with the market.
A quick timeline, abbreviated from ipod-lounge.com: April 2001: iPod released, Mac-only, FireWire-only. July 2002: Windows compatibility announced via the execreble MusicMatch Jukebox, but FireWire is still required. April 2003: USB-compatible iPods are released, though MMJB is still required on Windows. iTunes Music Store is released for Mac. October 2003: iTunes for Windows (including the Music Store) is released, finally bringing Windows iPod users into feature parity with Mac iPod users.
So what the hell was everyone waiting for? There were 1.5 million plus total iPods sold prior to the release of iTunes for Windows, in the first two and a half years of release. That figure doubled in eight months, and then the numbers really went crazy after that: they sold 4.5 million in the final quarter of 2004 alone.
Don't give Apple credit if you want, but they did what no one did before them, and gave others plenty of time to best them and no one did. I think you could say they deserve their success. You can't chalk it all up to marketing. They released what was clearly the best product of its type, and (arguably) still is.
"And as Steve Jobs said many times in the keynote speech, 2005 is the year of HD. The Mac Mini is HD ready. Windows is not."
I'm a bleed-six-colors Apple guy, but this statement is incorrect. The only way the Mac mini is HD ready is in that iMovie, the bundled entry-level movie editing app, now supports HD content. That's it. If you don't use iMovie, it's no different than Windows with regard to HD. Neither the OS nor the hardware has any inherent support for HD more than Windows running with an appropriate video card. Almost all HTPC's people have been been rolling over the past several years are based on Windows.
Ah, but you can make screenshots: shift-command-3. Works all the way back to Finder 1.0 - I just tried (using MiniVMac). It will save a MacPaint file called Screen 0, which Mac OS X Preview or Mac OS 7/8/9 QuickTime Picture Viewer will open without difficulty. Of course, if you don't have a floppy drive for your G3, you need to buy one or find a Mac that does have one.
Also, with your G3 you can make disk images (use Disk Copy 4.2, I think, buried somwhere in http://downloads.info.apple.com) of your old disks and use them in MiniVMac.
In case you're late to the party, Apple's point releases for OS X are equivalent to most products' full numbered release. See, they're milking the "Mac OS X" brand as long as they can, or can you not see through the marketing-speak? The point-point releases are free and are equivalent to most products' point releases.
I'd say it's ambiguous. The article you cite states: "Adding memory (DRAM, VRAM) or other user-installable upgrade or expansion products to an Apple computer is not considered a modification to that Apple product."
What they seem to be saying is that if they say something is user-installable, you don't void your warranty by installing it. Until the Mini, every post-1990 Mac had user-installable RAM, and they seem to state this in the phrase "memory or other-user installable expansion products".
If they had instead said "memory or user-installable expansion products", then the Mini obviously would be in the clear. But since they seem to suggest that memory is a user-installable product, and since this article was clearly written before the Mini, I'd say the jury is out, since the Mini has different memory installation terms than all other Macs.
I would assume that with Apple citing 80 GB as the HD limit that the Mini uses a laptop drive, so the ones you've got lying around probably won't work. It would help explain how they got it so small. Personally, I would have liked it a little larger and able to use a desktop drive.
Of course, I don't know this for sure, but all available evidence would seem to point to it.
I got this once. I can't remember the exact message, but I know it ended with "You just had to try, didn't you?" The funny part was that I was actually using it for a serious reason, as opposed to just trying...
I do. I worked on MAE 3.0, which emulated Mac OS 7.5/680x0 for Solaris and HP-UX. It was awesome. MAE is the direct ancestor of the "Classic Environment" in Mac OS X -- same development team (which, incidentally, worked on A/UX before MAE).
I have used VPC for Windows to run a DOS application which simply wouldn't launch with the DOS emulator built into XP. It hosted DOS 6.22 and worked great.
Interestingly, it was a database app, but much slower than running natively -- until I put the database in a Mac folder and told VPC to share it (meaning it shows up in Windows as a network drive). This was MUCH faster. I/O in a shared folder is much faster than the hard drive file, as it turns out.
Slashdot Mirror
You can install the latest OS X on your Beige G3 by using XPostFacto, available here:
http://eshop.macsales.com/OSXCenter/XPostFacto
I've used it. It works. Make sure you have lots of RAM.
I'm an Apple fanboy, and not at all a GNU/Linux person, but I see the point of view of the GPL developers. I think it's a red herring to get into whether GPL is "selfish" or not. As I understand it, GPL concretizes the values that existed in early hacker/coder culture -- namely, that source code (as a manifestation of knowledge) is a shared resource, and does not belong to any one individual, and it is for the overall good of the code (and, by extension, humanity) that it be that way. (My primary source for this understanding is Steven Levy's "Hackers," right or wrong.)
You may or may not agree, but that's the philosophy behind the GPL. In the world of the GPL, user=developer, and a developer can't very well "use" a program if the source code isn't readily at hand to modify. Thus the GPL enforces that the source code always be readily at hand, so that all developers can benefit from that code. The GPL enforces sharing of knowledge.
That's why I think it's a little meaningless to get hung up on whether BSD-style licenses or GPL licences are "selfish" or not. It depends upon your perception. A simple reading says GPL might be more selfish because it imposes more restrictions; the developer is expecting something in return for their effort. But to the GPL developer, the license promotes the greater development of humanity by requiring that knowledge be shared. That is a highly idealistic aim. You might not agree with it, but it's certainly unselfish in the mind of the GPL developer.
What about BSD (which I think the APSL derives from)? If BSD licenses are "here, enjoy," that's certainly unselfish at an individual level. But by permitting others to keep their knowledge to themselves, when it was derived from the knowledge they received, the GPL developer sees selfishness in the BSD license.
A counterargument would be that BSD, by being more corporate-friendly, actually get useful things into the hands of more people, e.g. NTFS filesystems. But then a countercounterargument comes down to a question of values, and in the GPL universe, there is no value higher than knowledge (made flesh in source code). Stuff is ephemeral, knowledge is eternal.
I admire the idealism of the GPL. It's idealistic and communistic (in a good way). I also have no problems with businesses wanting to make money from their intellectual property by keeping it secret. Therefore, I don't see either the ntfsprogs developers or Apple being in the wrong here -- they each have their own prerogatives, and Apple wanted to see if they'd be willing to change their license so that Apple could use their code for their own purposes. That's not unreasonable. The developers said no, and that's not unreasonable either.
Whether or not the sharing of knowledge is the most important thing about software development is the sort of thing that will be argued forever, but in the end, it's just that -- a question of values, and that's all it is.
I'm saying it is an upgrade because it *requires* a computer that had Mac OS installed on it.
Technically, perhaps so, which was a point I granted you. However, from there you're making the leap to legally, and I don't see how you can do that if it's not in the EULA.
Why would the EULA discuss a non-existent situation?
Are you kidding? Lawyers don't leave things to inference, deduction and assumption. Legal documents discuss *every* kind of situation which might conceivably ever apply. If they legally wanted to require that you have a previous version of Mac OS, the EULA would clearly specify that, and I doubt many would disagree. And if they wanted to call it an upgrade, they'd do that too, as they have done with the upgrade discs I described earlier.
The current retail package is for PowerPC not Intel, and you don't have viable non-Apple hardware until Intel. So whether the machine now has a blank hard drive or not, the machine was sold with a Mac OS license.
And whether the machine was sold with a Mac OS license is completely irrelevant as far as the retail OS X is concerned, because the EULA says NOTHING about that license. You're making the inference (really assumption) that it does, because it requires Apple hardware. But you could assume a lot of things because it requires Apple hardware. You could assume that it means you have to have Open Firmware. You could assume that it means you have to have a one-button mouse. You could assume it means you have to have Apple decals that come in every box, or the box itself. After all, every Mac once came in a box...
If the EULA doesn't spell it out, it's not a requirement. I can't imagine why you would think otherwise, and you've said nothing to help me. And if there's no requirement, there's no upgrade. Simple as that.
The only way one could be engaging in "piracy" by using an upgrade as a full product is if that upgrade is labelled as such by the manufacturer, and ownership of the prior product is part of the license requirement for usage of the upgrade. Both of these conditions must be met.
What you are saying is you, personally, consider Mac OS X retail to be an upgrade, because it is installed on a computer that at one point had some other version of Mac OS on it. That's certainly your prerogative, but it's absurd. If Apple doesn't call it an upgrade, then it ain't an upgrade. Even if we grant you that the retail boxes are "technically" upgrades, that certainly doesn't make them legally upgrades, which is what they'd have to be in order for one to engage in the "piracy" of using an upgrade product as a full product. Piracy (generally) involves a legal violation in which you get something you didn't pay for, a variation of theft. No such thing happening here.
Nothing in Apple's EULA for the retail OS X (have you read it?) suggests that you need to own a copy of Mac OS. However, you do violate the EULA for OS X by installing on non-Apple hardware: "This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time." So you might have no legal right (according to Apple) to install it on non-Apple hardware, but that doesn't mean you're pirating it, or are abusing an upgrade, because it ain't a friggin upgrade. Apple doesn't say you have to have Mac OS to use it. They just say you need a Mac, and you're inferring that because that Mac had Mac OS on it once, Apple is requiring something they're not to use the retail Mac OS X. It's a poor inference, it's not in the EULA (don't you think it would be?): it's not an upgrade. Your opinion/weak logic doesn't make it so.
On another note, doesn't it seem like one could legally run a retail Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware by affixing an Apple label to it, according to the EULA?
In some cases you may find that ignoring the Apple OSX EULA means you lose the legal right to install on up to five(?) other "family" computers (note, I'm not an OS X user myself - I've just heard some friends making reference to something like this)
What you're referring to is Apple's "family license." If you buy that version of the Mac OS X retail box, the EULA allows you to legally use what you bought to install Mac OS X on up to five machines in your home (not just any five machines). It costs $199 instead of $129 for the standard single-license version. As far as I know, the disc itself is identical to that in the single-license box, as Mac OS X has no licensing/authentication/activation/verification mechanism in the software. It's purely an honor system thing.
I don't know how many people buy it, but I kind of like the model: it's up to the user to comply with the EULA, rather than having user-hostile activation schemes to force you to do so. And they give you a pretty substantial price incentive ($70 for four licenses). Of course, I'd still like it better if they just used the family EULA in the regular $129 box, but as it is, I don't consider it unreasonable. (What IS unreasonable, however, is their refusal to offer some form of discounted upgrade pricing if you purchased the last retail verson, etc -- though their "full" price is cheaper than an XP Pro upgrade and around the same as an XP Home upgrade. Not as cheap as Linux, however.)
The retail boxes are technically upgrades. The requirements include a computer that shipped from the factory with Mac OS. The GP is correct, if you are not running on a Mac it technically is piracy, you are using an upgrade as a full product.
100% false. The retail boxes are full installers that run on any supported Mac, whether or not that Mac has any OS installed.
The only "upgrade" CD's are those that are bundled with computers which have an earlier OS pre-installed because the new OS was recently released. Sometimes you have to pay them $19.95 to have them send it to you if it didn't come in the box. They say "upgrade" clearly on the CD label.
The upgrade CD is also a full installer, no different than the retail box, but it refuses to install if it can't first find a drive with the previous or current OS on it. However, the new OS doesn't have to be installed on the same drive as the existing OS, meaning if you've got any computer with the previous or current OS installed, you can put it into Target (FireWire) disk mode, plug it into the machine you want to install onto, and the upgrade CD will let you proceed as usual.
So the retail kits are neither technically nor legally upgrades. You may well be right that Apple doesn't want to sell retail copies of the OS to someone who hasn't also spent money on Apple hardware, but that hardly makes it piracy or even an abuse of an upgrade to do so. Of course, before Intel Macs existed, it was impossible (or at least highly implausible) to run Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, so it's conceivable that when they release a retail version of Intel OS X (which they very likely will with 10.5), the license agreement may specify that you may only run it on Apple-manufactured hardware, and then you'll be in violation if you do otherwise. But that still doesn't make it piracy, or misusing an upgrade. It just puts you in violation of the EULA, whoop de do.
Existing accessories that connect to the docking port of other iPods will probably work, including external speakers and FM transmitters. (There are a few exceptions, such as the Belkin flash card reader, because the nano doesn't support "camera-storage" like the larger iPods do.)
Any accessory which connects solely to the headphone port of other iPods should also work (e.g. FM transmitters with their own batteries, or external speakers which work with any portable device).
However, accessories which connect to the headphone port and the small connector next to it will NOT work, since the nano doesn't have that small connector (e.g. Griffin iTrip).
You mean Mbps, or Mb/s. That is, bits per second, not bytes per second, which is what MB/s indicates. Also, "high-speed" USB 1.1 is 12 Mbps, not 11. for what it's worth.
But to the shuffle -- you're really only getting 20 Mbps (2.5 MB/s) for transfers? Or are you actually getting 20 MB/s (160 Mbps), which would be more what I'd expect?
We need to think more logically and carefully about what the tech specs are saying. Too much assuming here.
From the system requirements, you're assuming that FireWire can't be used. That's an inaccurate assumption. The system requirements don't tell you anything about FireWire one way or the other. They are telling you what kind of Mac you need, not what kind of interface you need. (This is like whatever version of OS X (Panther I think) specifies Macs with USB ports in its system requirements.) There are no Mac systems that have FireWire but NOT USB, though there are some that have USB and not FireWire (e.g. iMacs 400 Mhz, PowerBook G3 "Lombard"). So therefore USB is a minimum requirement; if you've got USB and 10.3.4, you can use a nano. Nothing is said about whether FireWire will work or not.
Others are assuming that because there's a dock connector, and because all other iPods which have dock connectors work with FireWire, therefore the nano will work with FireWire as well. That's also a false assumption. A reasonable conclusion is that it is *likely* that it will work, but that's not the same thing as saying that it *definitely* will work, which you can't say since the nano is a new device and Apple has not said that FireWire will work.
Finally, some are assuming that because the "Connectivity" section of the tech specs (which lists USB as the only interface) doesn't specifically mention FireWire as unsupported, therefore FireWire *might* work. That's also a false assumption. Right in the next column, FireWire is explicitly listed as a supported interface for full-size iPods in addition to USB. Therefore, its omission in the "nano" column means it is obviously unsupported. There's nothing ambiguous about it.
Therefore, the correct and only conclusion to draw from what Apple has said is that that the nano can't be used with FireWire. That doesn't mean it doesn't, of course, and one reader here already claims that he's tried it and that it DOES work.
But Apple says it doesn't, and if it does, it's clearly unsupported.
Noway MDD has USB 2.0 onboard, and noway OS X wouldn't support it if it did. (I just checked the specs from Apple; no G4 desktop includes USB 2.0). However, it's trivial to add an off-the-shelf cheap USB 2.0 card and it should Just Work with OS X.
Ok, I'm dumb, but here reposted so that it's actually readable:
sizes given are depth of lowest-capacity model (single-platter drive)
f: +3mm [0.12 in] (dual platter drive)
(xx) previous model sold alongside revised models
Full size iPod:
1g: 19.9 mm [0.78 in] (moving wheel)
1.1: 5 [$399, 23-Oct-01]
1.2: (5)/10 [$399/499, 21-Mar-02]
2g: 18.3 mm [0.72 in] (touch wheel+firewire port)
2.1: (5)/10/20f [$299/399/499, 17-Jul-02]
3g: 15.7 mm [0.62 in] (four buttons across)
3.1: 10/15/30f [$299/399/499, 28-Apr-03]
3.2: (10)/20/40f [$299/399/499, 8-Sep-03]
3.3: (15)/(20)/(40f) [$299/399/499, 6-Jan-04]
4g: 14.6 mm [0.57 in] (click wheel+monochrome)
4.1: 20/40f [$299/399, 19-Jul-04]
Pg: 16.1 mm [0.63 in] (color, aka iPod photo)
P.1: (20)/(40f)/40f/60f [$299/399/499/599, 26-Oct-04]
P.2: (20)/30/(60f) [$299/349/449, 23-Feb-05]
P.3: 20/(60f) [$299/$399, 28-Jun-05]
U2 models (black shell, red click wheel, rear engravings)
U.1: same as 4g20 [$349, 26-Oct-04]
U.2: same as Pg20 [$329, 28-Jun-05]
iPod mini:
1g: 13.8 mm [0.50 in] (five colors: silver, gold, blue, pink, green)
1.1: 4 [$249, 6-Jan-04]
2g: 13.8 mm [0.5 in] (four colors: silver, blue, pink, green; improved battery life)
2.1: 4/6 [$199/249, 23-Feb-05]
iPod shuffle:
1g: 8.4 mm [0.33 in]
1.1: 0.5/1 [$99/$149, 11-Jan-05
1.2: (0.5)/(1) [$99/$129, 28-Jun-05]
iPod nano:
1g: 6.90 mm [0.27 in]
1.1: 2/4 [$199/$249, 7-Sep-05]
Man there's been a lot of misinformation about original iPod/mini/etc prices here. Here's the story. Yes I made this table. sizes given are depth of lowest-capacity model (single-platter drive) f: +3mm [0.12 in] (dual platter drive) (xx) previous model sold alongside revised models Full size iPod: 1g: 19.9 mm [0.78 in] (moving wheel) 1.1: 5 [$399, 23-Oct-01] 1.2: (5)/10 [$399/499, 21-Mar-02] 2g: 18.3 mm [0.72 in] (touch wheel+firewire port) 2.1: (5)/10/20f [$299/399/499, 17-Jul-02] 3g: 15.7 mm [0.62 in] (four buttons across) 3.1: 10/15/30f [$299/399/499, 28-Apr-03] 3.2: (10)/20/40f [$299/399/499, 8-Sep-03] 3.3: (15)/(20)/(40f) [$299/399/499, 6-Jan-04] 4g: 14.6 mm [0.57 in] (click wheel+monochrome) 4.1: 20/40f [$299/399, 19-Jul-04] Pg: 16.1 mm [0.63 in] (color, aka iPod photo) P.1: (20)/(40f)/40f/60f [$299/399/499/599, 26-Oct-04] P.2: (20)/30/(60f) [$299/349/449, 23-Feb-05] P.3: 20/(60f) [$299/$399, 28-Jun-05] U2 models (black shell, red click wheel, rear engravings) U.1: same as 4g20 [$349, 26-Oct-04] U.2: same as Pg20 [$329, 28-Jun-05] iPod mini: 1g: 13.8 mm [0.50 in] (five colors: silver, gold, blue, pink, green) 1.1: 4 [$249, 6-Jan-04] 2g: 13.8 mm [0.5 in] (four colors: silver, blue, pink, green; improved battery life) 2.1: 4/6 [$199/249, 23-Feb-05] iPod shuffle: 1g: 8.4 mm [0.33 in] 1.1: 0.5/1 [$99/$149, 11-Jan-05 1.2: (0.5)/(1) [$99/$129, 28-Jun-05] iPod nano: 1g: 6.90 mm [0.27 in] 1.1: 2/4 [$199/$249, 7-Sep-05]
G3 iMac and eMac: agree
laptop screens: agree
laptop single mouse button: indifferent (I'm used to ctrl-clicking)
laptop keyboard: somewhat agree, except for the current (aluminum) PowerBooks, which have the most outstanding laptop keyboard that I've ever used. It's really a pleasure to type on. (The iBook, G4 Titanium, and PowerBook G3 keyboards aren't nearly as nice.)
G5 tower: yup
mini: Slabs are cool, but what's wrong with the mini's form factor? In the age of LCD screens, you're not putting it on top of the computer anyway, and as designed the mini is much more portable and/or custom installable. Expansion blows, though...
It's amazing how much misguidedness there is in such a short post.
"I guess Power Computing folded": Actually, Apple bought Power Computing, and their tech docs are still in Apple's Knowledge Base.
"McMac thing was just one way they stifled the competition.": Stifling the competition is when you're Microsoft and you say "if you sell hardware with other operating systems, we won't let you sell ours" or "We're not going to produce Office for Mac if you don't bundle IE on every Mac." That is, exercising market strength to control the actions of independent competitors. What Apple did may have been uncool to Power, UMax, and MOT and their customers, but ultimately that's the chance they took when they tied their business to licensing something from a single source, especially a "beleaguered" one with a known history of proprietary behavior. It's Apple's prerogative, as it is any company's, to license or not license its technologies as it sees fit, when it chooses to, so long as they don't violate whatever licensing agreement was in place.
Know why Macs could read PC disks but not vice versa? Easy. Apple's HFS filesystem was copyrighted: Give me a break. The copyright is irrelevant. PC's have always been able to read 1.4 MB (and larger) Mac disks with third party software. Windows doesn't build in the ability for the same reason they don't bundle an AppleWorks file importer for Word on Windows. They're the big fish, Apple's the small fish, and the small fish has to cater to the needs of the big fish, not the other way around. And 400K and 800K Mac disks couldn't be read by Windows PC's because Apple used more expensive variable-speed floppy drives and GCR encoding on the disks, making 800K Mac disks physically unreadable by PC drives. By doing that, they squeezed more out of each disk -- remember that PC disks were 720K. They later switched to single-speed and MFM encoding for 1.4 MB disks, same as in the PC world, which is why those disks can be read.
This isn't to say that Apple hasn't been jerks to their customers, distributors, competitors and developers, but your particular examples don't hold water and make you sound pissy rather than well-reasoned.
That's not semiotics. It's semantics. You fail it.
The Riot came out nearly a year after the iPod. I'd argue with you about MMJB being as easy as iTunes but let's just say that it is. Even so, the Riot was still a brick compared with the iPod, on account of its laptop hard drive. You couldn't put it in your purse or pocket unless you wear ugly oversized pants which I'm guessing you do. So not only did the Riot not exist before the iPod, but still wasn't nearly as small or light, and isn't the whole point of a portable music player to be as portable (i.e. small and light) as possible? The iPod was like no player that came before it, whether you want to believe that, and for the most part it's like no player which came after it either (although finally some reasonable alternatives surfaced this year). So Apple didn't market it to cool people, it marketed it to people smart enough to choose the obviously superior product. Sorry you're not one of those.
Yeah, IHBT. I know.
"Apple didn't invent it, perfect the manufacture of it, or do anything spectacular with it other than the input (yawn) and the marketing..."
Not that this hasn't been said about thirty times in this thread alone, but I was keenly aware of the MP3 player options when the iPod was released, and I owned a few. No, Apple didn't invent the MP3 player. But it's totally untrue that they didn't do anything spectactular with it, even if the UI fails to impress you.
There were a number of flash players (I owned two), and IIRC two hard drive based players, the Creative Nomad (which I owned) and the Archos Jukebox. The flash players has 128MB tops, and the hard drive players were huge bricks with no battery life.
The iPod was the first device to get the advantages of both types of both flash (small, long battery) and hard drive (high capacity) together into one device -- a huge synergy. The MP3 player wasn't really a useful product for most until this marriage. Maybe someone else would have done it eventually, but Apple did it first, and did it very well from the outset.
But they didn't stop there -- they took the extra step of being the first to really think about how to intelligently manage music with both a desktop application and a portable device. The iTunes-iPod relationship was vastly superior to anything else available at the time -- all other desktop applications basically treated the player like a disk drive, rather than an portable extension of your desktop jukebox. (Later, they extended iTunes to allow music purchasing, and again there was no online music source that came close to that level of ease and integration.)
And, of course, they made the iPod look good and gave it a very usable interface, which may bore you, but IMO it was just the icing on the cake.
So they deserve credit for doing something spectacular with it, even if they didn't invent it. They made it a player people really liked. Furthermore, Apple gave their competitors *two and a half years* of lead time to catch up and improve on Apple's ideas, because the iPod didn't really start flying until the Windows version of iTunes was released. No one even came close to a device like an iPod in all that time, allowing Apple to run away with the market.
A quick timeline, abbreviated from ipod-lounge.com:
April 2001: iPod released, Mac-only, FireWire-only.
July 2002: Windows compatibility announced via the execreble MusicMatch Jukebox, but FireWire is still required.
April 2003: USB-compatible iPods are released, though MMJB is still required on Windows. iTunes Music Store is released for Mac.
October 2003: iTunes for Windows (including the Music Store) is released, finally bringing Windows iPod users into feature parity with Mac iPod users.
So what the hell was everyone waiting for? There were 1.5 million plus total iPods sold prior to the release of iTunes for Windows, in the first two and a half years of release. That figure doubled in eight months, and then the numbers really went crazy after that: they sold 4.5 million in the final quarter of 2004 alone.
Don't give Apple credit if you want, but they did what no one did before them, and gave others plenty of time to best them and no one did. I think you could say they deserve their success. You can't chalk it all up to marketing. They released what was clearly the best product of its type, and (arguably) still is.
"And as Steve Jobs said many times in the keynote speech, 2005 is the year of HD. The Mac Mini is HD ready. Windows is not."
I'm a bleed-six-colors Apple guy, but this statement is incorrect. The only way the Mac mini is HD ready is in that iMovie, the bundled entry-level movie editing app, now supports HD content. That's it. If you don't use iMovie, it's no different than Windows with regard to HD. Neither the OS nor the hardware has any inherent support for HD more than Windows running with an appropriate video card. Almost all HTPC's people have been been rolling over the past several years are based on Windows.
Ah, but you can make screenshots: shift-command-3. Works all the way back to Finder 1.0 - I just tried (using MiniVMac). It will save a MacPaint file called Screen 0, which Mac OS X Preview or Mac OS 7/8/9 QuickTime Picture Viewer will open without difficulty. Of course, if you don't have a floppy drive for your G3, you need to buy one or find a Mac that does have one.
Also, with your G3 you can make disk images (use Disk Copy 4.2, I think, buried somwhere in http://downloads.info.apple.com) of your old disks and use them in MiniVMac.
IHBT.
In case you're late to the party, Apple's point releases for OS X are equivalent to most products' full numbered release. See, they're milking the "Mac OS X" brand as long as they can, or can you not see through the marketing-speak? The point-point releases are free and are equivalent to most products' point releases.
Asshead.
I'd say it's ambiguous. The article you cite states: "Adding memory (DRAM, VRAM) or other user-installable upgrade or expansion products to an Apple computer is not considered a modification to that Apple product."
What they seem to be saying is that if they say something is user-installable, you don't void your warranty by installing it. Until the Mini, every post-1990 Mac had user-installable RAM, and they seem to state this in the phrase "memory or other-user installable expansion products".
If they had instead said "memory or user-installable expansion products", then the Mini obviously would be in the clear. But since they seem to suggest that memory is a user-installable product, and since this article was clearly written before the Mini, I'd say the jury is out, since the Mini has different memory installation terms than all other Macs.
I would assume that with Apple citing 80 GB as the HD limit that the Mini uses a laptop drive, so the ones you've got lying around probably won't work. It would help explain how they got it so small. Personally, I would have liked it a little larger and able to use a desktop drive.
Of course, I don't know this for sure, but all available evidence would seem to point to it.
I got this once. I can't remember the exact message, but I know it ended with "You just had to try, didn't you?" The funny part was that I was actually using it for a serious reason, as opposed to just trying...
I do. I worked on MAE 3.0, which emulated Mac OS 7.5/680x0 for Solaris and HP-UX. It was awesome. MAE is the direct ancestor of the "Classic Environment" in Mac OS X -- same development team (which, incidentally, worked on A/UX before MAE).
I have used VPC for Windows to run a DOS application which simply wouldn't launch with the DOS emulator built into XP. It hosted DOS 6.22 and worked great. Interestingly, it was a database app, but much slower than running natively -- until I put the database in a Mac folder and told VPC to share it (meaning it shows up in Windows as a network drive). This was MUCH faster. I/O in a shared folder is much faster than the hard drive file, as it turns out.