Mac Cloner Psystar Ships First Service Pack

Preedit writes "Not only is Mac clone maker Psystar continuing to defy Apple's ban on third-party Leopard installations, it's supporting the hardware with updates. Psystar Mac clones shipped as of Monday will include a 'service pack' that features fixes for a range of problems, some of them inherent in Apple's own software, according to InformationWeek. The fixes address a range of troubles, from glitches in Apple's Time Machine backup feature to quirks in the Keyboard Viewer and Character Palette entries in Leopard's system preferences menu. There's also support for the latest version of Java and other updates. According to the story, by offering a full menu of support, Psystar appears to be daring Apple to attempt to enforce provisions in the Leopard license agreement that forbid third-party installations and sales." We've been discussing Psystar clones for a while.

Good

[geekoid (135745)]

Now Apple has to compete with it's own product. I mean, making a product better them MS wasn't exatly a challenge, was it?

Re:Good

[mrsteveman1 (1010381)]

It may not be, but they can do any number of technological restrictions in the name of preventing piracy.

Encrypted binaries fit in there, especially since the key is sitting in the SMC chip, which only real macs have.

Eventually breaking those restrictions, whatever they may be in the future if anything, may run afoul of the DMCA, in which case it is no longer a license issue. Somewhat like breaking DRM to use music on the device of your choice, this would be breaking locks on the OS to use it on the hardware of your choice, and both would technically violate the DMCA...right?

These guys have balls

[alta (1263)]

Really big hairy ones that must be protected by some sort of anti-steve force field.

Or maybe they're eunichs (sp?) and steve can't cut off their balls.

Re:These guys have balls

[rekoil (168689)]

More likely, they're hoping to grab a quick buzz, score some venture capital, and then run off into the sunset, cash in hand, before Apple legal pulls the plug on the party...

... medium size ones..?

[Fallen Andy (795676)]

I've just spent 15 minutes screaming "wait a minute I remember something like this from a while back". So here it is - the Advance 86 [old-computers.com] These popped up in "Dixons" (UK) for a while and then magically vanished. Turns out that they were compatible in the sense that the BIOS (at least AFAIK) *was* an IBM BIOS (grins). A friend of mine claims they took the money and ran before IBM came after them... Unlike "Pear?" etc (the Apple ][ clone) this time around Apple might have more trouble pulling the plug I guess.

Andy

Re:These guys have balls

[by Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe they're eunichs (sp?) and steve can't cut off their balls.

I believe it's spelled "Unix".

Re:These guys have balls

[eck011219 (851729)]

When I was about 20 (around 1991), I worked for a family friend who was doing custom DB app development. He was working on a warehouse tracking system at the time, and I helped him compile information about the competition for an article he was writing for Unix World magazine. When I told my parents about the article for Unix World, my father went all glassy until I explained the spelling and definitions involved.

I was impressed by his poker face, honestly. I think he thought he'd been exposing his boy to the decidedly wrong people.

Re:These guys have balls

[gyranthir (995837)]

I think Steve's blade may be a bit dull trying to cut through all the red tape set forth in their own EULA.

from: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:yZd3DfSTe6cJ:www.engadget.com/2008/04/15/psystar-says-rumors-of-its-demise-are-greatly-exaggerated-still/comments/11642842/+leopard+eula+unenforceable&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us [64.233.169.104]

Psystar/Open Computing is reselling a full (read: fully-licesned) copy of MacOSX Leopard. They are then preinstalling it onto the system, telling you that they do modifications, and telling you that the copy is no longer under warranty. In addition, the courts have been moving in the direction of saying EULA's are not necessarily contractual, because of the low barrier of people to click "I Accept", weakening any potential Apple case.

To be fair, DMCA is vague on modifying software for personal use, and violating license, but only from the perspective of "taking away revenue". In this case, Apple is getting attributed as creating the software, and sells a retail copy of Leopard every time Psystar/Open Computing sells one to buyers.

from: http://64.233.169.104/search?q=cache:dIo9yM9-QvMJ:timmorton.blogspot.com/2008/04/apple-vs-psystar-clone-mac-era.html+leopard+eula+unenforceable&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=7&gl=us [64.233.169.104]

What it boils down to is that running Leopard on a machine that Apple did not make violates the EULA. EULA's are largely NOT legally enforceable, and in those states where they are the degree to which they are varies widely. EULA's are not active contracts, and are largely invalid because you cannot read them in entirety (or at all usually) on the packaging before making your purchase, leaving you vulnerable to stipulations that were unknown at the time of purchase. EULA's are legally weak, all but entirely unenforceable, and would be outrageously expensive to attempt to enforce on any type of broad scale.

Basically I think Apple really would have to pay to play this game that it might lose. EULA's are largely flawed and usually unenforceable. Will be interesting to see what Apple does, if not nothing.

Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[argent (18001)]

The system is priced at $804.99. A similar, Apple-branded computer could cost more than $2,000.

The Psystar system has a single Core 2 Duo CPU.

They don't say what the "similar, Apple-branded computer" is, but if it's a Mac Pro it's got two four-core CPUs.

The problem is that Apple doesn't make a similar computer. If they did, Psystar wouldn't have a market. And Apple would have a bigger one.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[yincrash (854885)]

If Apple did try to go for this market, they'd need to cut their margins by a lot to compete with the current pc market which plays in this price range.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[MoonBuggy (611105)]

Why? They wouldn't be competing with Dell, they'd be competing with themselves. People don't (and never will, I'll bet) buy a Mac because it's the cheapest, they buy it because they feel it's superior in some way and thus worth the money.

What they would have to worry about is cannibalising the iMac sales, because a standard-tower Mac plus a third party monitor, graphics card & RAM would be cheaper than an iMac and superior in every way except form-factor, which isn't really high on most people's list for a desktop.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[drsmithy (35869)]

What they would have to worry about is cannibalising the iMac sales, because a standard-tower Mac plus a third party monitor, graphics card & RAM would be cheaper than an iMac and superior in every way except form-factor, which isn't really high on most people's list for a desktop.

No it wouldn't. The mythical mini-tower Mac, if it were ever made, would be priced at a little less than equivalent iMacs (if not exactly the same).

The real threat from such a box would be to Mac Pro sales.

Re:

[PopeRatzo (965947)]

You mean like a Mac Mini? I picked one up yesterday for $~670.

Did you pick up a 8800GT to go with it? Did you figure out how to install your RME Hammerfall audio card in that Mac Mini yet?

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[Junior J. Junior III (192702)]

The obvious comparison would be the iMac, as far as performance specs go.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[DurendalMac (736637)]

Hmm, desktop hard drive? Check. Standard laptop RAM? Check. Ability to replace the video card? Technically, check. It can be replaced as it's a separate module. Upgrading...well, you'd have to have a lower-end card and find a service provider willing to order/install the better one for you. However, it's kind of a moot point. You know why? BECAUSE MOST PEOPLE DON'T GIVE A SHIT. Geeks need to get that through their obstinate skulls. The vast majority of the buying public doesn't give a shit about upgrading their video card. They just want a computer that works so they can check their email, do word processing, and organize their photos. Upgrade-happy geeks are a tiny sliver of the overall market.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[Firehed (942385)]

Hey, I want the "xMac" too. But unless there's a small miracle at WWDC08 in a couple weeks, just start saving for the Mac Pro. It's what I'm doing. Customize it and knock out one of the quad-Xeons and save $500 if you're so inclined - chances are that if you're whining about it being the only option in the same way that I tend to, you won't need it.

However, "perfectly normal" people tend to just want to turn it on, pound out a couple pages in Word or fire off a few emails, and be done with things. TV, not so much, and blu-ray far less so (just spend the money on a PS3 and get blu-ray and gaming done in one). I'll give you the USB ports - it's a major source of irritation on my MBP (TWO on a pro machine? Yeah friggen right), and would be even more of one on an iMac that needs a keyboard and mouse plugged in. PC gamers that want Macs is a relatively small market, but except for the even smaller subset of overclockers who tend to truly be performance-on-a-budget-obsessed (I've been there), the Mac Pro isn't insanely out of reach given the specs it has. My aging PC desktop has a good $500 invested in the cooling alone (German watercooling) and another $250 in the case, and the other hardware probably cost me a good two grand at the time. Of course a lot of it was upgrade piece-by-piece which isn't really an option with the Mac Pro, but that's just not the "Apple Experience" nor will they ever allow that to be the case. Bad for you and me maybe, but we're a very small minority - even if we whine the most.

What I can say with a reasonable amount of happiness is that this kind of focus, even if it ignores what I want, is that it allows them to make what they have the best it can be. I know, RDF alert!, but I've yet to find a case modder or other enthusiast engineer something as sleek as the iMac.

Re:Much as I hate to defend Apple's prices...

[mr_matticus (928346)]

This is exactly the kind of ridiculous missing-of-the-point that your parent post is talking about.

Adding an $80 internal hard drive is easy, neat, and no fuss... and not possible on an imac.

Adding that $80 drive to a simple slide-in drive case is even easier and less fuss. It's also portable.

If you go with Firewire, it also has no net impact on the number of ports.

iMacs have 3 and one is tied up by the keyboard/mouse. Want more? Tough.

iMacs have 3 free USB ports after dealing with the keyboard and mouse. They also have Bluetooth built-in, and the vast majority of desktops with BT do it with a USB dongle. So that's really just about at par with your "6 to 8" USB port standard.

The easy fix? A USB hub. You're complaining about one of the very reasons USB was designed the way it was: to reduce clutter and the number of ports in a machine. It's also part of the iMac's design: most people have exactly two cords to deal with on their desk: power and the keyboard-mouse chain (which, unlike desktops, is one continuous cord rather than two separate ones back to the computer).

Want a TV-tuner card? Tough.

Nonsense. At least four companies make TV tuners for the Mac.

Bluray reader? Tough.

Again, an external one works fine, but I don't really see people clamoring for Blu-ray drives in their computers. Most people don't even have one in their living room yet.

hese are the sorts of things perfectly normal people want from their computers in the normal course of using them, or coming out of the store.

No, they're not. They're things geek expect out of their all-encompassing desktops, where they know how to open the case in 5 seconds.

Most people don't want to open the case, don't want to buy cards, and don't really care. They'll order the computer with the feature if they want it, or they'll drag it to Best Buy and have them upgrade it, or they'll find that computer-savvy niece or nephew to fix "that clicking noise".

External upgrades are ones that people can actually just do themselves. Plug it in and go, for the most part. When you don't want it anymore, you can just unplug it and put it in a closet. No disassembly required. If you want to hide all the peripherals in that space in the desk where the tower is supposed to go, it's a simple task, and it'll hold more than a typical desktop could.

Really, regular people prefer the flexibility of external devices. If the computer never got opened, that would be fine by them. Cards and screwdrivers are for IT people and geeks. That's it.

Once Again...

[Mikkeles (698461)]

I remember this happening in the days of the Apple ][, what with the Peach and other clones. But then, you had to get the ROMs. Maybe this time will turn out (un)successful (depending on your point of view :)

Re:

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

Actually, I don't think you had to get the ROMs for the Laser 128 (Apple //c clone). It had its own ROMs, which VTech clean-room reverse engineered.

Bet ten to one

[Khyber (864651)]

We'll see no lawsuit. This gives Apple more exposure. If they do sue, I won't be offering them a bandage for their blown-off foot.

Re:

[dreamchaser (49529)]

You are assuming that EULA's are enforceable. It might be an interesting case to see just what the courts make of this.

Re:Bet ten to one

[Uncle Focker (1277658)]

My guess is that they will wait until the company dies. Then, if, for some reason, it fails to die, they'll sue 'em--and win, of course. Clearly, Apple has this one--this is a blatent knowing violation of the EULA by a for-profit corporation.

There is no guarantee that that part of the EULA is even legally enforceable. Just because it's written in a EULA doesn't mean it has any actual force of law to back it up.

Re:Bet ten to one

[kestasjk (933987)]

But at some point the people at Psystar must have clicked "I Agree", so they agreed to comply. This is the strongest contract in the entire software industry, even stronger than a "TOS" link at the bottom of a web-page

Re:

[HairyCanary (688865)]

People keep saying this, and I don't understand the logic behind it. This is not a case of the end user violating the EULA, this is a for-profit company violating the EULA to make money. That's a whole different ballgame.

Slow News Day?

[Generic Guy (678542)]

From TFA:

...Psystar appears to be daring Apple to attempt to enforce provisions in the Leopard license agreement that forbid third-party installations and sales.

To me it seems more like daring suckers to send their credit-card information to a fairly shady operation. As in the last slashdot article on Psystar, has anyone besides a few high-profile writers with 'protoypes' actually seen a Psystar -- in the wild, so to speak? InfoWeek cribbed a breif website notice and apparently created a whole 'article piece' based on it

Anway... Instead of becoming a noble defender of user's EULA rights, it seems far more likely they'll take the submitted order money and disappear into the night.

Re:

[Bryansix (761547)]

Do you have any information to actually back this up or are you just making things up? Why in your view is the operation "shady"? Apple is overpriced because they can be. They are on x86 architecture now so they don't really have an excuse. You CAN compare them to similar spec'd PC hardware to see how overpriced they are.

Re:Slow News Day?

[MightyYar (622222)]

I went through exactly this excercise the other day with someone. It turns out that Apple and Dell have very similar prices. The exception is with the MacBook Pro, in which Apple exceeds Dell by about 20% or so, but the closest Dell laptop is also larger by a fair margin.

Dell doesn't sell a Mini competitor, and Apple doesn't sell a headless low or mid-end desktop tower, so those products were impossible to compare.

Apple's MacBook line, iMac line, and Pro line are all very comparable - even cheaper right after a refresh - to their Dell counterparts.

Go try it :)

Re:Slow News Day?

[geekoid (135745)]

And there is value in style and a nice interface.

Re:Slow News Day?

[p0tat03 (985078)]

There is as much "perceived value" in style and interface as there is "perceived value" in genuine performance. A computer is a tool to do something, and for the vast majority of users not running servers, the interface contributes to the tool's usefulness as much as teh megahurtz.

Having used some truly horrible interfaces in my time, and having seen the real productivity improvements that come with superior design, I assign a pretty high value to usability. Just look at any recent Motorola phone *shudder*.

Refresh is not working for me..

[cheros (223479)]

even cheaper right after a refresh

I've now tried refreshing several times, but in my browser Mac prices stay the same.
Should I switch to Safari? :-)

The problem is

[Sycraft-fu (314770)]

They don't have a consumer desktop line, which is what a whole lot of people and companies want. Their Mac Pros are good for the money if and only if you actually need all the high end hardware they mandate. The entry level Mac Pro is $2800 with no monitor. Now that's no surprising as it features things like dual quad core Xeons. Ok, fine, but there are very, very, very few apps that can use 8 cores. There are, in fact, very few that can use 4 cores. So for most people it, like much of the other high end hardware you have to get (ECC RAM, for example) is a waste of money. Consider that MPC (our supplier at work) will happily sell me a single quad core desktop for just under $1000.

Thus it is overpriced if you don't need the hardware they are trying to push. They don't have a mid range tower at all.

You can go down to their all in ones, but of course those come with their own problems. A big one would be why do I want to get a nice monitor, if I am going to have to get rid of it when the computer attached to it is obsolete? Monitors last longer than computers, particularly nice ones. You get a nice 24" IPS LCD, man, that's a keeper for a long time. However, the computer is going to get outdated at the same rate all computers do, which is to say fairly quickly. So if you buy the all in ones, you have to get a monitor every time you want a computer upgrade.

That's a waste of money to most of us. Pretty much everyone I know keeps their monitors well past their computers. Either they buy cheap monitors, in which case they generally keep them until they break because they don't want to spend any more money on a display than they have to, or they buy good monitors, and they keep them because the monitor is still a good monitor and works for many years.

I have a nice 26" IPS panel that I plan on keeping probably until it fails. Hell, first thing to go out on it will be the backlight, and I can and most likely will buy new tubes and a new ballast and replace it. It's a great display and when the day comes that I retire it from my primary system, it'll work very nicely on my guest system. No reason to throw it away in a couple years. However if it were tied to my computer, well that's what would happen. I upgrade my system very regularly. My monitor though, that lasts.

So that's where the complaints against Apple's price tend to come from. It isn't that they are necessarily bad if you do a straight 1:1 comparison. It is that they don't offer many choices, and one of the choices they exclude is one of the most popular choices: consumer desktop/tower and separate monitor. People like that choice, and businesses REALLY like that choice. If you want a separate monitor, you either have to get a very low end system, with no upgradability (mini) or an amazingly powerful workstation (pro). Nothing in the middle range. Thus for most people, the pro is what they'd look at and it is expensive.

Show me a mac tower with a single dual core processor and regular DDR2 RAM and then we can talk. Until then the choices are a system that isn't powerful or expandable enough or a system that is overpriced.

Re:Slow News Day?

[p0tat03 (985078)]

Do you have any information to actually back this up or are you just making things up? Why in your view is the operation "shady"?

Slashdot covered this before, as have other sites. In summary, the company pulled credit card orders a few short days after announcing the product. Efforts to track down the company at its real-life address turned out to be difficult, and we still have not seen any evidence that the company is legit (there was no business by its name at the address listed on its site). When confronted with this information the company changed its physical address on its website numerous times, none of which seem to reflect a real business. THAT is why it seems shady. Indeed, it looks like this is an amateur operation at best, a scam at worst.

Apple is overpriced because they can be. They are on x86 architecture now so they don't really have an excuse. You CAN compare them to similar spec'd PC hardware to see how overpriced they are.

Go ahead. Do it. I've done it, as have many others. When you don't make cheap excuses like "oh yeah let's leave out the Bluetooth, 'cos who uses it anyways?" you'll find that Macs are quite competitive. Yes, there's still a premium, but "as overpriced as can be" is not it. I would say Sony's are far more overpriced than Macs.

Re:Slow News Day?

[meadowsoft (831583)]

IANAL, but this sounds like the IBM vs. Clone lawsuits of the 80s where IBM wanted to be the only company to sell their IBM software on IBM hardware. They lost that battle, and if APple were to try to enforce their EULA they would lose that one as well. I think they aren't suing because 1) this isn't their market and 2) they wouldn't win and it would open the door for a precendent where any and all PC vendors would start selling hardware with OSX preinstalled.

How the hell...

[by Anonymous Coward]

... are they shipping a service pack to correct problems in Apple's binaries - or are they downloading the open source portions and fixing/rebuilding/shipping those as fixes?

In that case having open source is again working against Apple.

obligatory star wars parody reference

[OrochimaruVoldemort (1248060)]

begun, the mac war has.

Apple doesn't dare sue them

[Animats (122034)]

Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.

More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.

Re:

[itsdapead (734413)]

More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.

No, all they have to do is stamp the words "Upgrade: for computers with OS X 10.3 or earlier only" on the box - which is effectively what they're selling anyway. If a court decided to rule that illegal it would set some very interesting precedents for Microsoft et. al.

Wasn't the ruling in the recent Skype vs. the GPL case (where they tried to use antitrust law) something along the lines that, if a copyright holder wanted to specify that their software should only be distributed in a green envelope, such

Re:Apple doesn't dare sue them

[ShieldW0lf (601553)]

Apple is unlikely to sue Psystar. Apple would probably lose; Apple's EULA is an "illegal tying arrangement" under antitrust law. Psystar is tiny, but a court loss would encourage bigger players to start making clones.

More likely, Apple will stop selling their OS as a boxed product.

Uhh... and how would Mac owners upgrade to the latest OS? Download how many gigabytes of files that make up Leopard?? Oh yeah... I got hours to sit around and wait for that to complete.

Think before you post.

Same way countless other software companies have done, by shipping an "Upgrade Only" version that requires you to have a legitimate install before upgrading.

Think before you post.

FYI

[mpapet (761907)]

The mac market share isn't 4%. That's a dumb number that's used to make Windows appear much more dominant.

Compare Dell's unit sales to HP's unit sales to Apple's unit sales for a given segment and you'll find Apple in the top-5 for sure on any given month. In laptops, Apple is #1 per unit and dollar and has been for a really, really long time.

Still, I doubt there's the expertise on /. for a legitimate discussion about anti-trust.

Apple doing nothing is best response

[ToasterTester (95180)]

Buy doing nothing Apple isn't give any free press to this company. Companies like do are only looking for their fifteen minutes of fame. People who want Mac's will buy Mac and get a better deal once you factor in cost of OS X the clone isn't that good a deal. Down the road they will have trouble keeping up with updates and etc. In other words leave them alone and they will go back to being just another white box computer maker.

Please stop calling it a clone!

[Leomania (137289)]

Mac clone maker Psystar

This box is NOT a clone, it is a hackintosh [wikipedia.org]. Please refer to it as such, but not a clone. A true clone would have EFI firmware, not EFI emulation. It would require no hacks to install OS X, it would cleanly install and be recognized by the OS.

I believe this would actually be a desirable system if it really were a clone... but with that fan noise problem and all, how many people would really want one?

Re:

[Leomania (137289)]

If it's cheaper and runs OS X, then why not?

I gots no problem with Psystar selling a hackintosh. My main nit is calling them clones, which not even Psystar itself is doing. But for $555 (base system plus Leopard), I think the loud system fans are worth taking into consideration, as well as the unknown status of updates going forward. Buying one of these is a gamble many of us would consider taking, as even if Psystar gets slapped down by Apple we'd still have a halfway decent PC that just needed a new OS; could probably trade the copy of Leopard fo

Apple doesn't have to be the one...

[by Anonymous Coward]

Netkas, one of the hackers that basically made OSX86 possible, is not happy about how they've taken a community effort that was trying to stay away from the Apple hammer by not being involved with money. ON his blog netkas.org, he's updated the EFI bootloader license to be non-commercial...of course this would imply he'd have to reveal himself...

Maybe Apple Wants This To Happen

[mkaylor (1020395)]

Just maybe Apple is allowing this to continue to test the waters for a PC version of OS/X

Re:Maybe Apple Wants This To Happen

[kannibal_klown (531544)]

Just maybe Apple is allowing this to continue to test the waters for a PC version of OS/X

I doubt it.

One of the main reasons Apples are stable is because the hardware they have to support comes from a very small bin. Heck, even with that they're not 100% bug free (google MBP keyboard issues).

A lot of problems in Windows come from either poor drivers or low-quality components (which in turn often have old/poor drivers). For all of the flack we give MS, they do an alright job considering they have to support millions and millions of combinations of hardware.

If next month they released a generic PC capable OSX it would be a disaster. Most of their problems would come from bargain-bin PCs from Joe Sixpack trying to run OSX on his $150 Walmart box.

Linux has been dealing with this for a few years now, and though the community drivers are quite good, a lot of distros have problems with more "unique" or cruddy hardware.

Oh, the irony...

[imyy4u3 (1290108)]

The funniest part of this whole thing is the guy who wrote the patch that allows Psystar to install Apple's OS X on their PC boxes is pissed because Psystar is using his "free software" to make tons of cash and they are not giving him any of the profit. What's ironic is the fact that he blatantly violated Apple's EULA, and is now surprised that Psystar is violating his EULA. LOL.

Re:Oh, the irony...

[p0tat03 (985078)]

If the dude released his work under BSD, then he has no right to complain. If he released it under GPL, and PsyStar is making the source available, then he has no right to complain.

If he released it under his own license, then sue away, and be happy :)

A conspiracy theory, submitted for your approval.

[quag7 (462196)]

I was there in Cupertino in the early days. On my third day of employment I was called into Jobs's office. He was there, alone, in drag. He lifts up the blue skirt he was wearing, and BAM. Cilice.

"You know what this means?" he asks me, twirling a faded Apple ][+ case badge in his hand. "Opus Dei. I have some friends I'd like you to meet."

In walks Gates and Ballmer. Ballmer is in a Masonic apron and Gates says, "You know what Gates translates to in Aramaic? Bilderberger." L. Ron Hubbard (Jobs kept calling him honey-pie) then walks in with an Apple IIe prototype, or so it seems. Opens it up. Juice cans. Ballmer forces me down into the chair with a big meaty hand. In 3 hours, I'd gone clear. They had me in the basement of Novation for a few years with a chip puller, replacing perfectly fine commodity ICs with compromised chips made of pure evil. All of those g-philes about homemade bombs and manufacturing cocaine out of draino? No one in the BBS scene wrote them. They sprang forth onto boards in the middle of the night from those compromised ICs. The concept was to cause disruption and chaos in the suburbs. Why? They wouldn't tell me. But when I'd proven myself by not asking questions, they moved me up through the ranks. OS/2 Warp was mine. As was the scuttling of that product line when it didn't match this infernal cabal's machinations. But I've said too much already.

NeXT? What you don't know is how many of those were sold to the Soviets. You don't see many of them anymore; most of them were made of an unstable polycarbonate which, when exposed to alcohol, denatures into something like sarin gas. But I'm not supposed to be telling you that. The Russians are well known for computing drunk. Vodka. NeXT cube. You know what happens next. How do you think we won the cold war? The NeXT cubes you might have seen are facsimiles. If you've seen one powered on, all you've seen is a hacked version of Windowmaker running on embedded Linux. Don't believe me? Fine, be a sheep.

About a year ago Jobs calls me in. The Pope is there, as is Hubbard (who did not, in fact, expire in the California desert as the Church of Scientology would have you believe). Jobs says, "You know, people are fucking with my OS. I can't have that. Soon, we're going to see hackintoshes all over the god damned Pacific Rim. This is what you're going to do," he says to me. "We're going to start a shell company and we're going to build the worst goddamned hackintosh you can imagine. It should be loud enough to make all of the audio capabilities of the thing damn near useless. Crippled, but intriguing. That's your mantra. Fuck insanely great - the only mantra you have going forward is 'Crippled, but Intriguing.' I want you and my friends here to work it," and he motions behind me.

Standing behind me are 14 original members of the Process Church - Processians, who you might remember from the Manson connection. God and Satan in league. Turns out Jobs was a double agent, working for both the Catholics and Processians. Which side he favored is unclear to this day. But we lit out for Florida in the early morning hours to pull off the Crippled but Intriguing thing.

Jennifer Lopez, who, inexplicably was one of the "original Processians" but had somehow become age-resistant during a joint working of the Temple of Set and the OTO in 1979, says to me, "It is important that this fails. We want to sour the concept of the hackintosh in the mind of the public. It will put this issue to rest, once and for all."

We then proceeded to discuss Enochian magick and grimoires and all the casual kinds of stuff you normally discuss with an electronics-savvy death cult in a 1979 Econoline van on the way to Florida, and so we got there and set up shop.

I could be killed for posting this. But take it under advisement. There are dark fucking AEONIC FORCES behind this thing, and if you can figure out the kind of gematria Jobs is into, you'll figure out what Psystar *really* means (in A

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

tar can already process streams just fine, there's no need for a fork.

Re:OS X EULA text, interpretation

[mr_mischief (456295)]

Well, your reading of the EULA is interesting. Slapping an Apple logo on a non-Apple computer, though, would be a violation of Apple's trademark in their logo.

As long as you're looking for interesting ways to read the end user license agreement, isn't that a license between Apple and the end user? PsyStar is reselling the OS, not using it.