The whole Psystar $399 Computer to run OSX, brings to light an interesting issue about software ownership. The Psystar spokesman is reported to have said “What if Honda said that, after you buy their car, you could only drive it on the roads they said you could?”. This is a straw man argument. When you purchase software, you are purchasing a license to use the software, and to use the car analogy, it’s more like leasing a car. If you lease a Honda, it’s a violation of the lease agreement to modify and race the car. End User Licensing Agreements (EULAs) are exactly like lease agreements, You purchase the right to use the software as a licensee after agreeing to the terms of the EULA. Good, bad or indifferent, that’s the way it is.
The other Argument by Psystar is that this is a anti-trust case citing that “What if Microsoft said you could only install Windows on Dell computers?”. If that were the case, then perhaps that would be a violation of the Sherman Anti-trust act for collusion, but if Microsoft bought Dell and then only sold Windows to owners of Microsoft computers that is not a violation. Back to the car analogy, Honda makes Honda engines to run Honda cars (and Acuras), if you want to put a Honda engine into your Miata ,you could probably do that with some hacking. Now, if a company started selling Miatas with leased Honda S2000 engines pre-installed for $5000 dollars less a than a Honda S-20000 and called it the “Open Honda” it would be the exact same thing as the Psystar case. This would violate the engine lease agreement and it’s a trademark infringement. Not that I wouldn’t want a 240 HP Miata , the same way I want a Mac Mini with a 512 Meg graphics card in it. Hello? Mazda and Apple are you listening?
So unfortunately, I don’t think Psystar has a leg to stand on. The old advice to RTFM might have to be changed to include RTFEULA as well. On a side note, Psystar’s website is back up and they are no longer offering the “Open Mac” It’s been renamed the “Open Computer.” Like Mae West said “Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”
If you want a visit from Apple’s lawyers, one way to get their attention, is to announce that you’re selling a $399 Computer preloaded with Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. That’s just what a company named Psystar did this weekend. Pystar is selling a standard PC tower called “Open Mac” and is using the EFI emulator to run OSX on it with “minimal patching.”
Psystar is touting the computer as a cheaper more expandable alternative to a Mac Mini saying :
When comparing base configurations, the Mac Mini costs 150% of the price of the OpenMac while offering poorer performance, smaller storage space, and RAM. Not only that but the Mac Mini doesn’t have the option for an nVidia GeForce 8600 video card like the OpenMac does so playing games on it is a lost cause.
The idea of running Second Life, or W.O.W. on a “Mac” with a 512 graphics card for under a thousand bucks does have it’s appeal for many users, me included. But I would be wary.
The Open Mac brings back memories of my Power Computing Tower a few years back. The Power Computing computer had it’s compatibility issues with, then Mac System 7 and I remember that the CD drive was a constant nightmare. And the Power Computing computer was legal, the Open Mac is not. Also note that installing Leopard on non-Apple hardware is a specific violation of the OS’s End User License Agreement (EULA).
You can just hear Steve Jobs shouting “Release the hounds!” Apple’s lawyers will surely try to take the party out of any third party hardware company trying to sell anything loaded with Mac operating systems. So the Open Mac may already be a closed case.
(Ed.Note) Apple Lawyers have already shut down the Pystar site as of this morning.
I remember a time when the thought of a Web browser crashing was unheard of. I mean, it’s only a Web browser, what is there to crash? When Firefox was launched back in 2004 . My first thought was why does the world need another Web browser? Windows users have IE and Mac users have Safari for free. Soon though Firefox won me over, primarily because of the Web developer tools plug-in greatly simplifies Web development and Firfefox displays valid Webpages and CSS more accurately than IE or Safari. And let’s face it, there are some pages out there that don’t display correctly using IE and there are some pages that ignore the Safari browser.
This was all well and good up until about six months ago. Then I started noticing the dreaded beach ball of death appearing more and more often. Then Firefox would stop responding altogether and I would have to force quit the application. Having to force quit an app is pretty drastic in my opinion, and indicates some serious bugs. I’ve reinstalled the latest version and only added the Web Dev add-on, yet at least once a day I’m having to force quit Firefox. It’s gotten to the point that I surf with both Safari and Firefox open. I’d go over to only Safari but WordPress admin doesn’t seem to like Safari, and I’m still attached to the Web Dev add-on for Firefox.
What to do? The Apple crash reporter sends to Apple not Mozilla, and it IS a free app. I mean I would expect a complex app with millions of lines of code like Photoshop to crash every once in while, but a Web browser? Cmon.
Of all the applications that come as part of the Mac OS, iTunes is without a doubt the oddest creature in the zoo. First off like the blind men describing an elephant, if you ask ten people what iTunes is, you’ll get ten different answers.
For podcasters, it’s the place to subscribe to and sync podcasts, But only if the podcast has been submitted to the podcast directory of the iTunes store. Also iTunes and Quicktime Player are the only applications that will play “enhanced” (.M4a format) Podcast.
For a DJ, iTunes is a great way to put together a playlist for a set. And it’s the only way to play songs from your iPod through your computer. I you want to play music from your ipod from a third party DJ program you are outta luck.
The other thing is that Syncing your music though i Tunes, doesn’t sync it at all. Sync would mean that you would have the same music on your computer and your iPod, but iTunes version of “sync” is a one way deal. It only moves new music from your computer to your iPod. Forget getting music to your computer from your iPod. That’s a No-No because that would make it too easy for you to steal and copy music. The Sync Process makes it WAAY too easy to wipe all your songs from your iPod that you may have put on there from an older Mac or some other source. losing music (or any other data) is never good.
It’s good that iTunes makes it easy to buy music from the iTunes store, but it’s horribly bad that most the music is AAC DRM encoded music. Screw that !I’m buying .mp3s from Amazon or E-music.
Buying TV shows is pretty cool if you don’t mind watching TV on your computer. But the movie rentals are absurd.,the 24 hour limit to watch a movie is just plain silly.
Also you can use iTunes to convert sound files import CDs and Burn CDs. But you had better be a power user to figure it out. Here’s a situation that comes up in my Music class all the time.Let’s say you have an imported .wav file on your desktop and you want to convert it to .mp3. Do you know how to do it in iTunes? It’s simple:
1. Open iTunes
2. Go to the file menu select Add to Library, navigate to the desktop and add the wave file to the Library.
3. Find the file in your music library by going to the recently added items playlist.
4. Go to the iTunes menu and select Preferences.
5. go to the advanced Tab and select Importing.
6. Select MP3 Encoder from the pull down selector and choose a sampling rate. and click on the OK button
7. Go back to your file in the recently added items playlist and highlight the file.
8.Go to the Advanced Menu (or option click on the file) and choose Convert Selection to MP3.
9. Once the file is converted to MP3 you will have 2 files with the same name in your playlist, one of them is a .wav file and the other is your converted .mp3 file. To tell which file is which, go to the View menu and select view options, Then make sure that the kind checkbox is checked.
10. In the playlist window scroll right to expose the kind column. You will see that one of the files is an .mp3.
11. Finally option Click on the .mp3 file and select Show in Finder, to find where iTunes saved your .Mp3 file. And then ypou can drag the file to where you actually want it.
See, an easy eleven step process.
There are many other reasons I love/hate iTunes. I’d love to hear a few of yours.
You might look into your iPhone and discover that it’s full of stars. That is, if you download one of these cool astronomy apps for your iPhone.
iSkygaze provides backyard astronomers with information on where and when objects will be viewable from their location. It provides rise/set times, current location in sky and basic brightness, as well as some other information on several easily viewable night sky objects. I do wish it expressed magnitude in standard numbers though.
The folks at Space.com bring us Starry Night Mobile, an iPhone friendly version of their stellar astronomy app Starry Night.
This is a super cool web app that lets you set any time or location and see a graphic representation of the sky.
My personal hobby is to watch satellites pass overhead from my hot tub. Though I would not get an iPhone near a hot tub, there’s an app that will let me know what to look for before I get in. Look Up is another little App that will let you know when some of the bigger satellites will be passing overhead. If you want to view information all the satellites that might be visible from your location, you’ll still have to go to the Heavens-above Website.
I’m hoping that when the SDK for the iPhone arrives, that we’ll see some cool telescope control apps from the iPhone.
It didn’t take long before somebody turned an jailbroken iPhone and turned it into a musical instrument. Moo-Cow-Music did just that, in fact, they created not one but three virtual instruments for the iPhone: a Guitar, a drum, and a piano. The best part is that the applications are donation-ware. Call your friends on their iPhones and let ’em know you are getting the band back together. But you might have to get into a shred-off with the first all iPhone band, iBand. You can check out the iBand in this YouTube video.
But Moo-Cow-Music isn’t the only instrument maker out there, there’s also the open source Pocket Guitar from Shinya Kasatani. Here’s a picture of the elegant interface of the Pocket guitar:
But wait there’s more! If you were thinking that you were left out just because you play an instrument called the Gansa in a Balinese Gamelan orchestra, you’d be wrong. Just download a little app called Gangsa by Masayuki Akamatsu, who has a bunch of other handy iPhone apps including the perennial favorite iPhone electric shaver app.
It will be interesting to see,what’s going to happen to all the jailbroken iPhones and apps once the iPhone SDK is released, hopefully it will allow the developers to make more stable legitimate applications. Then let the battle of the iBands begin!
I was talking to one of my students and she said that she would switch to a Mac. But she didn’t want to have to buy all of her apps over again. I asked what apps she was talking about and she said, her office apps, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My first thought was you could get Office for Mac and then I thought you can do all of that with online apps like Google Docs. Welcome to cloud computing.
While Macs are relatively free of viruses and spyware and malware in general there is one area that isn’t as secure as you may think. That area is identity protection. And one way criminals steal your information is from phishing.
The Second Life virtual world generally requires some serious computer power to run, mainly for it’s real-time 3-D graphics. So being able to run SL on an iPhone, requires some trickery.
I was on the phone with a friend, trying to help him solve a Web design problem, and he said, “The client wants it to work on an 800 by 600 screen,” and I said, “What? Nobody designs for 800 by 600 anymore,” And then I realized that pixel creep had happened to me. That’s right folks, we’ve super-sized again. 1024 by 768 is the new 640 by 480. If those numbers are Greek (or geek) to you, I’m talking about screen size.
I teach classes on GarageBand and Soundtrack Pro at the local community college. We have video projectors and these things called Smart Boards, where you can navigate the computer screen from the projection screen. This is like magic except that the maximum screen size is 1024 X 768. This is the minimum recommended size for those applications. GarageBand is cramped but usable and Soundtrack Pro is practically unusable, as is Final Cut Pro. I have to wonder when it was that the software engineers all got together and said from now on, no applications under 1024 X 768?
I’m spoiled, with dual 20″ LCDs at the MacMost office and a 20″ iMac with another 20″ LCD at home, but I gotta feel sorry for you if you’re still stuck with a CRT that only does 1024 X 768. It’s only a matter of time before the minimum will be full HD 1920 X 1440, and CRTs and VGA will be a distant memory.
Okay The new MacBookPros came out today and three of the four models sport the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB graphics card. and I say card because these reportedly use the NVIDIA MXM graphics card connector. I remember a while back that I read in a Gizmodo article that the new 24″ iMacs used the MXM connector and were theoretically upgradeable. Do you see where I’m going with this?
Hardware-wise the Apple TV is super-fly. 802.11n, component and HDMI or even DVI (with an adaptor) video output, Toslink digital audio, and USB 2.0.
The rumors are pretty strong that we’ll see three new models of MacBook Pros tomorrow as well as Time Capsules shipping.
The Time Capsules are reportedly in this weeks Best Buy printed flyer, and the stock numbers for the new MacBook Pros have been entered into Best Buy’s Point of Sale system, according to multiple forum posters on the MacRumors website.
The rumored features of the new Macbook Pros include multi-touchpads ala the MacBook Air and LED backlighting on the 17″ Models. Also Penryn processors are anticipated, one hopes that the Penryns run cooler than the current processors, which seem to run just below the melting point of the Macbook Pro’s Aluminum case.
Don’t hold your breath for iPhone SDKs tomorrow, most are saying that the SDKs wont ship for another two weeks.
I was drooling over the features of the 32GB iPod Touch, and thinking to myself that it may be the most perfect portable media device in the world. At 32GB it can hold most of my music and a couple movies. I was dreaming of kicking back on my next plane flight and watching a widescreen movie in widescreen with stereo sound in my Bluetooth wireless headphones… but wait, the iPod Touch doesn’t have Bluetooth? This has me scratching my head. When they were stripping down the iPhone to make the Touch, I can understand why they didn’t put a camera in it, but why did they leave out the speaker, the mic and the Bluetooth? I can believe it’s a cost issue, the 8GB Touch is a hundred bucks cheaper than an 8GB Phone, and the 32GB Touch is the same price as the iPhone 16GB.
I still can’t justify getting an iPhone myself, but for most I can see why they would spend their half a grand on an iPhone over a Touch. I would consider a Predam iPhone, but as of firmware update 1.1.3, no A2DP stereo Bluetooth on the iPhone either.
I know I could just buy a $49 iCombi stereo Bluetooth adaptor for the Touch or the iPhone. But that is just plain ugly and ruins the elegance of the device. C’mon Apple, have the Bluetooth fairy bring us A2DP Bluetooth in the next iPod touch and implement A2DP in the next iPhone update, please.
Okay, say you’re NOT an Idol fan, but you’re a Mac fan, Why should you care that the iTunes store is selling the performances from this years American Idol?
It means there are going to be about a bazillion PC users that are going to be installing iTunes and Quicktime on their PCs. And they will be setting up purchasing accounts in iTunes And after they’ve purchased and downloaded all their favorite performances. They are going to be buying a lot more music in iTunes. in other words Idol is going to be the Gateway drug to iTunes, iPods and eventually all things Apple.
It means the stock will go up and the reality distortion field will widen and we’ll have iTablets in no time.
It means that iTunes could become the Tivo in the Cloud, where people will drop their cable subscriptions and get all their TV shows ala carte on iTunes.
It means that rabid Idol fans are going to mob Apple stores demanding more Apple TVs, So they can keep the next Carrie Underwood’s performance immortalized in HD.
It means that Simon and Steve will be Kings of the world!
Okay, I’m blowing this out of proportion but isn’t that the stuff that dreams are made of, just like American Idol.
Maybe it it’s the geek in me, But I like dials, gauges, graphs, and blinking lights. Whether it’s my car or my computer I like to pretend I know what’s going on with it.
I like deciphering the blinking lights of my OBDII reader to learn that, yes, I am going to have to buy an O2 sensor for my car soon. That’s why I like The Activity Monitor on my Macs.
The Web browser market is starting to look like the stock market. Currently Firefox’s stock seems to be going down and Safari’s is going up. Opera seems to just hang in there and IE for Mac is trading as a penny stock.
It’s got to the point that I have both Safari and Firefox open most of the time, just so I can navigate sites that don’t support one or the other. Maybe, I’ll have to have yet another browser open now. Flock is a new web Browser whose raison d’être is to consolidate your Web 2.0 rock and roll lifestyle.
Flock uses tabs to keep tabs on your various social networking sites. Your Facebook ,Twitter , Flickr, and You Tube friends and timelines are all under the People tab and your Flickr, Photo Bucket and You Tube photos and videos are under the Media tab, and You can sort all of your RSS and other feeds under the Feeds tab. Other cool features in Flock are an accounts tab to keep track of all your web accounts and passwords, and you can post to your blogs and upload photos all within the browsers interface.
All this stuff is cool, but maybe it’s just shyness, but I’m not quite ready to make Flock my default Web browser… yet.
First, it takes about an hour just to configure the thing to work with all your sites and once you’re done with the ordeal, you kind of wonder if you could have done the same thing in Firefox with tabs and an add-on. Secondly, I’ve got to put it through it’s paces as a plain ol’ web browser to see how compatible and fast it is before I trust it as my main browser.
I have run into one snafu trying to get it to log onto my blogs to post, but I want to figure it out a bit before I declare it a bug.
If you are heavily social networked, Flock may be your new browser, Saving you time logging onto all those sites, so that you can waste more time networking.
Flock is available as a free download at flock.com.
Okay, I usually don’t blatantly promote software. Nor would I usually steer you to another Mac site. But this is too good of a deal to pass up, if you are at all interested in DJ software.
There are several good DJ mixing applications out there, the big three are Tracktor DJ Studio, Ultramixer and DJay. Of the three, Tracktor is the big-boy Pro app but at $280US list price, it’s definitely beyond the budget of the casual DJ. UltraMixer Pro has most of the features of Tracktor and goes for $230US and while I like UltraMixer’s interface better than Tracktor’s in most aspects, UltraMixer is obviously a cross platform port, There is nothing Mac-like about it’s interface or menus. Finally there is the little engine that could. If you like spinning with two turntables and a microphone DJay is the app for you! It has a cool two deck interface and all the controls are Mac-like and intuitive, and at $50 US its a bargain.
So here’s the deal For today only (February 20, 2008) Djay is available as promo deal on MacUdate.com for $24.99.
Even if don’t catch today’s deal, if you have any interest in DJ software you should check out the trial download of DJay at the DJay website.
You might think that the staff of a big Mac site like MacMost would get all the new Apple products for free. I only wish it were so. So in the grand scheme of the tech ecosystem, I have to decide how much of my paycheck I’m going to recycle into Apple products and I have to decide which product I should be saving my pennies for next. Here is my current thinking.
I’m not much of a cell phone guy, but I do like the idea of the internet in my pocket, so the iPod Touch seems like it would be a really cool thing that I would use all the time, and I could even pretend I had an iPhone, and look cool, without the monthly commitment. On the down side is that it only has WiFi access (read, no driving and surfing) and my wife would probably take it and then I’d have to buy another one.
Our G3 iceBook is all but dead, it gets a case of the blue screen about a minute after booting, So it’s time to replace the iBook with a MacBook. I’m not much of a traveler, but when I do, I need my computer. Or rather, my wife needs my computer. This is because the entire social network of Second Life will falter if my wife is away from it for more than 24 hours. So iPod internet will not do, we need to be able to run Second Life. Downside to buying an MacBook? First is I know the day I buy one, the NEW MacBooks will be released, Actually that’s why the new ones aren’t out, Steve is waiting to see my purchase order for the current model before he releases the new one. Oh, and if I buy the MacBook, that blows my budget for the year and my wife would probably take it and then I’d have to buy another one.
Finally There is the Logic Studio, Logic studio had half the features, was harder to use and cost twice as much a year ago. Now it’s half the price, has tons of new features, includes Soundtrack Pro 2, a bazillion new Appleloops, and most of all, it got a new intuitive interface that mortal musicians can understand. The downside is that my wife can’t use it and therefore probably wont approve the purchase.
And finally I could just buy my wife the new iMac to replace her G5 and bask in the warmth of a happy wife and wait till next year for the next version of Logic studio.
Apple announced that they had dropped the price of the 1 Gig iPod Shuffle to $49. $50 is the price point that technology essentially becomes affordable to anyone. That means that kids are going to get real iPods for their birthdays instead of cheap knockoffs from companies like Creative and SanDisk. That in itself is going to be a huge market.
