Apple Wins Hollow Victory In Psystar Ruling

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/182220/apple_wins_hollow_victory_in_psystar_ruling.html

November 15, 2009
Apple Wins Hollow Victory In Psystar Ruling
Apple won the court ruling against Mac clone-maker Psystar, but does the outcome really benefit anyone?
Tony Bradley, PC World

A federal judge has ruled in Apple's favor in its lawsuit against Mac-clone maker Psystar. Prevailing in the court battle seems like it should be a good thing, but what Apple really gets out of the victory is limited market share potential. Uhm, congratulations?

Obviously, I am not a lawyer, but it does seem like Apple's case against Psystar was pretty solid. In order to make the Mac operating system work on the PC clone hardware Psystar had to actually hack part of the operating system and replace it with unique code of its own. Even if Apple was being compensated, the result still seems that Psystar was profiting from a derivative work that violates Apple's copyright.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup explains in his ruling "In sum, Psystar has violated Apple's exclusive reproduction right, distribution right, and right to create derivative works."

I don't agree that Apple should have the ability to restrict the hardware that I install the Mac OS X software on, but based on the application of existing laws I can understand why Apple won this case. The fact that Apple can leverage existing law to maintain draconian control over how its products are used is a flaw with the laws and their application, not with Apple.

I don't understand or agree with most copyright law and EULA restrictions as they pertain to computer hardware and software. As far as I am concerned, Apple dictating what hardware I can install Mac OS X on is like Doubleday Books telling me where I am allowed to read Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, or like Sony restricting me from playing The Taking of Pelham 123 on a Toshiba DVD player.

Imagine if other industries worked like that. Let's use cars as an example. You pay $30,000 for the privilege of indefinitely 'borrowing' a Chevy Camaro, but General Motors reserves the right to tell you where you can park it. And, if you try to customize or modify it in any way, like changing the factory-default rims or installing a new stereo system, General Motors sues you for creating a 'derivative work'. There would be riots.

I fully understand that I can't reproduce the product in part or whole for redistribution as my own. Got it. But, once I have paid Apple for my copy of Mac OS X it shouldn't be Apple's business any longer what I do with it. If I want to modify it to make an automated toaster oven, or use the DVD as a coaster for my coffee mug that should be my prerogative. Its mine, I paid for it.

This judgment comes in the wake of the recent update Apple released for the Mac OS X operating system that prevents users from creating 'Hackintosh' systems. By removing support for the Intel Atom processor, Apple effectively disabled the ability for users to install Mac OS X on inexpensive netbook hardware.

The Psystar case and the Hackintosh 'update' both work to ensure that Apple retains complete, draconian control of every aspect of Mac ownership. From developing the operating system, to what hardware the operating system can run on, to where you can buy the hardware and software, Apple dictates the customer experience.

The result is a solid operating system and a wonderful customer experience, with little or no potential of growing much beyond its current market share. Apple seems to be generating huge profit and maintaining high customer satisfaction just fine though, so choosing draconian control over market dominance seems to be working out OK.

10 Reasons Snow Leopard Is Ready For Business

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/170679/10_reasons_snow_leopard_is_ready_for_business.html

Tony Bradley, PC World Monday, August 24, 2009
10 Reasons Snow Leopard Is Ready For Business

There are a variety of enhancements and refinements introduced in Snow Leopard, the next version of the Mac OS, which Apple announced will be available this Friday (August 28). The Mac is generally viewed as a consumer or niche platform, but some of the features in Snow Leopard show a maturity that makes the Mac better than ever for the enterprise.

1. Annotations in Preview. New tools enable you to annotate and markup PDF files using Preview. The annotation tools include comments, links, highlighting, strikethrough text, shapes, text, and arrows.

2. Restore deleted items to original locations. This seems long overdue. In Windows data restored from the Recycle Bin is automatically restored to its original location. With Snow Leopard restoring to the original location is now an option on the Mac as well.

3. Sortable search results. Snow Leopard adds the ability to sort Spotlight search results for more efficient searching. You can sort search data by name, date modified, date created, size, type of file, or label.

4. Nearby printers. When printing Snow Leopard displays the printers that are detected nearby, enabling you to identify and configure the best available device for printing your document.

5. Automatic update for printer drivers. When a printer is connected Snow Leopard connects to the Internet and downloads the most current driver for the device. Snow Leopard also periodically checks via Software Update to ensure that the most up-to-date driver is installed.

6. AirPort menu signal strength. Connecting to the best available wireless network is easier with Snow Leopard. The menu bar item for AirPort displays signal strength for all available wireless networks so you can choose the strongest possible connection.

7. HFS+ read in Boot Camp. Users who use Boot Camp to dual boot between Windows and Mac now have support to be able to share data between the two operating systems and access files from the Mac partition while running in Windows. The functionality is read-only to ensure that any Windows-based viruses can not write malicious software or data to the Mac files.

8. Improved 64-bit support. Snow Leopard extends the Mac's support of 64-bit hardware. Key system files and applications have been rewritten in 64-bit code, and the Mac OS is now capable of accessing significantly more memory.

9. Cisco VPN support. One of the cooler updates for Snow Leopard is built-in support for Cisco VPN connectivity. Cisco VPN's are common in enterprise networks and now Snow Leopard users can connect securely with corporate networks without needing any additional software.

10. Exchange support. Last, but not least. The ‘piece de resistance' of Snow Leopard which arguably makes it more enterprise-ready even than Windows 7: Snow Leopard has native support for connecting with Exchange. That's right. No need for Entourage. It makes Microsoft's announcement to include Outlook in the next version of Office for Mac a little like shutting the barn door after the horses escape.

I am not under any misguided belief that there will be any mass migration of businesses to shun Windows 7 and adopt Mac OS X instead. However, the Mac OS X operating system has come along way from the hip, grunge ‘I'm a Mac' dude on the commercials. Now it's more like if the ‘I'm a Mac' guy put on 25 pounds and wore a suit. It's getting there.

Tony Bradley is an information security and unified communications expert with more than a decade of enterprise IT experience. He tweets as @PCSecurityNews and provides tips, advice and reviews on information security and unified communications technologies on his site at tonybradley.com .

'MacHeads' documentary looks at Mac faithful

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10133698-37.html

January 6, 2009
'MacHeads' documentary looks at Mac faithful
Daniel Terdiman

'MacHeads,' a new movie about the Apple and Macintosh culture, will premiere Wednesday at MacWorld.

It's a long-established truism in technology journalism that stories about Apple are pretty much guaranteed to do better than just about any other subject.

And why? It's certainly not because of the total size of the user base of Apple products. Rather, as has been very well chronicled in newspapers, magazines, online, and in books, the passion felt by the community of Apple users far outstrips its size.

Now, with the release of MacHeads, you can add movies to the roster of media documenting the full fervor of the Mac faithful and their particular brand of do-it-yourself brand evangelism.

MacHeads, a 54-minute film by the Israeli director and producer team of Kobi and Ron Shely, has its world-premiere Wednesday with a screening at Macworld, a suitable place for a film about 25 years (or more) of Mac fanaticism, especially because much of it was filmed at Macworld 2007.

It's also a bit of an ironic location to launch a cinematic discussion of hard-core Mac fandom, given the recent announcement that Apple will end its participation in Macworld after this year, a development that could well spell the end for the last large-scale physical gathering of the very people the movie is about.

In a way, however, the end of Macworld as we've known it plays right into the hands of the Shely brothers, as one of the chief arguments their film makes is that the newest generation of Mac users depends much more on the Internet for community than Macworld itself or the users-group meetings that have taken place in any number of cities around the world for so many years.

Either way, though, one thing is made abundantly clear in MacHeads: As long as there are Mac users, new or old, on working computers or museum pieces, the so-called cult of Mac will stay alive and well.

As a movie, I found MacHeads to be rather uneven. It struck me as haphazardly edited, and it struck me that the filmmakers were never completely clear with themselves whether their movie was about Mac users, their passion, Apple, the computers themselves or the transformation of a small, yet unbelievably vocal community.

Probably, that's because it's about all of the above. But where MacHeads succeeds in amply demonstrating the extent of the feeling the faithful have for their beloved Macs, it suffers from an obvious lack of clarity.

Still, it's kind of fun listening to the so-called MacHeads opening up to the world about their obsession. It's also not at all unfamiliar. I myself am writing this on a Mac, and between my wife and I, we have five Macs, two iPods and two iPhones. And she would probably recount proudly that she nearly dumped me early in our relationship when I told her that I was considering buying a PC for my next computer.

In the film, this distaste for all things Windows takes many forms, some funny and others even more funny.

Early in the movie, for example, the well-known sex author and blogger Violet Blue, says, with only the slightest hint of irony, "I've never knowingly slept with a Windows user. Ever. Ever. That would never, ever happen."

Later, DigiBarn computer museum co-founder Bruce Damer talks about Apple taking on IBM and PCs as "the force fighting against the beige banality."

While the Mac--in its many iterations--is the technological focus of the devotion of the MacHeads, Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs is clearly the human form.

And together, Jobs and the products his company makes comprise a church of sorts, with thousands, if not millions, of followers.

"If you go online and look up the definition of a cult," Shawn King, the executive producer and host of Your Mac Life, says in the film, "Mac users are a cult. You know, complete fealty to one leader."

Fealty and devotion often have a physical component, and for some Mac fans, that's a tattoo. MacHeads, then, features at least two cases of users with Apple logos emblazoned on their legs.

But some Mac users clearly think of their computers as an extension of themselves--a sentiment that some might laugh at, but which others will understand fully.

"Only Mac people really put stickers all over their laptops," digital media strategist Deborah Schultz says in the movie, "and I think it's indicative that this is kind of something that is close to me like my clothing and it's an identification."

These days, with Apple flying high on the strength of the massive success of the iPhone, the iPod and the Mac line, it's easy to forget that in the mid-'90s, the company was on the verge of failure. And for the 25 million or so Mac users at the time, events at the time like Macworld were a place to come and share their hopes and fears about their future computing.

"You have to be an optimist to be a Mac user," said former MacAddict columnist Joseph Holmes in the film, "because there were those tough times when we thought, you know, maybe I'll have to use a Windows system. Maybe there won't be a Mac in a couple of years. It was kind of tough."

Or, as fellow Mac fan Debroah Shadovitz put it, "We would have entered the dark ages if Apple went away. We couldn't let that happen."

As is the basis for endless business school case studies today, of course, Jobs returned from the Siberian exile of forced life away from Apple, and brought the company back to glory, first with the iMac and then with the company's next--and maybe biggest--game changer, the iPod.

Oddly, MacHeads hardly covers the iPod, and its importance in making Apple what it is today. I think that's because the whole point of the film is to focus on the passion of a niche group of tech users, and the iPod has been such a mainstream hit that it is the dominant portable music player today, hardly the kind of device that establishes the us against them mentality that many of the Mac fans in the film evince.

Yet, the movie feels like it has a hole without a discussion of the iPod, and I think that's evidence of the lack of clarity I talked about earlier--the indecisiveness as to what the film is really about.

Because this is well-covered ground, there is little in MacHeads that would surprise anyone who is familiar with the cult of Mac. Yet, because that community is so visible and outspoken, the movie is bound to have an audience--at least of the already converted. Whether it will appeal to those outside the fold is less likely, to me, at least.

No matter, though. Apple's fan base alone is large enough to give the Shely brothers a sizable potential audience, even if many of those people really just want to see how their kind is portrayed on film.

After all, in the end, what makes the cult of Mac powerful, and interesting, is the people.

"It's the community that you want to talk about," says Shawn King in the film. "Don't love Apple, love the community."

Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between.

Analyzing Google's "Android"

http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.aspx?feed=FT&Date=20071106&ID=7772032

Analyzing Google's "Android"

If you can measure a new technology's popularity by the number of companies trying to attach their names to it, then Google's new Android mobile-phone platform is a big deal.

By the time I left the office yesterday, I'd heard from the developer of Android's voice-command software, a company providing fonts for Android, a publicist for a competing Linux mobile software effort, yet another mobile-Linux software developer, a firm that sells cheap international cell-phone calling, the Public Knowledge think tank (which basically opined "Yay, Google!") and CTIA, the wireless industry's trade association ("If ever there was evidence that so-called 'net neutrality' rules were not needed, today's news is it").

This kind of breathless anticipation says something--and not just that a lot of people are unhappy with their cell phones. Google's past successes have rightly led people to expect great things from the Mountain View, Calif., company, and now it has given itself one of the toughest tasks imaginable: reinventing the mobile phone with this new, open-source software.

Without prototype phones to test or even pictures of the Android software to study, it's hard to say how well Google might live up to these expectations. But a few things seem clear about this project--formally known as the Open Handset Alliance--from the limited material published so far, press coverage and a phone interview yesterday with Google's Rich Miner, who helps run the company's wireless strategy:

* Although dozens of companies are listed as partners on the Android site, Google started this work and continues to orchestrate the project, Miner said. This isn't a phone by committee, nor is Google inviting the world to inspect and edit the Android source code just yet--though people will have that right, one absent from name-brand phone software, once this platform ships.

* This project also incorporates many contributions from people and companies. For example, its music- and video-playback software comes from a developer called PacketVideo. And Miner said that Android's Web browser is built on the same open-source WebKit software as the Safari browser in Mac OS X and the iPhone. ("Next week, we'll be releasing all of the improvements we've made to WebKit," Miner said--meaning that if Apple incorporates these revisions into Safari, the next iPhone could itself be a bit of a Google phone.)

* The Android software is written to run on cheap handsets, not just flashy, high-end smartphones. Miner said it allows for a variety of input methods, including conventional numeric keypads, QWERTY keyboards and touchscreens. Handwriting recognition is not built in, although Android's open-source license means anybody could add it later.

* The interface remains a secret. Miner would only describe it as "consumer-friendly and state-of-the-art," but said the software-development toolkit to be released on Monday would include a working, preview copy of the Android interface. Considering what Google has done to make Web search, e-mail and mapping--to name a few things--both powerful and simple, cautious optimism seems justified here.

* Miner said Android will be written to allow synchronization to a computer's address book, calendar and other personal-info-management programs. But it will be up to other companies to write appropriate sync software.

* The hardware manufacturers listed as Android partners have all made significant contributions to phone design recently: HTC, LG, Motorola and Samsung. The supporting U.S. carriers, Sprint and T-Mobile, have not done as well despite offering more liberal usage terms than AT&T and Verizon (T-Mobile unlocks its phones to allows use with other carriers after the first 90 days of a contract, and Sprint doesn't prohibit broad categories of Internet use with its mobile broadband service). For more on this angle, see veteran tech writer Glenn Fleishman's analysis of Google's partners in the Mac newsletter TidBits.

* Any wireless carrier that adopts the Android software could, however, build a traditional, locked phone with it. During a conference call yesterday afternoon, Android director Andy Rubin and Google CEO Eric Schmidt each said this software's open-source license requires them to offer that freedom--although Schmidt called that "both possible and highly unlikely," in that a locked-down Android phone would only disappoint customers.

* While we'll be able to see what the Android interface looks like starting next week, nobody is predicting the arrival of any Android-powered phones before the second half of next year.

While we all wait, what do you hope to see come out of this Android project?

By Rob Pegoraro
November 6, 2007
Category: Gadgets