* Posts by Luke 22

2 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jun 2009

Chrome OS: Windows killer?

Luke 22
Jobs Halo

@Lutra

<quote>Most people would widely agree that Macs are nice computers and that the operating system is fast, efficient and secure (the latter a really bad rumor spread my Apple, they're easier than Windows to attack).</quote>

Please enlighten us by providing a step-by-step guide on how to hack into a Mac box. I want to know the specific details of the exploit. Oh yeah, and user-engineering doesn't count. It has to be an exploit that runs without user consent. Also, Apple patched the recent Java vulnerability.

Thanks!

Apple wins right to continue Hackintosh beating

Luke 22
Jobs Halo

Psystar leaching off other people's work

Psystar essentially wants to leach off the 20 years of work that went into building OS X and use it to make money with little or no up-front investment. No, OS X is not just a simple GUI slapped on top of BSD. It's based on NeXTStep which is/was:

1) Mach/kernel. Contrary to popular believe, the kernel is not BSD. It's a hybrid Mach/BSD kernel. Mach is a microkernel, not a monolythic kernel like BSD and Linux.

2) GUI development toolkit and tools. These have morphed into Cocoa/XCode, but they were once part of NeXTStep. These development tools and GUI framework didn't come from the open source community. It's proprietary technology that was built from the ground up, with substantial investment.

3) Filesystem. The filesystem is HFS+, which was developed by Apple.

The only thing to come out of the BSD codebase is the command-line shell (FreeBSD), and part of the kernel (NetBSD).

Think about it, if developing OS X were so easy, don't you think there would be tons of PC makers selling machines with pre-installed Linux with a nice GUI built on top of it? No, Apple has a competitive advantage because they have unique technology that took 20 years to develop.

Also, the "EULA's aren't valid" arguments are wrong for two reasons when referring to the licensing of OS X:

1) OS X boxed sets are sold as updates to existing OS X installs. The only reason that full installs can be done with them is as a convenience to Mac users who choose to do clean installs. Apple isn't Microsoft.

2) Any Hackintosh install involves modifying key system binaries and replacing them with hacked versions in order to run on BIOS (non-EFI) hardware. Doing this work private doesn't really violate the spirit of copyright (even though it does the letter) for hobbyists because they're not distributing it. Any company that sells a product based on this derivative work is violating copyright, so this has nothing to do with the EULA.

Besides, all Apple has to do to kill the Psystar would-be cloners is to simply change the way OS X updates are distributed. I'll bet you Snow Leopard has a few surprises in this regard.