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Posted

So I bought a 3ish year old Mac Pro tower on Craigslist. Decent machine with 9 gigs of RAM, 3 hard drives, 2x Xeon quad cores, but the previous owner wiped the hard drive and no longer had the original install disks. Probably one reason why is was such a good deal.

So working in IT for many years but just more recently needed to get good with Mac, I thought to myself, hey no problem. I'll just go buy a copy of the OS and away we go... wrong. Apparently to combat the hackintosh "problem", you can no longer just go buy a copy of OSX. They have stopped selling the Lion USB install drives and Snow Leopard DVDs. Direct words from the genius bar. What they want you to do is, bring the machine to the Apple Store and let them install it for you.

I kindly explained that working in IT, I would likely want to mess with the machine and have the ability to re-install if I chose so that was really not my preferred option. The reply to this was, once they install it for you, you can make a time machine backup to use if you ever want to re-install. Maybe I'm just being a fist shaking old man here, but this is horse shit to me. The newest generation of hardware has the ability to re-install over the internet from an options key bootup, which is nice, I admit, but it does not help with older hardware such as this. So I have a nice, slightly used mac with good hardware, and no real way to install the OS unless I lug this chrome steel tower into an apple store and then use a time machine file as my only re-install method. Or I could also go on ebay and try to purchase retail snow leopard disks or a Lion USB key for 2-3x the original retail value.

Apple, this is BS. People are still going to be able to make a hackintosh if they want, you are just annoying people. Put the damn DVDs and USBs back on the shelf already.

./rant off

Posted

One of the reasons why I don't use Apple products very much, they are full of it. With PC you have the flexibility to do, what you want.

Apple just like to control what it's users should be doing or not with it's product.

Posted

@Mr-Protocol, lol that shit was so hilarious. Do you have anymore of those videos?

Posted

@Mr-Protocol, lol that shit was so hilarious. Do you have anymore of those videos?

It was a video from a long time ago, i have a swf copy saved when it was first popular. Don't know of others.

Posted

One of the reasons why I don't use Apple products very much, they are full of it. With PC you have the flexibility to do, what you want.

Apple just like to control what it's users should be doing or not with it's product.

When you say "PC" are you referring to Microsoft?

So tell me how you feel about Secure Boot.

Posted (edited)

When you say "PC" are you referring to Microsoft?

So tell me how you feel about Secure Boot.

Never heard of it.

Ehh, no biggie.

Microsoft confirmed it would require hardware manufacturers to enable secure boot on Windows 8 devices, and that x86/64 devices must provide the option to turn it off while ARM-based devices must not provide the option to turn it off

Edited by barry99705
  • 3 weeks later...
Posted

Never heard of it.

Ehh, no biggie.

Microsoft confirmed it would require hardware manufacturers to enable secure boot on Windows 8 devices, and that x86/64 devices must provide the option to turn it off while ARM-based devices must not provide the option to turn it off

It's interesting to me that your response to that is "no biggie".

In any case, http://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2012/09/thank-you-apple.html

Posted

It's interesting to me that your response to that is "no biggie".

In any case, http://commandcenter...-you-apple.html

It's really not a big deal. It can (supposedly) be turned off on x86 machines. For the arm based machines, so what? It's not like most (or any) people are going to try removing win8 tablet edition or whatever the fuck they call it to put on Android, or linux.

Posted

I will and pretty much every linux user that buys a arm tablet.

This will pretty much lock us out of our machines in time. ( ok overkill but how useful are iphones and ipads --- think of all computers like that)

Posted

It's really not a big deal. It can (supposedly) be turned off on x86 machines. For the arm based machines, so what? It's not like most (or any) people are going to try removing win8 tablet edition or whatever the fuck they call it to put on Android, or linux.

Originally there was no requirement to allow it to be turned off on x86 machines, they only caved after a lot of pressure from the FOSS community. Now they've loosened the noose on x86, but not Arm.

Are there going to be fewer people who want to put an alternate OS on their tablets? Probably. However by locking down the platform like this they are stifling that potential for innovation and competition before it even be explored.

More and more Microsoft and Apple are both moving toward a walled garden model where users are "protected" form any applications or content which is not explicitly approved by some unknown body according to vague and unevenly applies criteria. Believe it or not, this is a kind of censorship. Even Google and Amazon are playing along, too. We are handing over our personal freedom and control over what applications we run and what content we see to these profit-driven, publicly traded companies. They have biases and agendas.

It's short-sighted to say, "it's fine if they take away a freedom that few of us will exercise". By that logic, they will chip away at our liberties one by one until we have none left. Do you really want a world that is curated and dictated for you by some corporation that only cares about their own bottom line?

Posted

Wow sitwon, that is how I feel expressed in a smart way I could not type.

No it was not easy to get debian on my acer iconia tablet - put it could be done -- I still do not see native linux on any I-device and Mircosoft has just said it is ok to lock down the arm processors but not x86.

Triple the speed of the P6 chip. Yea RISC is good, Its going to change everything.

Posted

Wow sitwon, that is how I feel expressed in a smart way I could not type.

No it was not easy to get debian on my acer iconia tablet - put it could be done -- I still do not see native linux on any I-device and Mircosoft has just said it is ok to lock down the arm processors but not x86.

Triple the speed of the P6 chip. Yea RISC is good, Its going to change everything.

Isn't that what Apple was saying years ago? As for linux on an arm windows tablet, why not just buy an android tablet? Or better yet, why not just buy an arm tablet that already supports linux? They're out there. Other than "because we can" why bother installing linux on a device that wasn't designed for it? You know there's going to be at least one component with no open sourced drivers, we get that already with Android phones and tablets. Why do you expect Microsoft, a company known for not being open source friendly, to be free and open with their own devices? I'm all for open devices and operating systems, more than half the devices in my house are running some form of 'nix, but expecting every hardware vendor to support it is just insane.

Posted (edited)

I think you missed the joke. http://www.subzin.co...h. RISC is good

Isn't that what Apple was saying years ago?

This might help. http://www.subzin.co...h. RISC is good

As for linux on an arm windows tablet, why not just buy an android tablet? Or better yet, why not just buy an arm tablet that already supports linux? They're out there. Other than "because we can" why bother installing linux on a device that wasn't designed for it?

It's not about running Linux, it's about having ownership of the device. I paid for the device, I should be allowed to run ANY software I want on it. I should be allowed to reprogram it any way I want. Maybe I'll run Linux, maybe I'll run Haiku, maybe I'll run FreeDOS. But that's not the point. The manufacturer telling you, "it will only run software that has been signed with a private key... and I'm the only one with the key," is not acceptable.

Furthermore, this concept you seem to have of "wasn't designed for Linux" is just strange. How can hardware really be designed for or against a particular OS. It's designed to be Turing-complete so it can run any software that can be loaded on it. The issue is over who has the right to load software on it. As the owner of the hardware, shouldn't I be allowed to load any software I choose on the hardware?

You know there's going to be at least one component with no open sourced drivers, we get that already with Android phones and tablets. Why do you expect Microsoft, a company known for not being open source friendly, to be free and open with their own devices?

I don't care about drivers. We can always get datasheets for the chipsets from the silicon manufacturers who sold them to Microsoft and write our own drivers. I'm talking specifically about the problem of loading and running arbitrary software onto the device.

For the sake of argument, if I want to run an Arm build of ReactOS then in theory I would be able to use the same Windows drivers that Microsoft uses.

I'm all for open devices and operating systems, more than half the devices in my house are running some form of 'nix, but expecting every hardware vendor to support it is just insane.

Again, I'm not asking anyone to support Linux. I'm not asking anyone to support ANY operating system (other than the one they sell me). This isn't about whether or not it runs Linux or whether or not Linux is "supported". It's about having the right to install any software or content I want on a device that I have purchased and now own.

Here's the analogy, imagine you go to an office supply store to buy some paper. When you get there you find they have a new type of paper from Microsoft, but this paper is a little different from normal paper. Microsoft promises that anything you print or write on the paper will be backed up to their online cloud automatically. However, the Microsoft paper can only be used with printers that have been certified by Microsoft. You can't even write on it with a pen or pencil unless the pen or pencil was certified by Microsoft. And if you happen to print or write something that Microsoft doesn't like, they can permanently erase it right off the page (and out of the backup) at any time for any reason. If you try to find a way to circumvent these restrictions so that you can write on the paper with a normal Bic pen, then you will get sued by Microsoft. Does that sound like a good deal to you? Does that sound fair? Do you want paper like that?

Edited by Sitwon

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