MacOSXPhiles

Last October, Maui X-Stream Inc. burst onto the scene, a completely unknown company in the Mac sphere, and claimed to have developed, from scratch, a PowerPC emulator called CherryOS that would allow people to run Mac OS X on x86 architecture at up to 80% of the x86 machines’ capabilities. They were also claiming that it was just days away from release, that a trial version would be available for download, and that it would be available for purchase at the blue-lite special price of just $49. But nothing came except for excuses as to why it wasn’t available, and the ability to order CherryOS from their website quickly became the option to pre-order it.

I’ll admit that when I first heard about CherryOS, I was not familiar with the technical challenges of emulating PowerPC architecture, and was definitely interested in buying it, should their claims be true. At the time, I was playing around with some different flavors of Linux designed for PowerPC, and thought it would be great to be able to do the same with OS X on the Athlon64 system that I had built to run Linux.

Well, as it turns out, the claims being made by MXS appear to be completely false. (more…)

Filed under: Reviews, Software, Rants
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As Napster prepares to launch their new Napster-To-Go service, I’m not sure whether to laugh, or to feel sorry for them. As published yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle and by Reuters, Napster is planning to launch a $30 million dollar ad campaign promoting their new music-to-rent service by attacking Apple, and the iTunes Music Store, who currently dominate the online music and hard-drive-based music player market.

Napsters’ claim in their upcoming ad blitz is that paying a monthly fee of $14.95 to download all the music you want is a better deal than actually buying your music for $.99 per song from the iTunes Music Store. They try to justify this by claiming that filling an iPod, which could hold 10,000 songs depending on the model, would cost $10,000 to fill with music from the iTunes Music Store. But with a music player that plays music in the Windows Media format, you could download all the music you want from Napster-To-Go for just $14.95 per month to fill your music player.

First of all, I don’t think that many iPod users are filling their iPods with music purchased exclusively from the iTunes Music Store. Sure, there may be some people out there doing this, but most people already own music prior to buying a portable music player, and start by filling their players with an existing digital music library, or start building their library by ripping their CD’s to their computer. And second, to suggest that people out there aren’t downloading music from P2P networks, or otherwise obtaining music without paying for it, would be ridiculous. Right?

The real question here isn’t how you obtain your music, but rather a question of ownership, and fair-use rights. (more…)

Filed under: iPod Stuff, Rants
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