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10 — Mac-cloner Psystar Loses Apple Lawsuit

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=12000EQ0SOYO

Listen to Apple Lawsuit Podcast

Transcript:

This article is about how Apple has won its copyright-infringement claim against the Mac cloning company Psystar.  Psystar, a company based in Miami, Florida, has been selling the Mac OS X hardware in Mac clone computers at a cheaper price than Apple’s Mac OS X computers.  The U.S. District Court has ruled against Psystar because it sold PCs with Mac OS X installed in them, and stated that this act was in violation of Apple’s end-user licensing agreement.  The way that Psystar did this was by purchasing an Apple computer and removing the Mac operating system.  After doing this, the company placed Apple’s operating system into a different computer frame and sold the computers under the Psystar name at a fraction of the cost.  As a result, consumers were able to purchase a Mac operating system at a much lower cost, cutting out Mac as the seller. In addition, Psystar violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) when they circumvented “lock-and-key technological measures to prevent Mac OS X from operating on non-Apple computers”.  After reading the article and researching the case more in depth, I agree with the judgment against Psystar.  The reason that I say this is because Psystar was relying on interpretations of copyright laws that were stretched to begin with, thus making their argument much less solid and credible.  From a moral standpoint, I do not agree with the resale of Apple’s technology without their permission or without them seeing any of the revenue earned by doing so.

As a result of this recent ruling, I do not see Psystar staying in business for very long.  The reason I say this is because it is currently in the process of selling its headquarters.  All in all, Psystar had a good business concept, but failed at meeting the legal requirements of executing it.

9 — Bing Maps Beta: Very Cool, but Limited

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/12/03/cnet.bing.maps.microsoft/index.html

This article is about how Google’s search engine, Bing, came out with a program called Bing Maps.  The new program is Microsoft’s latest attempt to steal market share away from Google.  Bing Maps is very similar to Google Maps in that it allows users to view street-level or bird’s-eye view photos as they move around a city.  The article stated that Bing Maps is useful, but it is much slower than Google Maps, thus making it very limited.  The one area that outperformed Google Maps is the geotagged picture galleries that can be opened in bird’s-eye view.  This allows the user to click on a green icon in a given location, and photo galleries shot of the location will pop up in a separate window.  The new Bing Maps allows Bing users to search maps and expand their searching capabilities.  I agree with the article’s review of Bing Maps.  After taking time to explore it, I think that the picture quality is great, however, it is much slower than Google Maps.  When I left the search up on my computer, I realized that it was taking up a lot of computer power due to the fact that my other browses were going much slower than usual.  One other thing I did not like about Bing Maps is that it requires users to download numerous other programs to use it at full capacity.  It can be used without the other programs, but the biggest downgrade that results is a lower picture quality.

Overall, I do not see myself using Bing Maps over Google Maps.  However, this could change if Microsoft steps up its efforts to improve the program and make my searching experience more efficient and fast.  As a user, speed of finding data is crucial, and Bing Maps has room to improve in this category.