As of yesterday the notorious Mac Clone manufacturer Psystar has released a commercial software called Rebel EFI. Rebel EFI prepares a normal PC to allow for the installation of Mac OS.
After downloading Rebel EFI,
[..] users simply insert a retail copy of the Snow Leopard DVD, follow the installation procedures and then install the application. The [...]

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With the advent of Snow Leopard many users have issues installing it onto PC based hardware. Well this is not very curious, since a PC is no Mac. Anyway as Gigabyte motherboards proved to be very close to the original Apple Intel specifications many people decided to buy those boards.
With the release of Snow Leopard [...]

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About a year ago a company called ASEM released a device called EFI-X. This device has been claimed to be capable of booting several Microsoft Windows versions and Mac OS X Leopard.
Legal concerns
From the beginning there were question regarding the legal status of the device. But ASEM claimed the device is legal, although it circumvents [...]

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Pay attention guys when updating iTunes on your Microsoft Windows machines. iTunes will list Safari as a recommended update to your iTunes installation, although you never installed Safari before – and of course: you’d better not install it, since Paypal is about to block it anyway. More details to be found on Golem.de (german only).
» [...]

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According to a white paper by Paypal, Safari lacks certain specific anti-phishing protections and EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates. Paypal will in the first place just tell the users, that they are using those unsafe browsers. Later on Paypal will take steps to refuse access to Paypal at all, when users are [...]

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As denoted yesterday, the Psystar topic seems to be a little fishy. First: obviously they use the EFI v8 emulation developed by Netkas. For comprehensible reasons Netkas is not amused about Psystar and decided to edit his EULA to bar commercial use of PC EFI – well… we don’t expect Psystar to respect Netkas’ EULA, [...]

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It took a really long time, but in the end Apple decided to offer at least something to their customers of the 2yrs old MacPro’s. Apple now offers a GeForce 8800 GT graphics board that is compatible to the old 32 bit EFI. The price in the Apple US webshop is US$279 (=€175).
» Apple NVIDIA [...]

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Probably Apple is in a weaker position than all of us may have expected in the first place. That comment in the MacRumors forum and that article on Wired.com explain, why. The biggest problem seems to be: Psystar does not break the law. They don’t sell pirated copies, but legally bought copies of OS X [...]

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Informationweek interviewed a Psystar representative about their strategy of selling Mac Clones (see our recent articles). In short: Psystar says, the EULA (end user license agreement) – especially the parts where Apple restricts the use of OS X Leopard on Apple manufactured hardware – is in violation of U.S. monopoly laws.
» Informationweek: Psystar challenges Apple…
» [...]

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deutschsprachige Version: hier klicken
All of us know how to change the standard file associations in Microsoft Windows, but recently we switched to a Mac and Boom – everything is almost the same, but there are minor to major differences. Like changing the program to open a specific file type (like Adobe’s Portable Document Format or [...]

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A friend of mine today told me, his MagSafe power adapter gave a nice smell and finally made a meltdown. Customer reports in the Apple Store read like “Power Adapter Smoking Smell, loose & Super HOT“. It seems like Apple got some serious issues with the MagSafe power adapters. Run for cover, if yours begins [...]

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The Miami, USA based company Psystar Corporation is the first to have a heart to build Mac Clones and sell them. Psystar is selling a model called OpenMac. Psystar obviously managed to put an EFI (extended firmware interface) onto the BIOS of a standard motherboard to emulate the EFI commands in Apple OS X.
The price [...]

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The two finger scrolling in OS X is just fantastic. I would never like to miss it ever again. Always when I use a normal PC Laptop I wonder why two finger scrolling doesn’t work. I wonder how long it takes for the other Laptop manufacturers to copy that feature and integrate in their systems.
Anyway [...]

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The german tech-news Golem.de today reports, Adobe Photoshop’s product manager John Nack announced, that there won’t be 64bit support in the Mac OS X version of Photoshop CS4. The reason is, Apple announced on the WWDC in summer 2007 that they won’t enhance the Carbon API anymore and that developers should migrate to the Cocoa [...]

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This is for the matter of completeness of my own records. You will find this on many places on the net, prolly not that well documented ;-) Anyway, the following flags and parameters may be put into Darwin before bootprocess:

flag / parameter
meaning

-f
Force rebuild extensions cache

-v
Verbose booting shows debug information

-s
Boots into single user mode (means only [...]

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Ever had the situation that you just copied a specific file to a folder but it won’t show up in the finder? Yes? Well more than once should be the typical answer. Don’t let crappy finder decide when to update your view. Just install Rainer Brockerhoff’s “Nudge” and update the view in the finder whenever [...]

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English
Deutsche Übersetzung weiter unten…
All of us switchers know the situation: rather that switching from one application to another in Microsoft Windows we can switch from every window to another using ALT-TAB. The problem is such behaviour is not known to the Mac world. A major solution for that problem comes from Peter Maurer. He developed [...]

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On the annual security conference CanSecWest the MacBook Air was the first to become compromised (link to german Heise.de article). The attackers used a not yet known way to get access to OSX 10.5.2 but it was necessary that a user opens a prepped webpage, typical network intrusions did not work. Apple is in [...]

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So guys you have bought an “ASUS P5LD2 VM DH” motherboard because it was suggested to be working, but something does not work. The following article will show you how to configure the BIOS to make Leopard 10.5.2 working with its vanilla stock kernel. Before starting over please do me the favor and tell me: [...]

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Yes it is true. The “XMBC on OS X” project maintains a version solely for OS X. It is running quite stable and look well known from my beloved XBox. It seems like the x264 implementation is a lot faster than the one inside VLC. But on the other hand XBMC has for instance issues [...]

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