DrunkenBlog

By the short and curlies

I made a few changes to the CherryOS post, including adding in another bit of amusing evidence, making a clarification, and changing the direct download link.

Regarding the clarification, it involved the part about MacWorld running a feature on CherryOS that for all intents and purposes was just its marketing bullet points.

Someone at MacWorld rightly pointed it was an article on their website, not their actual magazine, and that 'feature' was probably too strong of a word...

There's a larger issue here in publishing involving the inherent limitations of wanting to run with what seems to be a juicy story but not necessarily having the background to smell something really fishy in the marketing materials, or sometimes the inclination to follow up on it.

I wasn't trying to single out MacWorld about this -- it's systemic to most levels of publishing, including blogs, and including this one -- just trying to give the history of what happened and show the patterns in Maui-X's behavior. In terms of buzz, the MacWorld article just happened to be ground zero in this case.

For a more recent example check out what OSNews carried when the trial download was announced. Probably the most egregious piece was at MacObserver.com, by Brad Gibson, where he boiled down the evidence to one sentence involving some "alleged" forum posting and complaints.

*sigh* Somewhere in there is a large blog post I don't have time for until this other stuff is off my plate.

I almost don't want to deal with having to change it all the time, but if there was a company I didn't want to have people's information, this would be it, and people are downloading them for posterity because as I mentioned they seem to be removing things daily. If you have the time to do it daily and archive them, more doing it couldn't hurt at all.

No, I'm probably not going to be mentioning it every time I update the post (and there's more info out there, I'm being selective), but this one is just too amusing...

The emulated network adapter's MAC address (Media Access Control) is the same as PearPC's. Since there are about 281,474,976,710,656 potential MAC addresses out there, the statistical odds of this being a coincidence are about zero.

Most networking protocols -- ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, SCSI, Firewire etc. -- need a unique numerical identifier in order to function. This is your system's MAC address, and it's already set by the manufacturer when you buy your computer or router or other device. When you plug your computer into your cable modem, your ISP binds your connection to your MAC address before giving you an IP address.

I always kind of worry when I'm trying to break down what something like a MAC address is, and why it exists, in the constraints of a paragraph. Hopefully it gives the right idea to someone who doesn't really know what's going on, without completely twisting the panties of those who do.

One of the things that has struck me (and others) is just how incompetent Maui-X has been in trying to cover their tracks with CherryOS. There is an inherent ratio between risk and reward these guys would need to calculate, and they just seem to be incapable of finding their ass with both hands.

It's like this: you often don't go to very elaborate lengths if the chances of your behavior coming under scrutiny are low. It doesn't mean your behavior won't come under scrutiny, just that if your mom comes in from the next room and catches you sneaking the last cookie, the fact that you didn't devise an elaborate plot to do it in the dead of night with paw prints next to the now broken cookie jar in order to implicate the cat wouldn't necessarily put your critical thinking skills into question.

However, when you know there are questions about your product's lineage, and you don't hire one of your pakistani sweat coders to do nothing but obfuscate the trail, it does. That or it's just hubris, and their belief that they can outrun the story while raking in cash.

I've been asked for benchmarks regarding Maui-X's claims for CherryOS versus PearPC, but I specifically avoided doing that except to say that I've tried them both and when it comes down to it, CherryOS is actually slower.

I didn't specifically post benchmarks because that post is aimed at a wide range of people, and I want them to hopefully do it themselves, but I wanted them to understand what they were going to be seeing when they did it. Especially journalists for larger sites who -- with a bit of effort -- can take it out of 'vague questions about its speed on the internets' to the next level of awareness.

It's like this; you just know Maui-X is going to be following their pattern and pulling every single trick they can when answering questions about their speed claims. They'll all be designed around raising doubt and buying time while they are raking in cash. "Configuration issues with those benchmarking" will probably be the starting point...

Which isn't to say I won't have benchmarks on here. I really do urge you to try it for yourself (if you're daunted by PearPC, there is a graphical installer for it) and do benchmarks on real-world things normal people can understand and generate nice pretty graphs I can link to. Record your actual hardware, and your methodology, and by all means send it in.

I'm just hoping other places will do it first. I want EWeek and MacWorld and a host of other publications to do their own benchmarks and approach Maui-X with them, not to approach Maui-X with other's claims only to be given a vague brush-off that buys them more time while giving them more press.

If the word doesn't get out about not only the licensing issues, but the verifiably false claims, those 'just linking to it' and not following up will be doing their readers a grave disservice in this case.

Maui-X has said they'll be posting a response to the criticism on their website in the next few days, which I'm going to assume it's going to be amusing and fascinating in its own sick way.

When you consider they said they'd have the public trial out within a few days and it took months -- who knows when it'll be, but stay tuned.

 Posted by drunkenbatman
    March 14, 2005, at 07:03 AM