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Comment by othermaciej | Hacker News Reader

I am skeptical that this is actually a true story and not a parable. The alleged regular people consumer statements do not ring true.

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Also, he shows off a "OS/X" [sic] virtual machine to convince laymen that Apple's overcharging because you can run OSX in a VM. This is clearly a guy fabricating a story. Anyone who's ever virtualized OSX outside of VMWare Fusion will tell you this line is bullshit and would never offer that as a legitimate substitute for the real OSX desktop experience. Even legit OSX VMs on Fusion perform worse than their natively installed counterparts (GPU drivers just aren't very robust).

That's not something noticeable during basic desktop use. I've used VMWare Fusion a fair amount and I was very impressed. I imagine someone non-technical would not be able to tell the difference.

There's also the small aspect of it being a complete hack and against the licensing terms of the software, making it essentially piracy.

It's fragile hack, and it is against their EULA when the host OS is not OSX, but AFAIK|IANAL, violating a EULA has no broad legal precedent set in the US yet in limiting copyright terms against consumers, e.g. violating a EULA term alone does not make it piracy.

This in reply to the 'essentially piracy' comment below, which for some reason I cannot reply to (too much nesting?)

What's next? Am I stealing music if I put it in a CD player and it makes a 25ms buffer copy while I'm playing?

Fair Use is an important principle. We can't structure our laws to work against Fair Use, or dig ourselves into the absolutely braindead position that exercising your fair use rights of software, music, etc - should be regarded as piracy.

To do that is to be a total shithead.

Regarding your first line, the link only appears after a delay, that increases based on how nested the thread already is. It's a feature that is supposed to prevent flamewars by forcing people to "cool off" before replying.

In practice it seems to lead to this, which is worse since it breaks the flow without solving the issue.

Simple “reply (charging…)” would fix that. Javascript counter would be even better but let’s not hope for miracles :)

I would personally disagree, anything that's GPU accelerated is noticeably laggy inside Fusion and worse in Workstation. Notification Center, Launchpad, Mission Control, entering Time Machine, they all stutter. I applaud VMWare's efforts so far, but it's not the same desktop experience like Windows inside a VM can be. Further, Apple's trackpad and the gestures they integrate adds quite a bit to the OSX experience. No PC vendor comes close to replicating that and it's something you'd have to just resign yourself to never replicating fully.

But ignoring the trackpad, pitting a full screen OSX VM under optimal but real-world conditions against native OSX, I would still bet anyone could tell the difference.

I have virtualized OS/X with the specific naughty versions of VMWare in question on windows boxes as part of UI testing setups. While I would not play games on it, it'll run Safari just fine.

I chuckled when I read the part about starting the OSX virtual machine inside the Windows 7 host on the Samsung machine:

"And it really is just the same. See, it even runs OS X!"

I successfully installed OS X on virtual box. You cannot update it. It is therefore useless for developing iPhone Applications since XCode cannot be updated unless OS is updated.

Agreed that it's not the same experience. Very slow/laggy.

I know, right? Boy are those folks going to be disappointed when they bring home their new Samsung laptop and can't find the "OS/X" button.

I am already considering to drop OS X after the lawsuit, but I only read 2 paragraphs before I decided to look for this comment in HN before reading further.

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