A little-known company called Psystar attracted attention with its $399 OpenMac offer. Through the use of emulation, the company claimed it could get Mac OS X Leopard to run on a conventional set of PC hardware, at a vastly lower price than Apple offers.

The blogger behind Netkas claimed ownership of the PC EFI v8 emulator, which was designed to do what Psystar offers: provide an emulation layer between Leopard and the underlying hardware. “Redistribution and use in binary form for direct or indirect commercial purposes, with or without modification, is strictly forbidden,” the license reads.

When gadget-loving Gizmodo got on the track of Psystar’s physical location in Florida, their efforts turned up nothing but a residence at one address listed for them, and an entirely different company at another Psystar address.

“Not only does the Miami Chamber of Commerce and BBB not know anything about any company named Psystar, the actual physical address they listed on their website actually changed halfway through the day yesterday,” said Gizmodo’s Jason Chen. Gizmodo is calling Psystar a hoax.

If so, they got a lot of people with the gag, including no less an Apple luminary than Steve Wozniak. He told ArsTechnica, “I like the price, so I may get one.”

We advise him to hold off on giving Psystar a credit card number anytime soon. Even if Psystar suddenly starts churning out these machines, all it will take is one update from Apple to turn them useless bricks, as they did to people who modified their iPhones.

That’s according to ZDNet’s Alex Moskalyuk, anyway, who adds, “Total minutes at the Apple parent company grew 22% YTY, from 7.0 bln in Q3 2006 to 8.6 bln in Q3 2007.”

What do these numbers mean?  Well, as mentioned a moment ago, they probably relate to two high-profile product releases.  Even as the U.S. began to get used to the iPhone, it launched in Europe, and “Mac OS X Leopard.  Now Available,” is splashed across the Apple homepage at this very moment.

Increased attention, deeper involvement . . . Apple’s done rather well this quarter as a result, even considering the scary drop in its stock’s price (from which it’s about half-recovered).  With the holiday shopping season approaching (or already here, judging from the inside of retail stores), all these figures will probably continue to rise.

Microsoft’s new Zune, meanwhile, hasn’t made much of a splash.

I’m hoping they have something that will stun Microsoft. A while ago I wondered if Apple is playing Poker with Microsoft and is holding a hand in Leopard that will knock Vista right out of the pot. But..

Last night I was playing 5/10 cent Hold-em on-line and was dealt a pair of nines. Someone ahead of me bet sixty cents or so, and I called.

The flop was 968, which of course gave me a nice start toward a full house.

The woman who called bet a couple of dollars, which made me think she either had two pair or perhaps trips. I called, the next card was another 8 and she bet hard again.

I of course figured she had an 8′s over full house, so I raised her as I had the better hand. She went all in and I called. The pot was now $14.00.

As it turned out, she had four eights. Too bad for me. Could the same sort of surprise be in store for Apple?

Sure Vista has been late, and we’re all assuming that it is because Microsoft is having internal problems. But what if this is Microsoft’s poker ploy? Look weak for a couple of months while Apple finishes up Leopard, then slam down the big surprise?

Well, maybe. Personally, I think Apple is going to win this hand. Microsoft still has most the chips, but Apple and Linux are not out of the game yet and the laying down of hands in Vista vs. Leopard is going to be very interesting.

Anyone think Microsoft has four eights?

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com

My very first thought was that they’ve wrapped a gui front-end around filesystem versioning or snapshots. That would be the logical way to do this; otherwise you waste a tremendous amount of unnecessary space for backup:

(From http://www.macworld.com/2006/08/firstlooks/leotimemac/index.php):

How will Time Machine work for people who modify gigantic files on a regular basis? For example, consider a 1GB database file. If I make a tiny modification to that file, Time Machine writes out another 1GB file to record that change. As a result, drive space on my backup device could quickly disappear.

A while back, it was rumored that Apple might be working on ZFS for Leopard. Is that how they are doing this? Well, maybe, but others say “ZFS is not in the Leopard discussed at WWDC in any capacity”

Maybe they added versioning to HFS+?. It wouldn’t seem all that hard to do given the metadata capabilities already present. Versioning itself isn’t all that new; it goes back to DEC’s TENEX and VMS filesystems. Even SCO implemented undelete with versioning. But no, the descriptions of Time Machine don’t sound like versioning: they talk about having a separate drive for the backups. So that’s probably not it.

So do they really duplicate data over and over again? That seems so unlikely. At the very least a simple version control diff method would cut down on that tremendously. But we don’t yet know. Wikipedia’s reference says:

It is unclear at this time whether Time Machine should be considered as a simple back-up utility or as a complete filesystem-level version control mechanism. Apple’s website merely states that an API will be released so that third party developers can take advantage of Time Machine.

And that’s where it stands for now.

*Originally published at APLawrence.com

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A.P. Lawrence provides SCO Unix and Linux consulting services http://www.pcunix.com