Apple warns users of impending Boot Camp expiration

80 Comments

1. @ iMaki – I hope you like sex and traveling, because you should do both right now !!! and kick the preverbal bucket whilst doing it !!!

   … Oops, sorry, was that was a tad unsentimental of me?

   MacCrazy – our little looney friend with a penchant for tin foil apparel on his head, we know who you are … DUDE !!!

   next!

   Reply

2. Some of us have been using Leopard for long time now. It is just perfect. Order your copy as soon as it is available.

   MDN magic word: reason.. there is no reason to wait.

   Reply

3. @Donna,

   I looked at the code presented in the link you posted. Several things come to mind.

   1) The programmer has ‘borrowed’ source code from an open source web site. This code is offered free of charge. That is not an automatic mark of either quality or otherwise, but it does indicate that the programmer was too lazy to adapt it himeself.

   2) The programmer has added an additional copyright notice which would appear to be deceptive practice. Also not a good sign.

   3) The web page uses both PHP and Java as its programming language. These both present the generated HTML code differently to Internet Explorer which regularly departs from international standards as supported by W3C (the accepted Internet standard)

   4) Some of the font sizes in the code are rediculously small and it would appear that Safari and other browsers attempt to render them correctly as coded. Internet Explorer on the other hand cannot cope and so ignores it. This is an example of a defect in Internet Explorer accidentally helping the user. It is likely that a future fix of IE by M$ will result in this page misbehaving as it does in other browsers.

   I am happy to advise further if required so please feel free to email me directly and I will see what I can do.

   While both VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop provide good solutions for running Windows, it would be much better if the underlying problem could be fixed so you did not have to run Windows at all.

   Good luck anyway.

   PS. The browser ‘Opera’ in its latest version will allow itself to be configured to mimic IE but I am not sure that this would extend to miming IE bugs which is what you have here.

   Regards

   G

   Reply

4. Donna,

   Hard to answer your “why does it not work question” without full access to the software and looking at it both on the Windows and OS X sides. Having said that, what it looks to me is that the software these Homescape folks are using is a Java applet.

   Just like any application (or applet in this case) there are bugs. IN this case, what they are saying to you is, there may be bugs in OS X but that is not our problem because we fully tested it in IE for Windows and we are not seeing any issues there. Also, we told you that we only support IE for Windows, so we don’t know/acknowledge any other issues you may be having outside of anything you can see in IE for Windows.

   I would suggest an alternative to a scenario others mentioned. Instead of getting a spoofer for Safari that tells the world that it is IE, get a spoofer for IE that tells the world that it is Firefox. If my suspicion is right, you will get the same result in IE that you get in Safari (the small login window) and then you can sit back and watch in glee how the IT department goes bonkers trying to figure out why you are getting this issue…as long as you don’t tell them (or they figure out) the spoofer…

   For this to be more effective you might even want to do it with a true Windows box, otherwise they’ll say “well this does not happen with any of our other Windows machines, it must be that Boot Camp crap you are running.”

   Another thing you might want to do probably before the spoofing thing is to install the Java software directly from Sun and tell IE to use that instead of its built-in Java support. This will also very likely produce the same result in IE that you are getting on the Safari. Why?

   Because I’m betting your IT staff does not install Sun’s implementation of Java and only relies on Microsoft’s implementation of Java. Other OSes use Sun’s Java implementation because it is the only one available for them.

   If you replace Microsoft’s version with Sun’s version, you should be in a more Apples to Apples environment.

   Sun’s Java: http://www.java.com:80/en/download/manual.jsp
   Spoofing: http://whatsmyuseragent.com/SwitchingUserAgents.asp#IE

   In the meantime, as others have mentioned, Parallels or VMWare will give you a full IE implementation without having to shutdown and reboot like Boot Camp makes you do.

   Hope some of this helps and remember, by simply running two OSes on your computer like you do right now, you already know more than your IT guys do. If you don’t think so, ask them how many OSes do they know how to use?

   To top it off, by going through some of the steps above you’ll be even more technically ahead than they are…not that you want to be, but it will still be something to be proud of.

   Reply

5. Or you can work with fenman who is a lot more technical about the issues.

   In particular, I’m sure that pointing to your IT staff (tell the CIO not his/her croonies) that the code they are using could bring them into legal trouble will probably get a quick response out of them.

   If the CIO ignores you, tell the CFO, nothing scares a CFO more than watching their hard earned money go down the drain because of legal issues.

   Reply

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