Use an editor like TextWrangler that can display all the characters in a piece of text, not just the visible ones?

http://www.edibleapple.com/psystar-disses-apple/

It seems that I am not the only one who is viewing some of the statements made by Psystar as less than believable.

I am actually pretty happy to have been snagged on the took versus taken rule. I am already a grammar terror at work. Now I have another pet peeve to spring on the unsuspecting secretaries who might be relieved that I have something else to talk about other than m-dashes and n-dashes. Did you notice I used n-dashes properly in my piece? Yes, I am quite proud of my n-dashes and m-dashes. To Psystar’s credit, they use the m-dash properly. Very few writers do.

I appreciate you pointing that out. I won’t make the same mistake again. I bet you can find at least one more. But I don’t make the same mistakes twice when they are pointed out to me, and there is only one person proofreading my work. Me. At law firms, these pleadings went through at least three hands, likely more. I would guess that the senior partner’s hourly rate is $500 an hour. I know this may be shocking, but I don’t get paid that here. I know, I know, its hard to believe.

I actually did agonize a bit over that statement when I wrote it. Why? Technically, Psystar is a singular entity as it is a corporation. However, it is well known that practically speaking Psystar is the two Pedraza brothers. So I went back and forth on that and in concentrating on that point, I missed this rule:

In fact, there are two past-tense forms of “take” which shouldn’t be mixed up with each other. For the simple past you need “took”: “Beau took a course in acoustics.” But if a helping verb precedes it, the word you need is “taken”: “he has taken some other courses too.”

source: http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/took.html

You can bet your biscuits that I will not make that error again. Thank you for pointing it out. Perhaps you can point out where I ever claimed that an error or two is inexcusable? Oh that’s right, you can’t.

How again does this excuse a high-powered law firm from making numerous mistakes including misspelling their own client’s name multiple times and misspelling the name of one of the products they are speaking of? I wait with bated breath, so please do tell. Do you have any comprehension at all of the enormity of one’s filings in a case of this magnitude before a Federal Court?

You see, I make no bones that dislike Psystar and believe they are unethical. However, before I posted this scathing take-down, I had let Psystar know about these kinds of errors so that they may avoid them. I had absolutely NO duty to do so. Why did I? Two reasons:

1. The contact I have close to Psystar is a friend of mine, and I care for this person.

2. I wanted to show professional courtesy to people practicing in the same profession.

My contact faithfully relayed this information to Rudy Pedraza. Nothing was done. That is highly unprofessional and disrespectful to the Court. Period.

May I solicit your proofreading assistance in the future? Email me, and I will definitely take you up on the offer. It is quite hazardous to have only one set of eyes on a document. It is amazing that I make so few mistakes considering that this type of writing is done on the fly and often at 2am. Yes, that is when this article was posted. At 2am. How good is your grammar at 2am after spending six hours reading legal pleadings and performing the necessary fact checking? I bet you mine is better. Mine is certainly better the highly-paid attorneys who had days to carefully craft their response to be presented to a person who carries the title “Your Honour.”

Sorry fellow, Psystar has no excuse here. Nice try.

PS: My original sentence said “Psystar should have just bucked up and taken it like men…” I then thought to myself that “buck up” might be a local colloquialism which does not carry the same meaning to everyone. Much to my dismay, I discovered (through Urban Dictionary) that it is also slang for a phrase I would never use. That also disoriented me when writing that sentence. I came so close to potentially using gutter language unawares which would have been mortifying.

I pointed out that “Max” error months ago and tore apart their proposed Amended Counterclaim to my contact with Psystar. I did not (yet) tear it apart here. Why? I fully expected within hours for Psystar’s attorneys to move to amend to correct Scrivener’s errors. But they did nothing. I asked my boss if I would still have my job if that passed through my hands. I was told I would not be the only one gone though that might have been hyperbole as we tend to have a very pleasant and jovial work environment.

It isn’t that we don’t make mistakes. Once we used a form and forgot to put in the current client’s name in the correct place so that in one spot it named the client incorrectly. You can bet your biscuits that once this was discovered that we make triply sure that doesn’t happen again.

So I guess I took all this time to say they were sloppy from the beginning. I just didn’t notice because I was impressed with the cleverness of some of their arguments that they were able to squeeze out of what I felt was a dog of a case.

Thank you for the UNIX information. The nitty gritty of the really geeky stuff is beyond my ken, so I don’t even act like I know. I do, however, have some UNIX books in my reading stack to try to correct that deficiency. That type of imprecision is present in their Amended Counterclaim as well in which they stated that Steve Jobs returned as CEO in 1997. That is not precisely true. He was “interim CEO” for quite some time while Apple was ostensibly searching for a permanent CEO. In casual conversation that would not make a difference. In a statement of facts to a Federal Judge? I think that is a different ballpark.

This stuff is so poorly written, is it at all possible that Psystar’s high-priced lawyers have abandoned them? Perhaps they cleared out after the dismissal, and Psystar has resorted to using relatives and blog-commenting “attorneys” for their defense?

I mean, really, the First Amendment? Clearly, we’re not just talking poor grammar and proofreading here.

BTW, Mac OS X Leopard is not “UNIX like” or “UNIX style”. It’s the real deal. Leopard was Apple’s first OS X iteration in full conformance with the Single UNIX Specification and POSIX. It’s now UNIX. Period.