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Macs Ostracized on Capitol Hill
jonerik writes "Wired News has an article today on the last Apple holdout on Capitol Hill, Ngozi Pole. Pole, the office and systems administrator at Sen. Edward Kennedy's (D-MA) Boston and Washington D.C. offices, argues that the Senate Office of the Sergeant at Arms (SAA), which makes technology recommendations to senators, wants to make its job as easy as possible by pushing Windows-based applications as much as they can. According to the article, 'The SAA allocates $250,000 per six-year term to each senator. The department had hoped Pole would use the budget to replace aging Macs in Kennedy's offices. Instead, Pole will spend the remainder of his budget through 2003 filling Senator Kennedy's Washington office with new flat-panel iMacs.' Unsurprisingly, the SAA declined to comment."
Far too many admins focus on the process of being an admin, rather than on serving customers. On platforms and products rather than solutions.
Far too many Windows-only admins have been trained as MCSEs, and that training emphasizes a one-world homogenous platform. Products and platforms. "Here's Windows - and the things you can do with it," rather than, "What do you need to do, and how can Windows help you do that?" The thought processes of these admins (and I've seen this time and time again in 14 years of being a sysadmin) takes the cant of "how can I convince my customers to work this way?" The way that the MS tools provide.
It's the wrong question. The wrong approach.
The user is the customer, not the enemy. They pay you to solve their problems, so give them solutions. It shouldn't matter what platform - Mac, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD - what should be at issue is what provides the best solution for the customers needs.
-- Niherlas
By all means, let's be fair.
CC:Mail, the current mail platform, is not Y2K compliant (I'm a former CC:Mail admin), it is not supported, and they are likely not providing any further patches of this dead platform. Everybody was supposed to make the switch to notes before Y2K. The SAA didn't. Macintosh has a CC:Mail client so the macs are likely just as secure/insecure as the rest of the users.
Microsoft Exchange, the SAA proposed new mail server, has a native Macintosh client though many Exchange administrators don't know about it since it is hidden on a separate HFS partition. Put the client disk on a mac and the mac client shows up (I've also managed Exchange Servers).
Jaguar is supposed to come out with a native mail client with excellent Exchange compatibility. In other words, there are likely two viable clients going to be around RSN.
As far as security track records go, XP has what track record? How about 2000? Mac OS X is pretty much equal or superior in actual tract records to both of them.
Stability track records are similar. An Apples to pears argument isn't fair. MS's code base has been significantly redone and I haven't seen a whole lot of stability testing demonstrating either Apple or MS being superior here. Assuming instead of testing is just another way to not earn your paycheck.
As for visibility, I would say that this is not the SAA's business. It's the Senators business as they get a budget for all sorts of things, desks, chairs, computers, etc. and if they want to make things look good, that's their choice, not the SAA's.
As for cost effectiveness, Senate offices don't buy $500 scrape the bottom of the barrel laptops. They buy IBM's, Compaqs or Dells with which Apple is pretty price competitive, sometimes a bit higher, sometimes a bit lower.
I've worked in offices where administrators had a platform agenda, sabotaging other platforms, hardware and software, in favor of what they wanted. Occassionally, it can lead to a disaster where a sabotaged system is abandoned and they simply don't replace it.
This is no way to spend the taxpayer's money.
The last time a government body tried to choose a single computer as a standard, it caused a big stink. The body: NASA. Here's a letter from Dan Goldin, then-NASA administrator, who replied to a congressman on this issue. (http://www.reston.com/nasa/a/07.02.97.goldin.lamp son.html)
Goldin didn't institute this policy, I feel, but some other clown at a NASA agency. Today, since NASA's mandate needs more than a bunch of Windows workstations (with fault tolerances that would give a man-rated program like the Shuttle cause for abandoning spaceflight altogether since destruction of the spacecraft or launch failures would be a virtual certainty) to handle scientific programs and the like. For NASA, moving to Windows just made no sense. For Capital Hill, there is some sense for this until you realize that, in these days, standardizing on a single platform locks a company into the faults (many dangerous) which can result in data destruction or security compromises.
Someone on the Hill needs to be reminded of their own laws. Problem is that the Hill MAKES the laws, and it wouldn't be the first time where Congress does its "do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do" routine.
Government is normally not allowed to pick one competitor over another for anti-competitive reasons. Bidding is normally done for things where multiple standards are impractical (like fighter jets).
Standardizing on Windows for Congress puts up a big "HACK ME" sign to terrorists and other people with time to waste. UNIX isn't a panacea, but it has a hell of a better resistance to attacks and doesn't suffer from Microsoft's code insecurity and bloat.
Most importantly, Mac OS X is the only UNIX family that runs Microsoft Office, but without the virus compromising technologies like ActiveX and VBScript.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
But there is another factor that's kept Macs out of federal life to a big extent: the law on universal access, formerly known as handicapped access in less enlightened times.
Specifically, mandates in Section 508 (29 USC 794d) of the Federal code, require computers purchased by fed agencies (not to mention their websites and more) to be fully accessible to people with vision problems, etc.
With Jaguar, Jobs claimed at WWDC that its "universal access features go well beyond fedarally mandated standards."
Translation: "We screwed ourselves, but now we're fixing that."
In other words, with this upgrade, the OS includes Quartz for magnification so the magnified screen is relatively resolution-independent. Zooming in on text would show you a fully anti-aliased font at whatever font size you needed, not just pixelated magnified clunkiness. Apple is apparently also shipping screen-reading software with Jaguar, and it works for interface parts (menus, windows), for documents or any text under the mouse. Keyboard navigation (remember "Sticky Keys" and Easy Access Software way back when?) is back, this time for Classic apps, not just Cocoa ones.
Altogether, these changes make it legal now for Apple to compete for federal purchasing contracts. This flaw in Apple's operating systems before now, maybe more than the SAA, was to blame for the relatively poor marketshare in government offices. At least now that has a chance of being changed.
That being said, I still don't like Congress all that much, just on general principles. I hope they get hammered, too. But Apple's not completely pure, either. Is anyone?