Using Macs In The Work Place

Kelly McNeill writes "It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."

Comments

Anyone having trouble accessing the website?

[herrvinny]

Anyone having trouble accessing the website?
All I get is:

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Re:Anyone having trouble accessing the website?

[gsdali]

OSViews does not have the highedt availability at the best of times. No wonder it collapsed under the slashdot onslaught. No matter, the article was not terribly informative. It would have been nothing at all if he had not had one or two problems.

Re:Anyone having trouble accessing the website?

[Alan Partridge]

You mean like "Reagan" or "Bush"?

Hosting

[suwain_2]

I don't think the IT people realized that by "bring my Mac to work," he actually meant "Host a website that's going to be Slashdotted on it."

Tee hee hee

[CGP314]

then get through ignorant IT staff

Wouldn't the IT staff be the ones who want to make the change to Apple?

Whoops! I forgot, the problems with Windows ensure permanent employment for techies.

Re:Tee hee hee

[clifyt]

"Whoops! I forgot, the problems with Windows ensure permanent employment for techies"

Hell yeah man!!!

Do you think we would PURPOSELY kill our employment? Back when I started at my job, they were considering switching to the PC from Macs. I convinced them that was the right choice.

Now I don't have to worry that this was the right choice as its the right choice for me. I stay employed and they think I'm doing something because I'm running around like a mad man keeping my office together and now that we are a M$ office, I have put 3 other techies to work to help me out.

With the Mac office, it was ONLY me and I was doing nothing most of the day.

I do however run 2 OS X machines at home...I don't have the time to deal with PCs except for gameplay there (waiting to see how well Quake runs on the G5s before I switch up and finally get rid of my last Win Box and move it to being another Linux box....)

No Macs For Businesses!!!!

Re:Tee hee hee

[cK-Gunslinger]

"+5 Funny," my ass. I have started to believe this "joke" to be entirely true. You cannot imagine the amount of resistance some company's IT show when you start mentioning replacing some of the Windows boxes with Linux and running Samba. (No one needs a Win2k server and Backup Domain Controller for a ~10 PC, closed-net lab) The only defense they have is that they can't support it. And when you tell them that you don't need theer support, you can handle it, they get extra defensive. Interesting, and sad. Maybe they enjoyed the 36-hour marathon of cleaning up our msblaster problem.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

In my experience, when I've told someone I can't support something and they tell me they'll just handle it, it almost inevitably turns into my problem anyway. Most people who assume they can 'just handle it' are geniuses who run one or two boxes at home and don't have a clue at the issues they're going to run into in a corporate environment.

Standards are sucky things if you are looking for the most efficient way to perform a particular function in an organization, but they are a necessity if you want to run a smooth and cost-effective operation overall. Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them. And presenting THAT bill to management would not go over well.

I've tried running open systems for people who think they can 'just handle it' and it has never, ever been worth it in the long run. Whatever efficiencies they imagine they are bringing to their own personal job, it has always come at a larger cost to the organization as a whole than any individualized savings have been worth.

Re:Tee hee hee

[torpor]

This is always the case with cross-architecture changes, though. It was true in the IBM vs. Wang days, it was true in the IBM vs. Sun days, it will still be true in the X vs. Whatever days.... and you can bet that Billy Boy is counting on this resistance factor.

Remember the "Developers, Developers, Developers!" monkeydance can be danced for IT 'specialists' as well.

In *any* architecture, though, not just this Microsoft scenario.

Re:Tee hee hee

[quasipunk guy]

Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them

Why do you need three different systems?

Give the graphics guys their Macs.
Utilize Mac OS X Server for your website (What would you use under Linux that won't run on OS X?)
And give the accountants shiny Macs with Office v.X installed.

Simple!

Re:Tee hee hee

[torpor]

You know, I just love how people jump to conclusions when it comes to assesment of character.

Who is to say this guy didn't have *other* factors involved in his MSblaster infection, such as office politics, or some other bullshit like that?

You have no clue. Yet, you, Anonymous Coward#7200431, seem to infer a great deal of insight into his situation, and willingly form an offensive view of this persons character.

I can't insult you, but I would if I knew you.

Re:Tee hee hee

[jawtheshark]

Wouldn't the IT staff be the ones who want to make the change to Apple?

Depends on your company and the people working there. The company I work for gives laptops to people. I refused mine, for several reasons. (Pissed off management a bit, but hey...) I have a private iBook. I took it with me when I had to work at the main office, looked for a empty network socket and plugged it in without asking. Within 5 minutes I had mounted the relevant network shares and configured the browser for their proxy.

The IT support staff just looked at my shiny iBook, wanted a little demo and made a joke about "hey, you know you can't plug in a computer without an antivirus package, eh?". That was it.... Nobody made a fuss.

Re:Tee hee hee

[cK-Gunslinger]

Bah. Not all of work in our Uncle's basement. The blaster virus affected the net-connected PCs (about 800), not any of the small, private labs. They actually had the situation somewhat under control that same day, until people started bringing in laptops. Not all shops distribute patches the day they are released. Ever hear of regression testing? I thought so.

Re:Tee hee hee

[RevMike]

In my experience, when I've told someone I can't support something and they tell me they'll just handle it, it almost inevitably turns into my problem anyway. Most people who assume they can 'just handle it' are geniuses who run one or two boxes at home and don't have a clue at the issues they're going to run into in a corporate environment.

I'm an applicationn developer, but I have the same experience. Someone does a quick and dirty app on their PC using VBA, and then wants to deploy it to a 30,000 employee firm. They don't understand why we constantly throw up roadblocks like "How are we going to deploy it to 30,000 PCs?", "Why did you design it to require over one hundred new NT servers spread through 30 or 40 offices when we could have put the backend on a single Oracle server in the datacenter?", "Where is the documentation for the Help Desk?".

I run into this issue with J2EE all the time. Web developers who haven't done much more than a few small web sites for a few local businesses using php or perl frequently criticize the longer development cycle of a J2EE app. What they fail to consider is that J2EE is a platform for "enterprise quality" applications. Writing a web app is easy. Writing a web app that runs in a clustered environment with automatic failover, integrates seemlessly with every major messaging system, integrates with every major directory system, talks CORBA, integrates with all major RDBMS vendors, integrates with independant enterprise security and authentication products, etc. is difficult.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

We don't. That's exactly my point. Thank you. :)

But I suspect you would find that someone will always claim there is something they can't do no matter what platform you standardize on--which is what we are really talking about here, not which offers the best standard.

Re:Tee hee hee

[jo_ham]

Quake III Arena and Team Arena fucking rocks on a G5, as you'd expect it to - it's equal to or greater than most home PCs out there and far and away in excess of the system requirements.

We have regular all Mac LAN parties with Quake III at our workplace (so sue us - we're self employed commercial video makers with lots of free time!) and it's brilliant. I'm actually pretty pleased with myself since I've been using my 600Mhz 12" iBook vs my friends on their 15 and 17" powerbooks and a Dual 450 G4 - I now have the dual G5, quite a step up!

Re:Tee hee hee

[cloudmaster]

Funny, I support a graphics department tht uses all macs. Our web and file services all run on Linux boxes. Our non-graphics workstations are all windows 2000 machines. Supporting 3 platforms isn't hard, because I chose the best platform for each particular job. So, I'm wasting less time trying to shoehorn one "standard" into several niches that it won't do well. I do it all, gasp, by myself. Then again, I'm doing this job because I like doing it, and I think I'm pretty good at it. I guess that the typical IT employee doesn't like wasting his time learning stuff, and would rather be playing Quake or keeping his MCSE certs all up to date.

That said, *never* will I let a user bring in a system of their own choice under the "I'll support it, don't worry" guise. If they wanted to spend their time as a sysadmin, they wouldn't be doing something other than working as a sysadmin. It's a job, not something to be done "in your spare time"...

Re:Tee hee hee

[shotfeel]

Would it be best if I could give our people who do graphics Macs, and run our website off Linux, and provide the accounting department with the latest and greatest version of Excel? You bet, they would all love it. But then I'd have to staff the FTE to keep up with three different systems' worth of problems and patches and interoperability quirks and maintain up to date expertise in all of them.

That's the attitude that baffles me. Instead of giving the users the best tools to do their jobs better and faster, give them all the same tools so IT can do their job better and faster. Is that really a cost effective way to operate a business?

Sounds like a construction company where the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, and the painter are all given the same basic set of tools and told to build a house.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

Oddly enough, it's a construction company we are talking about. :)

It shouldn't baffle you, though. In fact, you tell most of the story in your analogy. Among those professions you listed, who doesn't use a hammer and screwdriver? Do they all have to be separate brands?

IT, in some senses, is strictly a cost liability in most organizations. What on earth is wrong with wanting to minimize that cost--to enable them to do that unprofitable but necessary job better and faster?

What it requires is an ability to see beyond the seemingly obvious--give the users the best tools possible for their specific jobs to get the best possible efficiency--and look to the reality of the situation. And that reality is, in most cases, that giving the users what they think are the best tools for their own efficiency does not improve their productivity past the point where it becomes cost-effective for IT to support them. I see it all the time--businesses hemorrhaging dollars because they have shelled out for a dozen 'best of breed' solutions for each department, which they then have to pour more dollars into supporting than the projected savings were over the 'brand X' solution.

This is something that is by no means universal, but when I have actually run the numbers, is true more often than not. It seems intuitive that you will do better by giving the users exactly what they want, but when you actually sit down and do the math, it's often simply untrue.

I suspect a lot of this has to do with the differences between what people want and what they need, and the fact that technology is still complicated enough that an educated IT professional can still do a better job of picking out what a user needs than the user can... few have the expertise to sift through the marketing jingo on their own, or to see the larger picture where interoperability becomes a factor. The same is not true for the trades that you mentioned; the sort of brush a painter uses has no effect on the pipe wrench a plumber chooses.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

I'm not sure I would consider that a corporate environment. It sounds a lot like my home network; which like you, is something I do because I like doing it. I may be off base saying this and I am not minimizing your expertise, but I tend to think that if you are doing all that on your own, keeping up easily, and not running into any of the headaches that standardization fix, then you are probably not facing a very challenging environment.

Certainly at my company, with the level of expertise and education of my users, you would be busy just answering phones full-time explaining how to get Word to print sideways. I've got a guy who does that; if you have a magic pill I can hand out that will cure all our hammer-swingers, I'll fire him and pay you his salary and you can play Quake or whatever you'd like all day instead. ;)

Re:Tee hee hee

[Graff]

With the Mac office, it was ONLY me and I was doing nothing most of the day.

See the trick is to have a Mac office but LOOK busy. Run around a lot, shut down some machines and claim that you are applying fixes, keep frowning and shaking your head (thanks to George Castanza for that trick) because it looks like you have a lot on your mind, always have some papers in your hand. Then you can have the ease of Macs and still look like you are busy.

I run two labs of 20 iMacs in each and I haven't had to touch the things in months. If I didn't work hard at looking busy they'd realize they could probably replace me with a monkey and those machines would still run as well!

Re:Tee hee hee

[cloudmaster]

It is a relatively small environment, but I think most of my success with this particular network is the level of technical competence of my users. They generally know enough to get themselves out of the most common problems, and I make it a point to teach them what steps I've used to solve the problems that do come up - hopefuly making them more educated users.

At my previous employer, a medium-sized community college, I had slightly worse luck with user incompetence. I was running a combination of linux (and a couple of BSD boxes) in a pair of labs and windows workstations on desktops and in lab situations. The campus-wide file services were Novell, but my lab-local fileservers were linux. The nodes that I was exclusively responsible for had very few problems, though the workstations that I shared responsibility for did keep the other techs somewhat busy. Again, I kept my workload fairly light by educating my users.

This mostly works in situations where the users are receptive to learning, though. I've managed to minimize problems in general by choosing operating systems that allow restriction of user access. The key, in general, is to restrict access enough that the users feel like they have to ask you before installing crap, while at the same time allowing enough freedom that they feel mostly in control. Even at other larger scale employers, though, most days have left me a fair amount of free (away from users) time. I like to think that attention to detail in initial deployment combined with some well placed education, and general trust-building, have worked together to make my networks behave nicely. Challenging environments seem to result from things like legacy support, which usually is a result of tech people not being trusted to make decisions. I haven't had that problem.

When it's all said and done, though, nothing will compensate for idiot users. I've been blessed with very few of those, too. :)

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

I think we're basically of the same mind, then. Standards are essentially restrictions on what can be installed, and I agree that is the key to smoothly operating most environments.

You definitely have to tailor things to your user base. If you can get away with not having to explain every little thing, and they can figure most issues out on there own, then you are in a different place from most businesses and have a lot more of your own time to keep everything else running smoothly. I'd have to hire a Mac guy, a Windows guy, a *nix guy to get away with that with as many users and as much turnover as we have. Not to mention the issues that would come up with five different departments all wanting custom, interfacing systems based on different platforms. I can't imagine any scenario in which that would be a fun day at the beach. :)

Re:Tee hee hee

[llf4nlp]

From your comments here, though, it sounds as if the original set up would be what was most challenging. I'm far from experienced in this arena, and so really am just wanting to learn from others experience. Still, given the recent report distributed by CCIA suggesting that diversity of platforms would increase security, this may become more of an issue. And, given that some cite costs of $300,000 a year per 100 boxes just to do MS patches, it would seem that Mac OS X and Linux boxes would cut down on the workload.

Re:Tee hee hee

[shotfeel]

Among those professions you listed, who doesn't use a hammer and screwdriver?

However the carpenter may be much more efficient using a nail-gun for much of the work, and may need more than one kind of hammer depending on what kind of rough vs. finish work is being done.

OTOH the painter has little use for a nail-gun, but will need several different kinds of brushes and rollers. The electrician an plumber also have specialized tools that make them much more productive, and are not found in your "basic" tool set.

Yes, I agree an analysis has to be made to see what the cost benefit is of having multiple types of systems, but I don't think anyone is well served by the oft-stated assumption that one-size fits all for computing services across a wide array of disciplines (secretary-accountant-CEO-marketing).

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

Well, the problem with most places is that the original setup is just a starting point--management doesn't just want you to set something up and run it, they want new features, new capabilities, and you end up with a more or less constantly evolving environment. If it was set it up and forget it, it would be a different story, I agree.

And my impression on the platform diversity issue is that it's really an advantage to the global matrix of sites, rather than specific sites--lack of diversity both encourages exploration and development of exploits and increases their possible rate of spread, but those are things that are not much of a factor unless taken in a larger context than at a single organization (except very large ones). If I have three different platforms to support three different departments, it does me little good if two of them are working when the third is taken out. Diversification to the level that would prevent that sort of problem wouldn't be even remotely cost effective, IMHO.

Re:Tee hee hee

[ScuzzMonkey]

And you found the point at which the analogy breaks down there--computers and operating systems are far more versatile than pipe wrenches and paint brushes. A 'basic' computer toolset serves as a base for the advanced tools, where the same is not true for tools in the trades (unless you want to REALLY stretch it and start talking about air compressors and ladders and trucks and such ;) ).

But you are right; it's folly to proceed under the assumption that one-size fits all will work. My point is just that the other assumption, that best of breed is automatically better (and I think that is the more common assumption), is just as folly and that it isn't until you sit down and do the numbers that you have a real inkling either way.

Damn.

[lfm_the_couch]

Sounded like an interesting article... guess I'll have to read it later, or maybe tomorrow.

Would somebody please...

[xanderwilson]

supress this article ASAP? Everyone has to use Windows. It's important. For our economy. Or something.

Alex.

Re:Would somebody please...

[skaffen42]

Don't worry. Slashdot is doing a pretty good job of suppressing the article. :)

Re:Would somebody please...

[DeltaSigma]

Yeah, we're kind of self defeating that way.

Re:Would somebody please...

[bwalling]

supress this article ASAP? Everyone has to use Windows. It's important. For our economy. Or something.


Don't worry. Even the article author is running Windows - he's using VirtualPC. I fail to see what is interesting about the fact that you can do all your same stuff if you just continue to run Windows.

Re:Would somebody please...

[Godeke]

Clearly anyone who would try to be an Apple user on a Windows network is subversive and dangerous. The current monoculture must continue, lest the very fabric of America be destroyed.

I suggest government hearings where we bring these Apple users into the bright light of day, and expose them for the anti Micr... um, American scum they really are.

I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[farrellj]

And I have had no problems, really. Once you get the TCP/IP stack on the Mac going, and Netatalk on the Linux server, they are just like another node on the network...they can access the internet, and print, and store files on the linux box.

ttyl
Farrell

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Jellybob]

It's a shame this is an article about using Macs in the Windows office, instead of a Linux one.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[rootofevil]

well given that the editors have had a giant hardon for OSX lately (not commenting on justification for said hardon), im not at all surprised this made the front page instead of just in the apple section.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Zelet]

A Mac in a Linux office is a no-brainer. It works seamlessly. The only reason a Mac is harder to get working in a Windows Network is because Windows always messes up networks.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[TekkaDon]

Once you get the TCP/IP stack on the Mac going? Netatalk?

You are probably talking about Mac OS 9 or earlier. The name of the game at this point is Mac OS X, now in black fur with its 10.3 version (aka Panther). No need for Netatalk (no need for AppleTalk at all) and TCP/IP is there, in fact the backbone of OS X communications.

Merging a Mac OS X Panther computer in ANY corporate environment today is easy. Just plug and play. You can even store your user directory in a Windows server, like any PC user. TCP/IP, SMB sharepoints and print services, CUPS, NFS, WebDAV, FTP, VPN, LDAP... anything that has to do with networking, anything you can think about is present in Mac OS X 10.2 or 10.3 (the later being more complete and smooth).

And the fun thing is that no setup is needed for all this stuff to work. It seamlessly integrates, fire and forget and enjoy.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[WatertonMan]

There are some limitations and difficulties with Active Directory under Jaguar. However I believe that Panther (coming out in a little over a week) is a full Active Directory player and can even store your home directory on the Windows server for proper roaming.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[macwhiz]

netatalk? How quaint :)

With Mac OS X, there's no need to go running netatalk; OS X will speak NFS just fine -- or, if you don't want to go that far, there's always FTP and/or SSH. If you're in a mixed environment, OS X's SMB support is good enough that there's little point in running netatalk in addition to SAMBA.

If you want to see stuff run really slick, install CUPS on your UNIX boxes. Watch all your systems, Mac and traditional UNIX, use SLP autodiscovery to self-configure printers.

A big part of allowing Macs to be easy additions to one's IT environment is simply using actual standards, instead of "Microsoft standards." Generally, Mac OS X does an excellent job of supporting standards that have RFCs associated with 'em. For instance, OS X plays great in an LDAP directory environment. If you're using Active Directory, OS X can still be made to work -- but as with any non-Microsoft OS trying to use a proprietary Microsoft "standard," it's going to be awkward.

It's not that Macs are hard to put into an IT environment. It's that a lot of IT environments have been designed using protocols and tools that only work well under Microsoft OSes, because Microsoft designed them that way. If Ford came out with a car that only worked with a special Shell gasoline, you shouldn't blame Mobil for not being able to fill your tank.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[erikdotla]

Oh, that's great. Thanks. Can you give me back the 10 hours we wasted trying to figure out if and how it could integrate before we realized it was hopeless pending the all-solving future version?

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[WatertonMan]

It sort of depends upon what you are doing with it. I'm not an expert on Active Directory. I did a bit with Novell's equivalent. But I've not done much with Microsoft's AD. I do recall a write up someone did that went through the limitations, fixes, work arounds and so forth. But I believe the general consensus is that Panther is necessary to be a full player.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Gherald]

Everybody loves the underdog in theory, so they write and link to articles about it.

In actual practice everyone knows interoperability between Macs and the Wintel world is as much of a pain as with Linux.

I know I am sort of preaching to the choir, but as everyone knows:

A . Cost: High to Very High
P . Performance: Moderate (excepting video/media)
P . Value: Moderate to low
L . Support: Good
E . HW Compatibility: Very poor
. . SW Compatibility: Fair to poor
. . Ease of use: Very Good
. . Overall Quality: Good
. . Coolness factor: High for non-geeks
. . Niche market: Dumb people, nonconformists, educational institutions, and professionals with specific needs.

W . Cost: Moderate to High
I . Performance: Fair
N . Value: Moderate
D . Support: Widespread
O . HW Compatibility: High
W . SW Compatibility: High
S . Ease of use: Good
. . Overall Quality: Poor
. . Coolness factor: Low
. . Niche Market: Idiots, conformists, and anyone with lots of money.

L . Cost: Low to very low
I . Performance: Moderate to High
N . Value: Moderate to High
U . Support: Rare (but increasingly "Fair")
X . HW Compatibility: Fair
. . SW Compatibility: Fair to Poor
. . Ease of use: Poor
. . Overall Quality: Good
. . Coolness factor: High for geeks
. . Niche Market: Hardcore geeks, stingy corporations, and the occasional IT journalist.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[farrellj]

I was talking about my past experiences, not what can be done today. Of course OS-X makes it so simple, but as far as I am concerned, it has always been simple, as long as open source software has allowed the intergration of both environments...just plop a Linux Server into mix, and it becomes easy.

ttyl
Farrell

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Aldurn]

...but as with any non-Microsoft OS trying to use a proprietary Microsoft "standard," it's going to be awkward.

And this is becoming untrue. As of the latest Panther build, Mail.app supports Exchange. Granted, it seems to use Outlook Web Access, but I still have access to all of the folders that people who pay much more for "Outlook" see. Address Book and iSync are supposed to support syncing with an Exchange server as well, but I have yet to get this to work.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Feral Bueller]

"It's a shame this is an article about using Macs in the Windows office, instead of a Linux one."

Which? An article about using Linux in a Windows office or OS X in a Linux office? Assuming you're not some mindless Penguinista out trolling the Apple channel, I'll bite. I've been playing around with Sun's Java Desktop (needs another name, please) which is basically SuSE with a no-brainer installer (for the NT admins). Looks OK. Hopefully we can lock it down so that the power lusers don't get too creative with it.

I've been using OS X in an almost exclusively Windows/*nix environment for the last 1.5 years. The only real issues I've had is with NT Admins putting underscores in server names (the Unix admins took caree of that...) and having to run the Java Citrix client for the first 6 months or so...

Other than that, it's been a breeze. Integration between Windows and *nix servers has been pretty seamless, thanks to SMB. I actually feel sorry for people still stuck on *Classic* versions of the Mac OS.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[repetty]

"netatalk? How quaint :)"

My home network is NFS-based but I run netatalk just for older computers (guests, usually).

I don't run Samba because... I've never had a Windows computer in my house.

--Richard

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Jellybob]

Just thought I'd clarify that I'm just bad at ordering sentences right :P

I actually have no experience at all of using Mac OS X, so can't speak on the subject, just thought I'd point out to the OP that Mac compatibility with Linux is irrelevant here.

And to beat of the Penguinista thing, I'm a sysadmin, who works in a Microsoft shop (and doesn't mind it much), hosts some websites I developed on FreeBSD, and has a Linux desktop.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[RobPiano]

I had to integrate OS X machines into a novell network for a university. Novell won't accept OS X print messages.

In a university lab the kids want to be able to do one thing.

I love OS X, but its not perfect for everything

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Feral Bueller]

And to beat of the Penguinista thing, I'm a sysadmin, who works in a Microsoft shop (and doesn't mind it much), hosts some websites I developed on FreeBSD, and has a Linux desktop.

Most of the Penguinistas I've worked with like the OS X boxen: they just can't figure out why we're willing to pay so much for them. Cheers.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[skinfitz]

OS X plays great in an LDAP directory environment. If you're using Active Directory, OS X can still be made to work -- but as with any non-Microsoft OS trying to use a proprietary Microsoft "standard," it's going to be awkward.

OBJECTION - Apple describe this process as "seamless" - are you DARING to disagree?

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Thunderbear]

A very easy way to confuse OS X so much that it will need a reboot, is to use a portable Mac, mount a Windows share, shut the lid on the Mac without unmounting the share, and reopen it on another network.

After a while you just give up, and reboot it...

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[NetFu]

Sorry, I've been using my PowerBook G4 12" for 5 months on a 98% Windows network, and this has never happened to me using either OS X v10.2.x or v10.3. After I open it up, it just says the share was disconnected unexpectedly (or sometimes it reconnects or asks if you want to disconnect, I think it depends on the connection type).

Maybe that happened on an early version of 10.2x? I didn't use 10.2.x earlier than 10.2.5...

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Gherald]

Any credibility you might have had is destroyed by your stupid sig attempting to equate Microsoft with Hitler.

Yes, well, sigs like mine are commonly refered to as "jokes".

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[Graff]

Maybe that happened on an early version of 10.2x? I didn't use 10.2.x earlier than 10.2.5...

It used to happen with 10.1.x and earlier. Ever since Jaguar (10.2) I haven't seen this problem pop up. Apple has been pretty good about actually improving Mac OS X with every version. It actually gets faster with every revision too!

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[macwhiz]

Novell? People still use that? :)

Anyway, I haven't used Novell in over a decade, but my understanding is that nowadays it speaks the standard Internet Printing Protocol (IPP). Mac OS X 10.2's printing system is based on CUPS, the Common UNIX Printing System, which speaks IPP natively. A quick Google search indicates that you ought to be able to just hand OS X the correct IPP URL, such as "IPP://username:password@<server>/ipps/<printer >" to talk to Novell.

Of course, again, if one goes with a proprietary print protocol as opposed to the RFC-standard protocols, of course one should expect interoperability issues.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[oingoboingo]

HW Compatibility: Very poor

I agree! As soon as Apple ditches USB, FireWire, Ethernet, PCI, AGP, Serial ATA, Bluetooth and 802.11 and adopts some open industry hardware standards, the better!! Damn that proprietary shit out of Cupertino to hell!!!

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[jub]

yes, much like the referenced post

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[llf4nlp]

Unfortunately, at least your evaluation of Apple is out of date. Cost is often less that an equivelent wintel box these days, and Macs really do last longer, and cost less to support - very few patches to install. In addition, because they are easier to use for 'dumb people', of which, by geek standards, there are lots, the people become more efficient at their work. Your value rating also should be raised, to be accurate to today's facts. Don't get me wrong, there was a time when what you say was accurate. But that time has past.

Re:I've integrated Macs into PC offices before...

[good soldier svejk]

With Mac OS X, there's no need to go running netatalk; OS X will speak NFS just fine -- or, if you don't want to go that far, there's always FTP and/or SSH. If you're in a mixed environment, OS X's SMB support is good enough that there's little point in running netatalk in addition to SAMBA.

OS X 10.2.x's SMB support is fine, unless you want to browse shares on a routed network. It can't do that. The WINS/nmblookup implementation is broken. There is an Apple technote about it, which I have posted here previously but don't feel like digging up right now. I have been bugging my Apple tech rep about this since Jaguar came out (Hi Eric). Apple assures me that Panther's implementation will work.

NFS, and certainly FTP, do not meet our security standards. SSH/SFTP is great, but not an appropriate substitute for a network file system (neither is FTP of course).

A big part of allowing Macs to be easy additions to one's IT environment is simply using actual standards, instead of "Microsoft standards." Generally, Mac OS X does an excellent job of supporting standards that have RFCs associated with 'em.

This could not be more true. Nonetheless, although we are an MS centric shop (CIFS on Windows and Exchange), we have no problem supporting ~580 Macs (vs. ~6,000 PCs) with a single field tech. His main complaint is that management is always trying to get him to fill his time working on Windows. And we are only just now implementing ARD. There are a few little issues stemming from crazed MS monoculture (like administrative assistants who publish web forms generated from PowerPoint), but in general things run pretty smoothly.

Our PHB's have been impressed enough with OS X that it is now our recommended unix workstation platform. We have a large grant funded research community, whom we can't exactly tell what to buy, but we strongly encourage them to go with OS X over RedHat (their other favorite). I am a unix sysadmin, BTW.

Ignorant IT staff is right

[tulmad]

And they're generally the worst part of it. With Samba now (and going to 3.0 soon), you can basically do whatever you need on a corporate network with OS X. The only problem that remains is Exchange. Even though MS supposedly updated Entourage to deal with it, Exchange support still sucks. Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a company with a Citrix server, there's a native OS X client for that.

Re:Ignorant IT staff is right

[decepty]

The big problem is not so much exchange, but older versions of exchange in particular. Exchange 2000 and up work more or less flawlessly however Exchange 5 (which we run at work) has issues, which is why all our OS X Macs run Outlook 2001 (Classic) as their primary email client (at least until the 24th :) ) . IMAP & POP3 work flawlessly and I'm looking forward to the "improved Exchange support" in Panther.

Re:Ignorant IT staff is right

[lysium]

With Samba now (and going to 3.0 soon), you can basically do whatever you need on a corporate network with OS X.

Samba on OSX is great -- if you need to share documents. You cannot launch most any file (or even drag & launch it) from a SMB-mounted drive because whatever bits the OS uses for file identification does not get saved on a Windows filesystem. Even the documents are harder to use -- one can only access them from within the pertinent application, no click-to-open. Very unMaclike.

Microsoft does not want Apple crowding into the corporate market, and I wonder if Apple would rather prefer all Apple enivornments to playing nicely with such an unfriendly neighbor. Interoperability seems oddly handicapped by both parties involved.....

========

Re:Ignorant IT staff is right

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a company with a Citrix server, there's a native OS X client for that.

Really? YOu can have ours... I hate it. Since migrating our legacy, reliable, functional application to a delivery via citrix we have heard nothing but complaints. It is unreliable (sessions hang for no reason), and just plain slow. Plus we've had various issues with Terminal Server profiles becoming corrupted (at random) that keep users out of their (business critical) Citrix app.

Frustrating? When we want to say something is really fucked up, we say it has "Citrixian" properties.

Re:Ignorant IT staff is right

[tulmad]

Really? YOu can have ours... I hate it. Since migrating our legacy, reliable, functional application to a delivery via citrix we have heard nothing but complaints. It is unreliable (sessions hang for no reason), and just plain slow. Plus we've had various issues with Terminal Server profiles becoming corrupted (at random) that keep users out of their (business critical) Citrix app.

Ah. The only thing I honestly use my company's Citrix server for is Outlook. I'm sure there's more that they try to do with it, but I don't have a need for any of it.

Re:Ignorant IT staff is right

[merger]

Regarding mac's and exchange there is software by Snerdware that integrates Exchange into your address book and soon ical. I haven't used it but it yet but it looks pretty interesting as a bridge. One major downside in a corporate environment is that it looks like it will have to be installed on every machine rather than being server based. Email can then be handled with the imap connectors turned on and you will have most of the connectivity to exchange.

PostNuke ...

[AWxSlashdot]

is rather heavy for the server ... this won't help surviving slashdotting :( Anyone hosting a basic nonPHP powered copy ??? AWx

I have to say one thing.

[Raven42rac]

The author appears to have done zero research into how to get a Mac talking on a Windows network, if he had done maybe 1-2 hours of research, he would have saved himself 2-3 weeks of grief. Instead of not having any clue on how he got it to work, he would have known exactly how to set things up how he wanted. I don't get it, why spend the money on a Mac if you are not prepared to do any research on how to make it do the things you need to do? Would you buy a car without knowing whether or not it came with an engine? Or if that engine would play nice with your gas? I ordered a 12" Powerbook and I am going to make damn sure I can make it play nice with any other boxes/servers that I may have to interact with (Windows, Linux, other Macs, etc.) by the time it gets here.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[loosifer]

The sciences have a saying:

A month or two in the laboratory can often save an hour or two in the library.

This seems to be doubly so. Here's my computer corollary:

A month or two of hacking can often save an hour or two on Google.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[the_2nd_coming]

well, with Panther, you will have even better intigration into a window environment...you will be able to access your settings and files via active directory.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Raven42rac]

That's exactly what I was trying to say. Thank you for putting it so succinctly. So amusing, yet so true.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[plsuh]

http://train.apple.com/
</Blatant plug>

:-)

--Paul

Re:I have to say one thing.

[decepty]

Agreed, and the Windows zealots took it upon themselves to infer that one man's ignorance with the Macintosh platform somehow equals Macs being difficult to integrate into a Windows network. Here are the points one poster in particular raised:

1) Doesn't work well be default on a network.
Never had a problem integrating on our Win2k network, right out of the box. On the first run, you let it know that you'll be connecting via a LAN and using DHCP and bingo -internet connectivity-.
2) Requires the user to do "a lot of reading" to connect to the corporate LAN
If you consider "Hit 'command-k' while in the Finder to bring up a list of any computer reachable on the network and the protocol used to connect to it (afp, smb, etc.)" to be "a lot of reading" then sure.
3) Doesn't work reliably with DHCP and other network standards.
It does if you select "Using DHCP" from either the Network System Preferences menu or during first run. Just like a Windows machine, you have to configure a Macintosh. iTelepathy is still in beta, sorry.
4) Doesn't have a full featured e-mail client.
Full featured meaning...? Mail.app seems to have all the features I need, however Microsoft offers Entourage, you can run Outlook 2001 in Classic mode, Mozilla Mail, hell, get crazy and compile Pine on that sucker if you want. There are tons of options, however if by "full featured" you mean IncrediMail, then I'm sorry, you seem to be out of luck. You'll have to find another source for you animated smileys...
5) Requires users to manually connect all network drives and printers.
Sure, if by "required" you mean "has the option to". I find that using "Add Printer..." from the Print Center seems to locate all networked printers, and 'command-k' brings up the servers/network drives.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

The author appears to have done zero research into how to get a Mac talking on a Windows network, if he had done maybe 1-2 hours of research, he would have saved himself 2-3 weeks of grief. Instead of not having any clue on how he got it to work, he would have known exactly how to set things up how he wanted. I don't get it, why spend the money on a Mac if you are not prepared to do any research on how to make it do the things you need to do?

BLEEP BLEEP! Warning, the preceeding was a TECHNICAL point of view.

It seems to me he had experience with Mac's, how easy they are to use, and how much of a piece of shit his MSWindows box is.

He doesn't have networking experience, that's what the IT department is for. Seems to me like they were completely unable to do their jobs.

They actually had a user that was so frustrated, that he spent his own money to buy himself a computer that worked well enough to do his job in a non-frustrating manner.

Don't you think maybe IT should exist to allow users to do their jobs without being frustrated at the tool that's put in front of them?

IMHO, he should be billing the IT department for his Mac right now. Not only was his previous system unusable, but he was also the guinea pig for a new system - all on his own dime.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Raven42rac]

No, it strikes me that he has zero experience with macs, not that there is anything wrong with that, but at least get an O'Reilly book before you undertake a switch of this magnitude, as it could certainly not do any harm. Again, if I phrase things in a certain way, I can teach anyone basic networking terminology/practices, it is part of being a good teacher, again, something an O'Reilly book would have covered in like, Chapter 5 or something. It is not the IT departments responsibility to support something they, well do not support/sanction, he chose to get a Mac and deploy it in a Windows server environment, why should they be expected to learn it for him? Do you believe in personal responsibility? Nobody held a gun to his head to purchase a mac, he chose to. So no one owes him anything.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

It is not the IT departments responsibility to support something they, well do not support/sanction, he chose to get a Mac and deploy it in a Windows server environment, why should they be expected to learn it for him?

IT is expected to provide usable tools for the end-user to do their job. Not set flat standards that only help themselves, because now (on paper) they only have to know a small subset of what's out in the industry

Do you believe in personal responsibility?

Yes, the IT department should be held accountable

Nobody held a gun to his head to purchase a mac, he chose to. So no one owes him anything.

IT ows him a working system. Sure, I'll give you the fact that most of us would have done a better job integrating it. I'll give you that he could have done a better job being prepared. But it's also been HOW MANY years and this shit still doesn't work across the board? That's not his fault. IMHO, that again, would be IT's fault.

I think it's a piss-poor IT department that forces it's users to get their own equipment and set it up to work with a system that the IT department designed.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Rasta Prefect]

He doesn't have networking experience, that's what the IT department is for. Seems to me like they were completely unable to do their jobs.

Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users. They picked a standard platform, Windows on Dell. They know about that platform. They have Dells with windows on them that management has bought for them. They can use them as testbeds. I generally hate and despise windows, but the only "unusuable" Dell Laptops I've run into over the years are the ones that belong to non-technical people whose system trays extend more than a third of the way accross the screen.

So he goes out and buys a Mac, and suddenly the IT people are magically supposed to know about Macs. Why are they supposed to know about Macs? They haven't had any Mac training. They don't have company supplied Macs to use as testbeds. They probably don't own Macs at home. They may never have admined a Mac ever. Yet suddenly because jackass employee went out and bought a Mac, the IT guy (Read: Some poor sap manning the help desk for $9.00/hr) is supposed to know all about Mac configuration, with all of its quirks and oddities(every OS has them). If he'd bought a SparcBook, would you expect them to become Solaris Admins over night? How about if he'd just decided to install BeOS on his Dell? VMS?

I hate the implication that every guy whos ever worked with computers is supposed to know about every platform in existence and everything that can possibly be wrong with it and that if they don't they must be incompetent. It seems to be a fairly prevelent attitude. I don't expect my proctologist to know why I've got these funny headaches and doubled vision, I don't ask my my optomotrist to look at my twisted knee. Why the hell should the the help desk guy in a Windows-standard shop be expected to know about Macs when one suddenly shows up on his doorstep one day?

Re:I have to say one thing.

[jbrunsell]

While I've got to agree with what you've said, I also think that the "it just works" philosophy should apply here. Anything that Apple can do to make guys like this have an easier time to introduce a Mac to a Windows environment should be done. They do quite a bit already, but every tiny bit helps.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[allgood2]

Of course your comments are from someone with technical expertise. I read his comments and thought, " Wow, Joe Blow actually made that work without any help from IT."

The truth is from an IT perpective it isn't that hard to integrate a Mac, especially one running OS X, into a PC network. I do so a couple times a week at different client sites, with bare minimum problems. But thats because: 1) I know what I'm doing, and 2) I know most of the pitfalls of corporate IT, Win-dependent networks.

That said, I would expect your average joe, trying to connect to custom PC apps, dongles, and the lot to experience hardships. The fact that the guy was able to overcome them without even leaarning what was wrong in the first place, is more a testiment to Apple than any great skill or struggle on his part. Of course the fact that his IT-department didn't even attempt to help him is just as telling.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

He doesn't have networking experience, that's what the IT department is for. Seems to me like they were completely unable to do their jobs. Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users.

Close, How about: Spoken like someone who's never had one of the user's he was admin'ing be forced to get their own equipment.

They picked a standard platform, Windows on Dell. They know about that platform. They have Dells with windows on them that management has bought for them. They can use them as testbeds.

Oh please. Get some decent people and software, and you don't NEED to get that specific. All standardization does is help the IT department - not the users. I generally hate and despise windows, but the only "unusuable" Dell Laptops I've run into over the years are the ones that belong to non-technical people whose system trays extend more than a third of the way accross the screen.

I would agree - BUT - what are the users doing that required the number of apps they have open? Have you not met their requirements with your standard?

So he goes out and buys a Mac, and suddenly the IT people are magically supposed to know about Macs. Why are they supposed to know about Macs?

Why not? I know about Mac's. Hell I know about PBX's. If you (not specifically you, but this is Slashdot so I have to explain it's not a personal attack) are a technical person, this isn't rocket science. If you can't pick up something new with the fucking Internet as a resource, maybe you need a different career.

They haven't had any Mac training. So what?

They don't have company supplied Macs to use as testbeds. They probably don't own Macs at home. They may never have admined a Mac ever.

So what? They've already failed at what they were trained in - else he wouldn't have bought a Mac.

Yet suddenly because jackass employee went out and bought a Mac, the IT guy (Read: Some poor sap manning the help desk for $9.00/hr) is supposed to know all about Mac configuration, with all of its quirks and oddities(every OS has them). If he'd bought a SparcBook, would you expect them to become Solaris Admins over night? How about if he'd just decided to install BeOS on his Dell? VMS?

HA! Spoken like someone whos never had to admin a large number of users. :P
Seriously. Helpdesk is level 1. If it doesn't fit their scripts, they need to escalate the problem. If the user needs VMS to do their job, and there isn't an IT person on staff who can figure it out, the CIO/CTO needs a flogging.

I hate the implication that every guy whos ever worked with computers is supposed to know about every platform in existence and everything that can possibly be wrong with it and that if they don't they must be incompetent. It seems to be a fairly prevelent attitude.

Just about everyone understands if you DON'T immediately know everything - but you're supposed to be able to figure it out. Again, this isn't rocket science.

I don't expect my proctologist to know why I've got these funny headaches and doubled vision, I don't ask my my optomotrist to look at my twisted knee.

Bad examples, 'the body' is the only thing in common. Why not pick three different types of 'electronics'. Satellite, Computers, and say, short wave radio.

Why the hell should the the help desk guy in a Windows-standard shop be expected to know about Macs when one suddenly shows up on his doorstep one day?

He's not, he should escalate it to the real techs. That's what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Not for sitting on their asses and following a script the IT Manager wrote up, but solving problems. Problems that may not even have a documented solution.

To just give up because "It's not our standard" is beyond being a totally lame loser.

Now you know why so many 'common' people think computer people are snotty and arrogant. You're supposed to help them get their work done. Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Raven42rac]

Maybe it is just me, but if something is broken, then mysteriously starts working again, I damn sure would like to know what was wrong in the first place. Lets say you work at a nuclear plant, and all the alarms and klaxons go off, indicating a meltdown, yet the alarms just magically shut off weeks later, would you just say "Oh well, it works now, I don't care what was wrong in the first place."? Of course not. Of course not every situation is like this, but I am just a very curious person. I am not saying that it is hard to integrate Macs into a Windows environment, quite the opposite. I would expect a user accustomed to Windows would find Macs much simpler compared to the complexity of some Windows functions, hence should not have too much trouble getting them integrated, with a little research. Working without knowing what was broken is a testament, but, is it a good one? How far do we want to seperate users from the functions of their computers? His IT department did try to help him, it sounds like he caught one of them eating a sandwich and asked "Did you change anything?", to which one of them probably said "Nope.". It did not sound like he asked for anything else to me, maybe he did, and just did not convey as such in the article.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

It really sounds like this guy brought his powerbook in, opened an help desk ticket, and then started bitching. That's not how you get things done in the real world.

What world do you live in?

What, as the CEO, would you say when you heard one of your employees was so frustrated that he bought his own system, and the IT dept didn't do a thing to help?

Re:I have to say one thing.

[derF024]

On the first run, you let it know that you'll be connecting via a LAN and using DHCP and bingo -internet connectivity-.

MacOS 10.2 has quite a few networking issues that cause it to occasionally refuse to speak to some DHCP servers. Rebooting is the only way to get a stoned mac back on a network. The 10.3 developer previews don't seem to have this issue.

If you consider "Hit 'command-k' while in the Finder to bring up a list of any computer reachable on the network and the protocol used to connect to it (afp, smb, etc.)" to be "a lot of reading" then sure.

Which doesn't work with either windows XP or some many samba shares.

4) Doesn't have a full featured e-mail client.
Full featured meaning...? Mail.app seems to have all the features I need, however Microsoft offers Entourage, you can run Outlook 2001 in Classic mode, Mozilla Mail, hell, get crazy and compile Pine on that sucker if you want.

Neither Mail.app, entourage, or Outlook can be considered full featured mail clients by an stretch of the imagination. No real GPG support (mail.app has a plugin available that does rudimetary GPG verification, but not GPG signing), no message thread tracking and poor support for IMAP, SSL IMAP, and authenticated SSL SMTP.

and 'command-k' brings up the servers/network drives.

Which you then need to manually re-mount every time you log in.

Apple's desktop may be an improvement over things like windows XP, but it still doesn't even come close to a real UNIX based desktop.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[C10H14N2]

The general rule in most larger organizations I've worked in is if you bring in your personal equipment you support it your damn self, that is if you're even allowed to bring it in the door in the first place. The infinite configurations of a home computer are nearly impossible to support in a corporate environment with any consistency. It's not ignorance keeping them from supporting personal hardware, it is configuration management policies and procedures that are there to ensure the business doesn't come to a complete stand-still because some petulant ignoramus is insisting on doing everything their way even though they haven't the remotest clue HOW to do it their way without wasting everyone else's time. How many OS configurations do you think an IT department should support? One is already a pain in the ass with enough users once anything needs to be changed or upgraded. Most larger IT departments are already dealing with a few flavors of *nix on their severs, plus a few variants of Windows on the desktops. Adding Mac support would not add one, but several OS variants to the mix as well as innumerable hardware and application configurations. It sounds so simple to say "support my Mac," but it just isn't. You don't just "learn mac" or "get a mac guy." There are organizational concerns that make it perfectly reasonable to demand a level of conformity. This "I can't get my randomly configured computer to work, ergo you must be ignorant for not wanting to fix it" is a common point a view that makes me dread working in tech support.

This guy needs to give up his freaking red-swingline-stapler and stop whining.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[big_a]

Which you then need to manually re-mount every time you log in.

Not if you add them to your "Login Items". Then they automatically re-mount.

Or, make a shortcut to the drive in your Dock, then they're only a click away when you need them...

Re:I have to say one thing.

[lucifuge31337]

What, as the CEO, would you say when you heard one of your employees was so frustrated that he bought his own system, and the IT dept didn't do a thing to help?

I'd say that he handled the situation the wrong way, repramand him for breaking IT standards, and then get my CTO to pull a history on the guy's problems and IT requests. If none exist, he's done. If the do exist and were a failing for the IT department, the IT manager is (probably) done. If he's a stupid user breaking things/just whining because the IT standards don't suit his preference, he's done.

IT standards are rarely optimal for all users. But there are there because the days of a 1:15 IT to staff ratio are LONG gone. With the belt-tightneing that has been going on these days, most IT staffs are skeleton crews, barely able to maintain a single equipment standard. As the CTO I'd have to weight more IT staff=more choices for users over less IT staff=less IT staff cost and a narrow standard against company's fianacials .

Re:I have to say one thing.

[lucifuge31337]

Oh please. Get some decent people and software, and you don't NEED to get that specific. All standardization does is help the IT department - not the users

I'm very glad you are working for a company that can afford enough decent people to get that job done. You are in a minority.

And if by "help the IT department" you mean "allow the IT department to not blow it's salary budget while maintaining a reasonalbe level of service", I agree with you.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Awptimus Prime]

He's not, he should escalate it to the real techs. That's what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Not for sitting on their asses and following a script the IT Manager wrote up, but solving problems. Problems that may not even have a documented solution.

You mentioned at least 2 times in your text about IT helpdesk and their 'scripts'. I've worked for several large corporations over the past 10 years and none of them had people in IT reading from scripts. These were typically people who were just as intelligent and bright at problem solving as any engineer from our other groups, just typically younger and still in college.

Before you start with your elitist, derogatory remarks, remember that a large percentage of /. readers and posters are, or were, helpdesk at some point of their technical careers.

Also, the reason for standardizing the desktops in a corporation has a lot less to do with being convienent for an IT group than reducing the TCO. I have my doubts that you've worked for a corporation of any size if you think anything caters to the IT folks. My experience has been 12 hour days, impossible projects, the company always wants more, better, cheaper, faster.. You make it sound like they need more time to play Quake and slurp cheese off their pizza crust..

If you purchase all of your systems from Dell, typically, you can get extended support for your IT people. If the helpdesk people can rapily fix a problem, then there's less hours invested in a problem and it costs the company much less in man hours.

I'm sorry, but your derogatory remarks just make you look like one of those users who tries to alienate himself due to some sort of superiority/inferiority complex. You also hit me as that one guy in every company that is so disrespectful to IT staff that everyone just avoids him, period.

Having been on both sides of the Helpdesk, I can honestly say that none of the helpdesk folks I have known have been hated by their userbase. They are typically seen as helpful people who do their best to get things rolling when users are in a jam.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

For the most part, I agree up to:

IT standards are rarely optimal for all users. But there are there because the days of a 1:15 IT to staff ratio are LONG gone.

Wow, that's pretty shitty. When I was in 'the big company', We were 1:50.

I ran the servers (Netware), desktops (Win9x), PBX (Fujitsu 9600), Telecomm issues, Internet.

I sure hope 1:15 includes developers (who outnumbered Systems 3:1). I personally don't include them, mostly we fixed what the developers broke.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

I'm very glad you are working for a company that can afford enough decent people to get that job done. You are in a minority.

For the past 3 years, it's just been me - so yeah, I'm in the minority. :) Last job, it was me and a couple other people. (I've got about 25 people to support now. Before, it was over 200). We didn't spend a lot of money, we know what we're doing. I currently support Netware/Linux/Win9x/OS X/EDI & VFP. It's not hard stuff - you just need good people. Previously there was a guy who didn't want to have anything to do with the PBX. Guess what, that's part of the job. Learn it, live it, love it. If you don't like it, go somewhere else. IT isn't a cookie-cutter job, you have to know how to think and learn new things.

And if by "help the IT department" you mean "allow the IT department to not blow it's salary budget while maintaining a reasonalbe level of service", I agree with you.

I agree, but now we're into, "Why the hell does HR/Management hire nimrods with college educations, instead of good tech people."

But I digress :)

Re:I have to say one thing.

[lucifuge31337]

Wow, that's pretty shitty. When I was in 'the big company', We were 1:50.

1:15 was sarcasm.

I ran the servers (Netware), desktops (Win9x), PBX (Fujitsu 9600), Telecomm issues, Internet.

Wow. You're a superstar. (also sarcasm....see how that works?)

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

You mentioned at least 2 times in your text about IT helpdesk and their 'scripts'. I've worked for several large corporations over the past 10 years and none of them had people in IT reading from scripts. These were typically people who were just as intelligent and bright at problem solving as any engineer from our other groups, just typically younger and still in college.

Before you start with your elitist, derogatory remarks, remember that a large percentage of /. readers and posters are, or were, helpdesk at some point of their technical careers.

You're taking that way too literally. There are certain steps you need to take to solve some problems. Most common helpdesk things are the same routine issues - THAT'S what I mean by 'script'. If that helpdesk person can go beyond that, then they won't be a helpdesk person for long.

I thought that was pretty obvious. But as you said, this IS Slashdot :P

Also, the reason for standardizing the desktops in a corporation has a lot less to do with being convienent for an IT group than reducing the TCO. I have my doubts that you've worked for a corporation of any size if you think anything caters to the IT folks. My experience has been 12 hour days, impossible projects, the company always wants more, better, cheaper, faster.. You make it sound like they need more time to play Quake and slurp cheese off their pizza crust..

_A_ reason is to reduce TCO. One of the biggest issues with systems deployment is setup - Standardization makes desktop setup a breeze. Don't confuse that with using standardization as an excuse for not helping the end-user get his job done.

If you purchase all of your systems from Dell, typically, you can get extended support for your IT people.

Never have, never will. My people should be better than that. If they can't fix a certain brand of laptop that is OUR STANDARD, how the hell are they going to be able to figure out something as simple as a Mac? Oh wait, that's the problem here isn't it? :)

If the helpdesk people can rapily fix a problem, then there's less hours invested in a problem and it costs the company much less in man hours.

Exactly, and you don't just plunk someone out of Micky-D's to do that job.

I'm sorry, but your derogatory remarks just make you look like one of those users who tries to alienate himself due to some sort of superiority/inferiority complex. You also hit me as that one guy in every company that is so disrespectful to IT staff that everyone just avoids him, period.

Sorry. I AM the IT staff. My job is to make your, the end user's, job easier. I need to do whatever I can to make what you need work for you, or get you something appropriate for your job. IT is a SERVICE within a company.

IMHO, Everyone who is bitching at me needs to realize I'm not an end user, I'm a Network guy. I have to make this stuff work just as much as you do.

Maybe the difference is that when I'm done, it DOES work.

Call my cocky, but what REALLY pisses ME off is the college requirement. Half-assed shitty admins with zero experience working with users will get a shot at a job before I do.

This is why articles like this are written. The IT industry is full of D&D players who can't talk to the end user and actually find out what they need to get their job done - then blame THE USER when the user has no choice but to take actions into their own hands because their IT department is full of twits.

Having been on both sides of the Helpdesk, I can honestly say that none of the helpdesk folks I have known have been hated by their userbase. They are typically seen as helpful people who do their best to get things rolling when users are in a jam.

I have never been on the 'end user' side of the help desk except when talking to the clueless tech support at a "Dell". But I DO talk to my users. And I can tell you for sure they know who they want to talk to, and who they want to go to when they actually want to get something fixed. And conversely, who the END USERS don't want to help them - because even end users know the difference between a crappy tech and a good tech.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

Wow. You're a superstar. (also sarcasm....see how that works?)

Yeah, you gave up.

Works for me, easier that way.
I'll be taking your first-born now ;)

Re:I have to say one thing.

[shotfeel]

Which you then need to manually re-mount every time you log in.

Try opening the Help Viewer and typing "Connecting to servers when you log in" into the search field. It takes two steps to do what you want (I'm assuming you're using Jaguar, don't know if it works for earlier versions).

Have to say, I do miss the simple checkbox that did the job in earlier Mac OS's.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Rasta Prefect]

He's not, he should escalate it to the real techs. That's what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Not for sitting on their asses and following a script the IT Manager wrote up, but solving problems. Problems that may not even have a documented solution.
To just give up because "It's not our standard" is beyond being a totally lame loser.

Your assumption is that these people are just sitting on their asses reading their scripts because they're lazy. As opposed to say, helping the 50 other people who have real problems with their systems, and doing all the other stuff their bosses wanted done last week but that hasn't been done because half the support staff were laid off? If someone wants support for something non-standard and there are resources available to devote to it, great. But just because the IT staff doesn't have time to devote to learning a shiny new operating system because some employee thinks it's so much shiner and newer than his boring charcoal grey Dell doesn't mean they're incompetent. (It doesn't rule it out either, but hey).

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Awptimus Prime]

You are just as wordy as I am. I'm suprised we don't get troll modded. ;]

Your response cleared things up a bit. I'm familar with the D&D butthole from Alaska who's too arrogant to figure out he's got a funky BO going on. Those types usually worked in tech support or the noc. Fortunately, the helpdesk crews were always pretty well managed and anyone that didn't generate a lot of positive feedback were re-assigned to other groups with less human contact.

But yeah, nobody likes the techie with the ashtray mouth and doo doo armpits. Not the guy you want to send up to work on Miss VP's laptop. You know, the lingering looks and nasal noises he'll make right before blathering something about how she should run Linux on her laptop and save everyone a lot of trouble.

College requirements can kiss my ass, too. I've got 11 years experience doing this stuff. My current job said a 4 year degree was required, but after the interview, they hired me anyway. I figure I should get back in school, I know it's going to impact me at some point..

Re:I have to say one thing.

[decepty]

no message thread tracking

Which will be fixed in 11 days... Via Apple.com: "With SSL/TLS encryption for SMTP, POP and IMAP, Mac OS X Server can encrypt the data sent between the server and the mail client. This allows secure and confidential transport of mail messages and attachments within a network. For maximum security, SSL can be required for communication on any protocol, including SMTP, POP and IMAP. With easy administrative control over authentication levels and support for a variety of strong cryptographic authentication services, Mac OS X Server gives you the flexibility to fit authentication methods to the needs of your organization. It supports CRAM-MD5 and APOP; and Kerberos can be used for SMTP, IMAP and POP services. "

Re:I have to say one thing.

[derF024]

no message thread tracking

Which will be fixed in 11 days...

Nope. I've been playing with the developers previews of 10.3, and this was one of the first things I looked at. Message threading support in the new mail.app is very badly implemented. It simply groups messages by subject. It doesn't construct threads so you can't see what messages mean in context. Mozilla/thunderbird is still the closest thing to a real mail client on OS X, but it doesn't come anywhere close to Evolution.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[decepty]

is anyone planning a port of Ximian to OS X any time soon? :)

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

He's not, he should escalate it to the real techs. That's what they're getting paid the big bucks for. Not for sitting on their asses and following a script the IT Manager wrote up, but solving problems. Problems that may not even have a documented solution. To just give up because "It's not our standard" is beyond being a totally lame loser.

Your assumption is that these people are just sitting on their asses reading their scripts because they're lazy. As opposed to say, helping the 50 other people who have real problems with their systems, and doing all the other stuff their bosses wanted done last week but that hasn't been done because half the support staff were laid off?

Nope, I disagree. If the company is in THAT much disarray that a 'real' tech person can't hook up a freaking Mac, then the IT department (specifically management) needs a flogging.

If someone wants support for something non-standard and there are resources available to devote to it, great. But just because the IT staff doesn't have time to devote to learning a shiny new operating system because some employee thinks it's so much shiner and newer than his boring charcoal grey Dell doesn't mean they're incompetent. (It doesn't rule it out either, but hey).

Ok - I'll grant you the potential "They're really too busy to work with something they don't know.." But that only excuses the IT worker bees - not management. Unfortunately it doesn't answer the question as to WHY his system was so unstable that he needed to pursue a replacement on his own - and WHO is responsible for the POS on his desk. Personally, if the worker bees can't get a stable Windows box on his desk, they need new worker bees, or a new 'standard' - or (gasp!) multiple standards.

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Havokmon]

You are just as wordy as I am. I'm suprised we don't get troll modded. ;]

Yeah. I ranted a bit around here somewhere, and expected a "Flaimbait" mod ;)

But yeah, nobody likes the techie with the ashtray mouth and doo doo armpits. Not the guy you want to send up to work on Miss VP's laptop. You know, the lingering looks and nasal noises he'll make right before blathering something about how she should run Linux on her laptop and save everyone a lot of trouble.

My favorite: "So ... Do you lady's like wear panties under your nylons? Or over? Or do you just go commando?"

Of course, childhood friend of the boss...*sigh*

College requirements can kiss my ass, too. I've got 11 years experience doing this stuff. My current job said a 4 year degree was required, but after the interview, they hired me anyway. I figure I should get back in school, I know it's going to impact me at some point..

Yep. Same boat. I've moved into management, and I'm not into the politics. I like the small companies, and if I were to move again (lose my 10 minute drive, bi-weekly massages, random free lunches :P) I would still go for the small company. In my case, because I mostly skipped school to support my kid(s), my resume and reasons for skipping more than cover the lack of a piece of paper.

BUT - keep in mind there are more and more of us doing the hiring now :)

Re:I have to say one thing.

[Awptimus Prime]

I just spent a lot of time watching porn!

How dare you!

[Medievalist]

Ignorant IT staff?

We here on the IT staff are exceptionally bright and well-informed. And don't you forget it!

What is a mac, anyway?

Re:How dare you!

[JamesP]

Guy: I would like to know how to set my PowerBook in the company network...

IT: Weel, you should click the start button, then control panel...

Re:How dare you!

[bev_tech_rob]

Or:

Guy: How do I set up my Powerbook on the network?

IT: You don't. Take it back to the store and buy a Windows laptop, per Company policy.

Re:How dare you!

[Xrc65kl]

> What is a mac, anyway?

My IT support staffer saw the SGI workstation on my desk and asked me if it was a Mac. The fact that it had Silicon Graphics writ large on the front of the machine didn't give him pause for thought.

Been there, done that...

[mirko]

I recently brought my Powerbook at work.
I am a Unix Sysadmin.
The only thing I had to do was to obtain a Microsoft Office License from the Business support division.
Now, Entourage can connect to Exchange servers while most of my work is done using Word and the Terminal.
It's really good to work using my favourite tool.

Re:ok... so you can use a mac in the workplace...

[sp3c1alK]

Not that I would make the choice to bring a Mac into my environment, but way to set a good example of 'ignorant IT staff'. I'm sure you've done a lot of research into the subject.

Maybe not so easy?

[glenist]

Kevin in Google Groups, having problems with DHCP? (not sure this is him, but is dated 10/1/03.

A Mac in the Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Contributor: Kevin Ledgister :: Open Content

"It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."
---

For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.

I ordered the brand new 12" PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks -- and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.

As I've come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.

IT Ignorance

The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn't offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.

When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate network, I would only get a 169... number which meant that I wasn't getting one from the network server.

I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.

Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.

Ups and Downs

After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."

So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.

I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it wouldn't let me join. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.

Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn't work because I didn't have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!

I don't know when this happened but I could now browse through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services for Mac, which I had asked them to consider. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn't care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network shares. As a side benefit, I uninstalled the evaluation copy of ADmit Mac and everything still worked fine which s

Don't need Citrix

[Wudbaer]

Of course, if you're lucky enough to have a company with a Citrix server, there's a native OS X client for that.

You even don't need that, a W2K server licensed as Terminal Services Application server (still costs some money, but considerably less than Citrix) is fully sufficient as MS has been offering a RDP client for OSX for quite some time.

My Personal Experience (Macs Rule)

[artlu]

My company specializes in Business Process Optimization (E-Integrate LLC.) We use macs for nearly all of our programing, movie making, and Oracle database development and administration. As a company, we are trying to move solely to Linux and OSX. There have only been a few tasks where windows is still needed and those are slowly diminishing such as Oracle JDeveloper development and terminal services connections. Each month we are expanding our employees to have mostly powerbooks, however, I am still forced to carry around my powerbook and vaio for a few more months :(. We currently have about 0.8 macs/employee and about 0.2 windows machines/employee with 8 Linux Servers running Oracle Collaboration Suite and 9i.

Sorry about rambling, just wanted to throw in my $0.02.
AJ

Re:My Personal Experience (Macs Rule)

[horsie]

Oracle already has JDeveloper for Mac OS X out, have you given this a try? Available for download on Technet.

Re:My Personal Experience (Macs Rule)

[artlu]

Yes, but not the version of JDeveloper for doing Oracle Application Framework development. That version is 5.7H2 which does not exist for the mac (YET,but hopefully soon).

This was a problem??

[Cat_Byte]

I've never known this to be a problem. Most places I worked the cute girls down in marketing "needed" Macs to do their graphic designs. I hooked them up, loaded the client, and it worked. Maybe I missed something that broke in newer versions of MS and OSX in my unemployment downtime.

This isn't a troll...seriously...it's a problem?

Re:not feasible

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, if in an eMac either screen or computer hardware is fried, I have to throw one functional part of it away.

you are absolutely correct. as it is 100% impossible to get a MAC repaired.

Please, send me your mac's that are broken and you HAVE to throw away... I'll give you $5.00 each for them!

Re:not feasible

[Daytona955i]

Not really because you can have a dual monitor setup and have lots of monitor space.

Full Text

[coolmacdude]

Contributor: Kevin Ledgister
:: Open Content

"It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."

For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.

I ordered the brand new 12" PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks -- and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.

As I've come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.

IT Ignorance

The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn't offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.

When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate network, I would only get a 169... number which meant that I wasn't getting one from the network server.

I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.

Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.

Ups and Downs

After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."

So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.

I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it wouldn't let me join. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.

Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn't work because I didn't have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!

I don't know when this happened but I could now browse through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services for Mac, which I had asked them to consider. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn't care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network share

Re:Full Text

[Shadow99_1]

First I will say thanks for reposting the article as I couldn't conenct.

Now for my comment on the story:

Dude you were usign a Dell what did you expect performance-wise? If you'd had a good PC you'd have been able to have more than 4 apps open (I use up to 10 at once on my home PC) without a hitch... And you wouldn't have had to shell out the extra cash for a Mac...

Heck if you were unheppy with windows you could have gone linux... Going Mac just seems like the worst choice in this situation...

Re:Full Text

[notque]

I'm sorry, I completely forgot that an I.T. department that does not have Macintosh computers on their network are required to know why your powerbook would not get an I.P. address.

Silly me.

Re:Full Text

[coolmacdude]

I have no need to whore, I've been at the top a good while now.

Re:Full Text

[Arker]

If they're competent, they would know whether or not they have set their DHCP service up properly - or at least be willing and capable of checking when the question arises.. Of course, in my experience, that's often way too much to ask of IT.

Re:Full Text

[notque]

If they're competent, they would know whether or not they have set their DHCP service up properly - or at least be willing and capable of checking when the question arises.. Of course, in my experience, that's often way too much to ask of IT.

That entirely depends on who you are asking in "IT."

and yes, that is way to much to ask of most of the member of I.T.

If it isn't in their job description, if the question doesn't arise often, they probably don't know it.

And I beileve that I am very competent, and I would have no idea if our "DHCP" service is setup properly. I also wouldn't know how to check. I'm sure if I were to ask the person whose responsiblity that it is, he would say, "Yes."

How can I go wrong with Yes?

Re:Full Text

[Wiz]

Well I presume that the desktop PCs are getting IP addresses just fine, otherwise nothing would work.

It is obvious that you are not a sys-admin from your above comment also.

As a sys-admin, if someone bought a Mac in they'd be on their own. I support 3 OSes as it is, and I'd rather my time was taken up trying to learn 3 BSDs, BeOS, Mac OSX, etc when we I've got a damned lot of work to do as well.

Yes, please let me drop everything to support $DIFFERENT_OS as I've not got enough to be going on with anyway.

Re:Full Text

[lobsterGun]

If they aren't going to support I.T. users then perhaps they should be called the Windows Serviecs department instead.

Re:Full Text

[trick94114]

insightful? sheesh. Why would a Dell be more sluggish? And extra money for a Mac for what the author clearly considers a superior experience hardly seems inappropriate.

Re:Full Text

[notque]

If they aren't going to support I.T. users then perhaps they should be called the Windows Serviecs department instead.

Okay, you're a cook.

Now teach me how to farm.

Re:Full Text

[notque]

Yes, please let me drop everything to support $DIFFERENT_OS as I've not got enough to be going on with anyway.

Yes, let you support OS's you don't even get paid to do!

Re:Full Text

[Shadow99_1]

I see way to many people that buy into Dell's marketing line that they make some of the 'best' systems out there... And what do they get for it? Mostly junk I wouldn't use to build a system...

I seem to get at least one joker a week that things because they own a Dell they can 'run anything' or 'play any game' and complain to me when they can't... I've stopped explainign it to them and instead just life and go "Dude! You got a Dell!' in what I can only think of as true irony...

As for the extra money for a Mac 'experience', well uh... Frankly I can make a windows box (for an example look at: http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/) look like a Mac and act like a Mac... I can do the same in Linux. How much more of an experience do I need? And more importantly perhaps why should I pay to have it straight from Apple?

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the need...

Re:Full Text

[Arker]

It is obvious that you are not a sys-admin from your above comment also.

What a wildly ignorant comment!

Yes, please let me drop everything to support $DIFFERENT_OS as I've not got enough to be going on with anyway.

If you're too busy to support standards, and/or cannot distinguish such things from platforms, then it's obvious you're not qualified to be a sys-admin.

Unqualified sys-admins are the source of the majority of network problems, in my experience. And experience is something I've had plenty of.

Re:Full Text

[Wiz]

What a wildly ignorant comment!

I don't think so. Quote you:

Of course, in my experience, that's often way too much to ask of IT.

If you are asking IT then you are probably not in the IT dept. If you are in IT, then perhaps you should be asking why you can't do it yourself?

If you're too busy to support standards, and/or cannot distinguish such things from platforms, then it's obvious you're not qualified to be a sys-admin.

I'm sorry, this is just crap. I do support standards, the corporate desktop standard. I work for a company with 20000 thousand PCs, do you presume we just allow them to run anything they want, and let them install it only for us to try and fix their problems? If we did, we'd spend all of our time fixing them!

We do run 3 OSes, and I probably could handle any other Unix-esq. But by your definition, if someone brings in a BeOS/Amiga/whatever and I can't bring it onto the network then I'm crap.

Ultimately it is pointless, as I wouldn't allow them to do it because:

1. I work in R&D, we don't allow people to bring stuff onto our network at their will. Our IP is too important. They could easily take a copy of it on their machine and walk out.

2. They could have viruses on their machines.

3. They could be running packet sniffer, or launching $LATEST_OS_VULN against my machines.

4. If it was MacOSX, I don't support it.

If one of our corporate desktops was not picking up a DHCP lease then I would fix it. But as long as the production machines are working, I'm not going to care whatever problems are occuring with people's various stuff.

Re:Full Text

[Arker]

If you are asking IT then you are probably not in the IT dept. If you are in IT, then perhaps you should be asking why you can't do it yourself?

It's a figure of speech. Perhaps you've heard of such a thing?

I was IT back when most people hadn't a clue what that was. I did it for years. I have a better job now.

But I would have said the same thing if I was still doing it. The phrase I used expresses a general observation, not a specific self-evalutation.

1. I work in R&D, we don't allow people to bring stuff onto our network at their will. Our IP is too important. They could easily take a copy of it on their machine and walk out.

If your precious 'IP' is so poorly protected that simply hooking into your network is sufficient to copy it, you are in serious need of a security consultant.

2. They could have viruses on their machines.

Ditto.

I'm not going to care whatever problems are occuring with people's various stuff.

Typical attitude of the newer generation of IT folk, and exactly the kind of nonsense I got sick of having to work with every day. You aren't the grand poobah that gets to tell everyone in the company what they can do. The engineers, programmers, and even the salespeople and marketers are the ones that make money for your company - not IT. IT is there to provide services so they can work better. If they need a Mac - or a BeOS box or an Amiga or whatever - to do their job, then that's what they should have. Not some IT doughhead with an MSCE and an inflated ego attacking them to avoid admitting he doesn't even know how to setup DHCP properly.

Re:Full Text

[mbbac]

Look isn't feel. There is a lot more to the Macintosh experience than skins and a dock. I suggest you actually try using a Mac someday, then you'll be able to answer your own questions.

inside and outside

[Slowtreme]

Bringing my iBook inside any of my corp networks have not been a problem, but with external security such a priority now the ability to remote in is getting pretty rough. AT&T Global net dialers, Citrix servers, etc etc. Mac clients for getting past gateways are generaly non-functional. I keep an XP box ruuning at home that I can RDC into and then remote into networks using the Windows clients.

Re:inside and outside

[Feral Bueller]

Mac clients for getting past gateways are generaly non-functional. I keep an XP box ruuning at home that I can RDC into and then remote into networks using the Windows clients.

Yeah, right.Have you tried using the OS X Citrix Client? How about a terminal window?

I have yet to have a problem getting past a gateway if the IT staff responsible for said gateway gives me the information necessary to get past it.

Good try though.

Re:inside and outside

[Slowtreme]

Exactly. It's generally not setup correctly, so the only way to be successful is to fake windows access. OS X Citrix Client is a joke.

In case of /. effect, read this post.

[Raven42rac]

A MAC IN AN ENTERPRISE
Contributor: Kevin Ledgister
Posted Oct 12, 2003 - 04:10 PM

"It's been said that bringing a Macintosh into a corporate environment dominated by Windows-based PCs is not an easy task. Once you cut through the corporate red tape, then get through ignorant IT staff you still have to connect and gain access to all the services on the network. osViews editorial contributor Kevin Ledgister took on this challenge and passed the test with flying colors."
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For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.

I ordered the brand new 12" PowerBook on my own and decided that this would be my daily computer to replace my Dell. Quite a few people were curious at this silver beauty compared to the generic charcoal laptops on their desks -- and some even said that their next system will be a Mac too.

As I've come to learn however, integrating a Mac into an all PC world is not without its challenges.

IT Ignorance

The first challenge was dealing with an IT department that was completely ignorant of the Mac platform. Although they were helpful and curious about the Macintosh, they really couldn't offer much help so I was on my own. At my place of employment, they use Active Directory and after doing a lot of reading on the subject, I realized that it was not going to be the easiest transition.

When my PowerBook arrived, I immediately plugged a network cable into it, but for some reason, it was not being assigned an IP address. I checked all the settings and they were correct. I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate network, I would only get a 169... number which meant that I wasn't getting one from the network server.

I downloaded ADmitMac from Thursby hoping that it would help connect me to the laptop but that required a valid IP address as well so I still was left out in the cold.

Frustrated, I connected my PowerBook using the phone line by my desk and dialed into our corporate network, which was slow, but at least I could browse the Internet and check email to our Exchange servers running Outlook for Windows under Citrix. No one was able to help explain why this was happening. Not Apple, nor our IT department.

Ups and Downs

After two days of this, I got disconnected again from the phone connection but iChat stayed active and I was still getting messages! I opened up the System Preferences and suddenly I had an assigned IP address. I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."

So now I had high-speed access to the network but not all was solved.

I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it wouldn't let me join. So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000, and asked an IT person to join Win2k to the domain and it worked. I was also able to browse the network using a Citrix client but this was still hokey.

Little did I know that ADmit Mac didn't work because I didn't have rights to join a computer to the domain. But a week after I got all this up and running, I accidentally chose the Connect to Server function when I meant to go to a folder and Voila! I could see network shares!

I don't know when this happened but I could now browse through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services for Mac, which I had asked them to consider. Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

Another unsolved mystery perhaps but I didn't care. No longer would I need to go through a Windows interface for network shares. As a side benefit, I uninstalled the evaluation copy of ADmit Mac and everything sti

Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[kevinbr]

I am an IT architect who has for the last 10 years simply plugged my Mac into any LAN where I work. TCPDump allows me to sniff what network range is in use, then ping for an unused IP, and away I go. When support staff walk around, just unplug and look innocent. 99% of corporate security is LAX and allows anything. I keep virtual PC for Project and Visio. Afer staff see me, there is a flood of portables that then appear when the users figure out that can use their nice sleek powerful home portable as opposed to rigid old slow corporate junk. And yes, now with OS X, I can connect easier to Windoze servers. With OS 9 I used DAVE.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[connorbd]

Okay, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. If you're an "IT Architect" (presumably that means you have substantial decision-making capability in your organization -- if I'm reading this correctly you're actually working as a contractor) you should know better than to be bringing outside hardware onto a company network.

I'm a Mac man myself, I sympathize... but even though you're using a Mac (more secure), you're compromising network security. If you were my employee I'd write you up at the very least.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[kevinbr]

Security Policies must reflect sanity. In no instance was there a written or verabl policy given to me........had I been told NO I would have complied. Trust me, I also write security policies AND the processes to make sure they work. My job is to get work done. My Mac gets work done. I was not compromising anything. Having a PC with Windows ensures that any bunny can compromize the network.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Pii]

Actually, you need to get out more.

If he's a contractor, or a 1099 person, then the company cannot provide him with the tools he needs to do his job. This includes a computer, a phone, or even a permanent work space. Them's the rules. Check with the IRS.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Elwood P Dowd]

Right. But it's perfectly ok to bring those IT-approved company-owned laptops in and connect them to the network.

The ones that were home for the weekend.

And connected to AOL accounts.

And contracted Blaster.

That's right. You should write this asshole up for compromising network security.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Arker]

Okay, I'm calling shenanigans on this one. If you're an "IT Architect" (presumably that means you have substantial decision-making capability in your organization -- if I'm reading this correctly you're actually working as a contractor) you should know better than to be bringing outside hardware onto a company network.

And I'm calling bullshit on you. Contractors normally provide their own equipment. In some cases it's illegal to do it any other way.

I'm a Mac man myself, I sympathize... but even though you're using a Mac (more secure), you're compromising network security.

War is peace, slavery is freedom, eh comrade?

If you were my employee I'd write you up at the very least.

If I were your employee I'd quit.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Dun Malg]

If he's a contractor, or a 1099 person, then the company cannot provide him with the tools he needs to do his job. This includes a computer, a phone, or even a permanent work space.

This is true, but the key there is permanent. I did a lot of 1099 work for a game company (showing my age here) porting PC games to the Commodore 64. They couldn't give me any of the above named items directly, but I was allowed to use someone else's cubical, phone, and computers. The IRS doesn't unilaterally ban access to company resources-- that would make most contract work impossible.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Feral Bueller]

hrmm... If he was your employee he'd be making coffee.

No offense, but it's those kind of statements that might keep people in the real world from hiring you.

All of the developers in the shop I work for bring in our own boxen to work: desktop *and* laptops. And switches. And KVMs. and whatever else we can fit into our cubes. We run the BSDs and OS X primarily, but we've got a few who prefer running Windows. Our corporate desktop is Win2K, but we're looking at Sun's Java Desktop with a fair amount of interest (if they'd just change the name...)

Our software wins awards and our online presence is pretty heavily trafficked, according to what I've read.

Fortunately, our network and system admins know what the hell they're doing and our VP came up from the sys admin side of things, so our network is a primary consideration rather than an afterthought.

Ultimately, if anyone really wants to do damage, if they're an employee, they've got physical access to the box.

Making absolute statements about writing people up indicates a binary thought process which reflects a lack of experience. My boss wants me to hit my deliverables, and wants them to work. He wouldn't care if I did it on a Commodore 64 and saved it to a cassette. People compromise network security, not boxen.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Pii]

True...

And it's not as if there's an IRS field rep stationed in everyone's workplace.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[Elwood P Dowd]

All I'm trying to say is that in practice, this dude with the PowerBook was not compromising network security, while there are real compromises of network security that happen every day and are ignored.

Re:Seek Approval - Seek Denial

[poot_rootbeer]

Hopefully you're an UNEMPLOYED IT architect. I certainly would never hire any alleged expert who considers their own personal desire to get on the network, by any means necessary, to be more important than following established policies and procedures regarding connectivity.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[codifus]

I've experienced this problem on a Windows only network. When trying to copy a Windows 95 file to an NT4 share, i would occaisionally get those "file not found" issues. It turned out, that, as you all well know by now, that Windows carries 2 filenames for every file. One is the 8.3 name, and the other is 255-character-that-even allows-spaces name. The problems stems from the fact that Windows NT had a different 255 character format than 95. So, when trasnferring over, something got kludged. If I kept the filename conforming to 8.3 standard, the problems disappeared. I'm sure if you try that with Jaguar, it'll work. It is a workaround and not a fix, I know, but at least it will get you going. CD

Re:In case of /. effect, read this post.

[coolmacdude]

Ha, too late. ;)

IT should (and do) love Macs

[anothy]

*ahem*
It's not always the IT staff that doesn't want the Mac in the door. I'm Director of Information Technology for a good sized company with offices on three continents. We were recently spun out from what is essentially a government lobbying body. It's all Windows, top to bottom.
Or it was. When we had to replace the Exchange server that was part of our former parent, we got an XServe. We've now got three, in two locations. About a third of our U.S. based employees use Macs, and that percentage is growing.
Tomorrow, I have to meet with the CEO and explain what the hell I'm doing (I'm hoping this article and posts will save me some research!). I'm assured by the CTO that he's open minded about it, but just thinks it's really "odd" and wants to know why. I hope that's the case.
It's not always the IT folks that're "ignorant". I know more Macs mean lower admin costs and greater reliability. And I know what having Unix workstations means to the R&D work. But some of the upper management has doubts... mostly, I suspect, because they'll need to explain it to the board, who's likely to be even more conservative.
Oh... and all our internally-developed software is Windows-only as well. The new CTO has already agreed that we're changing that. And we've got budget to ditch the few IE dependancies on our web site.
Sometimes we get to move in the right direction.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[stereoroid]

I work at a company that makes PCs that use Microsoft OS'. Macs don't even get their head round the door, but our IT staff are hardly ignorant, and I keep hearing how they are running Linux in the data centre and want to use it on the desktops too. Unfortunately, there are too many PC-specific applications in use to make it anything but a long-term goal for them.

I'm not talking about MS Orifice, Graphics, Scientific apps, the ones we have open source replacements for, but boring call-centre applications, financial programs, server and desktop management tools, etc. The companies who create those are totally commercial and will only develop where the immediate financial gain is, i.e. Windoze. It will change, gradually, but at a boardroom level my employer likes Microsoft. Bummer.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[anothy]

dude, switch to decaf.
learning time on a mac for applications related to business is tiny. everyone who's made the switch has been up to ~90% productivity in a few hours.
even if your assertion that IT would get called for every issue were true (which it's proven not to be already), the total number of issues drops so dramatically as to still save time (and thus money).
i'm not sure where this anti-IT rage comes from, but would you really rather large companies not have one? and require each individual to be their own admin? like the office secretaries? i've been in that kind of organization. someone (or ones) gets tapped to be the go-to guy, and can't do the rest of his/her work. that work suffers, the tech stuff's done poorly... it's just a bad idea.
and i've bought one cisco box in my life: and ISDN bridge. it was and what company buys DIY laptops? for all their non-technical employees? i've worked in organizations (in IT and out) where PCs were self-built, and y'know what? they were down more. sorry, but you want reliability, you need engineering, not the ability to plug bits together. and engineering costs money.
i have business experience. i've been in charge of tech budgets. and i've seen support costs dramatically decreased by moving people to macs where sensible, first hand. your post is FUD, pure and simple.

and you don't know me. pull your head outta your posterior.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[natefanaro]

You shouldn't have any problems. I am sure these people are more concerned about the costs involved rather than what something is running. Just explain that it costs less and that it runs even better than what you had before. I don't think he can argue with that.

(Or you could copy the Microsoft commercial. Give him some change and tell him that you save that much any time someone connects to the server.)

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[g0hare]

Geez, I dunno. I bought some dells for $469 including office and XP pro. They were all up and running and service packed in under an hour each (45 minutes of which was moving the old crud and opening boxes). No sweat at all. OF course for this to work you actually have to know how to use active directory, RIS, SUS, and so forth, but it's all pretty trivial. No support calls at all. It just works.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[allgood2]

45 min. I'd say that's more the beauty of using anetwork image, than anything particular to WinXP. Set-up through pre-configured images is supposed to have fast deployment, regardless if your a Mac or PC. But a typical setup, without an image takes far longer than 45min--just walking through the guided assistants under XP takes 10-15 minutes. Then you have to download and install all the necessary patches. Reset administrators, set security, set policies, turn off ports that shouldn't have been active anyway, turn off services, that shouldn't have been active anyway, set-up network resources like printers and fileshares, install applications, then clean-up the registry since its always in shambles on a new machine 200-800 entries that require repair (is typically what we find), etc.

It's all quick, if someone took the time to prepare and deploy network images. Otherwise its not :)

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[Graff]

Tomorrow, I have to meet with the CEO and explain what the hell I'm doing (I'm hoping this article and posts will save me some research!).

Here's some info to help you:

Total cost of ownership article and links

A fairly balanced and well-thought-out comparison of Mac OS X and Windows XP

Apple's own site on switching from Windows to Mac OS X

Hope these help!

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[Kris_J]

This IT officer doesn't have a problem with a wide range of platforms in an organisation. For one, as a web developer I'd really like to be able to test our website on more than a couple of browsers on one OS. Meanwhile, I hear of other IT departments trying to get laptops banned because they're harder to support than desktops. The issue is not the platform, the issue is mindless self-interest.

Re:IT should (and do) love Macs

[anothy]

an excellent post all around, and correct on most points (and from an AC! surely the end times are at hand). a response to some:
i've developed (what i believe to be) a clear rational, i simply don't have it prepared in a form that i can present to C-level employees or BoD types. perhaps "research" was the wrong word to use - i've done the price/performance, TCO, overall functionality, and other comparisons. that's not so much what i needed - more the "nice shiny presentation" most higher-level types like so much. this guy was announced to the company less than a week ago, and it was announced he'd be coming to our location to talk with me and others (and see operations) friday. not a ton of prep time.
building management consensus would have been good, you are correct. but the organization is in a bit of transition (having just about finished up the spin-out-to-buyer transition) and existing/previous management simply neglected IT (and, for the most part, R&D and operations!). the old CEO was more-or-less on board; it's just that this is a new guy.

Amen brother

[Lamont]

abso-frickin-lutely.

and I'm sick of articles that talk about "ignorant IT staff" being the problem for mac users. mac's aren't rocket science, they talk tcp/ip like anyone else, it's just really not that complicated....any half decent IT guy can get it on the network. that's not the issue though.

the issue as you pointed out is brining in unknown personal pc's and attaching it to a corporate network. That's a security back-door if I ever saw one....

Re:Amen brother

[Ohreally_factor]

The minute a worker takes home a windows laptop, it becomes an unknown vis-a-vis network security. Historically, IT staffers have been pretty unhelpful to Mac users. This is in general; there are always those wonderful exceptions. How many corporate mac users have had to do their own tech support, because of the unwillingness and/or ignorance of the IT staff? Thankfully, this hasn't been too difficult to do, since Macs tend to be more trouble free for the user. This situation does seem to be changing, with the advent of OS X and with linux making great strides in the workplace. (Maybe that's because the type of person who will take the trouble to learn linux will also be willing to pick up on the ins and outs of another OS.)

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Ohreally_factor]

And apparently, your screw is a little too tight, although you should be excusedm since the article is having "availability issues". He asked his IT dept. for accomadations, but, understandably, they weren't able and/or willing to help him. Also, he didn't really know what he was doing, or how to go about it. And it worked anyway. He had to try a lot of different things, and he's not even sure how he got it to work, but it works. That's Macintosh and OS X for you.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[drinkypoo]

$99 is more than the cost of a 100 gig hard drive. Are you telling me that because Apple fucked up it's reasonable for me to double the price of adding a hard drive to my system? For that matter, the same product for a PC is $20, or like $50 for a cheapie raid controller. Guess you feel I should be paying the apple tax. I think I'll pass.

Now its mostly bias

[nurb432]

I fully agree that until recently it was a pain to get a Mac on a NT domain. It required flaky 3rd party hacks, and you still had to screw with AppleTalk somewhat if you wanted to print...

Now with OSX thanks to FBSD and Samba, it's not too big of a deal. (Its still not perfect .. but its useable with out having to sacrifice a sheep )

I do admit we only have a few Macs, but I'm sure having a lot wouldn't be that much different.

Re:Are you kidding me?

[krilli]

I somewhat agree with you even if I don't want to. My wishful thinking is that if everyone properly follow standards that have been established by qualified people, this kind of company-approved-only thinking will become redundant.

There is no universal law that says that personal hardware connected to a corporate network will always have to lead to disaster, although right now, in practice, it might.

Re:I Have an Idea

[grub]

Office is native for the Mac, retard.

Linux ain't that easy as well ...

[didjit]

I run into a lot of problems running Linux as my workplace desktop, but for slightly different reasons. The SMB stuff is no prob, and I can access the local network and printers without a problem. Most of my problems occur because of people. I work in an engineering firm (but no programmers, IT specialists, or other techies here) so I get a lot of the usual:

Co-worker walks by, looks at monitor,
Co-worker: "Is that Excel?"
Me: "No, its OpenOffice spreadsheet" (or Gnumeric)
Co-worker: "Well, why isn't it Excel?"
Me: "Ummm, err, they don't make Excel for Linux."
Co-worker: "Well they should."

There aren't any serious problems caused by this, just a general uncomfortable feeling every once in a while.

Re:Linux ain't that easy as well ...

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

I get a lot of the usual:

Co-worker walks by, looks at monitor,
Co-worker: "Is that Excel?"
Me: "No, its OpenOffice spreadsheet" (or Gnumeric)

While your answer is completely factual, it makes you sound elitist. It also makes it sound like OpenOffice will take a steep learning curve for your Excel-addicted co-worker. (which probably explains his ultimate reply)
How about any of the following replies instead:

• No, but it does the same thing just as well.
• It's the equivalent tool, but it's free.
• It's the same tool, but without the macro-viruses.
• Yup.

--

Re:Linux ain't that easy as well ...

[Joe Tie.]

As someone who's had to endure attempts to convert me to Windows in the past, personally I appreciate his reply. If the coworker was interested in switching to a different product, I'd be all for giving him a speech about the merits of OpenOffice. But not when he's only curious why some guys supposed Excel install looks weird.

It's called standards

[xrayspx]

Let's say you're running a network of 160 desktops. 20 of those people would like to bring in their personal laptop, a Mac, Ipaq, etc. You then have to consider the security of the other 140 desktops. Corporate IT will be held responsible if YOUR personal laptop screws their network. YOU will not. So if someone "slips something by" Corporate IT, and it screws something, is virus infected, not locked down, then it is suddenly their problem to fix.

Can't always batter the Braindead IT Department. Companies have standards for a reason. I can't trust that J Random Developer knows how to secure his shit. In fact, I would always, 100% of the time, bet that he doesn't. After seeing some of the poorly maintained, hacked 10 ways from sunday developer desktops I have, my default policy would be to say "no".

Re:It's called standards

[smack.addict]

Incompetent IT staffs use standards as a tool to beat the business side of things into submission. The IT staff exists to service the business, not the other way around. A competent IT staff will have a diverse set of standards capable of meeting needs and working culture of the business. That means a heterogeneous desktop environment.

An incompetent IT staff attempts to standardize on a single platform across all computing environments. That reduces IT costs and makes life easier on IT. It invariable raises overall business costs and reduces the productivity of the business that actually drives the revenue.

Re:It's called standards

[big_debacle]

Let's not forget about that little thing called licenses.

"...I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000..." Licensed, I'm sure.

"...I downloaeded Outlook 2001 for OS 8-9..." And I'm sure there were free licenses just laying around since the shop had no Macs.

Part of teh standards--at least in the shop that my ignorant IT folks and I run--includes using licensed software.

Let's not even start on the other previously mentioned difficulties that come with users bringing their own equipment.

Re:It's called standards

[the uNF cola]

There's a problem with that line of thinking. You can't design an environment where a vulnerable server can't be hit by an exploit that is on a client. Even proxies don't offer a 100%, garanteed solution. Some exploits can propogate the exploit data if it doesn't validate the request or rewrite it.

The reason for a homogenous environment usually is hardware support. Your nic fried? Replace it, 0 driver configuration. No worries. You KNOW the nic worked since you replace it with identical hardware. It's not laziness... it's a garnatee that servicing is fast.

I know a lot of places which do NOT allow laptops in the network for control reasons. If a peice of software is installed on one machine, it gets installed in a standard way on /all/ machines. Bringing in a laptop of even identical specifications is bad unless IT decides to support it. And even then, they need to be able to lock it down and prevent viruses and such.

Re:It's called standards

[smack.addict]

There is this cool tool called a firewall. Check it out.

Re:It's called standards

[xrayspx]

My current company is exceptionally flexible, at least as far as some users are concerned. In other places IT is very restrictive.

However, as to other places I've been as a consultant, they would just have people installing software and hardware just because they felt like it. It gives you terrible licencing headaches (the company will probably be ultimately responsible for any software found on an employee desktop, whether they knew about it or not). It's all about finding the right mix. If your developers are coding ASP.NET, and VB apps, should you let them bring in a random powerbook? Should you let them bring in their personal laptops without ensuring they're safe in any case? Nope.

You can have the best network topology, the best security policy, if someone brings in a laptop that has multiple backdoors and trojans on it, or if they get hit by a malicious site that installs an outbound nc.exe connection to another site over port 80, allowing an inbound tunnel to their cmd.exe, guess what all that architecture and planning is worth?

You have to give your users an environment in which they're comfortable and able to work, yes. You must NOT let it get to the point where your environment is so un-comfortable that they feel the need to plug in their own gear. When that happens, well, best laid plans and all that :-)

Re:It's called standards

[GarfBond]

Well, if those extra laptops were running Linux or MacOSX, then you wouldn't need to worry about the security of thsoe other desktops, because you can be 90% assured about the security of those laptops, and almost sure that any problem affecting those laptops won't be affecting your windows boxes.

Now, if those were 20 imported Windows laptops, then we'd be talking a different story (blaster showed us how 1 laptop can wreak havoc behind the firewall) here. If anything, this is a case for a heterogeneous environment, where practical.

Re:It's called standards

[swb]

The IT staff exists to service the business, not the other way around.

"Service the business" does NOT mean: "Cater to end-user technology whims." Unless your job description and/or contract include the specification of technology for your job function or that of others, you use the technology that your management has determined is appropriate to do your job.

Yes, work sucks, but the IT department hasn't structured the workplace or its rules. They usually have been given a gatekeeper role, based on their experience with and knowledge of, information technology. The role is there to maintain lower support costs and purchasing costs by minimizing unnecessary hetereodoxy.

You may think that by not providing technology specific to your personal needs or/desires and insisting on a technology standard that you find personally less productive that the IT department is inhibiting business function, but I assure you that's not the case, and I further challenge you to provide documentary evidence from any management study that backs anything BUT standardization of ANY tool or resource in a large organization. Soldiers in the army don't get to choose what gun they use, assembly line workers don't get to choose what tools they'll use or what kinds of fasteners they'll fasten.

You may believe that you're specific workplace needs as a "knowledge worker" are so unique and that the regimine of standardization will infringe on your heroic abilities to innovate, but I assure you, your innovation and deviation from standards *are* the destabilizing force.

Re:It's called standards

[smack.addict]

Letting an employee bring in any random piece of hardware and hook it up to your network is NOT an example of having diverse standards. It is an example of having no standards at all.

No kidding. I am obviously not advocating the random piece of hardware standard. So why are you arguing it?

Re:It's called standards

[smack.addict]

Your changing the subject. I was responding to the problem of people setting up their own sendmail servers that end up being open relays.

People need to be able to take computers home. If your IT department cannot deal with that fact, then the lot of them need to be fired.

Re:It's called standards

[Maserati]

My copy of VirtualPC came with an actual OEM copy of Windows 98, hologram and all. There is (was) a "no OS" version for use with x86 Linux, BSD etc. operating systems, or for those who have a Windows site license. No license issue there.

As for Outlook 2001, well the original poster did download it... from Microsoft. So long as you pay for your Exchange CALs you're ok here. I'm having some connectivity issues (nothing to bug the router guys about, yet) or I'd show you the license.

Re:It's called standards

[desolation angel]

is virus infected

I have been using a mac for over 10 years and I have never been infected with a virus.

I just sit back and watch tech-support rush around patching and updating the windows boxes, whilst I continue working.

Re:IT Policy

[Cat_Byte]

Perhaps they have a security policy that checks for critical security holes and it's not configured for Mac? I can see security not allowing home pc's with alternative os's that they can't secure on their corporate network. It's as scary as those ppl who want their home pc to dial into RAS with full access to department files on a mapped drive. You don't know if they let their kids play on it or not. My 2 yr old niece did a nice job of hitting enter while the C: drive was highlighted and tagging about 200 files for delete. I caught her when it was asking "are you sure you want to delete these files?". It could happen....

One deplyoment to rule them all.

[mac-diddy]

We've been using radmind to deploy OS X to our entire group for over a year now. The best part is, we have a single 10.2.8 image that can boot all of our hardware ( old school iMacs to Dual G5 to new 15" laptops ) and is used by everyone including managers, developers, and support staff. Since applications are done as overloads, people can choose what software they want ala cart.

As the system administrator for the project, that best part is I can roll back any changes. Say, if apple were to release a bad update, I could just remove the overload and everyone would be back at say, a working 10.2.7.

Let's see you do that with windows.

Re:One deplyoment to rule them all.

[Tadrith]

Not a problem at all.

Active Directory provides facilities for the distribution of software to workstations and users based on policy. Users can choose what they want off of the list which displays in "Add/Remove Programs". All system updates can be deployed (and rolled back if needed) using SUS. Not only that, I have full control over every single machine within the domain, and restrict or grant access to nearly any part of Windows on a per-user or per-computer basis.

Remote Installation Services gives me the ability to install workstations by booting off the network card, and the installation is fully automated. Most, if not all configuration changes can be made pre-install, so that post-installation configuration is virtually unneccesary.

What... you didn't know you could do that with Windows? It's generally a good idea to know what you're talking about before making comments on it.

Re:One deplyoment to rule them all.

[autechre]

How do you roll back updates using SUS? From what I could tell reading the documentation Microsoft provides, it's basically a "run your own Windows Update Server" where you decide which patches to let through and hope that the Automatic Updates function on the end-users' desktops installs the updates. I didn't see anything about removing updates; maybe that's actually a function of something else you're running, like AD? We're using Novell here. Is everything in your setup free (as in beer, obviously)? We're a university department in a state with a severe deficit, so expensive licensing wouldn't go over well.

I was happy to see that Microsoft plans to add the ability to deploy Office updates with the next installment of SUS.

Re:One deplyoment to rule them all.

[Tadrith]

Sorry, my mistake on this one... I wasn't paying attention. I don't think you can roll back using SUS. I'm running SMS (Systems Management Server) with the SUS Feature Pack. SMS is a lot more comprehensive than SUS, and alas, is not free.

Pretty much nothing in our setup is free, as you would expect with anything from Microsoft. I realize that's a huge point with most people here, but that doesn't negate the ability to do it. Sorry that it's of no use to you, though! :/

I've had a lot of experience with Netware, and I loved it until version 6. So far, it's been a bit of a nightmare... it seems like third party application support is becoming extremely poor. Should be interesting to see how Netware 7 runs, given that they will have a version running the Linux kernel with Netware services on top of it.

Re:One deplyoment to rule them all.

[Fryboy]

I, for one, welcome our new application overloads

Don't shoot me!

my experiences...

[micaelus]

I did this a year ago in my post-grad program: every student is required to own a laptop and a copy of MS Orifice. I am one of 2 Mac users in a class of 240.

When I registered and asked if it was okay to use a Mac, I got the same runaround: "We won't be able to provide tech support, we can't guarantee compatibility, blah blah." So I bought a Mac anyways, knowing that I could always use Virtual PC if necessary, and knowing how helpful and willing Apple tech support is, even if the problem is not directly related to Apple products.

After over a year, I have had no difficulties using my PB G4 in this Windows-dominated enviroment. I did have to explain how to ignore resource forks when sending email attachments to a couple of people, but that's about it. VPC was perfect when a certain professor demanded that we use a Windows-only statistics app. Wireless networking is flawless, and I get greater range then my PC-using counterparts.

Not to mention all of the positive attention I receive when toting a Mac around. All of the Dell/Toshiba/Sony/etc. users just want to touch it. And this year's incoming class even has a few more Macheads (I like to think that I had something to do with this)--so bring your Mac to work and spread the good user experience!

Mixed results

[nofud]

I asked for the permission to use it and was replied, we will never allow you to do it, but we'll look the other way if you do it. (The company was nearly 100% MacOS in the early 90's, 3000 workstations at that time, Apple blew it for not wanting to do services etc...)

All workstations are Windows NT being migrated to W2K, all servers are Solaris.

Well, a lot of things work out of the box, network (dhcp), access to SMB shares, proxy, printers access, etc... What I need is a correct Notes client (we still use 4.6), most of the intranet is "IE 5.5 for Windows or higher", and some custom applications.

I'd say I'm doing half my job on the Mac, half on my NT4 workstation.

I would do more on the Mac if Dreamveawer was not such a dog on MacOS X...

Re:Mixed results

[coolmacdude]

"I would do more on the Mac if Dreamveawer was not such a dog on MacOS X..."

2004 is definitely an improvement.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[mark_space2001]

Just for the record, the disallowed characters in a windows pathname are: \ / : * ? |

If anyone cares.

Re:I Have an Idea

[Zelet]

Troll or just ignorant? Office X for Mac is native... and perfectly compatible with Office XP.

Oh, and any TCO studies have shown that Macs are much cheaper than PCs in their lifetime. Not to mention that the top of the line mac is cheaper than the top of the line PC.

Re:not feasible

[krilli]

This is true, hadn't thought of it this way. Although you *could* get G4s, still. A basic monitorless G4 costs $1300 - the same as a basic iMac. Apple sort of needs a thin-client-ish box, it seems.

Oh-Puh_Leeeease!

[WwWonka]

I ran to the IT department asking for an explanation for what they did, to which they replied, "Nothing."

Oh they knew what was going on.They just didn't want to waste an hour explaing to some dumb ass in marketing what DHCP/MAC control is!

They had much bigger fish to fry, such as downloading new drivers for that 256M 600MHZ vid card they were putting in that new E-Commerce dual 2.8 Xeon server with 4 Gigs of memory to play Counterstrike on the 61" plasma in the conference room when everyone else was home playing with their "fruity" Macs!

Re:Are you kidding me?

[Del Vach]

Then my screws must be fairly loose.

When I was hired a few years ago my company purchased a G4/400 (rev. 1) for me to use, partially since we design web-based software and there was no QA for Mac users.

Two years later and I was ready for a Powerbook(17). So now I come in every day, connect my Ethernet, monitor, keyboard, etc., connect to the Samba share, and I'm good to go. The company didn't have to make a single change to get my machine working on the network, able to browse the Windows share, or any of the complications the author reports.

I'm sure individual experiences will depend largely on company setup, but I can honestly say I have less day-to-day problems than I've seen with the Windows users.

Diverse environment.

[Psmylie]

We have some macs mixed in with our windows machines. We also have Linux and a few legacy os2 and dos machines. And yes, you can get them to play nice together. For a while, at least. Then you make some little "harmless" change on the network that one os likes and the rest hate, and suddenly your nice and peaceful network is a chaotic mess. And tracking down those problems can be pure hell.
Just because it works great on day one doesn't mean it'll still be great on day 100.
That's the main reason our IT dept (and I'd guess most IT depts) has been pushing for a single os. It is not because of ignorance, but because of a drive towards simplification.

Re:Diverse environment.

[ummit]

Then you make some little "harmless" change on the network that one os likes and the rest hate, and suddenly your nice and peaceful network is a chaotic mess...

Yup. But if you've got problems with a brittle network like that, you've got problems, period. Putting your fingers in your ears, pretending the open networking standards don't exist, stubbornly sticking with the one devil that you do know, come hell or high water, may seem to give you stability and security, but look at how many other problems it causes (and how unstable and insecure it can be, anyway).

That's the main reason our IT dept... has been pushing for a single os. It is not because of ignorance, but because of a drive towards simplification.

Or towards stagnation. (But Microsoft, along with the legions of virus authors out there, love you for it...)

Re:Diverse environment.

[gutbucket]

Just because it works great on day one doesn't mean it'll still be great on day 100. That's the main reason our IT dept (and I'd guess most IT depts) has been pushing for a single os. It is not because of ignorance, but because of a drive towards simplification.

Look, there's planning simply and there's planning for simplicity. They are NOT the same.

The simplicity that you want is on the desktop, not on the admin's desk. "IT Depts" are service organizations They don't have, nor deserve, the luxury of dictating to the end user what tool is best for which job. It simply cannot work. It will, can, and should bring down the enterprise to strangle the productivity in that manner.

If you want simple, you've chosen the wrong career path.

I am the IT dept at a research lab at a university. I can't tell a tenured professor that he can't use this machine, or that a given OS won't connect to that server. I have to make it work and I do. I have FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris and Windows servers all co-existing nicely (thank you SAMBA) with FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, Windows and Mac desktops. I'm trying to get funding for an Xserver or four as well. Once I have time... I'll get that old Symbolics machine that's been gathering dust in the corner in the mix as well... Why? Because that's what the researchers need.

Re:Diverse environment.

[NaugaHunter]

Then you make some little "harmless" change on the network that one os likes and the rest hate, and suddenly your nice and peaceful network is a chaotic mess.

Umm... this can happen on a single computer. What makes it less likely on a 'single os' network? Especially since it's unlikely you'd go with a single os anyway - XP Professional != XP Server != 2000 Server != 2003 Server != 98 != 95 (You know someone still has it) != Me etc. Unless you ghost ever computer exactly the same, everyone has the exact same model/ram/disk, and allow nothing to save to each computer it is impossible to be 100% certain that all the computers have the same settings without verifying it manually.

Once computers are involved, there is no such thing as a "harmless" change.

Anytime someone doesn't want what you like..

[xaoslaad]

you think it amounts to ignorance. Here's a happy thought. I don't give a flying **** if the company AS A WHOLE decides they want to use Linux, Windows, Mac, or Solaris.

I just started a job with a shop that uses AIX, Netware, Windows Desktop and Server, and Linux. There's a friggan security vulnerability released everyday. It's f*ing rediculous. So let's bring in a Mac and add to the joy.

See the sad fact is no matter what OS you use it can be a safe and cost effective environment. Do you know how many tools for instance Windows has for making the installation of a desktop easier? RIS to install desktop, AD to distribute apps to the appropriate users/systems, SUS to actually INSTALL those security patches/service packs for windows. e-Policy Orchestrator for McAfee VirusScan and I'm sure Norton has something similar if that's your poison.

And so what if you choose linux. You have other tools, like say RHN if you choose RedHat.

Or you could use a Sun Ray server and Solaris for all. It could be done really beautifully. But no, as with all places someone has to be the autonomous exception to the rules. So you have a friend in management, what next?

So, not a troll, but just think for a minute. Like I said I wouldn't care if I was supporting all Macs or all Windows or all Linux, as long as it was ALL ONE. And people will harp on homogenous systems being insecure, but that is largely BS if the IT Staff are for once doing their job. Whether you have 1 or 8 insecure OS'es they are all still insecure. Taking care of one dilligently outways 8 haphazard implementations.

Re:Anytime someone doesn't want what you like..

[smack.addict]

Like I said I wouldn't care if I was supporting all Macs or all Windows or all Linux, as long as it was ALL ONE.

Why should making the job of the IT staff easier be the objective of a business? Last I checked, the objective of a business was to make money. If making money means IT's job is a pain in the ass, then so be it.

In most companies, IT is so stuck on its own efficiencies that it fails to realize that an efficient IT shop is generally a sign of an IT shop out of alignment with the core business. You need standards to make IT work, but not monolithic, unbending standards like ALL THE WORLD IS A WINDOWS BOX. In fact, Windows on the server is as silly as Linux on the desktop.

Re:Anytime someone doesn't want what you like..

[xaoslaad]

As an addendum to that thought, I would like to add that I believe the non-homogenous systems should arise naturally as company A chose Windows because it was good enough, company B chooses Linux because it rocked their world, company C chose Mac because it was best for them, etc. It should not be each companies desire to create this kind of thing within their own organization further reducing the sum of their manpower for supporting each, where it could have been pooled into one resource that may have had specializations, etc. but at least had a strong fundamental understanding.

Re:Anytime someone doesn't want what you like..

[xaoslaad]

Last I checked, the objective of a business was to make money. If making money means IT's job is a pain in the ass, then so be it.
And so it's not possible to run a company efficiently and productively with one OS? 95% of the time I would say you are sorely mistaken. There are always exceptions to the rule.

Windows on the server is as silly as Linux on the desktop
This is an ignorant statement. Linux can be a great desktop OS depending on your needs. Similarly if all you need is file and print for 200 users Windows will do this just fine. Hell it will do just fine for a whole lot more than that. Once again dependent on the situation.

Re:Anytime someone doesn't want what you like..

[smack.addict]

And so it's not possible to run a company efficiently and productively with one OS? 95% of the time I would say you are sorely mistaken. There are always exceptions to the rule.

A small company, of course, can run just fine on one OS. There is not enough diversity in their workflows to require multiple operating systems. Once the diversity in workflows and working culture becomes sufficiently divergent, you cannot run a business efficiently on a single OS. I have consulted to a lot of Fortune 1000 companies, and I cannot think of one that was even close to 95% one OS.

And no, my statement about Linux and Windows was not a silly statement. Linux is a shitty desktop OS. Unless configuring X support is your idea of good desktop behavior (among a lot of other problems with Linux on the desktop).

As far as Windows doing print serving and file serving... It works great until it gets infected with some virus or another. While you may think diligent system administration fixes this, I think history disagrees.

Re:Why is it difficult?

[E-Lad]

Yeah, it should be that simple, right? I'm in that "almost there" situation. I bring my 15" PowerBook to work and use it almost exclusively except for one thing - I need to keep my WinXP desktop around solely for the purpose of using Outlook to see my work's Exchange servers. Yeah, I could use Entourage to do that, but I don't like running it and Mail.app at the same time. Just like I don't like running Explorer and Safari at the same time.

Luckily, though, Panther's Mail.app has Exchange support, so all I need to do is hang tight for a few more days.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[keep_it_simple_stupi]

Unless of course you are using SiteServer, in which case you have to disable the 8.3 names to avoid unpredictable random blue screen events. Thanks Microsoft!

You know..

[cK-Gunslinger]

For the last two years, I have had to use a Dell laptop at work running Windows 2000 in a mid size company with 300-400 employees. After suffering through several complete rebuilds, blue screens, as well as dealing with patches and security upgrades, I decided that enough is enough.

In all honesty, if your company PC suffers like this, your IT department is to blame. [anecdotal evidence warning:] I've been using Win2k for over a year now at work, and I do a large amount of *dangerous* work (editing several large files, running 30+ applications simultaneously, writing I/O programs, allocating GBs of memory, etc) and have yet to have my box become unstable or crash.

Most companies realize that PC downtime costs bigtime $$$. A workstation should be stable as a rock. Your IT should have a current disk image that contains a company-wide standard, with all stable drivers, etc, and should be sufficiently *locked-down* that users cannot fubar the system easily. Joe Employee shouldn't be downloading the leaked HL2 source from Kazaa while installing experimental DX9 drivers for his 4MB S3 Virge.

Re:You know..

[RealAlaskan]

[anecdotal evidence warning:] I've been using Win2k for over a year now at work, and I do a large amount of *dangerous* work (editing several large files, running 30+ applications simultaneously, writing I/O programs, allocating GBs of memory, etc) and have yet to have my box become unstable or crash.

I'm doing the same sort of thing (Win2k, 512M RAM, running SPSS with data files of about 400M to 600M). The system gets flaky sometimes, particularly if I leave it running overnight. Sometimes, though, it will become so flaky that I'll reboot in the middle of the day, after 3 to 4 hours uptime. I've found that having more than five or six windows open aggravates the problem.

The symptoms are: windows (not Windows) behave strangely, desktop stops displaying properly, icons lose their pictures, the entire system slows to a crawl (and closing all the applications and restarting them doesn't help), and probably some more that I've forgotten. SPSS crashes regularly, too, but I'm not sure whether that's a Windows problem or a SPSS problem. The two (flaky OS and SPSS crashes) seem to be independent of one another.

I've put similar loads on my Linux box (512M RAM, Debian Potato), using Maxima to do calculations which take hours to run and eat up all the RAM plus most of a Gig of swap, and never experienced any similar problems. The swapping slowed things to a crawl, but as soon as the work was done, the system was as responsive as normal, and nothing ever got ``weird''.

Just more anecdotal ``evidence''.

Re:You know..

[Cpt_Corelli]

Same goes for me. I have used my WinXP box for heavy development for weeks without rebooting. Same goes for all other developers I know. It is a common misconception among Mac users that Windows is constantly suffering from blue screens and rebooting. The mantra "My computer used to crash constantly yada yada, but now I have a Mac and yada yada..." will take some time before it goes away.

Re:You know..

[gutbucket]

In all honesty, if your company PC suffers like this, your IT department is to blame. [anecdotal evidence warning:] I've been using Win2k for over a year now at work, and I do a large amount of *dangerous* work (editing several large files, running 30+ applications simultaneously, writing I/O programs, allocating GBs of memory, etc) and have yet to have my box become unstable or crash.

I think there is some truth to having IT to blame, mostly because, in my experience, IT depts were either understaffed/underfunded or were overstaffed/overfunded but decentralized and distributed across several management "fiefdoms" (for lack of a better word... I think you know what I mean) and were often tugged back and forth to no productive end. In my past corporate life, the IT departments I've met up with only met with you once your machine exhibited problems.

But I wonder... I do some weekly preventive maintenance (disk defragging, short-cut rewiring, disk-cleanup and simple cold-shutdowns) for a few of the several hundred machines I oversee. I've noticed, overall, far less problems on the machines with a weekly diet of TLC than in the others. I even have a few PCs that I've intentionally left running, with multiple users, for as long as possible (though not too long lately, as M$ offers a patch every other week or so, that requires reboot). These machines are often the ones that show the most problems.

Could it be that your *dangerous* work (Cue the bond theme!) keeps the disk and RAM in a fairly steady cycle of churn and burn? Sort of an ongoing defragmentation and garbage-collection? This is, as you may well know, not something joe-random-user knows to do.

Slow news day?

[szquirrel]

What makes this story newsworthy? There aren't any interesting technical details, it's just the account of one guy who bumbled through putting his Mac on the company network. Good for him.

I'm also not impressed by the knee-jerk bashing of the IT department that doesn't know Macs. The IT department's job is supporting hardware/software the company owns, not whatever the employees could ever want to have. Neither the author nor Apple could say why his Powerbook wasn't getting an IP, but for some reason only the IT department gets branded as ignorant.

Novell is the only speed bump here

[downrightamazed]

Where I work we're mostly a Windows shop with some Novell: NT, Win2k, XP, and Netware 4.1. I use my Titanium (running Jaguar) for lots of stuff here, and use it in conjunction with my Windows workstation as well. I'm even able to use the company-approved email client, Lotus Notes R6, on my laptop thanks to the OS X client that ships with the install CDs. I haven't had any problems printing, file sharing, developing, doing anything really, unless it involves Novell. Getting around WINS isn't hard thanks to SMB, but if I don't know the IP address of a Novell box off the top of my head, then that's kind of a pain because while it's not all that difficult to go *find* the IP of whatever Novell machine I'm looking for, it's easier to just drill in via "Network Neighborhood" on the Win box, whereas on the Mac I'm sort of stuck. So but yeah, that's the only real speed bump I've encountered. Otherwise, no sweat, man. A couple of our engineers over in R & D use their PowerBooks and have no troubles, either.

Re:Novell is the only speed bump here

[Jord]

Minor tip. If those novell machines do not have a DNS entry then just add them to your /etc/hosts file and your mac will find them by whatever name you give. Makes life just a little bit easier.

Too funny

[krray]

But you would have a hard time bringing a Windows box onto any of my networks. They're just not allowed anymore.

i love apple, but...

[eoyount]

OK, so I love my Mac, but why on earth would you try to use a Mac in a PC environment where you develop apps specifically for PCs? I would love to use a Mac at work, but I need SAS 8.2, so that's not an option. Macs are great, but maybe a PC would be best for PC-oriented tasks?

Suck a dick.

[FatSean]

You wanna be special and bring your different computer into the network? Heh. Sounds like you are ignorant. Maybe you should sign off on all support issues excepting a live network connection and they'll be more accommodating.

Re:Suck a dick.

[tulmad]

You know what? I'd be perfectly happy with them leaving with me just a live network connection. There's not a whole lot to being able to use a computer, and all the IT people ever seem to do for me with my Windows machine is push patches for the latest hotfix.

Bu "Cutting Corporate Red Tape"

[Lester67]

do you mean "Increasing your capital expense budget by 50+ percent"?

I can get Dell's tricked out, for the price of ONE Powerbook. And I don't have to teach anyone how to use the Mac equivilent of anything.

Mac makes an awesome product, but with IT budgets shrinking, now isn't the time to "Go Mac".

I agree.. this article stinks

[deadgoon42]

I can't believe the play this article is getting. First it was on MacSlash and now it is on Slashdot. I can't see that it offers any useful information. The author does little to explain how he did anything, mostly because he had no idea what he was doing. The general consensus on MacSlash that this article does nothing to help other people get Macs running in their own place of work. I agree!

Wow, that's informative.

[gekkotron]

So I connected my Mac to the network, and it didn't work.

But then it did, kind of.

Then it didn't.

Then by running Windows on my Mac, I could connect.

Just the sort of in-depth, technical article we should expect here.

The Triumph of Standards

[Dark Paladin]

In the company I work for, while there are certain standards of computers and operating systems, most of the time these "standards" are a "follow these if you want assistance" type.

In other words, if you do not have a Dell computer with Windows 2000/XP on it, the IT staff does not want to hear from you.

At the same time, they really don't give a care what you use on your desktop. Which, since I work for a company that does a lot of security work, actually makes some twisted sense. We have people running around the place running everything from Windows to GNU/Linux to OpenBSD (which is the OS of choice for our penetration testers), as well as quite a few OS X users.

So how does the IT staff handle this? Well, the first part, as I said, is if it's not the "official company approved stuff", they don't talk to you about it.

On the other hand, everything else tends to work because they system is set up to follow most open standards. They follow the DHCP proper configurations (and, if you've ever worked with Windows DHCP, you know there are ways to make it so that UNIX based machines will not be able to fully work within the environment depending on what settings you mess with). The Intranet runs on the https port, and they don't have any javascript/flash or anything that would prevent somone who's connecting via a slow VPN link and just using Lynx to log their hours to have a headache.

I've read the stories of the "well, if so-and-so brought that kind of machine into the building, we'd fire them!", then those same companies complain of rampant viruses because of their monoculture.

To a man with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail. But for those places which have the "this is the Support System - you can run whatever you like, as long as it a) has antivirus, b) you don't try to get around the firewall, and c) you don't bug us to support your weirdness", the employees are emplowered to get whatever tool they need to get the job done. Part of the company's system is 0% interest loans to employees to buy their own computers, which encourages them to buy their own stuff and use it for work (such as my Powerbook, or my Pen-Tester's BSD laptop, and so on).

It seems to work in my company, and except for 1 quarter in 30 years, we have yet to not make a profit. And we don't worry about the IT staff except when we have to.

Re:The Triumph of Standards

[illumin8]

Part of the company's system is 0% interest loans to employees to buy their own computers, which encourages them to buy their own stuff and use it for work (such as my Powerbook, or my Pen-Tester's BSD laptop, and so on).

Where can I send my resume? This 0% interest loan for computers is just what my crack^H^H^H^Homputer addiction needs.

teh stoopid

[memph1st0]

alright now, i think we all know the reason why people are scared to bring macs into the workplace. i look around my office, and over half of the dolts here can't even figure out a variety of basic actions on their windows pc's - the same os these individuals have been running for years. what do you think these people would do when a completely new os was shoved in their face? the problem with people like this is they do not want to learn, and you know i'm right.

these are the same people that are your relatives that have pc problems, and you go to fix their computer and they look like it as its some magical instrument that only you can repair, they don't want to know how to do things themselves. if people could get some brains, they could try a different os and see that it's better and much easier to use. i'm a mac user, but i have to have a mac and a pc at work, b/c i do .net work, and i'm not about to try all that mono shit.

Ignorant, No way!

[eblum]

I'm IT and here where I work (very big two letters company) 50% of the IT people at my site use Macs. We have a cocktail of machines, HP-UX, Solaris suns, Windows PC, linux servers. Macs have probed to be a very convenient system administration platform. They provide us a very stable base for administrating unix an linux boxes, because of the Mac's Unix guts, while having access to office applications like MS Office (Dohh) and mail. I personally use Apple's Mail and not MS entourage because I find the mail application nicer. Some times I regret this because I can't respond to meetings requests I receive from MS exchange.

Anyway, I think Macs are a very good tool for my work team an my self, because it is the best of two wolds. (Or the only unix OS capable of running MS Office) As stable as Linux or any other Unix, and cuter then Windows.

Ernesto

the last hurdle

[briancnorton]

is that you need to make all your corporate applications run on your mac. Not so much a hurdle as a brick wall.

Macs in a PC world

[eddiegee]

I work for a small company that was exclusively PC/Win2K. I'm an MCSE and have worked mainly with Windows, but have seen the advantages of UNIX-like free OSs (Open and FreeBSD mainly). So when they hired a new web developer who requested a Mac, I leapt at the chance to set one up. I found it quite easy to integrate OSX with the W2K domain with a couple of minor hassles.

SMB support was a pretty painless setup, but I have dealt with SAMBA on BSD. The UNIX-y mounting of network shares does have its problems. When a file server had to be rebooted, the Mac connected to it kept the connection mounted. A umount in the terminal got rid of it, and the connection worked properly when reconnected. Printing was tons of fun, and required some text file editing to get going. At first I could get the printers to connect but not print. Turns out I needed to install GIMP-Print and that solved it.

Now none of the issues were insurmountable but I had 1 thing going for me. I have a UNIX background and do not fear the Terminal. The user I set this up for was totally surprised when I brought up a CLI and started typing away. I mention this because the vast majority of Mac users don't have this background. I found that Mac users look at a terminal window and make the same face that most PC techs make when they have to work on Macs. Until Apple makes a nice GUI for Windows integration this is not a viable solution for the majority of Mac users.

Apple/Win tech ratio

[lysium]

In a building with 500 users, 50 or so of which are Macintosh users, there are 3 technicians. 2 are Windows technicians, 1 is a Macintosh technician. The Macintosh technician is constantly putting out fires whilst the Windows technicians play Red Alert II through the afternoon.

Point is, Macs take a lot of tuning, too. And they are not designed for ease-of-support as they are for ease-of-use. So Windows software may crash more, but when a Mac crashes, it crashes hard. In my experience.

========

Re:Apple/Win tech ratio

[ipjohnson]

Depends on system 9 vs. OS X ....

9 crashed on me all the time ... these days the only time my ibook goes down is when I run the drain the battery

Re:Apple/Win tech ratio

[torpor]

I call bullshit ... you don't need that Apple guy.

Re:Apple/Win tech ratio

[mkldev]

I call bullshit, too. When I was in college, I administered a lab of 20-ish macs on 1/8th full time. Average time spent per week was less than two hours actually doing any maintenance with any other time playing with the UNIX box and baby-sitting people who were new to the platform.

Typical corporate computing environment studies show that it takes an average of one support person per 150-250 Macs, versus one per 50-60 PCs. That has been reported in study after study. Thus, the odds are very high that there is something unusual about your situation (assuming you aren't just trolling).

The only Mac computing environments that I've seen with high failure rates were old Mac OS (pre-X) machines where someone tried to add disgusting password protection software to prevent users from changing settings on the machines. Those labs were a constant headache, with failure after failure. The lab I ran (which didn't have crufty third-party extensions installed) had zero non-hardware failures in two years. If memory serves, the problems were:

• Printer jammed once a week.
• Printer crashed and needs to be power-cycled once a week.
• Someone hooked an ethernet cable to his/her laptop and didn't hook it back to the desktop machine when done once a month.
• Had to reseat the motherboard on a PowerMac 5400 a couple of times.
• Had to reseat a cache card once.
• Someone turned off the power switch on the back once a week.
• The power cord got disconnected inadvertently once every few weeks.
• Netscape crashed machines on occasion. Encouraged people to use IE, which generally didn't.

And those are basically all the problems that we experienced in two full years. If you have enough fires to keep a full-time technician working all week for only 50 Macs, then this suggests that either A. your Mac tech didn't set the machines up very well or B. your Mac tech needs to write up a document to help clueless newbie users figure out basic tasks without calling support every five minutes. In either case, you've found your problem, and it ain't the machine....

Re:Apple/Win tech ratio

[lysium]

In fairness, it is 9. But considering the niche fashion design apps we are supporting, it's going to stay that way for some time.....without the benefit of improved hardware to run it on. We do so love Apple's commitment to older (once expensive) hardware. But that is a digression.

=============

Security risk?

[razol]

While I sort of see the point of some posters here that there is a risk in allowing a non-corporate machine access to the network. One IT type person noted that if said Powerbook was not secure and introduced a virus to the network that the IT people would be blamed. I work in a company dominated by Windows and the above type comments make me laugh. A few weeks ago most of the laptops were crushed by silly worms like blaster and such. They all had to be "fixed" before getting back on the network. Meanwhile I was plugging away on my Powerbook. While I understand the risk of the unkown machine, I offer this; Macs are much less likely to be infected with damaging bugs to begin with.

Re:Nuke'em until they glow in the dark

[michib01]

Well, actually according to you it would be ten eyes every one eye...

It's a very pity western countries governments aren't as smart as you... What a waste of strategic vision and intelligence...

You'll have my vote!!

Re:Only cooked studies

[Zelet]

Try this page. It references a bunch of TCOs. And that $100 price difference can easily be made up after you figure in the fact that you can get rid of a couple $35,000/year admins.

Do research and don't talk out of your ass.

Why this issue is a BIG issue

[bussdriver]

The whole issue of Macs getting into the rest the market (which is mostly business--the consumer market is much smaller) is VERY RELIVANT TO ALL OF US!

All the problems the mac has with adoption are the same as that of LINUX, BSD, etc. Except Apple has got a porshe of a setup and the latter does not. If Apple can't get a foothold because of x,y, and z then neither can LINUX. Apple has some nice extras LINUX does not, but LINUX is free/cheap. Other than those differences the whole problem is one that BOTH must face in gaining acceptance.

We need market diversity to help drive the open standards and the need for IT to make it all interoperate. Think of your future!

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[clbyjack81]

"Has OS-X killed the long lifespan of Apple computers?"

No it has not, OSX just raised the minimum bar of hardware requirements. Once you meet that bar, your computer will age just fine. On my TiBook 400 10.0 was slow, 10.1 was reasonable, 10.2 was impressive, and 10.3 is now just a dream to use. At this point I don't even miss Quartz Extreme.

Since Panthers runs just fine now, there is no reason that I can't run it until the LCD finally gives out several years down the road.

Long live the old Mac!!

Re:Only cooked studies

[Zelet]

Oops... my html sucks... this link here.

OS X for J2EE development in a Linux/Windows shop?

[akuzi]

A slightly offtopic but related question....

In my office we doing Java development using Sun JDK 1.4.1 & JBoss on PCs running Linux. I'm wondering if anyone has experience of using Macs/OS x in a similarly environment? On the surface of things, everything should be fine since OS X supports all the standard tools, apache, tomcat, Ant, JBoss, perl, python, Emacs etc and the compile time and JRE spped on a G5 should be comparible to a high-end PC (or is it?).

Does anyone have any experience of using a Mac such a PC/Linux-based environment? I'm especially interested in performance comparisons and compatibility btw Apple's JDK and Sun JDK and JBoss performance, of a G5 compared to a PC

The motivation for switching to OS x would be for the non-development related software that it runs natively (eg. Office, Lotus Notes, Photoshop etc) etc that i have to Wine or VMWare to use under Linux (as well as Aqua generally seeming a nicer environment to use).

Re:Why is it difficult?

[Rude Turnip]

E-Lad: I went to the link you provided. Based upon what I read, it looks like Mail.app is going to use Outlook Web Access as a workaround to using the Exchange server directly. That's the same way Ximian Connector works for Evolution. IMO, actual, native Exchange support should be the way to go.

He didn't pass anything

[haschka]

He was unable to find Go --> Connect to server FOR TWO WEEKS! Don't people read help on their systems?

ignorant IT staff

[pmz]

Adopt Macs. Fire ignorant IT staff.

Windows administrators are the Model T mechanics of today.

Too much drama

[Animats]

"Wow, look at me, I bought a computer and plugged it in. I am so l33t!"

Ignorant IT != Hostile

[Yazheirx]

The article said that the IT staff was curious but not much help. As long as your IT staff is not hostile that is a step in the right direction. If you can provide most of the support you need you may even convert a few of them

Arrogant users are worse.

[Shivetya]

Arrogant users are far worse than ignorant IT staff.

Sorry, but it is the businesses network, their site, hence it is their rules.

If you want a laptop where I work you get a nice shiny new laptop - of the companies choosing.

Why do IT departs demand and are right in declaring what is and is not permitted?

Support.
Licensing.
Security.

Those are the big 3.

I don't care if someone things product A sucks, hell I might agree. However as soon as exceptions are made to the rule for one person it starts a downhill slide into support hell.

So, grats to this guy getting his stuff to work. It would never happen where I am at simply because it would never be a question. If the standards provide the return the business desires then that is what will be adhered to.

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[thetonka]

So what you are saying is that the customer(the user) can't possibly know what the best tool for the job is? Are you an engineer? Are you a graphics designer? Are you a programmer? Are you an accountant? Are you all these things? Are you any of these things or any skill profession other than an IT person?

If you answer is no or maybe to any of these than how the hell can you properly decide what the best tool for any of these jobs are? I am sick and tired of @$$hole IT people dictating to experienced skilled professionals how they should do their jobs?

You are the problem. You job is to support the company and its infrastructure and users. They are you customers and reason for existing. They know the best way to do their job, you don't. YOU ARE NOT DOING YOU JOB. YOU SHOULD BE FIRED.

Mike

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[timeOday]

But remember, companies like yours were the very last to get on the PC bandwagon. ("We have a mainframe. Use it!") Rigid top-down control is convenient, but there are downsides too.

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[eam]

In my department, our problem is that we rely on vendor supported applications, and none of these products support Macs at all.

The IT group would have loved to stay with Macs, but we had no choice.

We have two hold outs. Every couple of months we would get a complaint from one of them that they still couldn't access the purchasing site from their PC. Each time we would point to the requirements page where it says that Macs aren't supported and would only work with Virtual PC. Lather, rinse, repeat.

On the other hand, THEY ARE NOT YOUR CUSTOMERS, THEY ARE YOUR COWORKERS! If they were customers, they could expect the money they spend to increase with the amount of work required. Instead they demand the impossible and expect it to cost nothing. The fallacy that the user base are customers was developed by Management when they wanted to make the staff think they matter without actually spending the money that their needs would require.

Here's the rule: Your customers don't get paid from the same bank account as you.

We're outsourcing our desktop support. Now the user community can finally be treated like customers. If they want to increase their demands on the support staff, they'll be increasing the money they spend.

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[w1r3sp33d]

Nicely put, it seems everyone has forgotten about the old "walk a mile" thing. I have met far more than my share of bad IT people, no wonder the field has this reputation. I know the messes I have had to clean up from accountants, graphics and CAD, and of course the execuative assistants, but the worst ones are always from other IT guys.

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[gryphokk]

When IT started to coming to me (the graphics guy) for help on Microsft Office documents, I knew I had 'em.

At first, I was granted access just for printing. Gradually, I hacked into my own e-mail, then the shared drives, and finally the intranet (all with legitimate purpose - I am a content provider).

They didn't (and don't) support me, they tolerated me -- now they consult me.

And finally, the reason I'm needed on the Mac, on the network -- I'm the only one who can get the job done -- on time, under budget, and looking good!

So, maybe your corporation can get by without a Mac guru -- but in this multi-billion dollar energy & chemical corporation, everybody comes to me when they get stuck with the impossible layout or the job that just won't print.

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[thetonka]

You sum up my point well. As long as an IT department is not held accountable to those that they support said IT department will never be able to support them well.

They are your customer. You are providing them with a service. They are accepting that service. You work for them.

Mike

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[Derek S]

At my first IT job, I had a department head who preached the idea that users are customers. The results were frequently disastrous, but he didn't care because he didn't have to do any of the hands-on work.

While the sysadmin-user relationship does bear some resemblance to that between service providers and customers, it is definitely not the same thing. You're providing a service, but you're not doing it in exchange for money (at least not from the people receiving the service). And you're both answerable to management. This sometimes results in situations where you have to deny the users what they want so that you can give them what the company needs them to have.

Of course, to do it right you need to have an IT department that gets to know the company's business and works well with other groups. Non-technical (or semi-technical) employees will frequently come up with unreasonable, impractical demands, but they can also be very understanding about being denied if they believe that the decision was made for good reasons. That's why it's very important for IT not to focus purely on minimizing their own workload.

Sysadmins and users working together in harmony...

Re:Arrogant users are worse.

[henryhbk]

So your position is that users' needs are secondary to the IT department's. Having managed a VERY large IT department which spanned 41 countries with a network that supported 8 protocols, in an environment which tried it both ways, strictly standardized and loose, I can tell you which works better.

Loose (and these were surreally demanding users) worked better because the users were happier. Since the users were happier, and although they made my life more complicated, they were generally more willing to cough up the dough for the IT budget. Since it was a privately held partnership, the partners (the most demanding users of all) remembered that we accomodated their needs in times of need.

This also helped us grow proffesionally as IT people, since the person who came to the office with a new technology caused us to learn and grow. Flexability takes more work and care on the IT dept's part versus simply saying no! but after all the only reason to have an IT group is to support the users in their work.

Business-Level Support From Apple is still Lacking

[PhoenixRising]

One problem that Apple still needs to resolve before they can really be a serious contender for enterprise-level use is the speed with which they service machines. When a machine needs a replacement part (e.g., when your mainboard up and dies on you,) it can take up to two weeks to get it back. First, Apple ships you a return box. You box up your machine and send it off to the depot. The depot takes a day to check it in. Once it's in the depot, it'll take a handful of days to repair it. Finally, they ship it back.

Unfortunately, they have no policy for getting you a replacement in the meantime. For a consultant like myself, sitting without a computer for a week and losing $$$ of billable time, not to mention getting behind on deadlines, is wholly unacceptable. The major PC-based laptop manufacturers (e.g., Dell and Sony) will get you a new machine pronto if your current one breaks down; until Apple can do the same, as far as I'm concerned, their machines shouldn't be used for any sort of time-critical activity.

Re:One deployment to rule them all.

[mac-diddy]

Okay you are right. I should have said, asked "how can you do this with an free, open source solution on windows". My bad.

Wel, yeah

[appleLaserWriter]

The only defense they have is that they can't support it.

That was code for "we'll be happy to support your Linux system as soon as you send us on a two week training trip to Las Vegas"

Because it's easier to use.

[SuperKendall]

Even with the overhead of VPC, it's often more pleasant to work on Windows only stuff in VPC and then do everything else in OSX - on better hardware (especially true of laptops). Compare wake times from other laptops to Macs.

Why is SAS 8.2 on the Mac not an option with VPC?

Mac and PC play together just fine

[rbanzai]

I've worked in mixed platform environments for quite some time. My current workplace is about 85% mac, most of which are OS X desktops. The network OS is Win2k. Everybody gets along just fine, network shares behave reasonably and sharing files is fine between users since we make sure to have equivalent versions of desktop apps.

Why I Switched.

[viper21]

As pointed out in the posted story, I think my largest issue with windows machines, and with linux machines, is the sheer amount of labor required to get from point A to point B. On windows everything crashes, or the hard drives mysteriously get corrupted, or the current version of the driver for my video card somehow conflicts with something which causes an instant blue screen 20 minutes (exactly) into my computing session. (Don't forget the creative sound card 'helper' that freaks out and eats all of your system memory when it gets bored).

On the linux side, which I love and use for all of my server applications, things just aren't user friendly enough for an office workplace as a deployed solution. I wouldn't ever expect a system administrator to have any interest in troubleshooting my linux box. The flaw here lies in the obscure methods for installing software, what happens to that software once it is installed, and how the heck to run that installed software when it doesn't show up in a dock menu somewhere.

Prior to OS X, I hated the macintosh platform. The kludgy way things had to be done, the strange finder, the weird apple icon that was the bitbucket for everything on the system. I just couldn't stand how hard they were for me to use. But now, ever since they did the whole Mac+Unix thing, I have been quite curious but cautiously hesitant at throwing down the big dollars for a substantial desktop machine. This is the point of the story when I have to employ Apple to create an envoy of 'trial macs' to rent out to users to experience what life is like with OS X compared to windows or linux.

I recently changed jobs from a Windows NT/2000/XP/Whatever house, to a mostly Mac Only shop. In the interviews I was quite interested as I met and chatted with the system administrator about their infrastructure, etc. I was immediately very happy that I would have a day to day opportunity to goof around on OS X while working. I do mostly web and database development, which doesn't tend to be platform dependent.

After the first day of using OS X at work, I fell in love with it. That's all it took. A whole entire day where I could focus on work and my tasks at hand without having to even think about the operating system--except for how cool it was. Everything from the standard Terminal App, that allows you to select text, hit Command+C to copy it, then Command+V to paste it in another app, to the slick way I can download and compile most linux/unix based apps that I need to run on my system, made this OS the OS of choice for Getting Work Done. Things just worked the way I expected them to when I expected to.

If I hadn't been given the opportunity to spend an entire day working on an Apple, I probably never would have taken the plunge and purchased one. Yeah, they're damn sexy. But the price point alone scared me away from trying one. You can get the equivalent PC for half the price. You just can't get the experience. I'm telling you, Apple needs to build more apple stores with "Try it for a day" cubicles available for check out. Come in, sit down, and see what it is like to work on a Mac for a day. It really would change minds. A lot more than demo machines in CompUSA playing the new lord of the rings video on that 23" panel display.

I still use Windows at home for things like games, or when I get really bored with having a computer that doesn't randomly die on me. But, to be honest, I don't think I have turned that computer on in 2 months. I use Linux on my dedicated web servers and love those machines to death. The real deciding factor here is the fact that OS X allows me to focus on work instead of the strange things I have to figure out how to fix with my OS.

It isn't without bugs, and my system hangs every once in a while. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks. Nobody is perfect. But for those people who label themselves as geeks, I really think that OS X is the way to go when you want to get down to business. I don't think I could live without it. Just sit down somewhere and give it a try. It is different, but sometimes different can feel good.

When do you think I can get my own Switch commercial? :-)

-S

Re:Why I Switched.

[demonbug]

All I can say is, wow, yo umust be incompetent. With regards to using computers anyway.

On windows everything crashes, or the hard drives mysteriously get corrupted, or the current version of the driver for my video card somehow conflicts with something which causes an instant blue screen 20 minutes (exactly) into my computing session. (Don't forget the creative sound card 'helper' that freaks out and eats all of your system memory when it gets bored).

I've been running the same install of Windows 2k for over two yers now, and it rarely crashes - when it does, it is exclusively when I am playing games - never, ever when I am trying to get work done. It just doesn't happen with work-related software. What is it you did to manage to make yours crash all the time? In my experience, it is usually more the user than it is the software that causes crashes. Macs just give you less control (changing with X, but still it takes a lot more effort to really mess with the system than on windows), so it is harder to screw it up. This is your fault, not the OSes.

Everything from the standard Terminal App, that allows you to select text, hit Command+C to copy it, then Command+V to paste it in another app
Even telnet allows you to copy and paste text from a aterminal window. Highlight with the mouse, press enter (for whatever reason) then control-v wherever you want to paste it. But I guess pressing enter is much more difficult than pressing command+C.

You may enjoy paying twice as much for the same computer (as you admit); I'm happy to pay half as much for a stable, reliable computer that does everything I want.
(part of my reliability may be due to the fact that I don't use any virus protection software most of the time - I'm convinced it does more harm than good. I've yet to get a virus on this computer (once again the whole idiotic user thing), probably thanks to the firewall built into my router.

Re:Why I Switched.

[demonbug]

Doh, I wan't going to post this cause it was a kind of pointless, poorly thought-out response, but I apparently accidentally tabbed to the damn submit button, so when I pressed enter it submitted instead of newlining. Do I get the idiot user of the day award?

Re:Why I Switched.

[dema]

Do I get the idiot user of the day award?

granted (:

Re:Why I Switched.

[Bazouel]

My guess is that you switched from Win95, Win98 or WinMe.

My Win2k box have yet to have any of the problems you mention and I do use it extensively both for work and games.

The only thing that gets on my nerves is the need to reboot for almost every single patches.

Re:Why I Switched.

[Brandybuck]

The flaw here lies in the obscure methods for installing software, what happens to that software once it is installed, and how the heck to run that installed software when it doesn't show up in a dock menu somewhere.

Is that why Windows users insist on keeping an icon for every piece of software installed right on their desktop? I think some of these people are switching to multi-head setups just so they can have more desktop room for all their icons.

Re:Why I Switched.

[jamesmrankinjr]

(changing with X, but still it takes a lot more effort to really mess with the system than on windows)

Um, any basis for saying this? And is this a compliment or a complaint?

But I guess pressing enter is much more difficult than pressing command+C.

This is EXACTLY why so many people HATE Windows. Copy is supposed to be C-c (on Windows). Who was the genius that decided this one application should use "Enter" to do the same thing?

(part of my reliability may be due to the fact that I don't use any virus protection software most of the time - I'm convinced it does more harm than good.

And you're calling OTHER people incompetent? "No viruses yet, must be just lucky I guess!" You better hope that's some super duper magic firewall you got running there.

Peace be with you,
-jimbo

Re:Why I Switched.

[Orbital Sander]

I use Linux on my dedicated web servers and love those machines to death.

Y'know... you DO realize that you need to get out more, do you?

Re:Why I Switched.

[RealAlaskan]

Repeating what I said above:

I never play games on the Windows machine at work. It's running Win2k, has 512M RAM, running SPSS with data files of about 400M to 600M. The system gets flaky sometimes, particularly if I leave it running overnight. Sometimes, though, it will become so flaky that I'll reboot in the middle of the day, after 3 to 4 hours uptime. I've found that having more than five or six windows open aggravates the problem.

The symptoms are: windows (not Windows) behave strangely, desktop stops displaying properly, icons lose their pictures, the entire system slows to a crawl (and closing all the applications and restarting them doesn't help), and probably some more that I've forgotten. SPSS crashes regularly, too, but I'm not sure whether that's a Windows problem or a SPSS problem. The two (flaky OS and SPSS crashes) seem to be independent of one another.

Since I'm not the system administrator, I've no clue why things are so bad. Everyone else in the office has similar problems, and loses work to them, so I'm pretty sure that it's not just me.

I went on, in that earlier post, to say:

I've put similar loads on my Linux box (512M RAM, Debian Potato), using Maxima [sourceforge.net] to do calculations which take hours to run and eat up all the RAM plus most of a Gig of swap, and never experienced any similar problems. The swapping slowed things to a crawl, but as soon as the work was done, the system was as responsive as normal, and nothing ever got ``weird''.

... part of my reliability may be due to the fact that I don't use any virus protection software most of the time ...

You're a better (or braver, or stupider) man than I, Gunga Din. I wouldn't put a Windows machine online, period. Even with antivirus and a firewall. Of course, at work, they do put Windows machines online with all of the above, and periodically they prove me right.

Re:Why I Switched.

[Graff]

It isn't without bugs, and my system hangs every once in a while. Maybe once every 2-3 weeks.

That's odd, why is it hanging so much? I haven't had a true hang or crash with Mac OS X in about 6 months or so. It might be a bad driver or a corrupted NetInfo database. Take a look at /var/log/system.log and see what is the cause of those hangups. Often you can see what is the cause by the number of tries as the system attempts to do something like a NetInfo lookup. There are several ways to fix these problems, a quick Google should help you out with that.

Good luck and welcome to the Mac!

Re:Why I Switched.

[Phroggy]

I just get kernel panics for no apparent reason. Oh, and SecurityAgent crashes every time I authenticate for anything.

Re:Why I Switched.

[Graff]

That's very unusual, you have to have something corrupted. I admin around 40 Mac OS X 10.2 machines and haven't had a kernel panic in at least 6 months.

First of all, try running Disk Utility (found in /Applications/Utilities/). Click on your boot partition at the left and hit the button on the right "Repair Disk Permissions". Sometimes those get messed up and programs that need to run with certain permissions can't do so and crash. SecurityAgent is one of those. It's probably also a good idea to boot off of the System disks that came with the computer and do a Repair Disk with Disk Utility, just to be sure.

Also take a look at these discussions to see if it relates to your problem:
Nvidea-related kernel panic
Keychain-related problems

Can you post the kernel panic log? Here's some info on how to find it:
Mac OS X: What Is a Kernal Panic?
Mac OS X: How to Log a Kernel Panic

If you post the log and stuff like what OS version, type of computer, was any new hardware added to the system (including memory), etc. I'll see if anything jumps out as a problem. Like I have said, your situation is very unusual and it should be taken care of.

Re:Why I Switched.

[viper21]

Drop me an email, my address is munged above.

-S

Re:Why I Switched.

[Phroggy]

Mon Jul 21 21:11:30 2003

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0x300 - Data access DAR=0x00000000 PC=0x19830f5c
Latest crash info for cpu 0:
Exception state (sv=0x19709500)
PC=0x19830F5C; MSR=0x00009030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x198314BC; R1=0x11D6BC40; XCP=0x0000000C (0x300 - Data access)
Backtrace:
0x11D6BC60 0x198314BC 0x198339F8 0x000BDF84 0x001D96C0 0x001D97C0 0x0020F3CC 0x00092970
0x00070003
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x19816000
Pr oceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x19709500)
previously dumped as "Latest" state. skipping...
Exception state (sv=0x19632780)
PC=0x9000AFCC; MSR=0x0000F030; DAR=0xE12E7000; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x9023A20C; R1=0xBFFFCB90; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.34.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

panic(cpu 0): 0x300 - Data access
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x0008581C 0x00085C4C 0x000287B4 0x0008F6C8 0x000927D8
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x19709500)
PC=0x19830F5C; MSR=0x00009030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x198314BC; R1=0x11D6BC40; XCP=0x0000000C (0x300 - Data access)
Backtrace:
0x11D6BC60 0x198314BC 0x198339F8 0x000BDF84 0x001D96C0 0x001D97C0 0x0020F3CC 0x00092970
0x00070003
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x19816000
&n bsp; Exception state (sv=0x19632780)
PC=0x9000AFCC; MSR=0x0000F030; DAR=0xE12E7000; DSISR=0x42000000; LR=0x9023A20C; R1=0xBFFFCB90; XCP=0x00000030 (0xC00 - System call)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.34.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

***

We d Jul 23 16:58:05 2003

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0x400 - Inst access DAR=0x1ada2000 PC=0x00000000
Latest crash info for cpu 0:
Exception state (sv=0x1A1C6280)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x40009030; DAR=0x1ADA2000; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x00226828; R1=0x12D2BC30; XCP=0x00000010 (0x400 - Inst access)
Backtrace:
0x0002E300 0x0022647C 0x00226C70 0x0022948C 0x0022FB0C 0x1A34BC74 0x0003EAD0 0x0003E9D8
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.2.6)@0x1a33f00 0
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.2)@0x1a25f000
Proce eding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x1A1C6280)
previously dumped as "Latest" state. skipping...
Exception state (sv=0x1A413780)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x00000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.34.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

panic(cpu 0): 0x400 - Inst access
Latest stack backtrace for cpu 0:
Backtrace:
0x0008581C 0x00085C4C 0x000287B4 0x0008F6C8 0x000927D8
Proceeding back via exception chain:
Exception state (sv=0x1A1C6280)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x40009030; DAR=0x1ADA2000; DSISR=0x40000000; LR=0x00226828; R1=0x12D2BC30; XCP=0x00000010 (0x400 - Inst access)
Backtrace:
0x0002E300 0x0022647C 0x00226C70 0x0022948C 0x0022FB0C 0x1A34BC74 0x0003EAD0 0x0003E9D8
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.2.6)@0x1a33f00 0
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(1.2)@0x1a25f000
&nbsp ; Exception state (sv=0x1A413780)
PC=0x00000000; MSR=0x0000D030; DAR=0x00000000; DSISR=0x00000000; LR=0x00000000; R1=0x00000000; XCP=0x00000000 (Unknown)

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu May 1 21:48:54 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-344.34.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC

*********

Mon Jul 28 14:56:20 2003

Unresolved kernel trap(cpu 0): 0x400 - In

Re:Why I Switched.

[Graff]

OK, some of the more relevant lines here are:

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x19816000

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x19816000

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.2.6)@0x1a33f0 00

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.2.6)@0x1a33f0 00

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x23055000

Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.filesystems.afpfs(3.8.2)@0x23055000

Now these lines tell me that two kernel modules are involved, com.apple.filesystems.afpfs and com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily. The first one is related to AppleTalk and the second probably to your video card. To eliminate these as possible problems you should turn off AppleTalk (System Preferences->Network->AppleTalk and uncheck Make AppleTalk Active) and you should try reinstalling your video card drivers.

However you didn't say if you have added anything to the computer, such as RAM. Very often a bad stick of RAM can cause the types of panics you are experiencing. I say this because a lot of the panics don't seem to involve kernel modules. Even those panics that did involve a kernel module could be caused by RAM problems. To see if this is the case try booting from the hardware diagnostic disk and run hardware tests. If nothing comes up then try shutting down and removing 1 stick of RAM (after market RAM first) and then starting up. See if your system is more stable without it. If it is then that RAM is probably bad, if not repeating this with another RAM stick.

Worst case, do a reinstall of your OS. Here is a PDF of the process.

I hope this helps you out!

Re:Why I Switched.

[Phroggy]

Now these lines tell me that two kernel modules are involved, com.apple.filesystems.afpfs and com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily. The first one is related to AppleTalk and the second probably to your video card. To eliminate these as possible problems you should turn off AppleTalk (System Preferences->Network->AppleTalk and uncheck Make AppleTalk Active) and you should try reinstalling your video card drivers.

Very interesting! Actually AppleTalk is off; afpfs means AppleTalk Filing Protocol filesystem, a.k.a. AppleShare, which can go over TCP/IP instead of AppleTalk. I run netatalk on my Linux server and keep my home directory mounted via AFP on my Mac. I know netatalk and OSX don't get along with each other all the time; I've had weird issues like what seem to be conflicting file ID numbers or something (I could explain if anyone's interested). Netatalk works just fine with OS9, but OSX's implementation is different; AFP is probably a damn strange protocol and I'm guessing it's completely undocumented.

I do have cheap after-market RAM. Unfortunately since it can be a month or two between panics, seeing if the "system is more stable" without the RAM isn't really practical.

I tried repairing permissions last night while booting from a CD; some of the things it repaired were in SecurityAgent.app. However, it didn't help the problem. This one is at least consistent - I wasn't aware of it until I set Console to launch when crashes occur, but now I see the crash occurs every time I authenticate - immediately upon login, or when unlocking my keychain, or unlocking System Preferences, and probably other times. Doesn't actually cause any problem though, which is interesting.

Ah, video drivers - it just occurred to me that I installed SwitchResX, which I'm not actually using (it lets me run at a higher resolution, but the refresh rate is painful, so I'm not doing it). Could be related. System is an eMac 700 with GeForce 2MX.

At this point it's probably not really worth doing a lot of troubleshooting; Panther comes out in a week and a half....

Re:Why I Switched.

[Graff]

I run netatalk on my Linux server and keep my home directory mounted via AFP on my Mac.

You might want to scrap netatalk entirely. Mac OS X and Linux both natively support NFS, it's probably a better option. Here's a link to more information.

I wasn't aware of it until I set Console to launch when crashes occur, but now I see the crash occurs every time I authenticate - immediately upon login, or when unlocking my keychain, or unlocking System Preferences, and probably other times.

Hmm, try repairing your keychain by using Keychain First Aid. If you don't have it then information and a download can be found here. It might clear up authentication problems.

As you said Panther is coming out soon enough and maybe it's just best to move on to it. From what I've seen Panther is going to be a nice step up from Jaguar (10.2), probably even more of a step up than Jaguar was from Puma (10.1).

Re:Why I Switched.

[Graff]

I tried repairing permissions last night while booting from a CD; some of the things it repaired were in SecurityAgent.app. However, it didn't help the problem.

Oh one thing that I didn't notice at first. You can't repair permissions while booted from a CD. The Repair Permissions function only repairs your current boot volume, so if you boot from a CD it will fail to do any repairs at all.

Boot from your normal boot volume and then run Disk Utility and repair the permissions. That might help things.

Corporate build?

[bobthemuse]

My Dell is a 1 GHz unit with 512mb ram but I didn't like running more than three or four apps at once because the performance became sluggish

Gotta wonder if there's something shady about the way their IT department configured the Dells. This hardware should be more than enough to run a dozens apps, even if some are outlook, project, etc. Makes me wonder how things would look with a clean install of 2K or XP for comparison.

"Unused IP"

[Kakurenbo Shogun]

Before you grab an "unused IP", you should check whether they have a DHCP server and use it to get a dynamic address if they do. Otherwise, you may be grabbing an IP address that has been assigned to a computer that is turned off or is for some other reason currently off the network. Plus, if they have a DHCP server, it may eventually assign the address to someone else if it doesn't know you're using it.

Re:"Unused IP"

[kevinbr]

They always use DCHP. However, the Mac instantly pops up a window as soon as there is a conflict, and the Mac bows out gracefully. I then choose another. IP conflict happens about once every .........4 years.

Re:"Unused IP"

[weave]

This is one reason why us ignorant IT people hate this kind of stuff. Tracking down someone using an unregistered IP address on a subnet is a real PITA

Done it

[Frums]

For what its worth there is one Mac in our organization. I have it, and I am the SysAdmin. Most of the workstations are Windows (mix of versions) a few are Redhat Linux, and the servers are a mix of Redhat Linux (app servers) and OpenBSD (IS systems).

Speaking as someone who recently did the same...

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently persuaded my boss to buy me a G4 Powermac, so that someone in the department could learn a little bit about the Mac, its hardware, and how OSX works. Seeing as every one else in the department shuns anything that isn't Wintel hardware, I got to the front of the queue :)

I've been pretty impressed with the system so far to be quite honest. Out network is predominantly Windows XP on the client, and a mix of Windows Server 2000 / 2003 and Novell Netware 5.1.

I've been able to obtain a Novell Netware client for OS X - the downside being that Prosoft (the people that make it) charge an insane $149.99 for it. This just so I can connect to my Netware shares. The same thing that Novell give away for free. But what can you do? *grumble*

Any applications that I really need I just Remote Desktop into our Remote Desktop Server, and run - things like Outlook, and sites that need IE as a pose to Apples Safari. Microsoft actually make a Remote Desktop Client which works almost identically to the Windows version.

You can browse and map to any Windows machine - and even when they are joined to the domain, and expecting a domain member to connect, OS X can understand and work with that.

Microsoft do a version of Office for the system, so thats opening the bosses word documents or powerpoint presentations covered. I even think they do a version of Outlook (I can't get on with Entourage which ships with Office X as standard) but I have yet to find the Volume Licensing CD with that on and try it out.

It really is tremendously flexible - plus its by far the coolest machine in the office, and thanks to its inbuilt 10/100/1000 network port, I am now hooked up to our Cisco 3500 series edge switch at 1000mbit, whereas everyone else is on 100 :D

Re:I Have an Idea

[Zelet]

First of all, you don't need to buy an apple display any will work with the INCLUDED adapter cables. Second, OSX comes with more bundled software than ANY PC. Third, a comparable workstation (what the G5 is) cost just as much (or more) with the same amount of software and hardware and arguably a more limited OS. Windows vs. Unix.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[outZider]

You once had to give a Mac access? What, four years ago? I hate to sound like a fanboy, but I've had positively zero problems getting these Macs connected to our NT network, and I didn't have to change any security policies to do it.

I'm also amused that you make the comment that Windows can connect to any network and be secure. Are you new here? Windows doesn't connect to much of anything securely. Windows also doesn't connect to AppleShare volumes very well. It connects just fine if the Mac or UNIX machine is running a Samba server, though, since that's what Samba was designed to do.

Ugh. This kind of ignorance frustrates me, because it's a major block in the acceptance of alternative operating systems.

Erhm

[g4sevenup]

After reading the article, it seems that the author just managed to figure out VirtualPC and other utilities to integrate into the corporate network. I too had a Powerbook and tried to incorporate it into the net at work. I just ended up running VPC also just to talk to the shared printers. Decided to sell the PB and just get a new Wintel laptop running Slack. Tell me how to print to a shared Windows printer with the OSX drivers via SMB and I will be impressed/indebted?. I still have my eMac just for the OSX experience but productivity at work in the Wintel infrastructure was best kept Wintel for now.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[sakusha]

You're criticising Apple over IDE bugs in the rev 1 Yosemite, a 4 year old machine. If you'd have griped about this 4 years ago when it was still under warranty, Apple would have replaced your motherboard with a Rev 2.
FYI, I have have no problems with the 3 hard drives in my rev 1 Yosemite, using the Apple-supplied Adaptec SCSI card. And 3rd party IDE cards are cheap.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[ePhil_One]

1. I once had to give a Mac access to a network file server. It sucked- I needed to bypass a majority of the file server's security to allow this to happen.

When was this, ten years ago under windows NT 3.0? Or were you just using an inflexible security model? Nine years ago I set up an NT 3.51 server for a cross platform network and had no issues with the Mac security side. NT was full of security holes, of course, and getting patches was a bigger pain.

2. Mac doesnt have any real kind of client software that allows it to attach to an NT network (much less an AD network). Quite unlike Windows, which can connect to ANY other network (Netware, Apple, Unix, etc), and still be secure.

This is just so many kinds of wrong you need to be slapped.

a. Mac OSX is built off a BSD core, so unless you care to claim Samba is a myth and BSD doesn't network well, you're just talking out of your a**.

b. Yeah, I tried to hook my Windows box up to an NFS share just now. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box. Tried to connect it to an old Appletalk network. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box (Server can act as a Appletalk server, but cant connect to another). There's lots of other stuff a Windows box won't connect to either.

This guy needs to learn what he is talking about, but thats a tall order. Its so much easier to just bitch and whine.

Unlike a reasonable and intelligent poster like yourself.

What makes it so hard?

[otterpop378]

I did it. And in 4 easy steps:
1. Purchase Macintosh
2. Take out of box and set up computer
3. Turn Macintosh on.
4. Set Up Networking controls.

I don't see what's so hard about it.

Re:What makes it so hard?

[TheRaven64]

I think you mean:

Step one, plug in.
Step two, get connected.
Step three. There is no step three! Haha! There is no step three...

Less than impressive

[ZorbaTHut]

First I plugged it in, but it didn't work. So I played with it for a while and it still didn't work. I left it alone for a while, and then it started magically working!

Then I went on to the next part. Again, I couldn't get it working. So I did some random stuff to it and it still didn't work. Then I left it alone and it started magically working too!

Our employer uses some proprietary software that has a Mac port. Unfortunately, the Mac port isn't perfect. But this won't be permanent, because my company is upgrading to a new version of the proprietary software, and I have faith that Apple will release an update to their package at the exact right moment to make it continue working.

. . . This really isn't making me want to rush out and buy a Mac, you know? I mean, the next part is pretty impressive - dongles working *through a virtual operating system layer* is mighty cool. But the first few paragraphs just make me wonder what I'd do if it *didn't* magically start working, or if the gnomes at Apple didn't release a new patch just in time for my own personal use.

If he said "it didn't work, and so I checked the extensive documentation, browsed the detailed error logs, and figured out exactly what was wrong", yeah, that'd be great. But if he's saying "it just started working eventually", that doesn't fill me with confidence.

The sad reality of it all

[chia_monkey]

It's sad...for now at least...that so many people in the IT world know all this. For us, it's a "yeah...I've seen this article or one like it a dozen times in the past month or two". All very good points are made. But the problem, or problems still exist. We still have to get all this knowledge to Corporate America. And even once that's done, we have to convince IT Directors that this is the way to go. There are many reasons they would fight this...they're still going on what they know about pre-OS X Mac technologies and implementations (which sucked compared to what they are now), job security, fighting THEIR bosses, and so forth. It's all a worthy fight, and it seems like such a black-and-white "no shit" solution to us...but "us" is a different group and we still have businessmen, stubborn IT Directors, etc to fight with to get these points known.

Re:The sad reality of it all

[chia_monkey]

When you make this argument, it may get a rah-rah from the slashdot crowd, but the people making the decisions think they are doing the right thing by their own criteria.

Exactly. They THINK they are doing the right thing. But they've been so out of touch with what's going on in the trenches they don't really know what's going on. They're more interested in reporting to the CFO, CTO, etc to say "yeah, everything is ok". And maybe I should stop saying "they" considering I was one of those decision-makers. I've been under them, I've been one, I've been consulting them. I've seen it from all sides. Many times, corporate politics play more into these decisions than actual performance.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[AKAImBatman]

Modern OS X uses Samba SMBFS for its CIFS/SMB networking. So far I have had ZERO problems taking OS X and hooking it up to corporate (or home) networks. My only complaints are:

1. There should be a way to permanently attach network mappings that automatically show up when you plug into the network.

2. Before #1 can happen, someone has GOT to fix that problem with Finder lockups when you leave a network without unmounting an SMB drive.

You're thinking of Mac OS 8 and 9 which I personally hated with a passion. I also had to support the blasted things and always came out annoyed. My favorite Mac User quote was "Don't go so fast! You'll lock it up!" Thank GOD Jobs finally finished OS X.

But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[hendridm]

I can understand the argument for replacing Windows machines with a KDE or Gnome (more secure and you're not tied to Microsoft technology), but what is the benefit of Mac OS in the work place? Just seems like you're making things more difficult than they need be for a higher price (you get security and you're not tied to Microsoft as much, but it costs more and is more difficult to use).

I think it would make more cents to migrate to Linux than Mac OS. I don't consider myself to be a Linux desktop fanboy either - I run Windows on the desktop at home and work and Linux on the server.

Re:But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[sammaffei]

but it costs more and is more difficult to use

OK, How does Mac OS X cost more than Windows 2000, XP? More difficult to use? Have you ever tried to create a network / printer connection on any recent version of Windows comapared to Mac OS X.

Mod this as flamebait.

Re:But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[sevenoftoine]

I use KDE all day at work, and have a Powerbook at home.

OS X just looks better. Period. KDE's a great thing, all things considered. But it's visually quite hideous when compared to the Aqua interface. There's an unexplainable Zen to the Max OS X UI, one that KDE lacks utterly.

So, is that Zen worth money? Probably not. But the greater homogeneity in hardware most likely is! When you have several hundred PCs that need to be kept near the leading edge, that leading edge has many shapes and sizes. Maintaining those variations costs money. For better or worse, the Mac hardware is more homogeneous. That's where the cost savings will manifest themselves.

Re:But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[hendridm]

What's more importantly to you - eye candy or productivity? To a PHB?

Re:But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[hendridm]

No, I meant more difficult to use in general. I don't think they're easy to use at all. When I used to work at a Help Desk, we would see people come in constantly cursing about not being able to get something to convert or work on a Mac and it made it more difficult to help them because Macs are so proprietary in nature (ie, Think Different). Something as simple as copying something to the desktop (which then disappears when you eject the disk) or connect to a network share was often a daunting task. Windows? Start -> Run -> \\server\share$ -> [Enter].

I think the eject mechanism alone is confusing on a Mac. You have to hit Alt-Y (clean up?) to eject the disk or the Mac gets confused for some reason. Why can't I go to Special -> Eject? Then I have the nightmare of programs getting caught in a continuous loop asking for the disk to be inserted, only to be remedied by a force quit. There is no 'Y' in eject and I don't usually associate "Clean Up" with ejecting a disk. Also, trashing things has different effects. As far as I know, trashing a CD or floppy is very different from trashing a hard drive. Why would I want to trash it anyway? I just want to eject it! Non-intuitive.

Macs don't seem to support PNG images either. I often get e-mails from Mac users bitching about images not showing up on my web site. They work fine on every other platform! PNG has been around long enough. Live in the now!

Mapping and finding a printer is a DAUNTING task at an organization with many printers, but I won't get into that for my memories of all the chaos and confusion of navigating the finder to locate shared printers while working at the Help Desk is fading, and I wish to keep it that way.

I also think the file explorer on a Mac is weak, but that's personal opinion I suppose. I think Mac SLIP and Mac PPP are unusual too.

Re:But why replace Windows with Mac OS?

[hendridm]

> print center finds printers pretty well in my experience

Is print center the same as finder, or is it a third party add-on? I don't think we had it installed on the Macs where I worked. :(

> Sorry to disappoint, but browsers on the mac have had proper PNG support for a while

I don't get it. My PNG images, created with Paint Shop Pro, seem to appear on all other platforms except the Mac. What do you think the problem is? PSP writing bad images or Mac being too picky?

> hmm, so it's not Windows, and you're too lazy to adjust to the different UI concepts, that's your problem?

I wasn't trying to be simply Windows-centric. Many of the problems I mentioned I don't have issue with on KDE (although printers on Linux can be a nightmare too).

Re:Are you kidding me?

[tf23]

If you're expecting to bring your own random piece of PERSONAL hardware and get the IS people to make special accomidations for one user you've got a screw loose.

Where is it that you work? Can I apply?!?

We get this all the time. This director's kid needs to print out a report they did with some version of some oddball software they have at home, he has it on a disk now get it printed. Oh the kid forgot to put line #'s on all the pages. Well can't you just edit it for him and re-print it, it's due tommorrow you know.

"Oh? You're late on the rest of the stuff you were supposed to have done this afternoon? Well what the hell were you doing for 2 hours after lunch?"

"oh."

I don't know where you work, but we get requests like this, and are expected to oblige, atleast once per month. And then there's board members... walking in with wireless PDA's having been told they can surf the web while they're here in the buildings.... that's always a treat accomodating them...

Lol, the Apple guy just wants to keep his job.

[BoomerSooner]

If they are running 10.2 or later it is a dream to admin. Now if it's a PowerMac 8500 with OS 7.6 I might see the problem, but since 10.2 came out (really 10.1 but it was slow compared to 10.2) OS X has been a dream.

I switched.

[torpor]

3 years ago, and have never looked back. Virtual PC is the #1 reason it was so easy, though ...

I freakin' love 'cocktail' hardware. Cheap crack is still crack.

THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[AKAImBatman]

> I even plugged my laptop into a router outside of our
> network and it worked fine. But inside our corporate
> network, I would only get a 169... number which meant
> that I wasn't getting one from the network server.

ifconfig --renew

That will solve his problem lickety-split

> I still couldn't browse network shares and I tried joining
> our Active Directory domain using Admit Mac but it
> wouldn't let me join. ...
> don't know when this happened but I could now browse
> through the servers and mount them on my desktop. I
> ran back to IT again asking if they had turned on Services
> for Mac, which I had asked them to consider.

What is he *doing* with ADmitMAC? It's simple, click on Finder, select "Go" from the menu and select "Connect to Server". No need for "Services for Mac" or any other BS.

> Then I downloaded Outlook 2001 for OS 8-9 and it
> connected instantly and ran much smoother than either
> of the two methods I used previously. The only downside
> is that Outlook for Mac does not render HTML email
> properly. But that is a small price to pay.

The name for the OS X version of Outlook is ENTOURAGE. He'd know this if he actually bothered to get Office X (which was probably pre-installed on his machine as a 30 day trial anyway).

Did he even TRY to search the net for tutorials on how to get his machine hooked up to a windows network? It *really* is NOT hard. I'm probably being a bit hard on the guy, but COME ON. It's a completely new OS and he's treating it like the 10 years out of date OS 9.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[craw]

I believe that he said that he had to connect to an older version of Exchange Server (5.5) and needed the ability to do stuff like scheduling.

Straight from the horse's mouth is this bit of info.

Server-side requirements for Microsoft Entourage X
Microsoft Exchange Server 2000 with Service Pack 2 or later.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[AKAImBatman]

Alright, I suppose I can give him that. His approach to the issue was extremely poor tho. Just 10 minutes on Google would have saved him weeks of pain and anguish.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[Macdude]

The name for the OS X version of Outlook is ENTOURAGE. He'd know this if he actually bothered to get Office X (which was probably pre-installed on his machine as a 30 day trial anyway).

Entourage requires a Win2K server running Exchange 2K (I thnk, it may be an even later version). As stated in the article, his shop is running Exchange 5.5.
Just the be clear, Entourage will NOT work with Exchgange 5.5.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[AKAImBatman]

See my response two siblings up.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[craw]

He did make some mistakes and his approach could have been better. He did okay on some things and screwed up on others.

What I found disturbing was that didn't think about using the "Connect to Server" option (he accidentally found this). You have to think that this would be an obvious option to pursue.

Re:THIS GUY IS AN IDIOT

[milou]

I agree. I used to be the only mac user in my company and it wasn't a big deal hooking into our MS environment. I only required minor trouble shooting help from our sys admin guy to ensure I had the right set up, but after a few minutes, I was off and running. And neither of us had even used a Mac before.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[The Almighty Dave]

We are still running Win95 here. It does what we need it to do. That and the fastest machine in the office is a 233MHz with 64 megs.

The problem is

[Sycraft-fu]

That you DO end up supporting it. I'll relate a couple of my experiences:

One was working for a small department at a large university. They couldn't afford a proper tech support staff, instead all they could afford was one .25 FTE student (me). Now, everyone except one woman used Windows PCs. It wouldn't really have mattered what OS they used, all they ever did was type things in Wordperfect, check e-mail and websites, and manage student data via telnet to the SIS mainframe.

Now, it happens I do know about Macs and how to support them, more than most techies, but not near as much as I know about Windows. One of my first tasks was to get new computers, since theirs were woefully out of date. Well I speced new cheap Dells for everyone. We then had to have a big meeting and fight over Macs. The Mac lady though they should ALL go to Macs and refused to change. Ok, fine, everyone else gets PCs, she can have a Mac. She says it'll be no problem since "Macs never break".

Funny thing, I spent the largest percentage of time supporting her. She wasn't all that much more demanding than the other users, but she still had problem all the time. I hear the siutation got somewhat worse when I left and the student that replaced me had NO Mac knowledge.

Or take now, I work for network operations, at the same university. Well being a university, we can't tell people how to do things, academic freedom is a powerful force here. Well, most users are content to work with our equipment. We provide all the equipment, service, and support up to the jack at the wall (we don't do computer support, departments have their own support as perviously indicated). Most departments are quite happy with this. Our equipment is reliable and we can get things fixed fast.

However, some departments just have to do their own thing. They want to have some or all of their own equipment. This is an endless source of problems. They never seem to know enough to properly run and support their equipment. So something breaks and they blame us. We verify that all our stuff is working properly in every way we can but still no dice. So we end up having to go out and fix their shit (not our job) to make things work so they quit accusing us.

Best example of that was the school paper. They moved to a new building because of construction. Well, after the move, their big laser printer stopped working properly. So of course, they call us and claim it's a network problem. We try to explain to them that IP is IP to our switches and routers and all OTHER IP traffic is working fine. We eventually come out there and find some cobbled together switches hooking the comptuers trying to print to the printer. It was never even touching our NETWORK (problem was a bad card in the printer).

So, see, these sorts of things are the reason IT staff dislikes cowboys doing their own thing. Yes, I'm sure there are plenty of you that setup your own system, maintain it yourself, and never bother the support staff. However there are plenty that don't. They do their own thing, break something, and cry to the support department, who isn't supposed to have to support that thing. Now this is annoying when it is a problem that the support staff can fix, but shouldn't have to, like our network problems. We have the skills to fix them, it's just not our job.

However if the IT department DOESN'T have the skills, then it's a real problem. Not everyone can be skilled in everything, and smaller IT departments usually have less staff, and less well paid staff, hence less skill. So having a cowboy can be a real nightmare for them. This isn't fair to the users who really can support themselves, but it is the way things go.

Re:The problem is

[edgar_is_good]

I had almost identical experience. I was also computer support at a large institution when I was a grad student, and I only handled the macs. The people I supported were also the most demanding (much more than everyone using linux) but this was a selection effect, I think. The people who wouldn't use linux boxes, refused to change because they couldn't possibly use a new system. They resisted updates of netscape and were angered when I used technical terms like "run the program". They had no hope of using anything but macs.

But I don't think the macs were the problem. I use a mac myself (now that I'm a postdoc) to minimize the support time I provide to myself!

Re:Apple policies not very user friendly

[sammaffei]

The dead horse gets beaten just one more time...

Without the almighty floppy, Apple somehow managed to sell a ton of them.

Also, If it wasn't for the iMac, USB would still be the "What does that port do?" port.

Give it up.

Corporate Red Tape

[CaptScarlet22]

Aw Yes, the "Corporate Red Tape"....


My company, a hugh printing company world wide, always seems to muck things up when it's time to make an IT decision.

And this one is no exception:
We are thinking of not buying anymore Macs and going all PC hardware....

WHAT?!?!?!? ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR FUCKING MIND?!?!?!?!?!

The biggest reasons, they said, because the IT department couldn't support them. And over in Europe they are having problems.

The first thing out of my mouth was: "What are they using OS 9??"

And they said yes.

Over here in the US were using OS 10.2, and I said that's were you problems are coming from.

And it just so happens the Mac IT Tech is coming over here to see why were not having the problems.

We run Novell for file/print...for the Windows world.

The Mac's on the other hand use a Linux server Running NFS for a file server....

The Mac's do not have problems....

Corporate smucks are always trying to MANDATE everything they think that isn't "Standard".

Well sorry, but in printing the Macs are "Standard"!!!

The biggest RED TAPE, I've seen has been trying to convince Corporate, that Mac's DO PLAY WELL with Windows...

I could go on an on here...But I need to do some work!!!

Just fucking upgrade already!!!!!

Re: Using Macs In The Work Place

[davidroe]

The article omits any serious tests and solutions to integrating Apple hardware/software into a Windows networked environment. The major issues described were resolved either by running Win2K under Virtual PC or by magic fairies that inexplicably established network connections. In fact, there are so many "unsolved mysteries" and "I don't know" statements, I find it unfair that the author points out everyone else's ignorance when his own is too obvious to ignore.

It sounds like he made a poorly researched hardware decision, purchasing a Powerbook for work purposes without knowing whether or not he would be able to integrate it, use existing office systems, run proprietary PC-only applications. The IT infrastructure of his organisation sounds like Active Directory this and Exchange Server that, and by the fact that they recognised it as a Mac (rather than a Unix box) leads me to believe that they're not running too many flavours of anything else.

/dave

But has anyone done any research about...

[Atario]

...how to avoid being smirked at and called a "Mac Weenie(tm)"?

Re:not feasible

[decepty]

...or you could go with a PowerMac G4... You can use it with any Apple, DVI or VGA display.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[Morky]

I agree that the SMB support in Jaguar is weak and I'm looking forward to see if it's been improved. I also agree the DAVE is the best solution for joining a Mac to a Windows-centric network. Samba is rock-solid, so there is no reason it could not be made to work well within the OSX gui environment if the effort were made by Apple. But as of 10.2.8, it's flaky.

Re:MAC vs. Standard Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Well ... if the stability, speed, and the ease of use of that stethoscope would significantly ease the burden of your job, why not?

Stethoscopes aren't computers, although, it was a nice use of an over-simplifying analogy.

PS: From my experience, people who know anything about a Mac never spell it in all-caps. It isn't an acronym, kinda like "Windows" and "Linux".

Flying Colors???

[Nom du Keyboard]

I don't know when this happened...Again they said that no changes were made to the network at all.

I saw too much of this in the article to consider this passed with flying colors. When nobody can explain why things don't work one day and do work another, I'd have to label it still a work in progress. No indication that even a second Mac would easily and successfully connect to their network right now.

I'd mod the original article Overrated if they still let me mod anything.

Switching to OSX - PURE HEAVEN

[www.sharkdefense.com]

Ive been an IT admin/tech/whatnot for about 12 years and Ive stuggled through the first renditions of Windows and some were bearable, and some were quite annoying with their quirks. Add now, recently, with all the security and virus issues coming out of the woodwork, and the lockups and I no longer needed an excuse to switch. I only have a few old Proliant I'll be switching over to UNIX (next learning project this winter) just for raid5 storage. I bought a DP G4 1.42 and love it. I needed a pc to do video editing and titling, and was having issues getting the Windows version of the 1394 firewire working, let alone trying to make good DV out along with Quicktime and .MOV files for the website. I sold the P4 and just keep a Windows machine for gaming, but, like someone else commented, I havent used it in a month or so. The g4 with OSX connects to all my windows shares for the storage, works with my 802 wireless network if I want it beyond the ethernet cable's range, and its smooth and stable. Personally, I havent had a pc which I didnt have to reload the OS every 6 months due to one problem or another. I'm talking 95/98/2000 and XP. If you have a stable system with testing new hardware and pushing your machine to the limits and youre running a MS OS, you're a lucky one. I wouldnt mind doing a "I switched" commercial, too, I'll tell you now, the only way Id go back is with virtual PC if I ABSOLUTELY needed to run something like Visio or just an app I couldn't find on the MAC. I am sure in the corporate workplace there are too many applications that would not work on the MAC, or are not written on the mac, for example, if you didn't want to use Virtual PC. I support over 300 Windows clients and they're just high maintenance with patches, bugs, viruses, and such. Servers and Desktops. Now, if I had MACS at the workplace for clients, IM sure myself and possibly other tech people would be out of a job due to their stability.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[b1t r0t]

I'd be happy if I can rename a file over AFP longer than 31 characters. I can copy it to the local machine, rename it, and copy it back, but I can't rename it to a long file name. Huh? You're also right about the [ and ] in SMB. I've noticed that too. At least (IIRC) SMBFS allows you to rename a file longer than 31 characters.

As for the B&W rev 1, that's just too bad. The chip has a bug in it. If you really have a problem with that, get a PCI IDE card and hook your drive up to that. It'll be an improvement over the UDMA-33 as well. (Not that I care. I recently found a B&W rev 2 that I'm going to use as a DNS/DHCP/NAT/HTTP/IMAP server.)

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[b1t r0t]

You need to escape the angle brackets so that they don't get eaten as HTTP junk: \ / : * ? " < > |

Why I haven't.

[autechre]

I know a lot of happy OS X users. I was the one who made the (successful) push to replace all the Windows desktops with OS X as I was leaving the Retriever Weekly (graduating). I think that OS X is a fine desktop, but my desktop at home is still Enlightenment on Linux.

Why? The Mac doesn't offer anything over Linux that matters to me, and it has some design elements that annoy me. I'm also cheap out of necessity: I haven't bought an entire new computer, ever, and actually enjoy my Frankenstein PCs. I don't spend "hours" on them because I know what I'm doing, but just like someone who likes to work on cars, I didn't mind back when I did spend hours on them.

Installing new applications is mostly trivial. Debian almost always has an application that's right for the task that I'm trying to do, and installing graphical applications automatically puts them in the Debian X menu hierarchy. Not that I use it; I have my own small, custom, efficient menu instead. I greatly prefer a tiny menu which comes up right under my pointer, and windows that spawn there, to a "dock".

I also curse Apple for removing windowshading. Bad! In E, I often have stacks of windowshaded Mozilla windows, which are identifiable as long as the page has a reasonable title. I have a 1600 x 1200 display and multiple desktops, but I would still run short on space without windowshading. And yes, I am using tabs; most of the windows have multiple tabs open. I can ALSO minimize apps down to the pager, which shows either an icon for the app or a tiny snapshot of it.

The multiple desktop solutions I've seen for OS X have all been hacks, to the point where they had limitations which were unreasonable to me (something like not being able to have the same app, like Terminal, in more than one desktop). All of my desktops are littered with Eterms.

I know that I am not the "average" user. I prefer The GIMP to Photoshop (sorry, not publishing a printed paper here). I prefer GNUcash because I can do accounting. Eterms far outnumber the real GUI apps on my desktop. I check my email with mutt and Vim. But I just wanted to point out that OS X, wonderful though it may be, is not the super-solution for everyone. If you are "frustrated" with Linux but don't want to go back to Windows, you will probably like it. But I am not frustrated with Linux.

Re:Why I haven't.

[data1]

Many of your concerns relating to multiple desktops as hacks and a more alterable UI will be changed (as i am told) in Mac OSX.3 Jaguar.
I plan to play with it for a while at the local apple store to see if it is worth the upgrade.
Cheers!

Re:Why I haven't.

[Juanvaldes]

I'm happy you like OS X and even more so that you have something that fits you even better (heard lots of good things about E will probably try it out when I rebuild the Athlon). But there is a very good hack to bring back Windowshade, it is shareware though but when I used it last (10.1) it was flawless.

Re:MAC vs. Standard Desktop

[Seldon_21]

COWARD

Business, not tech, is the key to success

[Doc Ruby]

Apple's biggest problem has always been their inability to estimate demand enough to ensure a steady supply. I worked strategy with many businesses, and was there when NorTel (then Apple's biggest customer) switched to Windows. When a company decides to add 300 workers, they don't want to need contingency plans for their reseller running out of PowerBooks. I worked for Apple out in California, and their innovation engine fires on all cylinders, moving the world forward one user at a time. But a succession of CEOs (including Jobs) has failed to keep Apple a minimum risk to the supply chain.

So what?

[EvilStein]

We all know that if this was an article about getting a Linux box onto the corporate network, this place would be full of "Yeah! Go for it!" posts. :P

Re:MAC vs. Standard Desktop

[Morky]

Mac were immune to all the crap that happened to Windows networks over the past few months. I don't see how a Mac could threaten the "safety, security, and reliability" of your network. I do see how it could improve all three. Sounds like you have set opinions of Mac established years ago. The Mac OS has changed completely, as has Apple. They are completely viable machines in a corporate network.

Whine...I Can't Get A Caramel Macchiato at Big Mac

[reallocate]

Well...the first hurdle in this quest would be to get your employer's permission to use a Mac on their network in the first place, wouldn't it? Since this guy didn't get fired, he must've dealt with that little detail.

ANd it's a tad unfair to dump on the IT staff for being "ignorant" of the Mac. They were hired to support all those Windows machines the boss paid for. Whining about an MSCE not being able to support a Mac laptop is a bit like complaining that the kid at your local Big Mac doesn't know how to make your favorite Caramel Macchiato.

1 step forward 2 steps back.

[DeadBugs]

From the article:

• "So, I fired up Virtual PC, installed Windows 2000"

His IT department must have to draw straws on who gets to answer his calls.

Ignorant IT staff ? ? ?

[sgtzim]

Why is the article dissing on IT staff (calling them ignorant). I have 10 years experience working in IT, first with a Fortune 500 company, and now with a large privately owned company. I've got an undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I've managed Netware, Solaris, Oracle, OpenVMS, Windows NT through Windows XP servers, various Unix types, etc. In my 10 years we've run across the random user who either really needed a Mac, or could convince management that they had to have it. You know what we did .... yep, you got it ... we put that those Macs on the network and let the users have fun. I'm not convinced that the majority of these users actually HAD to have a Mac to do there job, but I don't really care as long as they could coexist peacefully with our network infrastructure. I don't feel "ignorant" because my IT experience has been heavily weighted with Microsoft systems versus Mac ones. I'm an IT professional ... I just make things work ... Mac or Windows. Ed

Ease of use...

[Prep]

I'd be interested in seeing what the thoughts are of the IT staffers. Where I work, keeping legacy protocols like AppleTalk up (letting people easily abuse printing rights) and dealing with the fact that Rendezvos sets up a Class B on our Class C partitioned network (and then decides to throw multicasts and broadcasts out at strange times) is a pain in my ass. As handy as I find my PowerBook, I'd be a happier person if I didn't have to deal with the "ease of use" that Apple puts into it's products.

Re:Ease of use...

[Jord]

Why the hell would you need to keep AppleTalk up on your network?!?

I have a 12" powerbook myself and have the ONLY mac in the entire company. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, special that had to be done to the network for my Mac to work correctly. I plugged it in and it worked. Simple as that. I have access to everything in the network that everyone else does (thankfully we do not use Exchange).

Sounds like someone is trying to spread some FUD to me.

Re:Why is it difficult?

[BigumD]

Hate to break it to you, but Panther's mail.app Exchange integration is just as crappy as Entourage's.

Directory Services

[allenw]

The biggest issue that Apple has about gaining a foothold in the enterprise is the lack of documentation and support surrounding their directory services. While basic RFC2307 support is there for the easy stuff, that is, for the most part, pretty useless.

Try hooking an OS X machine into a network where network directory mounts are defined in LDAP. It won't work unless you first do a lot of research to find just what OS X wants. Then you get to do some MASSIVE modifications to the schema and repopulate MASSIVE portions of the db. Unless your enterprise has a lot of OS X machines, this simply isn't going to happen.

Then there are the other proprietary bits. For example, there is this nice checkbox that says "Use DHCP-supplied LDAP server". I'd love to know how that actually works if you don't have Mac OS X Server.

Apple is headed into pre-OS X territory again. No usable documentation makes IT folks very, very unhappy.

I think YOU OVERESTIMATE YOUR OWN INTELLIGENCE.

[porkchop_d_clown]

1. First, Entourage is not the "OS X version of Outlook". Among other things, it doesn't fully integerate with the Exchange server, which mean calendaring doesn't work right - just like the man said.

2. The Finder doesn't always work with AD networks. Personally, I'm tired of having to type my network domain over and over again, because keychain doesn't seem to store it correctly. (And, yes, I've read Apple's KB articles on the problem and their suggested solution doesn't work.)

Re:I think YOU OVERESTIMATE YOUR OWN INTELLIGENCE.

[AKAImBatman]

> Among other things, it doesn't fully integerate with the
> Exchange server, which mean calendaring doesn't work
> right - just like the man said.

Yes, it does. That's what the Exchange Connector package does for Entourage. Calendaring, email, etc. all works when used under the connector.

> The Finder doesn't always work with AD networks.
> Personally, I'm tired of having to type my network
> domain over and over again, because keychain doesn't
> seem to store it correctly.

This is an annoyance that I too wish Apple would fix along with permanently mapped drives. However, you'll note that he finally stumbled on the solution which I gave above and wasn't interested in why it suddenly worked. Had he spent 10 MINUTES on Google, he would have known why and avoided bothering people over "Services for Macs".

Oh a mac at work....

[Jaysyn]

... how cute. Wake me up when they get AutoCAD on there.

(not flamebait, I do like Macs, but one would be pretty useless here)

Jaysyn

That's Super

[Ranger]

I'm glad Apple is using Macs in their workplace. They must be tired of being ridiculed for using all those outdated Amigas, BeOS, and NeXT cubes.

Macs gaining acceptance in high end computing too.

[pillar]

On a similar note, I just posted a blurb on a similar subject over at SecurityDrop. Basically, I've seen a large jump in the use of Macs (primarily powerbooks) within the Networking and Network research fields. More than half of my peers at other facilities as well as at my own facility have switched or have been using Macs for a while. It's not enterprise (thank god) but it is a decent footprint. Virginia tech also has a large cluster of G5s, which I'll bet will make the top 10 in the top 500 supercomputer challenge. Are there any more network engineers or researchers using or switching to macs? Why or why not?

VT's G5 cluster is ranked at #2

[dmnic]

according to the article Slashdot posted over the weekend

Re:VT's G5 cluster is ranked at #2

[pillar]

Wow, I totally missed that. Nice....

I use my iBook at work...

[gamgee5273]

I have an iBook and a Dell Dimension at work. I use the Dimension 3-4 times a week (for Visio, Project or CC-MIS (a piece of proprietary software our ACD uses)), usually through Remote Desktop on my iBook.

My staff and most of my co-workers use Dells. I'm the only one who consistently uses the Mac in a mostly-Wintel office, and I've been doing so since October 2001.

I've had absolutely no problems coexisting with those Wintel machines. I would be even happier if Nortel came out with a CC-MIS for OS X or Java and if OmniGroup could get OmniGraffle to handle all Visio files. Then I would just need to worry about Project...

Ok, how then?

[grolschie]

Serious question. How can one make an iMac running Mac OS 9.2 connect to a Windows network shared drive - without forking out loads of cash for Virtual PC or Dave? Just wanna know if I have missed something. All the Mac admins say I need either Virtual PC or Dave, both aren't cheap. Yet with my Linux (and my Windows box of course) box, SMB ain't a problem.

Re:Ok, how then?

[k_187]

That's easy, shell out the money for Dave. To my knowledge, there is no other way to get a mac to talk to a windows network. There's a product called PC Maclan that lets windows talk to a mac. Or you could shell out the money for OS X. Doesn't really matter. But I don't believe that there is any free (beer and/or speech) way to do it.

Re:Ok, how then?

[grolschie]

For the price of Dave I can build a cheap Linux box. A better alternative.

Re:Ok, how then?

[Life2Short]

I doubt if this is the anwer you're looking for, but if you upgrade that iMac to 10.x, the built-in Samba is a dream. Nothing could be easier. If this type of connectivity is a real priority, then it's worth it to throw more RAM in the iMac and upgrade to OSX. If not, fork over the dough for DAVE. Again, not the anwer you're looking for, but there's always sneaker net. I used a zip drive for this sort of thing for a long time. Pain in the butt, but short of the upgrade it might be the least painful.

Re:Ok, how then?

[Feral Bueller]

For the price of Dave I can build a cheap Linux box. A better alternative.

And a previously unstated one as well. For free you can download Yellow Dog Linux.

not impressed

[ruiner5000]

Not too impressive I must say. I also don't quite like the ignorant IT comment particularly since my experience shows Mac users tend to be ingnorant as far to computer knowledge. I wonder why in times of shrinking IT budgets that they wouldn't want to deploy boxes that cost three times as much? Why isn't that overpriced Xserve dominating the server market? Because there are better and cheaper products for every market segment except the cutesy computers lovers Apple wins over. That 2% can't see inside the box. If the author was a real expert he would try and bring in a system to use that he hand built, like when I was going to upgrade my system when I was in IT at Dell with an Athlon. Now that would impress me. Not knowing how to integrate a Mac into his work and then being hypocritical enough to blame ignorant IT doesn't.

Some things never change...

[c_dog]

I love a good religious war as much as the next guy, but I'm forced to be pragmatic when it comes to choices on systems and hardware.

In my current enviroment, we have a very healthy mixture of PCs and Macs. Like most have stated already, OS X has "fixed" many OS related issues found in earlier MacOS versions, but has created several others specific to application interoperability. Paramount among them, no *good* Exchange Client...and having to contend with an infrastructure committment to Exchange due to budgetary issues for at least the next year...maybe two has made this a serious sore point. I know, I know...Entourage. Have you used it over a WAN link via a VPN connection? I have...not a solution...a much bigger problem. I would be hard-pressed to recall a crappier program in my sixteen years of IT/IS experience.

The other issue that seems to have escaped many that shout to replace the MS enterprise entirely with Macs is that of switching costs. Leave alone the reality that the total cost of a Mac system with all required software to replace an MS system is more expensive than an upgrade to a newer MS system (in anything but an academic environment), the fact that most computer hardware purchases are capitalized makes it fiscally obsurd to replace hardware if it hasn't fully depreciated. I'd love to see someone successfully make the argument to a competent CFO that a hardware write-off was the way to go because..."Macs Rule".

In my opinion, those that claim Macs are easier to support than PCs in a mixed environment either:

a. Have a collection of tech-saavy, self-supporting *end-users* that fully understand (and remember) the hows, whats, and whys of interop,

or

b. Have never heard of, or successfully implemented any process automation in the Win32 environment. Perl + PSTools = Complete Enterprise Patching in less than an hour.

Now, before anyone accuses me of bening anti-Mac, or an MS-lover, let me make clear that I personally own two Mac PBs, and have a Blue/White G3 in my office. I also have a deep hatred for MS. That having been said, I know when to take my lemons and make lemonade. There are far more *competent* MS admins out there than there are people with the necessary *NIX experience to manage enterprise OS X available in the current job market (that haven't embedded their skill set in other, more mainstream *NIXes). People that think popping a disk in a system and re-installing the OS is the depth of sysadmin tasks required in managing Macs will have fun (sarcasm found here) over the long-term.

I personally don't care what system is being used, so long as a person's job can get done, but I'm currently the only one in my enterprise that will work in the BSD guts of OS X to secure it and automate enterprise tasks. It should probably also be noted that I run Gentoo Linux as my primary OS on both Mac and PC hardware platforms. Interop problems? What interop problems?

Hail to the All-Powerful Ubiquitous Penguin! Rock on, brothers and sisters. Rock on.

Flames will be automatically re-routed to /dev/null.

Re:MAC vs. Standard Desktop

[Seldon_21]

First I think that both responses to this post have missing the point. I am talking about standards. Who sets the standards and why they are put into place.

Are your business applications written to run under Mac OS or Win OS? Mine are written to run on a WinOS platform.

Do the majority of your clients know and understand how to use MacOS/Hardware? Our clients have a hard enough doing the simple tasks needed to use the applications and WinOS by themselves. Adding the further complexity of another device/OS would only increase calls to our Support Center.

VM's, compatibility mode and clients (I did a way with clients when I got rid of Novell) to connect devices to backend systems only adds to the complexity and issues one experiences when trying to make non-native systems work together.

More Time to Configure + More time to support = More cost.

Boiling this down, we support a single system because of an understanding of how an information infrastructure is run and managed. What will our clients understand and what level of competency and performance improvements can we gain from our leverage of technology. They care about if it works and that someone picks up the Support Center phone when they have a problem.

This is about business and not about a personal preference again decided upon by a selected few.

Security issues are only a response to a lack of planning and understanding your computer environment. Our security was able to adapt and quickly overcome the issues raised over the last few months.

Re:Apple TCO (cost of ownership) is lower.

[Jaysyn]

Umm, quickly go out of business?

Jaysyn

IT 3 Macs

[slhack3r]

I'm the entire IT department for my University's newspaper. And let me tell you, I love macs. :-) Our shop is great - couple Xserv's, couple more osX servers, and 60+ mac workstations. It's 4:00 (read: crunch time for a college paper's news dept), and I'm kicking back and reading Slashdot like usual. :-) Our systems "just work." :-)

Re:Use Office

[Jaysyn]

Well, we (the people that actually make money with computers) know that's wrong now don't we.

Jaysyn

Re:Mac does not cut it.

[Morky]

Everything you say is true, but "Mac does not cut it" is a bit vague.

Three or Four Apps?

[Lexic0n]

From the article: "My Dell is a 1 GHz unit with 512mb ram but I didn't like running more than three or four apps at once because the performance became sluggish. On the Mac, I often run six or eight applications at once, including OS 9 and Windows 2000 in Virtual PC. Three open OS's at once plus playing music, downloading files and running updates is an amazing feat."

I have to take exception with this. I run a 1GHz Dell with 512MB of RAM, and I regularly have eight or more apps running simultaneously without any noticeable performance degradation at all. What apps was he running that slowed his system down so much, I wonder?

Rolled out 168 iMacs sucessfully.

[FrankieBoy]

I joined a company 5 years ago that had 440 users and no computer infrastructure, hard to believe these days but true. They wanted to give their employees Internet access and eMail. We purchased 6 iMacs for each of the 28 offices. Six users shared 2 wireless iMacs mounted on floating monitor arm-stands, we fabricated the base at a local metal shop and had them powdercoated (real sweet). The wireless Airports and SDSL allowed us to roll out the entire setup very cheaply, not having to rewire the place for CAT5. Each office had 3 groups of 6 desks facing each other head-to-head which allowed the iMacs to be shared while not anging into each other. We started with OS9 and a custom auto-install CD that we created to blast a new clean OS without much user intervention. This allowed us to have a central IS&T department without local MIS representation. When new software or updates came out we just sent out new CD's and let the users blast the new image to each iMac. With Web-based email the users had a quick and efficient infrastructure that was easy to maintain.

Typical Mac user

[bigjnsa500]

The dude is a typical Mac user. Don't you guys/gals get it that Mac users don't have to do research? Or read documenation? Everything is supposed to work out-of-the-box magically.

It what makes sysadmins call Mac users 'flaming idiots'.

Go ahead mod me down.....

Re:Typical Mac user

[pillar]

sad, really just sad. so much anger.

The IT staff is crazier than the Mac lover

[Argyle]

WTF is any IT staff letting a civilian admin his own box in this situation?

In our environment of Windows, Mac, and linux, the only boxes connected are COMPANY BOXES under COMPANY ADMINSTRATION.

The only real problem with a Mac in a Windows environment is Outlook/Exchange and that's an application problem, not an infrastructure problem. Everything else is fairly smooth and handled by simple scripts for server connections.

No user in a company should be attaching personal computers to a comapny LAN without a very good reason. Any IT group that allows it is begging for security risks up the ying yang. Not to mention the software licensing issues involved.

The author simply reinforces the the stereotype of the righteous Mac user with low knowledge and big attitude.

Re:The IT staff is crazier than the Mac lover

[ummit]

WTF is any IT staff letting a civilian admin his own box in this situation? ...
The author simply reinforces the the stereotype of the righteous Mac user with low knowledge and big attitude.

Whereas you, I see, have no attitude at all...

Re:The IT staff is crazier than the Mac lover

[gutbucket]

WTF is any IT staff letting a civilian admin his own box in this situation?
In our environment of Windows, Mac, and linux, the only boxes connected are COMPANY BOXES under COMPANY ADMINSTRATION.

Amen! I hear you brother!

Why, in my environment of Pens, Pencils and Paper, the only implements writing are COMPANY IMPLEMENTS under COMPANY ADMINISTRATION writing COMPANY APPROVED fascism.

I'll trade you three weeks of meta-moderation for 5 mod points for fascism

Re:Skewed perspective?

[Winjer2k]

1. There should be a way to permanently attach network mappings that automatically show up when you plug into the network.

You can have network drives show up automatically when you log in. Just drag the drives into the startup items box in the System Control Panel.

Re:Apple TCO is much lower

[Jaysyn]

If you look at it that way yes, but then you just cost yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars on design contracts that you can't work on because your (ex)IT manager is a moron.

p.s. Excel & MacPaint *cannot* take the place of AutoCAD. You're comparing rasters & vectors.

Jaysyn

Re:Skewed perspective?

[AKAImBatman]

Smart. Now if Apple would fix problem #2, I'd be good to go. :-)

I don't get the switch either...

[LilMikey]

Personally, I run Windows and Linux because each has their place. Linux runs web-server, SQL Server, business software, and mythtv. Windows runs games.

Why would I spend a lot of extra money on a machine that partially fills all of those roles but excels at none? I don't feel that either are difficult to navigate, it's only 2 or 3 clicks in either to launch a word processor or web browser or whatnot. Who are these mythical people that waste hours and hours of time and energy navigating the innards of their OSes?

Re:Think different

[Jaysyn]

The multi-billion dollar design industry would tell them they are wrong. AutoDesk has been around for decades & Bentley's been around longer than Apple's been in business. I have about $15,000-$20,000 in (legally licensed) Design & GIS software on what amounts to a $1000 pc sitting in front of me. None of this software runs on Mac or Linux (at least on linux there are comparable programs).

For my purposes a Mac would be like a BMW pulling a gravel rake, while I'm using the $1M combine.

Not that I wouldn't mind seeing a version of AutoCAD that ran on the new G5's (drool).

Jaysyn

Garbage

[FredFnord]

'Ever seen a badly configured system on the network fuck up connections to other computers?'

Not for years. And we're running the most hererogenous small network I've seen for a long time.

Basically, these days, since unswitched networks and 10-base-2 are gone the way of the winds, there is almost nothing that will bring down a well-designed network except operator incompetence or inadequate design due to inadequate funding or inadequate manpower. Which do you have?

'If an employee needs a tool for their job, they request it, just like any other resource. It will be investigated and implemented if appropriate and feasible.'

This almost always means management will look at it and shrug and look at IT, and IT will look at it and say 'No, that might mean work for us', and the request is rubber-stamped 'no'. As for 'More often than not, it's a bad idea to implement their demands', what that means is, 'I don't care if it actually works, more often than not it annoys me and doesn't save ME any work.'

Mind you, this is most often because IT departments are understaffed by 50% for the work they have to do. But that doesn't excuse the attitude. The appropriate response in that case is, 'We could order that, but we don't have the manpower to support it', or 'We could order that, but only after I talk to him and assure myself that he can support it himself, because we don't have the manpower to support it,' or even, 'Yes, that would be an excellent solution to his problem, and probably make him a lot more productive; it's a pity we don't have the manpower to support it'.

Just rubber stamping 'no' on things, or (even worse) assuming that YOU know better than the end user how to do his job, just leads to the kind of IT that *should* be outsourced to India.

-fred

Re:Garbage

[aarin]

Your comments are quite interesting. You move from a situation with which I have zero experience to once which is much more familiar. I would say that a majority of the cases boil down to two concerns:

As an IT manager/Network Engineer I have rarely said 'No' only to have the decision rubber stamped by my director. In fact, I almost always use the reasons that do make you happy, or some similar variation. My favorite is "Are we going to be able to track the support needs for this system separately from the other systems, so we know how much more to bill Department ______ to satisfy this request?" The simple truth is, while we aren't understaffed, adding more work to my all ready large workload is not a matter of being able to play Red Alert II in the afternoon-It's the difference between maintaining the juggling act and starting to drop the plates I have in the air. The larger problem is it is never one plate that breaks, it's always a few. Or many.

I love playing with new technology. I would love an excuse to get a nice new Mac here in the IT section to play with, or maybe have some good reason to request a Powerbook when it comes time to replace this aging Dell Laptop. I see as being in my best 'techie' interest. However, it goes directly against my 'job' interest. I don't want to choose this way, I feel that I have to. If I get approval to hire more people, or bring on temps or something-because the demand requires it (that means, reactively) then I'll add new cool things. I usually get agreements in writing, so that a month later, the newbie is let go and not replaced and all of the duties do not fall back on us.

Lines like "Interesting idea. However, during configuration this will have a direct impact on the production network, and while nothing should affect the production systems, it is still on the production switches, even if they are in their own VLAN." The next question is "Is there a way to do this without endangering the production network?" and my answer is almost always "There is almost zero danger here, there should not be a problem." PHB at this point tells me to run it on the lab (which is always unacceptable to the original requestor) or to tell the requestor no. Is this the same thing as a simple 'No'? It might be the same on your end, but the difference is huge. I've just gone to bat for you, partly because it is simply my job, but also because I enjoy my job. And I still get angry mutterings from you.

Are there IT department simply avoiding new things because of worry about more work? Yes there probably are. However, you might want to live in an IT guy's shoes for a week or so, and even sit in an IT manager's chair for a while. Life isn't pretty in the dungeon. Almost universally, IT is looked at in the low-end of departments when it comes to pecking order. Here, were I am, the CIO has his office on the 4th floor-The only lead executive that does not have an office on the top floor (the 7th). Do you think this is coincidence? IT budgets always seem to get axed sooner than other departments and funding increases are always slower in coming-unless there is some major project which comes from a need outside of the IT department.

And yes, IT departments are the ones outsourced to call centers in the Midwest, or heavens forbid, overseas-because the work we do is GENERIC! People don't even need to be here to do your job, we'll just route the calls to India!

For the record, I would love to see a more adequately funded IT department and see the number of requests it turns down. Alternatively, I want to see a company where the ongoing support and maintenance costs have input from the IT department from the beginning and guaranteed funding from the new project for the life of the new project (and no, this is not the same as having other departments hire their own support/programmers/contactors-in my experience, this is even worse, as people get into turf wars quickly). I want a place where the pleas of "We can do it

Never a Problem

[nycroft]

I was hired as a the in-house graphic artist for a Fortune 500 company. As a result, I was to be the only Mac user out of the 45,000 employees this organization had world-wide. My job was to administer the logo database and create newsletters and ads for the company on a regular basis. This involved my needing to be set up with e-mail and digital proofing via PDF (since most of my superiors were scattered around the world).

When my computer (a dual 1.25 Ghz MDD with 1 GB of RAM) arrived, the whole of the IT department was there, at my desk, to greet it. Since none of them really knew how to get it to connect to their network (Windows NT), they let me have the first go. They watched, in amazement as the OS X setup took me through the network settings when I created my account. All I needed from them was a IP address number for my computer, and a few other numbers for the router, subnet mask, etc.

Needless to say, I showed them, without anymore settings involved how I could "see" the entire network and connect to anyone's computer via SMB and the proper password.

It was seamless No trouble at all. The only hurdle I faced was geting my Microsoft Entourage to work with the Exchange server. Now, some of those very same IT guys have bought some Macs of their own for home use. They were pretty blown away when I showed them the Terminal app.

Lest you forget...

[FredFnord]

My company finds it much more effective to buy Powerbooks and Dell laptops for its employees. Plug into monitors and external keyboards just fine, and at the end of the day the employee can bring it home and maybe (eek!) actually do some work there as well. In fact, because of this, we actually have (no, *really*) some people who telecommute one day a week and actually *get* *something* *done* at home! Wow!

-fred

What's tempting me to switch

[LiberalApplication]

A few months ago, I attended an impromptu cookies'n'soda seminar given at MIT by Tim Berners-Lee, and while the subject was of interest, I also took the time to take a quick look around at the machines being toted by all of the attendees. It was a small classroom, everyone was in plain view, and "everyone" included some high-profile names in the geek world (although I can't remember them now, I was too busy looking around at people's hardware ;-) ). What surprised me at the time was the number of Macs present. Mr. Berners-Lee himself was toting a TiBook, and some of the MIT Computer Science professors even had the new-model iBooks.

It was a surprise to me, and a pretty powerful incentive for me to go with the sexy little thing I'd never previously considered worth the price-markup. Now all I have to do is starve for a few more months...

PS: For those of you who are wondering what the rest of the audience was carrying, there were two ThinkPads, and one or two grad-student-like fellows had desktop-replacement Inspirons.

Re:What's tempting me to switch

[Phroggy]

Similar at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention this summer; over half the laptops were iBooks/PowerBooks.

I found a useful Mac in our workplace!

[HEMI426]

This was the perfect job for the new Macs. They won't tip over like everyday, garden-variety, mid-tower PCs.

Re:I found a useful Mac in our workplace!

[grasshoppa]

Problem: I have found macs to be made of plastic, at least on the outside, and in that kind of enviroment, it would get scratched and cracked, thust taking away from a Mac's only inherent value.

Re:I found a useful Mac in our workplace!

[pillar]

Hemi is being a hater.....don't diss his mopar though.....

Re:I found a useful Mac in our workplace!

[JoJoFine]

i dont think its so much that it doesnt scratch but that we all know plasitc is nowhere near as resistant as steel. take my antec for example, i mean i could kick this thing and ya it'll take a pretty nasty scratch and prolly mess up my stuff inside but i gurantee you it wont have a huge dent or crack in it. now take the plasitc case of the mac and do that. bam instant broken case

Re:I found a useful Mac in our workplace!

[grasshoppa]

You're going to tell me that that doesn't happen with Pee Cee cases? Jumpin' jesus boy, shit gets scratched all the time, METAL INCLUDED! And more often than not, a small scratch on plastic, while noticable yes, is not as noticable as a small scratch that digs through the paint on a metal case (especially the horrid beige colour that most of them are).
Clue in.

Yeah, hi. This would be what they call a "Joke". A phrase used to invoke a very specific response, typically of laugher. You might have heard of it.

Re:Think different

[Hawthorne01]

You'd be interested in Architosh.com then.

Re:OS X for J2EE development in a Linux/Windows sh

[Jord]

A few months ago I switched from a Linux machine to a Mac. I do development in a PC dominated environment and we are using all of the above except JBoss. The only thing I can say to describe the experience is heaven. Developing in Java on my little powerbook has been nothing but pure joy since I set it up. Since I had NEVER used a mac before it took me a few hours to get it running "just right". Most of that time was a reeducation on my part and nothing that was lacking on the Mac.

If you decide to switch to a Mac for your development machine I am betting you will be grinning from ear to ear from that day forward.

While I do not have experience with JBoss on my Mac yet, I can tell you that Apple's JDK seems quite snappy and since Apple sees fit to include jikes with their development install, compiles are very swift. I can only imagine how instantaneous they will be on a G5.

Re : IT and Mac dislike (or like!)

[King_TJ]

Well, I can tell you this much. In one company I worked for previously, the reason putting Macs on their network will be a "tough sell" isn't because "ignorant I.T. staff" dislikes the Mac, or anything else. It's simply because they've been there and done that before, and got burned!

Back when they were first computerizing/automating the company, the owner was a big Mac fan. He used nothing but Macs at home, and didn't really want to be forced to use one of the new (286) PCs.

I.T. did their best to accomodate him. They purchased the Mac version (1.0!) of Oracle, adapters to allow his Appletalk network to communicate with the networked printers, and so forth.

Every time software got updated on the PC side, though, the Mac lagged behind. Database connectivity issues started coming up with Oracle, where the Mac version wouldn't talk right to the database, even though the PC version did (with updates to the connectors). Software started getting used that had no Mac equivalent, leaving the C.E.O. unable to review documents his own people were getting paid to make for him. It was just becoming a lost cause.

Finally, he admitted his trusty Mac just wasn't the best tool for the job - and went to a PC. All the remaining Mac peripherals and software went in the trash - and they never looked back.

Well, nowdays, things are MUCH different. Most likely, a newer Mac with OS X would work quite nicely on their network (and since they use Citrix, they could even serve a whole Windows session to a Mac user - to cover any cases of incompatibility that might be left). But you're asking the owners of the company to come "full circle" and embrace what it took years to convince them needed discarding.

Bottom line: Apple has a lot of "past history" to "undo" - to prove they belong in corporate America today. Proprietary Apple "standards" like phonenet and Appletalk, proprietary ADB connectors for keyboards/mice and requirements of proprietary Apple compatible local printers didn't win them lots of favor in "mixed environments".

If i had the dough!

[Microsofts slave]

If i had the dough i'd so be using a mac, however, the dough aint there!

is a solution of hacks and tricks really valid?

[0divide]

I was surprised to read the list of various little applications that the writer had to use to make things work. As a very long time Mac user, I was hoping this article would illustrate how things "just worked" in this Windows environment--this is still, unfortunately not the case.
Why should he have to run extra apps to see other machines on the network? I thought OSX was suppsed to just work automatically. And is running half of your normally used apps in Virtual PC REALLY a solution?
I am psyched he go it to work, but I am frustrated that he had to do so much work just to get email and such working. I am particularly chagrinned that his primary network issues just disappeared randomly. Much better if there was a cause/solution.
It will be interesting to see if there is a followup article once Panther comes out...

Wow...

[retro128]

Wow, I'm amazed reading the comments here. Slashdotters hating Microsoft so much that they advocate Macintosh before Linux, calling IT staff who don't consider Macintosh "ignorant", promoting non-homogenous networks, using the word "sexy" as a criteria for choosing a platform...

The end must be nigh. Repent!

Re:Skewed perspective?

[t0ny]

When was this, ten years ago under windows NT 3.0?

Three years ago, NT4.0.

Or were you just using an inflexible security model?

Ah, your lack of knowledge is showing. Security is, by its very nature, an inflexible system. The more flexible it is, the less secure it is. Thus, your logic is not only stupid, but shows you dont know what the hell you are talking about. An inflexible security model- thats a good one!

We'll just say I had to open up vulnerabilities in my file server to allow access, and leave it at that; anything more technical would obviously be over your head.

Nine years ago I set up an NT 3.51 server for a cross platform network and had no issues with the Mac security side. NT was full of security holes, of course, and getting patches was a bigger pain.

With all due respect, I seriously doubt your skills in securing a network. And anyone who is still whining about the security of a 3.51 server has a very obvious axe to grind.

This is just so many kinds of wrong you need to be slapped.

a. Mac OSX is built off a BSD core, so unless you care to claim Samba is a myth and BSD doesn't network well, you're just talking out of your a**.

Read my statement. I said it was a Mac. I never said anything about OSX. Nice analytical skills, chump.

b. Yeah, I tried to hook my Windows box up to an NFS share just now. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box. Tried to connect it to an old Appletalk network. Guess what! It doesn't work out of the box (Server can act as a Appletalk server, but cant connect to another). There's lots of other stuff a Windows box won't connect to either.

You dont know what you are doing, then. Windows comes with the AppleTalk protocol (or the MS equivalent). And the fact that you are even USING Appletalk shows how security conscious you are, moron. That protocol has more holes than swiss cheese.

Also, if you cant connect to something out of the box, stop being a lazy fuck and go download it from microsoft.com. Hell, they even have a client that will allow UNIX to access Windows 5.x as a server.

So stop spouting your ignorant propaganda. The stuff is out there, you just dont know about it (or understand how it works).

Unlike a reasonable and intelligent poster like yourself.

Exactly, dude.

Diversity kills reliability

[aleph]

In my experience saying that Mac's don't operate well within a Windows environment is just a special case of a more general principal ... Diverse heterogeneous environments are more trouble prone and less reliable than homoegenous ones. Any time you introduce to a production environment a new system that does the same things in a different way, you're gonna have headaches.

For me the greatest problems using Macs in a PC environment are not the big things like file sharing but the countless little things, like not being able to move fonts from one computer to another ... Oh! that PNG file was created on a Mac, which uses a different font naming scheme from Windows. If you open it on your computer you gonna have to change all the fonts over. If you save it and then send it back to the Mac, you'll have to change them all back again. You have *all* your fonts for both platforms right? In that case, let me look into the cost of re-licensing all our fonts for another platform.

Or how about, my samba/smb file shares don't have Mac resource forks, so now my Macs are going to splurge Desktop folders all over the windows file shares. That makes organizing files a pain for the windows users, who have no idea what all these Desktop folders are supposed to be.

I thought the biggest problem a Mac user..

[NanoGator]

...would have to face in a Windows office is the constant '3-button mouse' jokes.

Macs and Moms

[seth_hartbecke]

This a great but true story you mac addicts can pass around.

I got into Mac's when the first OS X boxes started rolling (before then I avoided them like the plague, and had quit running windows in favor of linux all the way back in 1997). Work is kind and flexible enough to provide me with a G4 workstation and a PowerBook for me to drag to and from from work.

But that's not the story. This story is this: one day I come across an old Mac G3 (something like 200MHz, don't remember for sure) that was in the trash. I'd been trying to convince my parents to replace their 500MHz PC with a Mac for some time, but a combination of lack of funds and unwilling to switch platforms prevented them. I saw this old G3 as the perfect opportunity to give them the OS X experience. True it's slow, but it would work at the same time.

Anyway, within a few days my Mom and completely switched to the little G3 Mac for all her web browsing, email, documents, accounting. It's significantly slower then their PC, but my mom put it best: 'It takes the mac a little longer, but it always gets there.' Last time I was home, the PC had been unplugged to save desk space.

I really hope the parents get a new G4 iMac soon...perhaps their oldest son will just have to give them a nice christmas present :)

new: Netatalk is for sharing AFP/PAP/etc

[sellers]

Not sure why people talk about Netatalk instead of SAMBA or Netatalk instead of "NFS? Netatalk is a package for sharing AFP over AppleTalk or AFP over IP. It will give you what Apple calls AppleShare access to disks on a UNIX based server. It can also do PAP for printers and can do some stuff for SLP and the like.

MacOS X has built in AFP over IP sharing. So netatalk is virtually uselss. However, netatalk is great on a UNIX server for sharing out volumes to AFP clients - such as home directories at a university, ISP, or corporation.

For MacOS X clients - AFP is still better than SMB - according to Apple.

Now - we just need ACL's for AFP :)

Re:OS X for J2EE development in a Linux/Windows sh

[CatOne]

Do you know that Panther Server (shipping next Friday) includes JBoss in the distribution, with deployment, configuration, and management tools?

If you're using the non-server version of Panther (or in fact Jaguar) just download JBoss and you're off and running.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Windows operating systems are like some horribly septic public toilet.

Ignorant IT staff?

[mnmn]

IT staff does not have to be ignorant to deny introducing the Mac to the workplace. Theres a reason why they use all workstations from one vendor... ie IBM or Dell or HP and not mix and match. They may have problems but the problems will be consistent, rather than having a wide range of problems specific to each computer.

IT staff also tend to have their hands full with various tasks and the management wouldnt hire more coops or temps to help. So if the workers can support their own Macs, BeOSes etc, all wonderful. But we all know the moment that messenger doesnt seem to work, they hit the IT department with the problem.

An IT department could start the whole network by building it all on Macs or Linux workstations... but most frequently, that decision was already made by the previous sysadmin, and changing all workstations would be too expensive.

Re:Think different

[Jaysyn]

Thanks. These are nice, but they are tuned to Architectural (& they look like they do it pretty well) & I do Civil drafting. Also none of them have half the feature sets of AutoCAD. AutoLISP is extremely powerful.

Jaysyn

Windows is the exception for us.

[javaxman]

We have two windows machines in our office, neither of which are on an employee's desk. We used to run a Linux file and command-line application server, relying on netatalk. That's all on OS X Server now, and so many little issues are now gone. Our extremely small IT department actually has time to write end-user applications, while we sit around and laugh about all the SoBig virus email we see. The Windows machines seem to be able to network with our OS X server just fine, though they are a bit tougher to admin than our other systems.

DHCP will do that.

[mindstrm]

Some protocls are not rock solid, you know.

In any decent sized network, I'm sure any of us who have administered DHCP can say that at one point or another we've had hosts that did not acquire an address properly, for no particular known reason, and then just started working.

Yes, there IS a reason.
But if there isn't an ongoing problem, it's often not worth the time and effort to figure out what.. and if it's not repeatable, it may be impossible to find out anyway. It's not worth it.

As an admin, I do care why it didn't work, the curious side of me would liek to know why, but if there are no other problems, and the other 500 machines are working fine, dhcp exhibits no problems, and the temporary problem we had was with one guy who brought in some new kind of gear not normally present... 99 times out of 100, I'm going to write it off as "something related to the fact that he had a mac" and just keep it in the bank of my head in case we have other problems later.

Re:Stink? Naahh. And the *followup*...

[ummit]

I can't believe the play this article is getting...

Believe it. Obviously there's something important going on here. The commentary, tons of it, here, and on osviews, and probably a bunch of other places, is fascinating, partly for what it's saying and partly by its sheer volume. It looks like some nerves -- more than a few -- have been touched.

That this user was willing to go through "all of that trouble" (e.g. running Office inside VPC inside Mac) shows, not that he's an idiot, but rather, how phenominally poor the Windows environment was, and how vastly more pleasant the Mac is, at least for him.

Even more informative is the chest-thumping from the big-stick "IT" folks who find all this variously unthinkable if not downright heretical. I understand their concerns about stability and supportability, but obviously they have no clue about how productivity-sapping a clumsy (even if officially supported) computing environment can be, and how liberating a good one can be, especially to creative types like artists and programmers.

(And what's with all the nonsensical backlash against this guy for "just wanting to shout `I'm different!'"?! Don't we -- shouldn't we -- all want to shout that? Do you expect me to agree that it's a Good Thing if some corporation's work ethic, or its "IT" goons, feel the need to try to quash it?)

Expertise?

[Slur]

If you've got basic familiarity with networking then it should be a no-brainer to do Mac support. They are set up to be simple, with all configuration stuff (except NetInfo) in the System Preferences. A weekend playing with Mac OS X should be more than enough for a typical IT dude to get a handle on networking a Mac with any other platform.

Re:Expertise?

[C10H14N2]

Wow, then the user should be able to get it together in the same amount of time, you know, because it is all set up to be simple... and stuff. Obviously, there are other, ostensibly reasonable, issues involved.

It is not that idea that Macs are hard that is behind a refusal to support them, it is the laundry list of administrative issues behind having personal equipment in the office that is. Will the network backup system work? Probably not. Will the network virus scanning work? Probably not. Do they have disk images ready so when your system is hosed you will be back to work in a reasonable amount of time? Nope. If they use Tivoli or other VNC software for remote admin, will that work? Maybe. Is there any control over installed software? Nope. Is there a huge liability that a user might claim something in the company, be it the power, some virus, the admins themselves destroyed something on the personal computer or the computer itself? Yeah, big time.

Sure, you're not like all the other people. You know how to keep your system clean and manage your own data. You don't install hostile software. You won't sue. Unfortunately, you're the only one who knows if that is true.

The bottom line is that by bringing in personal equipment you are potentially threatening everything in place to ensure business operates with as little interruption and liability as possible. Paranoid? Sure. It is also realistic and common practice in large organizations.

I would expect precisely the same attitude in a company with nothing but Macs on the desktops.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[coolgeek]

You need to try it again, then come back and tell us what you learned. You are absolutely incorrect on both counts. I connect my powerbook all the time to Win2K/AD installations np. File, Print, Exchange, all without making any config changes at all to the Win2K setup.

Diversity = good

[Slur]

Your point is well-taken. But doesn't it seem fundamentally fucked-up that you're pushing for the most problematic OS, the one that's causing you the most headaches? And aren't you concerned about limiting yourselves to Windows, while the rest of the world is moving on to more stable, standards-compliant, and open solutions?

A well-rounded IT staff (i.e., the kind that keeps itself challenged and learning) needs more than an MCSE, a lexicon of MS buzzwords, and a strange affinity for multi-layered tab panels. Your staff should be concerned with keeping its prospects open and gaining experience with Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, in addition to the latest Windows solutions.

Diverse knowledge is how you get the pick of the jobs when your employer goes belly-up. Knowing Linux / BSD is how you get a foothold with NPs, NGAs, and government subcontractors. Knowing Mac OS X gets your foot in the door in creative industries where you might get a good brain-stretch once in awhile and there's the remote possibility of meeting women.

If you're more the cave-troll type who enjoys saturated snack-foods and all-night Evercrack sessions then you may be better to disregard these insights.

The answer...

[Slur]

Web applications run anywhere. A smart company implements its apps using standards-compliant web-based applications, of which there are several open-source solutions. This naturally applies to calendards, workgroups, bug tracking, etc. I can think of few companies that deploy proprietary desktop applications on a wide basis.

Re:The answer...

[briancnorton]

Web applications are great in theory. The problem is still that you need IE to run them properly. IE is being discontinued for mac, so that doesn't make it easy to justify web applications just to run on macs.

If you can think of "few companies that deploy proprietary desktop applications on a wide basis" you obviously haven't worked very many non-technology companies. Most places use something until it no longer works. There are LOTS of places that still run their mission critical applications on old VAX servers from the 70s.

Re:Typical Mac user, indeed

[ummit]

Mac users don't have to do research? Or read documenation?
Everything is supposed to work out-of-the-box...

Supposed to, and does.

Go ahead mod me down....

Not at all!
+1 insightful. You got it just right.

Oxymoron...

[ErnstKompressor]

"Tough Computer User" ;) --

'Ass in a sling' -- You slay me.

The least scary thing I could imagine...Walking home through a dark alley and being 'jacked' by an overweight guy in a brown plaid short-sleeved shirt with a pocket protector, wielding a menacing ethernet punch-down tool :)

Amen

[overunderunderdone]

Just rubber stamping 'no' on things, or (even worse) assuming that YOU know better than the end user how to do his job, just leads to the kind of IT that *should* be outsourced to India.

Amen! Aside from working for something like an ISP the entire IT department is a "one-off" activity that is there to support whatever the real work of the business is. Sorry folks but fas often as not your job just isn't as important as the job of the stupid "luser" that is requesting the tool we wants (or perhaps needs) to get that job done. This explains why IT is often understaffed but it is also why the IT department should be bending over backwards to actually support users (i.e. make their job easier) rather than vise versa.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[drinkypoo]

here is a page on this problem. here is some more information. and there is still more info on it here.

Unfortunately, I cannot run the tool which shows the data corruption, as the drive which I was using in my G3 is now in an Athlon 700 machine - without errors.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[drinkypoo]

Apple would not have replaced the motherboard with a revision 2. I can no longer find the technote on apple's site, unfortunately, but it clearly said that the solution was to purchase FWB Toolkit or a similar package and install a non-apple disk driver which will allow you to set your DMA mode to multiword. They said this was the case because non-Apple hard drives are not supported.

I can't find the technote that says what I say above, but I did find the following note from 6/22/99 here:

(B&W G3) Rev. 1 and Rev. 2 logic boards are similar. To differentiate, check the number printed on the CMD chip at location U1. The CMD chip on Rev. 1 logic boards is PCI646U2 and on Rev. 2 logic boards is 646U2-402.
Rev. 1 and Rev. 2 boards must be returned like for like. Note that when you return a Rev. 1 logic board, you may receive logic board 661-2104 or a logic board equivalent to 661-2194 as your replacement module."

Which is to say, if they're out of rev 1 boards, you'll get a rev 2 board. But they are not replacing rev 1 boards with rev 2 boards as a matter of course. Or I should say, they were not.

I found another snip here which was allegedly from a page at FWB (whose techinfo database is currently down.)

" There is a potential for data loss or data corruption with certain Ultra DMA hard drives when transfering data at the full ultra dma speed on the new Blue and White G3's. Western Digital AC420400D, Maxtor 90840D6, and the Quantum Bigfoot TX series. Symptoms include the inability to copy or open data files, launch applications, or even installing an OS. A quick test is to open a self mounting disk image file (a file created by Apple's DiskCopy 6.2 or above). If an error occurs while opening this file, you most likely have the problem."

3rd party IDE cards are cheap for PCs, but they are expensive for macs. The cheapest one I found was $89.99. You can buy the exact same SIIG card with a PC rom for $19.99. It's certainly not worth it today for a 350MHz G3 mac, not even powerful enough to play (say) a SVCD-resolution MPEG4 stream. It can only play DVDs because the video card has acceleration :P

Also, another poster (an AC) is claiming that this is a problem with MacOS 8.5.1. This is not the case. It is a problem with the hardware, not the OS; the workaround is in software, but it's not a very good workaround as you sacrifice performance. (I'm replying here just to get the info out, not picking on you in this issue.) There have been reports of it being fixed in MacOS X but that certainly was not my experience; actually, I got more corruption under X. (The corruption seems to occur when the CPU is running near maximum load.)

My G3 has an Adaptec 2930-MAC in it, so if I wanted to run SCSI drives, then that would be an adequate solution, but I wanted to run an IDE drive, which is much cheaper, and which I had lying around. Switching to another bus is not a solution to a stupid hardware bug.

I'm sorry I haven't succeeded in finding the apple technote itself. I've actually seen it before, but I have no idea how I found it. Apple has trashed the old TechInfo Library (TIL) - for an example of the results go to this page and click on "PowerBook G3 Series: Data Corruption When Reading Audio CDs (#24985)". It looks quite a bit like Apple folded TIL into the AppleCare documentation system, while removing any documents which they found unfavorable. This is just my paranoia, but I can't seem to find it. this page has a note where Apple claims that all G3 and newer pages are present, so either they're lying or I just cannot find the document. Of course, I could be lying about it existing in the first place, and you'll just have to make your own call.

Macs are the better workstation

[skipwiley]

This argument is getting old, I am sick of people criticizing a platform that they have never tried to integrate into a business network. I support all three major platforms Windows, Linux and Macintosh. I am sorry but the amount of money, time and effort spent on securing, backing up, and deploying a Windows based network as masochistic at best. Your "average" PC user in most corporate environments is one step above a complete computer moron. They lie on their resume about their computer experience and are lucky if they can even check their own email. A $300-400 copy of Office is a complete waste of time for most users since the most they use it for is a typewriter with spell check. I believe the best solution for most of "corporate america" is the following: Workstations: Apple by far makes the best user-centric OS on the planet, reliable, stable, virus free (right now), and very secure. These machines can be abused by users and they still keep ticking. These can be had for as little as $599 (refurb eMac) so don't tell me it's twice as much as a PC. File & Print Servers Linux (SMB,POP,CUPS) stable, set it and forget it! Mac (MacOSX Server) OpenDirectory, great Admin Windows Terminal Services For any Win32 only apps still needed. (Microsoft Remote Desktop on Mac OS X is awesome)

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[sakusha]

Apple would not have replaced the motherboard with a revision 2.

You are misinformed. Apple Service Centers replaced r1 motherboards with r2 if you complained about incompatibility with IDE slave drives. But you had to ask them for it. My business partner had his swapped out, they swapped mobos for free, under warranty.
But none of this changes the fact you're whining about a problem from 4 years ago.

Re:Article ok until the end

[ishmaelflood]

Good catch. My Internet PC is a 400 MHz AMD with 128 M of memory, running NT4.

Typically I would run:
Mozilla email
Firebird Browser
OO spreadsheet
MathCad
carsim
EditPad
Agnitum antivirus
Outpost firewall

Plus other bits and pieces

All at once, with no stability issues. In fact it is very rare that I have /any/ problems with that PC. /This/ PC is some sort of monster with W2000 and even running serious simulation software in the background doesn't stop me running and using all the usual stuff in the foreground.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[Guy Harris]

Samba is rock-solid, so there is no reason it could not be made to work well within the OSX gui environment if the effort were made by Apple.

You realize, of course, that the SMB *client* VFS code in Mac OS X is *not* from Samba, right? (The Linux SMB client VFS code isn't from Samba, either. Samba is *NOT* the be-all and end-all of SMB support on UNIX-flavored OSes; it's the most common SMB *server* for those OSes, but it's not the source of the VFS SMB clients in FreeBSD and Linux.)

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[Guy Harris]

Authentication/Network Layer/Filesystem/transports should all be seperate things, IMO.

They are, at least for the latter 3 in your list. SMB runs atop various implementations of NetBIOS services, which, in turn, run atop TCP and UDP running in turn atop IP, as well as atop the NetBEUI frame layer running atop 802.2 running atop 802.3 and 802.5 and probably other link layers, as well as atop various other transports.

Authentication is somewhat tied into SMB, although Microsoft are using their mutant version of Kerberos now as well as various NTLM versions.

Poor guy

[Oriumpor]

This guy knew enough to know that the DHCP server wasn't handing him an IP but not enough to ask his IT staff why that might be.
If anyone had watched the DHCP server for the powerbook's computer name (i'm assuming its one of those shiny g4's) they would have seen the abnormal DHCP address the laptop spits out from the ethernet cable. Also, if it wasn't working when the guy worked on it, and then it worked later, SOMEBODY changed SOMETHING. Computer's don't magically start working when they didn't work before.

Lets go through common sense for the guy....

The cable was probably loose, he wiggled it it fixed the no dhcp issue.

He was impatient and unplugged the nic after only a few moments, (perhaps before he gave it time to get an IP.)

He was randomly clicking configurations and found the enable DHCP (or maybe they were running BOOTP) whatever.

And then again, it could be the abnormal mac addy screwing with their dhcp server.

Whatever, this guy wasn't all that savvy.

Re:IT Policy

[BostonPilot]

So, if my salary costs my company 4 times what one of the IT guys makes, and I'm forced to use a computer that makes me half as efficient as I could be, that benefits the company how?

Horror story at my last job: company IT policy: only PC hardware connected to the network (unless you were buddies with someone, then you could attach anything you wanted). User's can't install software - only IT can do that. All sorts of Nazi controls in place to prevent users from hosing the network. Except, hey! Several times a year my snazzy PC would hose the disk, the IT department would "reinstall" the OS, and I'd lose all my data, applications, and about 3 days of work. So, all their Nazi techniques made me unproductive, and the computer system STILL wasn't reliable. Their response? *SHRUG*.

Switched to a Mac running OS-X. No more problems with file systems suddenly going away. No more crashes. No more lost productivity. Typical uptime? 6 months - mostly reboots to load new versions of the operating system.

Predictably, IT was pissed that I was connecting a Mac, even tho a) it worked perfectly and b) it didn't need any attention from them at all (I'm sure that's what they were scared of).

The IT staff there was SO USED to the problem being the flakey Microsoft OS, that they would always just reload the OS, even when anyone with half a brain could see the problem was elsewhere. I had one PC that would reboot itself occasionally. I get grilled: no, I didn't install any funky software. No, no funky hardware. No, I didn't reboot it myself. No, nobody else walked up and rebooted it. Did you guys think about power? Maybe you should put a AC monitor in my office in case the power is flakey? No, they don't have anything like that.... Let's reload the OS again! Guess what it was... Power! Duh! The point is that they are so used to it being the lousy OS, they just always suspect that any problem is caused by the lousy OS. And... running this lousy OS benefits me how?

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[BostonPilot]

That's not true in my experience. My 266Mhz G3 with 192 meg runs OS X just fine... It's not as fast as my 800Mhz TiBook, but it runs pretty much as fast under OS X as it ever did under OS 9... I still use it for Photoshop work...

Mac OS != Mac OS X

[hayne]

It seems from your comments that you have missed out on the "news" that the current Mac OS is OS X. All of your comments seem to apply to previous versions of Mac OS - as far as I can see, none of them apply to OS X. You should try it some time.

Re:OS X for J2EE development in a Linux/Windows sh

[Feral Bueller]

We do primarily J2EE work here. Everything that you mentioned runs just fine, thanks. I've got Tomcat local , but I try and do as much work on the dev servers as possible. I can say that compile time on a rev. A G4 500 mhz laptop can be slow, but it hasn't bothered me yet.

Re:Business-Level Support From Apple is still Lack

[Feral Bueller]

One problem that Apple still needs to resolve before they can really be a serious contender for enterprise-level use is the speed with which they service machines.

You've got to be kidding me.

I sent in my almost 3 year old G4 laptop (display went south) -- back in 3 days.

I sent in my friend's almost 3 year old G4 laptop (broken hinges) -- back in 2 days.

Co-worker calls to send in 2 day old top of the line laptop from one of the "major PC laptop manufacturers" you mentioned. After THREE WEEKS on the phone, finally gets a Tech Support person who doesn't tell him to "just buy another one".

Co-worker is Director of Database Engineering. We're a technology parter with the vendor in question or else I'd mention their name.

While this is purely anectdotal, it's merely the most recent of multiple anecdotes I've got of similar disparity in service between Apple and BOTH of the other vendors you mentioned.

Apple has a number of other hurtles they have to jump before they'll be serious competition. Service isn't traditionally one of them.

Is MAME production considered time-critical activity? I know for myself MAME use is considered time-wasting activity :-p

Re:Skewed perspective?

[GryphonTech]

This is starting to get interesting. MS trolls attempting to start a flame war. We'll have to see what happens, unless their parents unplug there computers for using naughty words....... LOL

oh yes?

[RMH101]

and the OU policies we have in place will magically work, will they? and all the bespoke software we have is just going to work without us bothering to test it? and any validated applications that use validated infrastructure are going to do user testing themselves? and the network policies including the various lockdowns that stop you using the wifi card in the lid of your powerbook to connect to your home network and bring crap into ours are similarly going to work out of the box?

i'm not knocking macs, it's just a fact of the world that if you have a controlled infrastructure with standard clients, if someone else wants to bring another in and expect an overworked IT department to just welcome it with open arms, then it just isn't easy.

Something not mentioned.

[Noodlenose]

Greetings.

Even though the lot of you are arguing about the ease (or not) of supporting Macs versus PCs, the article triggering the discussion hasn't been mentioned:

It is actually pretty poor, as the author does not give us any insight how his problems were in the end solved (apart from running Virtual PC). Just stating "It worked! I don't know why!" should not be enough to get a slashdot mention.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[NickFitz]

And it was MacOS

Which version? If it was 9, then your problems are pretty much irrelevant to anybody considering networking an OS X box.

(Although if you want security, you're better off using the Mac running OS X as the server :-)

zzz

[BlackBolt]

On the Mac, I often run six or eight applications at once, including OS 9 and Windows 2000 in Virtual PC. Three open OS's at once plus playing music, downloading files and running updates is an
amazing feat. Having a PowerBook has made work fun again. ::

BANG! Fired!

It's bad enough I'm on Slashdot multiple times during the day during slumps; if I turn my box into a porn downloading MP3 party machine, I'm SURE there will be objections.... and then my life will be one big permanent slump.

Re:Is SMB support fixed yet?

[drinkypoo]

I seem to recall that Apple has announced that they're dropping support for the Beige G3. The blue and white cannot be that far behind, unless they're simply trying to remove all the old, ugly macs from the picture. (Of course, if they wanted to remove all the ugly macs, every iMac would have to go, too.) :)

You can still use 68k macs, and in fact System software is freely available for some of them now. But Apple has dropped support for them. What I find far more troubling is that apple dropped support for the oldest powerpc-based macs before OSX even came out. OSX wouldn't run worth a damn on them anyway because of Aqua, but there's no excuse for dropping them sooner. If Apple didn't create such wildly differing architectures all the time, they wouldn't have so much trouble supporting them.

Re:Think different

[Hawthorne01]

IIRC Autodesk is looking to port AutoCAD to the G5 in the near future. No links for it, but I seem to recall some mention of it on a rumor site a while back.

Re:Think different

[Jaysyn]

Very nice, I bet it will scream....

Jaysyn

Macs aren't just for graphics people any more.

[ISPTech]

I am a sysadmin for an ISP in NYC and I know one other ISP's sysadmin up here has a Mac laptop as well.

It's hard to beat built in FreeBSD on a 15" display that is so thin.

The display for the price sold me on my laptop. You couldn't buy a PC laptop with 15" display and DVD/CD-R capability for what I paid for this refreshed (apple's term for refurbished) laptop.

They also threw in a gig of ram which makes a world of difference in OS X.

I stopped using my desktop and totally switched to my Mac at work. Most of my work is in terminal though.

For those that have to connect to a windows network, the built in samba is hard to beat.

I bought mine at the apple store but Smalldog is has a good refurb selection if you don't have an apple store near you. Dealmac is where I found smalldog and has a lot of other good links as well.

Just sharing a little wisdom...

[rakmaster]

I have composed a list of reasons why you should stop arguing about this subject if you're a Mac or Linux user. This is not intended to be a scientific white paper. It's just for fun. MS ditto heads need not view this. If you feel you must, then decide to flame me, please feel free. Comments from you guys always make me laugh.

my journal

What a waste of electrons, that "article" is

[ChocoyitoChimbaron]

And they pay this moron to write software? If he had written the following sentence instead of that stupid article, we would have been uqally uninformed: "Uhm, I don't know, the thingie-magingie just worked, after I sat for a few weeks not doing any productive work...."

Re:You aren't an architect

[kevinbr]

As an "Architect" you might want to read detail. I stated clearly there was no policy. Had there been a policy I would not have connected. For your pissant statement, I have 12 years UNIX experience, up to the level of analyizing core dumps. The people I deliver an architecture to ( 2 major European mobile telcos) do not give a crap about "networks". They want results. I support sensible standards, and I use the most productibe platform so I can be ...... productive. My attitude is pragmatic. I am not hired to fix "flawed Windoze" policies or fight for days to get applications and connectivity, since usually I work on a Pan European basis and cannot afford to dick around in each location educating IT people to have written polices and what those polices should contain. Refrain for using pissant in a contect that perhaps you have no knowledge of. By the way, I design systems. Pissants design networks.

Re:Skewed perspective?

[outZider]

Hey, way to bring up an operating system that was shelved three years ago! I think it's perfectly fair for that other poster to bring up NT 3.51 if you're going to bring up something as off topic as the Classic Mac OS.

You make some interesting, unwarranted assumptions

[FredFnord]

First: that was an insightfull, well-thought-out response to my article, so don't take this the wrong way.

But when I read it I had to laugh. Why? You made a big assumption about which side of the fence I'm on. I'm not a programmer, or a QA guy, or a technical writer, although I have worked as such in the past.

I am an IT guy. More than that, I am the only IT guy at a company of 30 people. Five Linux users, two Mac users, and the rest Windows of various stripe and performance. We are a web software development company, and so I have to keep company services running, test servers running, demo servers (including one huge 50,000 user public demo service) running, development tools and source control systems working, and end users supported. And we won't even talk about IP telephony.

I work 50-60 hour weeks, plus commute, on median. One notable week a month or two ago, I worked 40 hours between 5 PM Friday and 5 AM Monday, after a 50-hour M-F and before another 50-hour M-F. (Trying to set up a pre-production Oracle product for a demo. I, in cooperation with two support people from Oracle, failed.)

But when someone comes to me and says that they need a tool to do their job effectively, I sit down and listen to them. If they can make any kind of a decent case, and a bit of exploration on my part doesn't turn up any obvious problems, then I will go to bat for them, sans veiled warnings and without the hope that my higher-ups will save me from some work. Because I'm focused on making the employees here as effective as they can be.

Now, maybe it's harder in a larger company. I don't know. It wasn't bad at Apple while I was there, but I hear it was awful in the late 1990s... people who couldn't get MEMORY, for God's sake.

It's interesting the assumptions we make. You assume that because I am unimpressed with the current state of IT in this country, I can't be an IT guy. I submit that if there's anyone who is qualified to be unimpressed, it's someone who has worked as a programmer, a QA engineer, a tech writer, and a salesman... and who is now an IT guy.

Touche?

-fred

And now for some real news...

[rixstep]

This is great, but what I would really like to see happen is the corporate suits opting for Apple hardware etc all through the landscape.

We'd all benefit by that.