Macs Gaining a Bigger Role In Enterprise

rev_media tips a short article up at InfoWorld giving some numbers on the increasing Mac presence in businesses. "We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes the operations manager for a global advertising conglomerate. They "now [support] 2,500 Macs across the US — nearly a quarter of all... US PCs." Another straw in the wind: "Security firm Kapersky Labs has already created a Mac version of its anti-virus software for release should Mac growth continue (and the Mac thus [find] itself prey to more hackers)."

Comments

Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that's only because you can run LCARS in vmware now...

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[Kamokazi]

Really? Can it emulate the bio-neural circuitry found on the NCC-1701-E, or am I stuck with old-school isolinear circuitry emulation? (or god forbid, duotronics?)

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[maxume]

You are stuck in the basement.

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[Kjella]

He just has an extra "GOTO 10" line :)

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[Dystopian Rebel]

Captain: Scotteeee! What... are... all... these... little files everwhere?!

Scot: Och, they arrre Finderrr Trrribbles, Captain!

Spock: It is illogical for the Finder to leave these little creatures everywhere. [DS_STORE screams as Spock touches it.]

McCoy: They don't seem to like pointed-eared Vulcans with external USB storage, do they?

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[Kamokazi]

I prefer to call it 'the bridge'. Now shut the door, you're letting sunlight in.

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[kitsunewarlock]

Is it a blog...

Or a captain's log.

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[real gumby]

Emulation only available for the models inclosed in transparent aluminium.

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[de_smudger]

A hungry-looking grue blocks your exit.

Re:Macs Gaining a Bigger Role in the Enterprise

[MacColossus]

What is this C.L.O.G. you speak of?

Low starting point

[timmarhy]

Well when you've got such a low starting point it's not hard to improve is it? i think this deserves a dilbert comic, something like marketing showing a 100% increase when they only sold 1 extra unit.

Re:Low starting point

[ill stew dottied ewe]

You fail at providing the link: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-04-19/ I admit, it took me longer to find it with their new "design."

Re:Low starting point

[flyingsquid]

You know, when they said that Macs were gaining a "bigger role in the Enterprise" I had a picture of a bunch of Macs installed on the bridge of a Federation starship. And this dialogue:

"Fire photon torpedoes!"

"I can't!"

"What's wrong, number one?"

"There's just a single mouse button! I can't right-click on the Klingon ship!"

"Dammit! Do a command-click!"

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course Macs have had two buttons standard since 2005, and could use a 2-button USB mouse long before that.

The Mighty Mouse has a left and right click.

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

Control-Click.

Goddamn n00b ensigns...

Re:Low starting point

[cbart387]

I admit, it took me longer to find it with their new "design." Getting slightly off-topic in this post but it's worth the penalties to say this. news.yahoo.com/comics/ provides a couple of comics, including dilbert. I never thought I'd say this, but yahoo's design is much more clean and functional then the official dilbert site. For navigation it has simple (previous, start, next) links and a dropdown for the most recent ones.

Re:Low starting point

[CastrTroy]

Yeah, too bad the new Dilbert site is so terrible. I actually refuse to visit there since they flashed it up.

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has been shipping a multi button mouse for several years now. Please get your facts straight.

Re:Low starting point

[SolusSD]

multitouch pad? two finger tap :)

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

You think we're not going to ridicule Apple just because they finally changed, after aeons?

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

You think we're not going to ridicule Apple just because they finally changed, after aeons?

No, but you'd think that geek humor wouldn't rely on a misconception more characteristic of a graphic designer with their first computer than someone who supposedly knows something about blinky boxes and cables. How many geeks use the freakin mouse that comes out of the box anyway?

Re:Low starting point

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you make primary fire right mouse button? That's just dumb.

Re:Low starting point

[gaspar ilom]

And then, everyone on the Enterprise DIES -- b/c CTRL-click is the default binding for right-click on a Mac.

Re:Low starting point

[xandro]

Scott Adams made a new site just for us geeks: http://www.dilbert.com/fast

Re:Low starting point

[cbart387]

Nice tip, I would never have thought to look.

Re:Low starting point

[Opr33Opr33]

But we all know the Enterprise doesn't use Macs. If she did, there would be Apple logos everywhere. (I'll never forget the day Will Smith saved the planet by networking his Apple laptop with an alien mothership...)

Re:Low starting point

[hcdejong]

Also see this Calvin & Hobbes strip

We join our hero, the courageous Spaceman Spiff, as he flees the awful bug beings of Zartron-9! Spiff's only chance is a daring strategy of head-to-head combat! Our hero swings around and readies his computer-guided death ray blaster!

Re:Low starting point

[MacColossus]

So I'm not the only one who thought it was weird the aliens used Appletalk. :-)

More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[New_Age_Reform_Act]

http://career-advice.monster.com/technology-skills/technology/Why-Macintosh-Skills-Matter-in-Tech/home.aspx

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[ColdWetDog]

Nah, according TFA, you don't need Mac tech skills:

After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.

To which I might add, "Citation Needed".

I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always).

And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[symbolset]

I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always).

I'm pretty new to the Mac too, after a 20+ year hiatus from the Apple world. You know what? Figuring this out took me all of a day. Figuring out how to do broadcast imaging using Apple's tools took most of three days. In short, people aren't as dumb as Microsoft needs them to be.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[kamochan]

You can cite me: our company has moved 80% mac since 2004. That resulted in 50% cut of IT support personnel, because there simply isn't that much to do. And 80% of the work for the remaining IT support personnel is dealing with the remaining 20% of Windows installations (most of which are a few experts' desk/laptop machines).

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[theurge14]

It has never occurred to me until your post that Macs may be resisted in the enterprise due to job security.

Somewhere the Maytag man is yawning.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[theolein]

Nah, according TFA, you don't need Mac tech skills:

After all, as Publicis' Plavin notes, Macs -- which cost the same as equivalently configured business-class PCs -- are cheaper to support because they are easier to support.

To which I might add, "Citation Needed".

I'm a Mac system admin. You're right and wrong. Macs tend to behave better under stress than Windows does, but there are many problems on OSX, a number of which are related to, very much as in Windows, legacy PPC stuff running under the Rosetta emulator. Apart from which, just as in Windows, if users are allowed to load their machines with crapware, they become unstable

I'm a recent Mac switcher with years of Windows experience. It's not all that easy to get OS X to work and play well with Active Directory and Windows networking (or maybe it's the other way around). IT lets me play with the Mac because I'm pretty self sufficient. Most enterprise OS X users aren't going to be particularly savvy - they'll need lots of help (like always). Again, you're right and wrong. The Mac users in our company, which has become 80% Mac in the last two years, tend to manage the basic things much better than the Windows users, but they run into problems in the more complex things. I think the Mac is genuinely easier to use for beginners, but more advanced stuff, like LDAP binding, network homes etc are totally beyond their grasp, for the most part.

And finally, the cynic in me wonders how many of those Macs are really running XP / Vista under boot camp while at work... Not that there is anything wrong with that. You'll look cool and all, even if you're running the same dorky programs as everyone else. The only Mac users in our company who use Windows, are me, so that I can provide support, and the users who have apps that only run on Windows, like CAD stuff.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[Anonymous Coward]

of over 1000 computers on site at my company, about 40% are Macs, and the Macs are overrepresented among the research scientists.

I'm a software engineer and use my MacBook Pro to develop software that ultimately runs on a Linux HPC cluster to do some intensive analysis, I fire up my VM to use in-house project/time management software (used only by my small department) which we are now planning to make cross platform to accommodate the SEs and statisticians in our group that are moving to Mac

I talked to someone in our IT department and even though he spends most of his time doing Windows support his windows computer is an iMac with Boot Camp, and he would like to pick Apple for our only desktop and laptop vendor (Windows people would use Boot Camp or VMWare Fusion) because they've had so much less trouble with the Apple stuff than the various windows-centric vendors they've tried

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[analog_line]

I do freelance support work for Macs primarily (though I deal with plenty of Windows machines as well), and I've helped switch several small companies partially from PCs to Macs. Generally, once the "how do I do this" calls stop, and the users get some familiarity, the new Mac people stop calling for months. The die hard Windows people I deal with also tend to be the least technically inclined, and generally I'll see them every few months to fix the results of their incompetence before they either run out of money in the budget to pay me to fix it, or decide that it's me who's incompetent and allowing all these viruses and spyware on their machine and go call the Computer Geeks at 2-3 times my rate.

There are a few people that have made the switch, and end up just not wanting to change the way they've always done things (despite the fact that they'd called me in to totally reformat and reinstall Windows 3 times in the last few months) and who pitch a fit about it, but there just isn't much you can do about them.

Plenty of the switchers I've dealt with run Parallels to run the one or two Windows apps that they just can't be without for whatever reason, but I haven't ever (depsite offering several times) had to install Boot Camp on anyone's machine to effectively switch them back. I have had a couple customers that who exchanged some quite old Macs for cheapass, low-end Windows machines, but that's was for cost reasons primarily, rather than preferring the Windows platform (and they're spending more money on my time as a result).

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[laffer1]

If so, they're not using them right. Macs are a pain in the ass to administer. They're great for end users, so you do avoid some of the stupid calls once you've answered EVERY question about why they are different than Windows. However, Apple's server product is an abomination. They change behavior with OS updates and you have to buy new versions to get security patches as they phase out after about 2 versions. If you consider the difference in the OS release schedule between windows and Mac OS, it is much more expensive for small deployments. If anything happens to your open directory setup, Apple will tell you to start over. If you're lucky, you were smart enough to export your users so you only have to reset the password for everyone! Combine with that fun things like php not having any modules that are common, lack of java 6, and random crashes with Leopard Server, and you have one of the most annoying products I can think of. The only useful thing about OS X server is the control over client systems. That is why you buy it. At work, we have a FreeBSD webserver because we couldn't get NFS mounting to work consistently between two xserves. The FreeBSD machine has much better uptime and it's a beater Dell Precision 1.4Ghz POS. In apple happy land, you're supposed to use dynamic AFP mounts for everything. It sucks when you're trying to serve web pages! Best of all, if a Leopard client connects to a 10.4 server, it sets an ACL on the home directory to explicitly block access by everything but the user thus blocking serving web pages! (if the user uses their webspace, it's mapped to a ~/Sites directory) I suggest anyone looking at doing Mac deployments consider buying a real server to go with it. It could be BSD, Linux, Windows Server, even Solaris. The problem with Macs is their inflexibility. It's great from a user perspective because it's hard to get into trouble, but when you're trying to work magic common on Windows or *NIX installs... Yes, I'm the Mac sys admin for a university computer science department.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[Anonymous Coward]

You've been spewing the same lying drivel for years. So you have a problem with Apple - good for you. Now shut up and let the grownups talk.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[Fear the Clam]

Go on, tell us how long it takes you to copy a file.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[drinkypoo]

You've been spewing the same lying drivel for years. So you have a problem with Apple - good for you. Now shut up and let the grownups talk.

Disclaimer: I know that this comment contradicts my sig, but I'm going to make it anyway.

I've been using Macs since the Lisa, and have used literally every generation of them.

I've been using PCs since the PC-1, and have used literally every generation of them.

I had an Amiga 500, and have used literally every generation of Amiga.

As my primary home machine, I've used various generations of Sun hardware including a 3/260 I upgraded to a 4/260, and an Ultra 2; I've had IBM RT-PCs, and a BeBox, and all KINDS of other crap no one cares about today. I have, in fact, owned more types of computer and run more operating systems than even most self-identified computer nerds even realize existed. Due to my long and varied experience, I can compare systems in an educated fashion.

Now, if you can point out which part of my comment was inaccurate, let alone a lie, I'll greatly appreciate it. But I have been there, I am still there, and I stand by every word. Meanwhile, you obviously lack the courage of your convictions, because you refuse to log in. Your comment consists solely of Ad Hominem attacks because you have nothing real to say.

Please log in, and join the big parade, so that I can recognize your stupidity in the future. Thank you.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[ceoyoyo]

One might question whether judging Macs by how well they work with Windows is a fair assessment....

Unfortunately it is a reality though. My lab uses all Macs. There are a couple of rackmount Windows terminal servers in the computer room but they haven't been upgraded in years since nobody uses them anymore. The Mac works pretty well with Windows file and printer networking (better than Windows, usually). Some of the other stuff requires some setup, but once it's done it's pretty much done. The savings come in the day to day support. Got a user who's click happy? No problem. Nasty worm going around? Don't worry.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[scottgfx]

Apple doesn't love you. Apple doesn't care about you. They just want your money.

If your love and affirmation only comes from a corporation, then you have other problems. Commodore didn't love you either.

Here's a story for you: About a month ago, a coworker bought a new MacBook laptop. She is also a student at the local university and was working on her finals when the screen went dead! She took the computer to the local Apple Store and they gave her a new computer and helped her move her files over to it.

As to your spinning beach ball: Yes, this would happen sometimes in OS X, versions 10.1 through 10.3 perhaps. I haven't noticed it in a long time. If you gave it some thought, you could have done what I did: Telnet into the frozen computer and kill the offending task or do a proper shutdown. Like I said, I haven't had this problem in a few years now.

Happy Mac and Amiga owner.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely feeling the same way. Trying to get Mac working in a mixed environment, OSX is the worst than any OS available.

See this for yourself for anyone claiming OSX works well in an enterprise environment, trying to set up some OSX file servers to serve Linux, Windows and OSX machines.

I know for sure some group once tried using xserve to do file sharing, they ended up with so much trouble and beyond to fix, then converted them all to Yellow Dog Linux.

There are a few factors OSX machines just can't get over:

1. With Apple machines, you are locked in both at software and hardware level.

2. There is really no working integration for Mac with other platforms, much worse than Windows on a mixed network.

So you can't blame IT department really. End users mostly complain about missing Mac in an enterprise environment never had much or any experience managing Mac in a truly mixed environment.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[Anonymous Coward]

"See this for yourself for anyone claiming OSX works well in an enterprise environment, trying to set up some OSX file servers to serve Linux, Windows and OSX machines."

Uh, try doing that Windblows without making the other boxes bow to NetBios. But you could put ssh/sftp on Windblows (the odd-ball that doesn't come with it out of the box when everyone else does), MacFuse/sshfs on OSX and your are GUI browsing with everybody with very little fuss.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[drinkypoo]

As to your spinning beach ball: Yes, this would happen sometimes in OS X, versions 10.1 through 10.3 perhaps. I haven't noticed it in a long time. If you gave it some thought, you could have done what I did: Telnet into the frozen computer and kill the offending task or do a proper shutdown. Like I said, I haven't had this problem in a few years now.

I had this problem just as much on 10.4 as I did on 10.3. Which was far too much.

As to your spinning beach ball: Yes, this would happen sometimes in OS X, versions 10.1 through 10.3 perhaps. I haven't noticed it in a long time. If you gave it some thought, you could have done what I did: Telnet into the frozen computer and kill the offending task or do a proper shutdown. Like I said, I haven't had this problem in a few years now.

ssh would often be unresponsive in these situations as well, and I don't use telnet (at least not without ipsec) because I'm not a schmuck. but aside from that, how is a user less savvy than me supposed to correct a condition like that? Same way people did it with the mac for years, with the programmer's key. Oh wait, new macs don't have those. What a pity.

Happy Mac and Amiga owner.

If you're still milking your Amiga for actual work for this long, then there's really nothing to say, is there? If it's just a toy, then mentioning it in this fashion is kind of disingenuous, isn't it? I mean, I have a GRiDPad 1910, but I don't generally mention it except in discussions of antiques because I don't use it to do work (or anything else.)

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[vvarder]

I never reply, only signed up for an account because of Discussion2. However....

I also work for Publicis and know David, and I don't know who he knows to be featured in these articles all the time. Yes, they run parallels (no boot camp), our Image Dev team had to build in WinXP support. However, most of the apps they use (Notes, Photoshop, other Adobe products, etc) run native, parallels is a recent addition - and not Enterprise wide. The thing is, we had about 2000 Macs last I knew (2-3 years ago), and Publicis has bought many more brands since, so I don't imagine those are "PC converts" as he implies. In fact, I can't think of a single case where that's true. Either he's misquoted, or the "requests" are getting stopped before they come to fruition.

It's not a convert story at our company. It's creative companies that have always used macs and probably always will. If I wanted a mac (and do) there's no way I'd be able to get it funded - because it costs the same as a HIGH END PC, not our normal Desktop model.

BTW- we have something like 12-14000 Users US wide (more now I think) so 2500 isn't 25%. As a disclaimer, I like the Mac platform - and help support it from the systems end, but this story just isn't what it seems, at least from Publicis.

Re:More IT Jobs require Mac skills

[sir fer]

hmm....I've heard this story before...that's right! from the sys admins in my university's comp-sci dept ;o)

Re:Macs on the Enterprise

[calebt3]

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market share..

[Rod76]

If Macs ever get to be the predominant platform or to common, Im switching to Linux. Call me a troll or whatever (Im a Mac user and have been for over a decade, so you other zealots feel free to mode down one of your own), but I dont want the Mac to grow anymore than it already has. Id much rather see OSS software take over the market and let the others be a paid choice.

Hmmmm

[ModernGeek]

Don't we hear this about once every two years or so? Maybe even more often than that. It is always same thing, "Macs will end up like Windows with viruses if it gets mainstream" Tagged with slownewsday

Re:Hmmmm

[NoobixCube]

Linux will never get like that though (-1 flamebait, -1 troll, -1 offtopic). Unless the worst viruses in the world are interested in your music collection, stored in your home folder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system.

Re:Hmmmm

[calebt3]

People are pretty trusting of the repos most of the time.

Re:Hmmmm

[jimicus]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, 10 years ago I got flamed (at the time, rightly so) for forwarding a copy of the "Good Times" virus hoax email. Most of the flames concentrated on how it wasn't possible for viruses to spread just by opening an email.

Then someone realised that the HTML rendering engine used by IE was full of security holes, and that Outlook rendered HTML emails using this engine - indeed, it couldn't (easily) be prevented from doing so. We've been mopping up the mess ever since.

or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system. Same's true in Windows - the user has to be an administrator or the amount of damage it can do to the local system is limited.

However, viruses which intentionally hose the local system are more or less extinct today. Instead, they spawn a process in the background, connect to some central communications mechanism (generally IRC) and await instruction. The instruction they'll get is the kind of thing that any user can do - "ping this host constantly", "connect to that host, open a particular port and send the following....".

It can be made more awkward in linux (mount any filesystem where the user can write as noexec is a good start, and something you can't easily do in Windows), but to imagine that it's totally impossible for today's malware to appear on alternate operating systems is sadly naive.

Re:Hmmmm

[NoobixCube]

I suppose you never do really know about security holes until either the developer or a security expert publishes them. Until then, any program could be being used to plant malicious code on any system. I guess I've just been a little blasé about open source software, since any deliberately malicious program would quickly draw attention. Although, that says nothing of security holes in open source software. Thanks for clearing that up for me.

Re:Hmmmm

[flnca]

I have a mailbox full of Mac exploits. Want some?? ;-))

They're easily identifiable by attachments with Mac file extensions.

Re:Hmmmm

[jeremyp]

It's the stuff in your home folder that is the valuable stuff though. If the operating system gets hosed, you can reinstall it. However, the 500 page novel you are writing which you haven't backed up for a while is irreplaceable.

Re:Hmmmm

[drinkypoo]

However, the 500 page novel you are writing which you haven't backed up for a while is irreplaceable.

Thank god. If you're not smart enough to back up, I don't want to read your shit anyway.

I'm equally uninterested in reading authors of paper novels not smart enough to visit Kinko's, drop their novel in the feeder, and press a button. Just to be fair.

Re:Hmmmm

[Random_Goblin]

However, the 500 page novel you are writing which you haven't backed up for a while is irreplaceable. Thank god. If you're not smart enough to back up, I don't want to read your shit anyway.

I'm going to be charitable and assume you were just a couple of cups of coffee short when you wrote this, but do you really expect your authors to be expert computer users?

Normal users dont do backups

Normal users don't know how their system works and don't want to know...

to expect your great writers to also be great users is to narrow your reading material more than you might be prepared to accept.

You do know for example that Douglas Adams lost an entire manuscript ( no backups) due to computer error. (back on topic the computer was an apple, the file was unrecoverable)

Fed up with MS

[stoolpigeon]

I think a lot of us really hoped that eventually people would really get what a mess Microsoft's products are and then OSS would really take off. Instead what I think is happening is that Apple may really see some growth.
 
I don't know if this means much but my department of 80-90 has gone from zero to about 20% mac in the last year. I don't see that adoption rate slowing down either. Now in the server room it is a mix - Windows, AIX and Linux. With Linux growing the fastest. But on the desktop I don't think anyone is full time Linux only. Even the Linux users all have a windows or apple machine.

Re:Fed up with MS

[ColdWetDog]

Even the Linux users all have a windows or apple machine.

Well, that's obviously because this isn't (yet) the year of Linux on the desktop. That's next year.

But seriously, I think it's because, on a Mac, you can run OS X, Linux and / or Windows of whatever flavor. The latter OS being the most important. Once it becomes more common for enterprise level apps to be written for *nix or just as web apps (shudder), you can then easily migrate the worker-drone clients to a cheap Linux box. Or convert your cheap Dell box into a cheap Linux box.

I see that as happening in the next couple of years - then OS X will be marginalized in the enterprise unless the mythical cheap Mac mini tower (i.e. the brushed aluminum beige box with an Apple logo) actually gets by his Steveness. Mobile users will still have Mac Book Pros, artiste-types will have their cheese graters, but the cubicle critters aren't going to get anything that fancy.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Telvin_3d]

Why would anyone go Linux only? OSX has a perfectly functional *NIX back-end to it so it's not like you lose out on any of the advantages of Linux by going with it. And you get to save on the hardware compatibility hassles that do still exist. Especially for laptops which I see more and more office workers getting.

Re:Fed up with MS

[stoolpigeon]

Me - I'd like to at some point because I really like working with and on open software.
 
I think cost comes into it for some as well.

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

losing out on the advantages of linux? by using OSX you lose out on the most important advantage of gnu/linux and free software: you actually own the software, you don't just license it.

the philosophical difference between software released under a free license and proprietary software is massive. as for the technical difference, well that is something you can of course never know, seeing as you can only know what free software technically is.

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

But on the desktop I don't think anyone is full time Linux only. Even the Linux users all have a windows or apple machine. do you really want to go with this? as it happens i do own an imac, which of course has a gnu/linux distribution on it. installing gnu/linux was actually the first thing i did when i got it, i never even booted osx once. my company laptop got the same fate.

Re:Fed up with MS

[flyingfsck]

Do you realize that Asus alone, sells more Linux laptops than Apple sells Macs?

Re:Fed up with MS

[orlanz]

Personally, I didn't like the Unix in OSX. I liked both individually, but programming on it for me was no different than having 2 separate machines.

The OSX and Unix sides don't play as well as say Gnome, KDE, daemons/services, and Unix (you know what I mean) do in Linux and the BSDs. Not to mention I am programming/interacting with a specific proprietary system instead of a more generic, open, flexible one.

It's just my style of programming. I try not to be implementation specific where I can and rather be generic interface based.

Re:Fed up with MS

[arminw]

....That's next year...

That's right, the year of Linux is ALWAYS next year in the same way the fusion power plants are always twenty years in the future.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Telvin_3d]

Well yes. But I'd love to be a fly on the wall when the IT guy tells the boss that from now on purchasing decisions for the office will be based on their philosophical merits. After all, working WiFi is a practical concern and what place does that have when weighed against your computing soul?

Re:Fed up with MS

[arminw]

...you actually own the software, you don't just license it...

What difference does that make since every computer comes with an OS anyway, either OSX or Windows. If you have a Mac, also get some other very useable software and you can also run many free UNIX flavor programs. If you want you can any flavor of Window, or Linux all running in a VM under OSX.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want you can any flavor of Window, or Linux all running in a VM under OSX.

Or I could just not run OS X at all... OS X doesn't provide me with anything I want so there's absolutely no reason to use it. If I'm going to be using Linux in a VM all the time why the fuck would I bother with OS X? I buy supported hardware and use Linux and it does everything I need. In my case, using OS X would be a step backwards.

P.S. I can also run Windows and OS X in a VM under Linux.

Re:Fed up with MS

[RiotingPacifist]

If you want you can any flavor of Window, or Linux all running in a VM under Any OS. Fixed that for you, if your going to be using free UNIX programs why pay loads for hardware?

Re:Fed up with MS

[RiotingPacifist]

whens the last time you used linux? Ive been using it for the last 2/3 years and WiFi just works. No you offer the boss the financial benifits ( e.g 0 installation cost, 0 additional hardware costs, dedicated support that will fix the software for you under the support fees)

Re:Fed up with MS

[RiotingPacifist]

But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell which is guaranteed to be compatible with you SuSe And when you phone up Novell with a bug, your phoning people that will fix the bug and send you a patch, not some generic mac help desk.

Re:Fed up with MS

[oatworm]

0 installation costs only work if your time is worthless as far as the company is concerned - hence why machines have OSes pre-installed these days. 0 additional hardware costs only work if you assume the hardware will never die, which isn't even remotely accurate. Dedicated support? Uh... isn't that your job? Also, don't forget that WiFi "just works" if you have just the right chipset (i.e. avoid Broadcom and Realtek unless you want to play with Ndiswrapper or have your OS do it for you).

Look, I'm typing this from a laptop running Linux - it works great. I'm happy with it. However, if you try to sell it as some sort of pie-in-the-sky utopian vision of "no cost", nobody's going to, pardon the expression, buy it. It just sounds (and, much of the time, is) too good to be true. That's not to say Linux won't eventually make some serious traction against Microsoft on the desktop - there's something to be said for running the ultimate definition of a "commodity" OS on commodity hardware - but it's going to take a long, long while to get there, and, by Linux's very nature, it's going to have to trickle down from the server room.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

Do you realize that Asus alone, sells more Linux laptops than Apple sells Macs? Citation?

In 2007, ASUS sold about 300 *thousand* Eee PCs, only 1/3 of which run Linux. In 2008, they plan to sell 5 million Eee PCs, which amounts to 1.666 Linux Eee PCs. Apple sold 2.3 million Macs last quarter.

Re:Fed up with MS

[daBass]

Can you please quote your sources? Apple sold well over 8M Macs in the last year, that's a whole lot of sales to beat.

I'd also like to see how many of those "Linux Laptops" actually end up running Linux. I have seen more than a few Eee PCs running Windows...

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

Free is just a feature. When I choose a computer or operating system, I weigh all the features, in proportion to their importance to me.

Free is nice, but I'd rather have a system that works well, and is compatible with the hardware and software I most care about.

as for the technical difference, well that is something you can of course never know, seeing as you can only know what free software technically is. Aside from specific technical requirements for such assurance, what does it matter, in practice? Should I worry that I can't prove that Photoshop isn't setting the blur radius to 2.1 when I request 2.0? Is it important that I can't prove that iTunes isn't shuffling the songs randomly?

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

Oh, WiFi works for you, so I guess it's universal?

The fact is, unless you make efforts to choose hardware that Linux specifically supports, you run the risk of various components not working. WiFi has gotten better, but it most certainly doesn't "just work" consistently enough to earn that description.

And this is one of the situations where Linux has an uphill battle. When people switch from Windows to a Mac, you have to buy a whole new computer, and the new computer really does "just work". Switching to Linux is more like upgrading to Vista. Because your computer isn't guaranteed to be Vista/Linux compatible, it might "just work", or it might not, and if it doesn't, the solution is not terribly likely to be easy, and it's quite common for there to be *no* solution, other than replacing the offending hardware.

With the nascent market for Linux-specific computers (like the Eee PC), switching to Linux can be similar to switching to a Mac, and LiveCD's should be able to eliminate any surprises. But that's not going to be enough to eliminate the problem Linux has with non-supported hardware.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

If you want you can any flavor of Window, or Linux all running in a VM under Any OS. Fixed that for you, if your going to be using free UNIX programs why pay loads for hardware? Why not pay "loads" for the hardware? Two good reasons to pay loads is you get loads more computer (speed, screen size, form-factor, etc.) and if you put that "loads" into a Mac, you also get Mac OS X and Mac software which, while it seems you may not value it, is definitely worth the price for an ever increasing number of people (as supported by, among other things, the article this story is centered on).

Re:Fed up with MS

[symbolset]

I don't know if you've read it yet. Microsoft's Vista Problem at the New York Times is especially informative. Pay special attention to the comments.

FTA:

Microsoft keeps insisting that Windows Vista is a winner, but the questions keep mounting -- and Thursday's quarterly report only added to the doubts.

The comments are especially interesting. 90% anti-Vista, 50% anti-Microsoft, 30% pro Linux (or thereabouts).

There was a saying once: "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It became untrue overnight and people who didn't see the change happening lost everything. Who are you faithful to?

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell which is guaranteed to be compatible with you SuSe And when you phone up Novell with a bug, your phoning people that will fix the bug and send you a patch, not some generic mac help desk. Macs are generally *very* cost-competitive.

Actually, let's break this down:

But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell Covered above.

which is guaranteed to be compatible with you SuSe And Macs are guaranteed to be compatible with Mac OS X.

And when you phone up Novell with a bug, your phoning people that will fix the bug and send you a patch And Apple will fix the bug, and even replace your computer if the problem is in hardware.

not some generic mac help desk. Not sure what that even means. When you call Novell, you get through directly to the developers? That seems fairly inefficient. On the other hand, you can take your Mac into an Apple Store and a Mac Genius will take care of you right there, hardware or software. Will Novell do that?

Basically, your position is predicated on wanting a Dell computer and SUSE Linux. Since Dell is fairly popular (although their hardware is rarely, if ever, considered more desirable than Apple hardware), we'll assume wanting a Dell isn't that uncommon. Wanting SUSE Linux, however, is nowhere near as common as wanting Mac OS X, so I don't see how it's a strong counter-argument to buying a Mac, and running Mac OS X, Windows, *and* Linux. But if you are in the small set of people who want to run SUSE Linux on a Dell, your solution is quite viable.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

To be fair, you are howling mad, Howie.

Re:Fed up with MS

[pandrijeczko]

Apple sold well over 8M Macs in the last year, that's a whole lot of sales to beat.

As I've said on here many times before, I've worked in the telecoms/IT industry for 25+ years now as a techie of various types.

And in ***ALL*** that time here in the UK, I have seen a total of ***THREE*** Macs anywhere - one was a notebook owned by an American trainer on a course I did, my friend has a Mac gathering dust in its box in his study because his boss gave it to him not knowing what to do with it and he doesn't know what to do with it either, and the third was a student posing with one in a local coffee store.

Yes, Macs may have a higher penetration in the US, I'm not arguing that. But over here in the UK (and I suspect Europe), I suspect more people still own Amigas than they do Macs - they really are ***LOW*** penetration over here.

Also, please bear in mind that in Europe, Linux penetration is far higher than it is in the US which also goes some way to explaining why Macs are very uncommon.

You need to realise that despite the very good Euro/Dollar & Sterling/Dollar exchange rates currently, over here we never benefit too much from those because US manufacturers consistently rip us off for pricing. Only the other day, I picked up an O'Reilly book in a bookshop that had a $49.99 cover price but was £39.99 to buy in Sterling - nowhere near the 2:1 Sterling/Dollar exchange rate that there is currently.

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

more important would be how much information is being collected about you by apple and microsoft to be sold to the highest bidder. or maybe the remote kill switch built into your computer.

Re:Fed up with MS

[kklein]

I finally had it with MS last summer and I wanted so so much to just switch to Linux. But something got in the way:

Nothing I need runs on Linux.

Most of what I need runs on the Mac.

The specialty stuff I need runs on Windows under VMware Fusion, which I bought for $40 because I was in the beta.

Now I've got a MacBook as my main work machine (university lecturer / researcher), and a new Mac Pro at home (I really wanted to just build a Hackintosh, but I didn't want to worry about when it would be bricked).

This is what I think a lot of Linux people don't seem to get: People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Until there is an Office version for Linux, Linux will never take off. And since MS knows this, there will never be a version of Office for Linux.

People use the platform that solves their problems. Linux solves a lot of people's problems, to be sure. But not most people's. The Mac, with the addition of Fusion or Parallels, solves a lot of people's problems, and provides a great user experience to boot.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

XP and Vista have "kill switches" integrated into the OS. There's no indication that there's any such switch in Mac OS X.

As for information collection, Windows definitely collects information, but all indications are it's not personal, and is used primarily in-house by MS. There's no indication that Mac OS X collects any information beyond that which is voluntarily provided during product registration.

Now, you might say, "but with Linux, you can prove, whereas with Windows and Mac OS X, you have to trust." And that's true, to some extent. However, even though you can theoretically prove Linux secure (ignoring the whole "what if the compiler has a backdoor?" paranoia exercise), it's not something that is practical for any single user, so ultimately it comes down to a matter of trust. You have to trust the programmers of the various projects included in the distro and you have to trust the distro makers.

Conversely, although you pretty much have to trust MS and Apple, you can usually get a fair idea of whether or not they are doing what they say they are doing (or not doing).

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

the difference being that there are thousands of people world-wide with access to the gnu/linux sourcecode trying to show how much it sucks compared with mac osx or windows. don't you think that if redhat started collecting information or had a remote kill switch, apple and microsoft would make sure you knew about it. heck it, the free software community wouldn't stand for something like that.

Re:Fed up with MS

[nogginthenog]

My experience is the same. At my previous place there was 1 Mac. I only ever saw the screensaver running on it. Not sure what they used it for. Before that the last time I saw a Mac was at least 10 years ago. I've worked in IT for 15 years.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

don't you think that if redhat started collecting information or had a remote kill switch, apple and microsoft would make sure you knew about it I doubt either Apple or Microsoft would say a word (for very different reasons--Apple because they just don't talk about Linux, and Microsoft because they include a kill switch, and collect information themselves).

It still doesn't change the fact that, unless you personally check it yourself, you have to rely on *trust* that your Linux system isn't up to something funny.

A kill switch on Linux doesn't make any sense. On Mac OS X, it doesn't exist, and on Windows it exists. Going hypothetical is interesting, but it doesn't alter reality. Similarly, OS X and Linux are fairly similar when it comes to collecting data (basically, only standard web-type info when accessing network resources), and Windows most certainly does collect data (but, probably nothing personally identifiable). Again, why pontificate about theory when we already know the answers?

The question isn't about what we've personally proven about the honesty of our respective systems, but it's whether we can trust the people involved. Apple has shown no reason to not trust them. MS has shown reason not to trust them fully.

Linux is quite unique. There are far more people involved, which increases the access to trouble-makers, but it also has many more people keeping an eye on things, which makes trouble-making more difficult. Still, it doesn't alter the fact that you must place your trust in others, or verify each and every program on your computer, whether you run Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows.

Re:Fed up with MS

[UnxMully]

And in ***ALL*** that time here in the UK, I have seen a total of ***THREE*** Macs anywhere - one was a notebook owned by an American trainer on a course I did, my friend has a Mac gathering dust in its box in his study because his boss gave it to him not knowing what to do with it and he doesn't know what to do with it either, and the third was a student posing with one in a local coffee store.

It's odd. I've had four macs myself since 2002. Now running a MacBook Pro. While working on site at a client there were 8 other Mac users all on the same floor. And at Canary Wharf they're all over the place.

New assignment and it's me alone.

Some places do, some don't.

Re:Fed up with MS

[pandrijeczko]

And at Canary Wharf they're all over the place.

I have several major clients in London and Canary Wharf that I visit occasionally. I do have a glance at the machines on people's desks as I'm making my way to a server room somewhere but I can't recall ever seeing a Mac.

I'm not saying you're wrong in your statement, it's just a matter of experience. If anything, whilst I do see a few Linux PCs in my travels (I'm primarily a Linux user myself) I don't see as many on desktops as I thought I would - though I guess the far majority of Linux machines are in server rooms.

Re:Fed up with MS

[mikael_j]

Of course, I'm in Sweden (which is in Europe) and where I work we have three guys who are very proc-mac and anti-windows with several others being "closet mac users" (meaning they don't talk about it but if someone asks what version of Windows they're running they answer "OS X"). Could it be you britons are a bit behind the times? Because I know seven or eight years ago the situation here was a lot more like you describe in your post, except in creative professions.

/Mikael

Re:Fed up with MS

[solevita]

Odd, I guess you're not hanging out with the cool crowd.

I'm in the UK and see them pretty regularly; I was at an Open Data workgroup last week and there must have been 20 macs there, a dell running Ubuntu and nothing else.

A woman from the British Library even had a Macbook Air.

We set up an office in France and were told that "everyone over here uses Macs", which was nice, but that's not the sort of thing we're going to be spending money on ;)

Re:Fed up with MS

[UnxMully]

I have several major clients in London and Canary Wharf that I visit occasionally. I do have a glance at the machines on people's desks as I'm making my way to a server room somewhere but I can't recall ever seeing a Mac.

I suspect I should have qualified that.

There were often macs in use in coffee shops at Canary Wharf, so not in offices but a more general response to "I've never seen..." and I suspect those end up being used in offices out there.

At the company where I worked, most of the technical architecture team were transitioning to using macs. When I moved on there four users out of a team of 12 with Macs with more on order. 50-50 sexiness and the outrageous charges for running a thinkpad/xp for a year.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Hognoxious]

Well, that's obviously because this isn't (yet) the year of Linux on the desktop. That's next year.

I thought it was last year?

Re:Fed up with MS

[EvilIdler]

I'm sharing offices with many companies - architects and designers mostly.
Among 30 people, there are 2 PCs and an Asus laptop about to be replaced with a MacBook.
Some have an iMac and a MacBook Pro or Air, while I'm the only strange one with just a Mac Mini.

Re:Fed up with MS

[argent]

But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell which is guaranteed to be compatible with you SuSe And when you phone up Novell with a bug, your phoning people that will fix the bug and send you a patch, not some generic mac help desk.

Macs are generally *very* cost-competitive.

That word, you keep using that word, I don't think it means what you think it means.

If you compare Mac and non-Mac hardware solutions to almost any realistic set of requirements, the Mac solution is at least 40% more than the comparable Windows solution.

To get Macs to look cost competitive with non-Macs, you need to

* Define the requirements as "exactly what this Mac has".
* Ignore the value of any features in the PC you're comparing it with that aren't in the Mac.

What makes Macs competitive is the software. The hardware is still super-expensive.

And Apple will fix the bug, and even replace your computer if the problem is in hardware.

I'm still waiting for Apple to fix some bugs from 2004.

Re:Fed up with MS

[RiotingPacifist]

0 additional hardware costs only work if you assume the hardware will never die, which isn't even remotely accurate. No the key word was additional, you still need to replace your systems but you can replace them with cheaper systems.

0 installation costs only work if your time is worthless as far as the company is concerned - hence why machines have OSes pre-installed these days Yeah but who gets paid for that time, while setting up the 1t Linux box may take a little time to configure rolling it out will take the same amount of vista.
I doubt that even apples are given straight to users, they have to be configured to work in your set-up 1st, which may be faster under linux, as you can burn your setup to an install disk, then install the systems preconfigured.

Also, don't forget that WiFi "just works" if you have just the right chipset (i.e. avoid Broadcom and Realtek unless you want to play with Ndiswrapper or have your OS do it for you). Really? I used broadcom for the last year without any problems, it was litterly clicking the "do you want broadcom to work" box and it worked fine. Perhaps my experience isnt indicative of all users, but while non-recommended hardware like ati (this offerd more problems in fairness) & broadcom, might not be perfect it does work.

Re:Fed up with MS

[RiotingPacifist]

(speed, screen size, form-factor, etc.) Ok so a corperate system isnt going to be using bluetooth or the webcam, and if they need it these are cheep addons so ill ignore them in the comparisons.

2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (13") 1,099 mac book
2.0GHz Intel Core 2 Due (15.4") $799 insprion 1525 (has extra 50GB)
Saving $300 (30%)
Sure the form factor isn't there you got a bigger screen size, same speed, in the cooperate environment those come in above having it white & sparkle.

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (15") 1.999 mac book pro
2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (14.1) 1.024 insprion 1420
This comparsion isnt as fair as ive got a worse PC, because i was only looking at the dell-linux site, but is the .2ghz and extra inch of screen, worth $970.

As for Mac OS X, well if people have been illegally running vista (pre -SP1) on macs, then were safe to ignore the apple clause in the EULA and just run whatever apple software you want.

Re:Fed up with MS

[itsdapead]

I think a lot of us really hoped that eventually people would really get what a mess Microsoft's products are and then OSS would really take off. Instead what I think is happening is that Apple may really see some growth.

I suspect that the reason/problem is that MS's real stranglehold is not so much Windows as MS Office - which runs on Macs too (albeit in a slightly knobbled version) and, unfortunately, support for OpenOffice has been patchy (but NeoOffice seems perfectly good, albeit a version behind OO, the X Windows version of OO is there, and there's a proper OS X OpenOffice in the pipeline).

Apart from that, any move away from the Windows monoculture should benefit Linux and OSS in the long term. OS X may not be open source but it uses and promotes a lot of FOSS components (Apache, Samba, CUPS, GCC, WebKit). Safari may be a few million miles from perfect, but at least its not Internet Explorer...

However - I tried for the first time to get something done on Vista the other day. Ye gods! Forget bugs/security pop-ups whatever, the user interface is just a visually confusing blur. Despite having "switched" I'm still perfectly familiar with the XP interface (and actually quite like it) - this was completely alien. Someone actually looked over my shoulder and asked "is that a Mac, then?" :-) I think MS may actually have risked their Unique Selling Point - familiarity - this time.

Re:Fed up with MS

[frehe]

the most important advantage of gnu/linux and free software: you actually own the software, you don't just license it. You don't own GPL licensed software, unless you've written it. For instance; can you republish it under another license, such as the BSD license, or close source it? IMHO, GPL is just a "benevolent dictatorship" like form of regular Microsoft style software licensing. It's restricts what I can do with the software, and in addition tries to lift those restrictions to a moral high ground.

Re:Fed up with MS

[cerberusss]

Only the other day, I picked up an O'Reilly book in a bookshop that had a $49.99 cover price but was £39.99 to buy in Sterling - nowhere near the 2:1 Sterling/Dollar exchange rate that there is currently.

Well, first of all half of the cover price is margin for your local supplier. And secondly, it might be that the book is actually domestically printed.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

With the nascent market for Linux-specific computers (like the Eee PC), switching to Linux can be similar to switching to a Mac, and LiveCD's should be able to eliminate any surprises. But that's not going to be enough to eliminate the problem Linux has with non-supported hardware.

Linux actually does not have ANY more problem in this area than Vista, and probably much less. This is because pretty much everything supported in Linux kernel 2.6.2 is supported in linux 2.6.22 (or whatever) while lots of things supported in XP aren't supported in Vista; meanwhile, there are plenty of things which will never be supported in Vista because they are non-current products and the driver model has changed, and many of those pieces of hardware already are or will eventually be supported by Linux.

Does that mean that OSX has less problem than Linux? Shit no. Having to buy a whole new computer rather than just some hardware does NOT repeat NOT make the problem less arduous. It simply shifts the problem from a little bit of money and some labor (which can be done by your local shop, if they have a Linux guy, and most computer shops are staffed with nerds) to a whole bunch of money. Low-end Macs are substantially more expensive than the competition, and most consumers don't buy the highest-end computer, which is the only point at which the Mac reaches price parity with a PC.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

Why not pay "loads" for the hardware? Two good reasons to pay loads is you get loads more computer (speed, screen size, form-factor, etc.)

Loads more than what? What you already have? Apple is about the same price as the competition in the high end (well, actually, my nw9440 was the same price as a MBP but instead of shitty consumer-level ATI graphics I got pro-level nVidia Quadro graphics, which adds literally hundreds to the value of the system) but in the low end they are horrendously expensive, sometimes 100% more expensive than a PC with similar performance, both of whose motherboards were probably made by Foxconn.

Dell will sell you a SFF Core Duo system with 2GB of ram and a 20" flat panel for $450 off the small business site, just look around for the savings code. They mail us a flyer every month or so (sometimes more) because we bought a Vostro 1500, Core 2 Duo 1.45, 2GB/160GB, ipw3945, bluetooth, 15" non-glossy, DVD-burner, FW400, 4xUSB2 for $650. You can also get a quad-intel with a 20" for $650ish.

Apple has nice case design and some cool apps for their wonky, unresponsive, nonstandard (they use open standards, but they use them in a way that makes customization difficult) operating system, and that's it. The OS is less responsive than any competition except perhaps Vista (which is pretty atrocious itself) and less compatible than XP, Linux, or even Vista. Driver support in OSX is piss-poor, I don't really know how it compares to Vista (which I have used very little, thankfully) but I know it's horrible compared to Linux.

There are reasons to buy a mac. They are Final Cut Pro, iDVD, iMovie, et cetera. None of them are related to the hardware or the OS, sorry.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

And Apple will fix the bug, and even replace your computer if the problem is in hardware.

I got rid of my B&W G3 because it was a Rev.1 with the buggy CMD IDE chip implementation, causing errors with almost all UDMA devices. Apple's official recommendation for fixing this problem was to buy a new controller card or use software to force the device into the slow and inefficient PIO mode. Apple deleted the TIL document when they rolled the TIL into the KB, so that the evidence of their assholishness was erased from their website. You can still read about it on lowendmac and other sites, if you do some digging.

Apple is entirely untrustworthy, and NeXTStep was usable and fairly peppy on a turbo slab while OSX is horribly unresponsive on a Dual G5 2.0 GHz. Apple poisons everything they touch with an artificial candy coating and then tells you to shut up and swallow. It's their way or the highway, and I want to ride it all night long - and put as much distance between myself and them as I can.

BTW, low-end mac hardware is horribly more expensive than low-end PC hardware and not made any better. (You could say the same about the non-ancient Sun workstation/desktop hardware; Ultra 1, Ultra 2, Ultra 5, Ultra 10 are all just PCs with UltraSPARC processors, for example.) High-end Mac hardware is about the same price as the PC hardware. If you don't have added value in OSX over alternatives like Linux, and for most businesses there is no value in the candy coating or the horribly poorly designed Dock, then you're really only harming yourself by choosing OSX. In the case where you purchase the top-end machine for every employee, the price really is the same, but I've never worked for a company for which that was the case, because the top-end machine is only current from a software support standpoint for a little longer than the low-end, and these days any crap PC can do all basic computing tasks.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

This is what I think a lot of Linux people don't seem to get: People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Until there is an Office version for Linux, Linux will never take off. And since MS knows this, there will never be a version of Office for Linux.

which people? I don't need MS Office, I only need MS Office compatibility. Mostly so that I can handle Word documents, but I do mess with the occasional spreadsheet.

Can you explain which people NEED MS Office, besides those who are too stupid and/or lazy to figure out how to use a different word processor?

Re:Fed up with MS

[lactose99]

Don't forget about all the Acorn and RISC-OS machines still in active use. Shame the ARM platform never really took-off as a PC alternative, some of those boxes are kinda nifty for basic tasks.

Re:Fed up with MS

[arminw]

...The OS is less responsive than any competition...

BS. I run XP under OSX in a VM. The response it about the same for both. If I use Safari under OSX or IE under XP, there is no difference anyone would notice.

It is instructive, that in spite of your claim of higher prices for Apple hardware, Apple Macs are selling rather well these days and Apple is making a higher percentage profit that any commodity hardware maker and even MS itself. Apparently there are plenty of people that appreciate the superior quality of design of the hardware, as well as not having to hassle viruses, worms, spyware and other computer vermin that plagues Windows. They also appreciate the included iLife software that comes with every new Mac. The equivalents of this software included with Windows, or even available with Linux is a sorry, second rate imitation.

Giving the inevitable /. car analogy, there are plenty of drivers who appreciate the performance of a BMW or comfort and luxury of a Mercedes. They keep the makers of these vehicles innovative and profitable. A Hyundai will get you from A to B, if that's all you care about. A cheap DELL or thrown together white box PC with also let you surf the Internet, if thats all you want to do with a computer.

If I were an avid gamer. I'd buy a Windows XP PC, just to run the many games available for it. It would have no permanent network connection, minimize malware.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Weedlekin]

"But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell"

Unfortunately, you would also be lumbered with a Dell.

Re:Fed up with MS

[hacker]

This is what I think a lot of Linux people don't seem to get: People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Until there is an Office version for Linux, Linux will never take off. And since MS knows this, there will never be a version of Office for Linux.

How exactly is this our problem? How is this a Linux problem? Microsoft Office is written by Microsoft. We have nothing to do with that application.

If you think lack of one proprietary application that runs on one proprietary operating system means the death-knell for another, completely unrelated, free operating system... I think you need to do a little more 'research' and a little less 'lecturing'.

Talk to Microsoft. If they wanted to gain more market share, they'd release Office for Linux. This is not our problem to solve, and by the way, Linux has already taken off... in case you missed the last 8 years of the industry.

Re:Fed up with MS

[John Jamieson]

I work in a rather large IT shop. I can say we have had a large increase in the number of IT people who use APPL at home, but on the corporate desktop we are mostly all windows. The only exception is a few people who have moved to Linux(and a few more who have done so unofficially just to make working easier). And yes, they do everything on Linux(our email system is based on Lotus Notes).

I can see eventual pressure to bring in the Silver and white equipment, but not from the point of getting the job done the best. Instead, it will be people who want to appear cool.

Re:Fed up with MS

[John Jamieson]

I realize that you are probubly mocking some "year of the Linux desktop" reporter, but man, is this old line ever getting TIRED. Please let it die!

Linux will have its own year of the desktop in the same century as Apple.
Yep, that is right, it will never happen for either.
Migrations are far too gradual to pinpoint to any year.

SUMMARY: Linux will have a 90% marketshare someday, and NEVER have had a "year of Linux on the desktop"

Re:Fed up with MS

[John Jamieson]

Your post is almost a troll, but you didn't mean it that way I am sure.

Linux works well with far more hardware than OSX! So don't use OSX as the posterboy for hardware compatibility, please.

OSX does work well if you stick to the hardware that is sold or supported by Appl.(But Linux works well on hardware that is listed as supported as well). And as lousy as MS is as a company, they have traditionally done an excellent job in the compatibility area.

Re:Fed up with MS

[jimicus]

Don't forget about all the Acorn and RISC-OS machines still in active use. Shame the ARM platform never really took-off as a PC alternative, some of those boxes are kinda nifty for basic tasks. What, both of them?

It's a terrible shame, really, because it was a nice little platform - I used it myself for a long time. But to be fair, Acorn never really kept up and (like most British technology companies) had absolutely stellar engineering and absolutely lousy marketing.

Today, they're somewhat overpriced and the only reason I can think of for using one is some weird piece of software which no equivalent exists on any other platform.

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

the difference being that apple hides its code away and says "trust us!" while free software says "here's the code. check for yourself!"

this means that with apple i have to trust one company which is trying its best to sell its own product, whereas with free software i can check myself or i can trust thousands of people who have nothing to do with any company that is making money off it.

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

sorry, we are having problem with english pronouns here. when i say "you" own it, i mean "you pl." own it. it belongs to humanity. so no you are not allowed to deprive me of it, because it also belongs to me.

Re:Fed up with MS

[petermgreen]

Macs are generally *very* cost-competitive
Only if your requirements happen to line up with what apple offers.Otherwise apples very limited range often means you need to buy loads of hardware you don't really need.

For example if you want a machine with more than one drive bay or a machine with expansion slots or support for more than one external monitor (all features that are either standard or availible for a small extra cost in the PC world) then you have to pay over £1000 even at education discount prices.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

this means that with apple i have to trust one company which is trying its best to sell its own product, whereas with free software i can check myself or i can trust thousands of people Exactly.

You act as though you can fully trust Linux, but you cannot trust Apple at all. All you've done, however, is stated why you *can* trust Linux (because the code is included), but not stated why you cannot trust Apple. What has Apple ever done that makes you not trust them?

Re:Fed up with MS

[howlingmadhowie]

apple is not an independent party here. the company has a vested interest in making itself look better and its competitors worse. moreover, apple would be able to steal personal information of install a kill switch and it may be in their interest to do so. if they did, i would have no way of knowing.

in fact i have absolutely no reason to trust apple and trust is earned, as they say.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

Linux actually does not have ANY more problem in this area than Vista Nice that you based a whole paragraph on pretending to correct me on something I already stated. From the post you replied to "Switching to Linux is more like upgrading to Vista. Because your computer isn't guaranteed to be Vista/Linux compatible, it might "just work", or it might not".

Does that mean that OSX has less problem than Linux? Shit no. Having to buy a whole new computer rather than just some hardware does NOT repeat NOT make the problem less arduous. It makes the problem *impossible*.

Low-end Macs are substantially more expensive than the competition No, they are not. The Mac mini is significantly more powerful, and significantly less expensive, than other computers of similar form-factor (actually, I have to use a very loose definition of "similar" here, because the competition is usually at least three times the size).

But you're trying to say that if you want to switch a Mac, you have to buy a whole new computer. Granted. You're saying that the Macs are more expensive than similar PCs. Not granted. You're saying that the average Mac price is higher than the average PC price. Granted. Interestingly, even though Macs are generally expensive, more people are buying them than are switching to Linux, so the price isn't as much of a problem as you seem to think it is.

This whole sub-thread started, however, when someone else stated that WiFi "just works" on Linux, which it most certainly *does not*. Complaining that Macs are expensive to you does not change this fact.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

You are cherry picking. You only chose the 15.4" Inspiron because it's cheaper than Dell's 13.3" notebook. Be honest and spec the Dell that *most closely matches* the specs of a MacBook. Also, don't leave out the features you can pretend some market segment won't want.

Your cherry picking demonstrates your lack of integrity.

Picking the Dell that most closely matches the mid-range MacBook, the Dell costs $1,408 - $50 instant savings for: $1,358. The MacBook costs $1,299. I chose the mid-range because Dell doesn't offer a 2.1GHz Core2Duo with 3MB cache.

Speccing the closest Dell to the low-end MacBook:
Dell - $1,283 - $50 = $1,233
Apple - $1,199

For the MacBook, I had to add 1GB of RAM to match the Dell, and that leaves us with a Dell that has a slower CPU, but better optical drive (I could not match those to components exactly).

Unlike you, I chose the Dell that most closely matched the Mac in question, then I even increased the specs (and price) of the Mac in question, as necessary, to most closely match the Dell, and lo and behold, the Mac was actually *cheaper*.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

apple is not an independent party here. the company has a vested interest in making itself look better and its competitors worse. moreover, apple would be able to steal personal information of install a kill switch and it may be in their interest to do so However, they have done neither. Saying "it may be in their interest to do so" is meaningless unless it *is* in their interest to do so.

if they did, i would have no way of knowing. Sure you would. You'd notice strange packets sent to apple.com (or some other unknown address). As for the kill switch, your computer suddenly dying on you would be a major clue. Additionally, a large portion of OS X is open source--in fact, the very place you'd expect to find a kill switch is open source. You can check for one yourself, as you have apparently done with Linux.

in fact i have absolutely no reason to trust apple and trust is earned, as they say. Exactly. Trust is earned by reputation and one's actions. What actions has Apple taken, and what reputation does Apple have, that indicate you can't trust that they haven't infested OS X with spyware and kill switches?

As for what positive reasons to trust that they won't do those things, there are legal implications if they are caught, and their reputation would suffer. Both are things which would cost Apple dearly.

Additionally, if you consider other situations where Apple could have acted like Microsoft and locked things down or mined your private information, they almost universally have chosen to respect the user's privacy, and have avoided remote control over a user's PC.

Re:Fed up with MS

[falconwolf]

losing out on the advantages of linux? by using OSX you lose out on the most important advantage of gnu/linux and free software: you actually own the software, you don't just license it.

Excuse me but I'm typing this in a Firefox tab on my MacBook Pro. As an office suite I use NeoOffice, the native Mac port of Open Office. I can install RPM packages with MacPorts and for Debian's dpkg and apt-get I can use Fink. Anything, well most maybe as I don't know for sure everything will, that runs in X on Linux I can install on my Mac.

Falcon

Re:Fed up with MS

[falconwolf]

I doubt that even apples are given straight to users, they have to be configured to work in your set-up 1st, which may be faster under linux, as you can burn your setup to an install disk, then install the systems preconfigured.

Having switched from Windows, when I got my MacBook Pro I unpacked it, plugged it in, and booted up. It asked me to setup an account then without any setup involved I connected to the internet over my WiFi router. Having said that, it was just as easy to connect to the net when I booted my Linux PC the first tyme, it automatically detected and configured for my router.

Falcon

Re:Fed up with MS

[falconwolf]

If you compare Mac and non-Mac hardware solutions to almost any realistic set of requirements, the Mac solution is at least 40% more than the comparable Windows solution.

I did compare cost before switching from Windows. A Dell with similar specs to my MacBook Pro cost $200 more while an HP cost about the same.

What makes Macs competitive is the software. The hardware is still super-expensive.

No it isn't, however like you said before, when you compare prices you have to start with the Mac.

I'm still waiting for Apple to fix some bugs from 2004.

I've only had my MBP 8 months but it that tyme I've only had 3 problems with it. The first, and only Mac specific, is it doesn't always wakeup after I've closed the lip. The second is that I wasn't about the get Fink Commander to work properly, however I'm not a Linux guru. The third was that Firefox used to occasionally crash though it hasn't happened in a few months.

Falcon

Re:Fed up with MS

[iPirate06]

Driver support? What would you need to support? If it's USB or Firewire, it probably works. I haven't installed any of the 4 printers (3 Brother, 1 Lexmark, one being a multifunction with scanner that instantly works with 'Image Capture.app') and they all work fine.

And if it's internal, what do you gain by opening the case?

As for responsiveness, More RAM = More speed. Dual Core Intel is faster than Single-Core PowerPC. Spotlight in Leopard is much more snappy than it was in Tiger (no lag in typing response due to searching). Spaces kicks ass. Spaces + Exposé kicks even more ass. iWork '08 is great for presentations, simple tables and reports (Keynote, Numbers and Pages respectively).

As arminw mentioned, I far prefer my BMW to a Hot Rod mod of a Hyundai. Theirs might go faster in a bare-bones rattle, but I have the luxury and comfort of my leather seat.

The only downside is the head of this metaphorical BMW is letting the success go to his head. Oh well.

Re:Fed up with MS

[mprindle]

Here's the link to the article....

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/microsofts-vista-problem/

Re:Fed up with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Low-end Macs are substantially more expensive than the competition..."

I tried to put together a box as small, as quiet and equivalent in power and features as the MacMini. I couldn't do it. It either ended up bigger, louder or more expensive (than a new x86 Mini). Maybe I just didn't find the right parts but they must be tucked in some remote corner of the Internet. So I bought a used MacMini on ebay for the task I had in mind.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

You're saying that the Macs are more expensive than similar PCs. Not granted. You're saying that the average Mac price is higher than the average PC price. Granted.

What?

And also, what?

How, precisely, is the average Mac price higher than the average PC price, without Macs being more expensive than similar PCs? Are you really trying to make the argument that having a slightly sleeker case and a slightly smaller form factor makes a dramatically different machine? The closest you can really get to that argument is that Apple machines attract people who value form over function and are willing to pay more for a slightly smaller case.

This whole sub-thread started, however, when someone else stated that WiFi "just works" on Linux, which it most certainly *does not*. Complaining that Macs are expensive to you does not change this fact.

I specifically addressed the issue of "the problem Linux has with non-supported hardware". You should be able to figure this out pretty easily based on the text that I quoted at the top of my comment. And as I stated, it does not have more problem with it than Vista. And in turn, Vista does not necessarily require the purchase of a whole new computer, which for a mac, it does. WiFi doesn't "just work" on the Mac unless you buy a mac and/or buy hardware with mac drivers. This is precisely the same situation as linux - you can buy a PC with linux or you can buy hardware with Linux drivers. The only difference is that OSX is never a fix for a problems with your PC running Windows because OSX won't run on that PC, but Linux often is because it does.

Linux, Windows, and Mac OS, and every other OS on the planet have something in common. That thing is that you need to have hardware which works with your OS if you want it to work. Seems like a simple statement, but a lot of people have problems with it. The simple truth is that Linux runs on a broader range of hardware than any OS that isn't netbsd (and I'm not sure they're still ahead, but it's always been a safe bet before) and supports more devices, to boot. Because I planned ahead when ordering my laptop and got a Centrino system, the WiFi does "just work", WPA2 included (I'm using it right now and I haven't had to do anything special.) If you want to talk crap about Linux in my house you have to talk about the shit support for Conexant modems (I found the Linuxant driver to be a waste of twenty bucks, especially when they suggested I do their job for them by developing my own patch from the ALSA dev sources and their driver) and issues with nVidia Quadro FX and EDID reporting.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

BS. I run XP under OSX in a VM. The response it about the same for both. If I use Safari under OSX or IE under XP, there is no difference anyone would notice.

I'm unclear as to whether you claim that XP runs no slower in a VM than it does normally, or that XP in a VM is about as fast as OSX running on the bare metal, but either way you are not actually supporting your case, but harming it.

If XP running in a virtual machine on OSX is just as fast as OSX running on the bare metal that's pretty pathetic. because XP should be slowed down by running in a translated environment.

It is instructive, that in spite of your claim of higher prices for Apple hardware, Apple Macs are selling rather well these days and Apple is making a higher percentage profit that any commodity hardware maker and even MS itself.

Apple doesn't sell functionality. They don't sell reliability. They SURE AS HELL don't sell price:performance ratio. They sell a sexy case and a pretty GUI. And for many, they sell "the commercial alternative to Microsoft". I know I was in that camp before I learned enough to run Linux.

Apparently there are plenty of people that appreciate the superior quality of design of the hardware, as well as not having to hassle viruses, worms, spyware and other computer vermin that plagues Windows.

There's plenty of sexy PC hardware out there, and I don't have problems with vermin on Linux, either.

They also appreciate the included iLife software that comes with every new Mac. The equivalents of this software included with Windows, or even available with Linux is a sorry, second rate imitation.

This is probably the single best reason to run OSX, although certain of Apple's apps just piss me off to no end. It's the typical "our way or fuck you" Apple attitude. It's easier to make a DVD with four clips and animated menus in iDVD than it is to just make one piece of video play and loop automatically.

A cheap DELL or thrown together white box PC with also let you surf the Internet, if thats all you want to do with a computer.

Let me tell you something about a cheap Dell: it fucking rocks. And aside from the case, it might as well be a macbook. $650 gets you a Vostro 1500 with a 1.4 GHz C2D, 2GB/160GB, IEEE1394, dvd burner (dual format, dual layer, but no lightscribe as if I cared) with intel graphics and sound, a conexant modem (yuck) and ipw3945. For the same price you can get a quad intel desktop in a nice little case with a 20" LCD from dell small business. No joke. I think I'll buy one for my next cute little server, and use the 20" as a second display for my Compaq nw9440.

For $1000 you can get the same thing from dell in a pretty case. But we didn't care. We may actually buy Macs down the road, when we have more excess cash. But I will only boot OSX occasionally if at all, unless I get a better camera and plunk down for FCP. I'd like a MBP, since Apple went nVidia. Too bad that the abysmal quality of ATI wasn't enough to do it, and ATI had to alienate them by preannouncing things in order to get dropped. My nw9440 doesn't have firewire boot, disk mode, or the thin case, but it does have Quadro FX1500 256MB graphics and a fingerprint sensor, and a full keyboard. Otherwise, it might as well be a MBP.

Re:Fed up with MS

[drinkypoo]

As for responsiveness, More RAM = More speed. Dual Core Intel is faster than Single-Core PowerPC. Spotlight in Leopard is much more snappy than it was in Tiger (no lag in typing response due to searching). Spaces kicks ass. Spaces + Exposé kicks even more ass. iWork '08 is great for presentations, simple tables and reports (Keynote, Numbers and Pages respectively).

Uh, I was using dual-processor PowerPC G5 at 2 GHz.

The single-core P4 2.4GHz running Win2k was substantially snappier than OSX on the Dual G5.

As arminw mentioned, I far prefer my BMW to a Hot Rod mod of a Hyundai. Theirs might go faster in a bare-bones rattle, but I have the luxury and comfort of my leather seat.

Personally I prefer a Subaru, but what do I know? I wrecked my Mercedes.

The only downside is the head of this metaphorical BMW is letting the success go to his head. Oh well.

The 10.5 dock stupidity is proof of that.

Re:Fed up with MS

[node 3]

What?

And also, what?

How, precisely, is the average Mac price higher than the average PC price, without Macs being more expensive than similar PCs? What?

The spectrum of computers Apple sells start in the mid-range, and extend to the extreme high-end. When you chop of the low-end from your product line, your average price rises, without necessarily affecting your price competitiveness of the remaining models.

That thing is that you need to have hardware which works with your OS if you want it to work. Right. But when you switch to a Mac, you're guaranteed every piece of hardware in your computer will be supported. No homework required. No surprises. It just works.

With Linux, you either have to deliberately buy Linux-compatible hardware or roll the dice, and try and use what you already have. Linux-compatible hardware research involves determining which hardware works with Linux, and even further, determining whether that hardware uses open source drivers, or closed binary drivers, as well as (for example, with video cards) looking into which 3d cards perform well, and which don't.

With the Mac, you don't have to do *any* of that. *That's* why Macs *always* "just work" and Linux most certainly do not "just work" consistently enough to earn that description.

You can't say Linux "just works", if it's very common for it to most certainly *not* "just work".

Re:Fed up with MS

[caution live frogs]

People don't need MS Office compatibility, they need MS Office. And it has to run perfectly. Have you used Office 08? If Microsoft can't deliver what you're asking for on a Mac today, what makes you think OpenOffice is any worse? I've been running NeoOffice on my MBP for a while now, because it gives me better compatibility with Excel 07 than Excel 08 does.

Yes, the Linux office equivalents aren't as polished as Windows Office. But the crap Microsoft is handing to Apple users is probably worse.

The Mac, with the addition of Fusion or Parallels, solves a lot of people's problems, and provides a great user experience to boot. True. The only reason I have a Mac is because I can run Parallels. There are many research-specific applications that just don't run on any platform except Windows. I'm still furious that there aren't more options for software on my Mac though; so many vendors make crappy alternatives to the Windows versions (Microsoft is firmly in this camp!). Maybe if usage is increasing as the FPP implies, this will change.

Re:Fed up with MS

[kklein]

Have you used Office 08?

Um... Yes... Every day. It's much better than 2004.

I have had zero problems with it, in fact.

You know that you can set it to just always use the old file formats, right?

OpenOffice, on the other hand, is a pile of garbage. I used it exclusively for a year (on Windows) until I got sick of my documents looking different on Word at university, no matter what format I saved them in. Some people might (even rightly--I don't know) blame MS in that, but when you're the underdog, you have to work with the dominant program even if it's wrong.

I still have installs of it on some Windows machines. It is handy and free. But it's not an option for me every day. I have to do a lot of co-authorship of research papers, etc. and the rest of the world uses Word and Excel.

Re:Fed up with MS

[caution live frogs]

This is probably going off-topic, but:

I have had zero problems with it, in fact. Ah. Then you must not use any third-party add-ins, like EndNote. Or use any Excel VBA code. Or collaborate with Windows users, so you don't run into the issues of transferring files between systems. The default zoom for example, NeoOffice opens things at a "normal" resolution, so that a file saved at a reasonable zoom in NeoOffice looks the same on Windows. Same file in 08 is microscopic text, because MS can't see fit to use pixel specifications for fonts. I never understood why Mac users had Word docs saved at 150% zoom until I started using a Mac myself. Look at the known issues with Office 08. At least 80% of reported problems are interoperability issues with 07-08 file compatibility. I add a graphic in 08, send to my collaborator who uses 07 and the file either won't open, graphic is missing, or is rotated 90 degrees for no reason? Fail.

It has nothing to do with file formats. All installs of 07/08 in our lab and my own computers default to the old file format, because the new one isn't widespread enough to be certain it will work for anyone we might share documents with. My issues with 08 are failures on MS's part to take the Apple platform seriously enough to give it a full-featured Office.

Office 08 (in addition to removing VBA) takes far longer to start up than NeoOffice. It locks up more often. [Maximizing an Excel spreadsheet froze my entire system, just a few days ago - the final straw that made me install NeoOffice.] The interface is also worse: NeoOffice has an interface that is far more like Office 03 than the default Mac Office is. The floating "toolbox" pallette in Mac Office is next to useless. It's either in the way or helpfully auto-hiding the tool I want. The floating Excel formula bar in 08 is an asinine feature. NeoOffice even works better with Expose and Spaces than Mac Office does. And this is free software. For what Microsoft charges for Office, we should by all means expect and get much more.

The failure to use a unified interface cross-platform is a major mistake on MS's part. If Adobe can do it, no argument about the size of the code base or difficulty of cross-platform programming works for me. MS has the resources, they just don't care.

Feature parity in Office 07/08 stinks. Mac Office hasn't had equivalent features with the Windows version since Word 6. For a few examples, try this: Open Excel 08. Use the "insert function" feature. Your Toolbox pallette will give you a list of functions - but where's the drop-down that allows you to filter them by function type? Missing. You have to scroll through them all. If you know the name it helps, but they aren't even listed alphabetically. Now open Word 08. Bring up the Styles tool. Look at the options for visible styles. Where's the "Styles in use" option? You get "All" or "Available". In a doc that has been shared and edited by multiple users, both lists get unmanageably large very quickly. The only positive changes in 08 are that it's a universal binary, and that PowerPoint finally has the thumbnail view (present on Windows since at least Office 03) rather than the outline view.

I use NeoOffice for a lot of things now because it's easier and more reliable than opening Mac Office. For more complicated stuff I run Office 07 in Parallels or at home on my Windows box. Office 08 is simply a major disappointment, and remains the single most annoying issue I have with using a Mac.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Saint Fnordius]

I think your numbers are a little screwy. Apple still dominates the design even in Europe, with France and Switzerland leading the pack. Even in Germany, Apple is making headway in creeping out of the graphics and print niche with companies trying to lower their support costs. I think the biggest argument lies in the painless conversion from MSOffice/Windows to MSOffice/Mac OS X with FileMaker replacing Access.

Then again, I won a convert by using Keynote. No lie. The guy loved it over PowerPoint.

Re:Fed up with MS

[Anonymous Coward]

So what if a bargain basement PC is cheaper than a Mac. Apply that concept to your car, stereo equipment and any other product you have. Do people have the cheapest of everything? Maybe some.

I buy a Mac because it is NOT Windblows. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Re:Fed up with MS

[arminw]

....because XP should be slowed down by running in a translated environment...

It may be true that there is a little overhead, but it is not a translated environment any longer, since Apple adopted the Intel x86 CPU. Parallels allows running a Windows boot partition either in virtual mode under OSX or direct bare metal booting. The latter would only give a clear advantage in CPU intensive tasks, such as games. For most work, you would not notice the difference between the two modes, native or VM under OSX.

(..Apple doesn't sell functionality..)

I don't know exactly what you mean by this, but Apple makes a WHOLE computer, with better software-hardware integration. Anything whole, by definition is better than anything partial and piecemeal. All other computer makers only make half a computer. The other half is always made by MS in the case of Windows or some nebulous group of programers in the case of Linux.

Re:Fed up with MS

[kklein]

Wow, great reply! Thanks for taking all that time!

But I collaborate with Windows users all the time; that's basically all I do. I'm the only member of my research team on the Mac (now--my co-coordinator is switching on the next upgrade cycle). I haven't had any problems.

However, there are annoying little differences. The functions thing doesn't bother me at all because I never even knew about "Insert Function" until recently! I've always just typed the functions in! I didn't even realize there was that easy way of doing things until I was teaching a basic stats workshop to my colleagues and I was just giving them the function names and telling them to type this and type that and my co-coordinator is like, "Um, why don't you tell them to just use 'Insert Function?'" I'd never even seen it, heheh.

The styles thing is a minor headache, but it's only a minor headache on top of the major headache that is Word styles. How MS could make such a potentially life-simplifying thing so difficult and unwieldy is utterly beyond me. Sometimes I hear people making fun of users who are so dumb as to not be using them, but really, if you are just doing a one-off document, which is what most people are doing most of the time, they are not worth the major hassle. I finally bit the bullet and set up styles for my research project's product (a test, actually), which is done in Word for whatever ridiculous reason.

It took an entire Saturday.

Then, you use these styles, but the list soon gets polluted with things like "Stem+Bold+Italic." It gets harder and harder to find something. And this is on Windows.

Then it saves these damn things in Normal.dot instead of in some Word pref file. So you have no access to them when you open a document you saved before you made them. You have no way of sending them to other people except to save a new document, have them open it, and then have them check "Add to template," which is a very unintuitive wording for what you're really doing: Making this style available from now on.

I've heard a lot of complaints about the loss of VBA, but we never use it (to a large extent, we really only use Excel as a data-formatter--everything has to be output to text files for the real work--IRT--anyway), so it hasn't bothered me at all. I do, however, think it is a bizarre choice on the part of MS. I have a friend who is an investment banker who moved to the Mac for whatever reason, and he's finding Excel unsuitable on the Mac (surprise surprise). I'm just recommending he use it under Fusion, which is what I often do.

Still, admittedly, I may have an over-critical view of OO.o, which is largely a reaction to the autoerotic platitudes given it on Slashdot. It's okay. That's all I can say. It's absolutely amazing for being free, but it's still just okay. The only people I know who use it full-time are on Linux, and are just doing it because Office isn't available.

But don't worry. When I'm elected king, I'm going to break up MS on antitrust grounds so that the OS and the apps are different companies, and then the app division will fix all this by unifying the code base and releasing a Linux version.

Re:Fed up with MS

[caution live frogs]

Get elected king soon, then. The world needs a better Office!

Re:Fed up with MS

[jellomizer]

I like Macs, I really do, I use a MacBookPro as my primary PC, and I use it at work all the time. But if asked if a company should move to all Macs, I would say no they shouldn't, unless they are a small company under 20 employees, or focus on graphics.

Reasons why.
1. User Replaceable Parts. Unless you are using a MacPro good luck with User Replaceable parts, that can get expensive.

2. Stuck on hardware, OK you chose to get stuck on an OS, Windows, Linux, but when you get stuck with MacOS you are stuck with Apple Hardware, meaning you can't shop around for different hardware next upgrade cycle, unless you will be running Windows or Linux on the Macs, or have good platform independent applications.

3. Big Feature Gaps. I like Apple Products because what they do they do well. And they do features that I tend to do... However In a business envrioment you will have crazy things like Remote Deployement, IT Timed Upgrades, Scheduled Backups on Tapes. Not that you can't find 3rd party tools to do such things and not that Windows nessararly has these features built in. But for Windows and Linux there are a better variety of tools and the OS is more configurable to take a lot of these changes.

4. Documenent compatability OpenOffice gets it right 99% of the time (3 days a year you have a problem), Office 2008 99.99% compatibilty (minus VB Script) so there is maybe one hour a year there is an issue. But Office for windows is 100% compatible with office for Windows. Like it or Not is the primary method of sending rich data to other businesses.

5. Difficult Upgrade Cycles. Apple keeps info very quite. I had my old PowerBook for 1 1/2 years longer then I wanted it for. Because I knew there was a new model just around the corner that I wanted, past version 1. A business would like to know when to expect they can upgrade and not get an old version when possible. So they can do their scheduling and budgeting correct.

6. Forced away from legacy. It is difficult to keep legicy apps on Macs. Because every decade or so they will redesign everything. and the Legacy App is SOL.

7. Developers. Objective C is not a good business development languge. As well the Coca is very different from what most developers are trained to use.

8. Outside support. Good luck on finding a large amount of consultants who can work on Macs at the same level they can work on Windows or Linux. As well calling support desk normally has no idea what to do after you say you have a Mac.

9. Small OS Life Cycle. When was the last time we got an upgrade of OS X 10.2 or .3 even .4 is getting less and less. We need to keep the OS running for 5 or 6 years not 3.

10. Bringing a platform war where it is not needed. A client comes in with a big bulky Dell. While the employees see this and snicker because they have slim trim MBAir. The more people who use Macs, the better chance they will become Mac Fan boys. It is just not a good thing.

I call bullshit

[zappepcs]

That was a very inflated summary... fuck

FTFA

"We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes David Plavin, operations manager for Mac systems engineering at the U.S. IT division of Publicis Groupe, a global advertising conglomerate. There are so many requests that Plavin now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. -- nearly a quarter of all Publicis' U.S. PCs. There that sorts it out, 2500 is no where near 1/4 of all US pc's... damn

Besides, uhmmmm, ok, so Mac is gaining ground. How much is that about the Mac vs. about Microsoft being shit for the last three years? Vista did more than an 'own goal' they are giving points away to EVERYONE else. Of course Mac will get some of them. It doesn't hurt that the iWHATEVER has been so popular. It's called the halo effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect and so Mac gets more customers right now. Lets see how long they keep them? The halo effect has been shown to be quite a peak-then-die thing unless the product has real staying power.

Don't get me wrong, Mac has some serious positive qualities and I'm not going to bash it (other than being proprietary and expensive) but this story is not taking into account the halo effect nor the gains made from MS defectors. Defectors? Why don't we just describe them as passengers on the titanic looking for a life raft without having to resort to building their own?

I have a couple of friends (who have obvious desires for Mac due to musical or creative arts reasons) who have opted for a flashy balls out Mac because, and I quote "I just want something that works and I don't have to fuck with it, no matter what the cost is."

Mac will get those votes. With the looming recession I don't think there will end up being all that many of those votes, especially when GNU/Linux is making so much headway. I'm not declaring a winner or anything, just saying that the optimistic view of this FA is .. well, overly optimistic given the other facts of life.

Re:I call bullshit

[ColdWetDog]

Oh come now, Mr. and Ms. Moderator. Just because zappecs isn't in a very good mood, there's no need to Trollerize him. Besides having a reasonably cogent point (the article is pretty lame and stupid), he's posting on Slashdot on a Saturday night. He's obviously a lonely guy stuck in some (perhaps figurative) basement.

Where's the love?

Re:I call bullshit

[CODiNE]

"We're seeing more requests outside of creative services to switch to Macs from PCs," notes David Plavin, operations manager for Mac systems engineering at the U.S. IT division of Publicis Groupe, a global advertising conglomerate. There are so many requests that Plavin now supports 2,500 Macs across the U.S. -- nearly a quarter of all Publicis' U.S. PCs. There that sorts it out, 2500 is no where near 1/4 of all US pc's... damn

You're just reading too fast and getting offended at what you perceive as Mac fanboism... they are stating that 2,500 Macs are 1/4 of Publicis' US computer systems. So it's an anecdotal report of one particular companies growing Mac trend. Read what you want from it, but it's not talking about Macs being 25% of the US PC sales or anything like that. Slow down and as a Technocarpenter might say "Read twice, reply once."

Re:I call bullshit

[zappepcs]

I nearly spit beer on the screen laughing at that. I've been imprisoned by the ring... wedding, not precious.

So posting on a Saturday night (after mowing the yard, organizing the garage, picking up brake parts to put on the car tomorrow, and fixing a bathroom faucet) is just a bit of relaxation before bed.

I was only trying to put a big-picture-business-analyst slant on the story. I'm not angry at all. I just don't think the business values, market trends, and predicted market conditions will sustain this growth so it's not much to clamor about. Same would be true of previous fanatical posts about Linux on the Desktop so to speak. I think we all want to see the results we desire and see them in anything that even remotely looks like it. For the same reasons that Linux won't replace the majority of PCs in the workplace soon, the Mac won't either. There is a LOT to be said for investment in technology. Once you're in the boat and headed down the rapids it's terribly hard to turn around for most people.

Re:I call bullshit

[zappepcs]

Actually, it's Saturday night, I'm not going out, so I'll point out that it was not mac fanboism that I thought of. If you read the summary you 'd see that it was 'edited' to say 1/4 of US pc's, and there are way more than 10,000 pc's in the US business world. The math did not add up. I had to read TFA to figure out what the hell they were talking about. The summary was written very poorly, my friend. I said nothing about Mac fanbois... nada, zip, nil, null, nothing. In fact I did mention that Mac has seriously positive points. My gripe was with the summary and the overt optimism of TFA.

Re:I call bullshit

[NDPTAL85]

Did you see Apple's latest financials this week? Apple's sales are growing while the rest of the PC industry is shrinking. This recession isn't affecting the company in terms of Macs at all so far. There's no indication it will either. As people's PCs break and get old they're buying Macs.

Re:I call bullshit

[fat_mike]

You can't argue with them, they'll find some retarded thing that they believe supports their argument.

I work in a company of 2200 people, not a Mac to be seen except for the 6100 with the DOS card that I keep.

Apple lovers, they're good for what they do, Windows XP is good for what it does, Linux is good for what it does.

Stop complaining and find the goddamn middle.

Re:I call bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

they are stating that 2,500 Macs are 1/4 of Publicis' US computer systems.

But even then it's an advertising agency. It's not a big shock that 1/4 of machines in a creative agency (regardless of whether they are for creatives or not) are macs. If anything the trend should be higher. The summary is poor, as is the article itself. Indeed it talks about maybes; an outsourcer saying they are "eyeing the possibility of extending its services to cover the Mac", one anti-virus manufacturer (who lets face it sell snake oil a lot of the time) and a hotspot reseller (who really aim at the traveller market, personal or business) do not a trend make.

The article attempts to say that "trends are making it easier for tech departments to say yes to the Mac by facilitating IT's ability to provide enterprise-grade Mac management and support." without offering any real evidence for the things that an enterprise really needs, centralised roll out, control, administration. Whilst it admits that the move to web based apps could drive a trend towards the mac, equally that could drive a trend towards anything on the desktop, as long as it supports Java; that is not specific Mac support. It talks about apple's remote desktop, "$500 per copy", something both MS and Linux offer for free. It talks about how it can link to AD policies, without highlighting that's only applicable to file shares, nothing more, no app rollout, no patching, no security settings for the desktop; you want that then you need to buy an Apple server and kiss your investment in AD goodbye.

It's a poor article; it talks about alternatives which really aren't. But hey, it's marketing right?

Re:I call bullshit

[vertinox]

Lets see how long they keep them? The halo effect has been shown to be quite a peak-then-die thing unless the product has real staying power.

Comparing Macs to Halo is comparing Apples to Oranges. (I see what I did there)

It would make much more sense to compare Macs to Xbox360 and Leopard to Halo.

So when every person got bored with Halo did they throw out their Xbox360? Nah. They just stopped playing it till some other game came out. Even then its hard to compare Halo to Leopard because lord knows I can't get 60 hours of game play out of the Finder (and I've tried).

Re:I call bullshit

[ColdWetDog]

Don't do this on a Sunday morning... If you're gonna be obtuse and use non standard analogies (where's the car?) at least use an emoticon. I'm still trying to figure out if you're just being a bit more sideways than usual or if you've had a Total Whoosh Moment.

If I can't tell what you're up to, how do you expect the moderators to figure it out?

Re:I call bullshit

[falconwolf]

There that sorts it out, 2500 is no where near 1/4 of all US pc's

So, you know how many PCs Publicis Groupe uses?

I'm not going to bash it (other than being proprietary and expensive)

I'll grant you proprietary, so is Windows, however Macs are not expensive. At least not anymore expensive than Windows PCs.

With the looming recession I don't think there will end up being all that many of those votes, especially when GNU/Linux is making so much headway.

Looming? As if there isn't already a recession? And what headway is GNU?Linux making? Is it against Macs? Both Linux and Macs are making gains against Windows: Windows is caught between Mac and Linux". And that's a Linux website not a Mac site.

Falcon

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[timmarhy]

thats right you can't be an elitist snob if everyone had one.

Crests and troughs

[Hojima]

This isn't surprising. We've seen this behavior many times and it's called the oscillations of business. Just wait until they are the dominant force in the market and it'll all go downhill from there. Just like Microsoft. They've already made the mistake of not allowing open source software on the iPhone (one of the many reasons I don't get one). That's the one that's pissed me off the most, but it certainly isn't their only mistake. I'll never be a mac fan since I'm so used to tactile response anyways.

It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[StreetStealth]

Perhaps it's just IT people looking down the road and seeing the same thing some end users saw with XP:

Like many others, I didn't like where it seemed Microsoft was headed with Product Activation and DRM and decided that long-term, I would attempt to migrate away from Windows. I might not have as quickly if I hadn't gone into "creative services," but that was my thinking at the time.

I can imagine IT departments are now experiencing a similar sensation: Even if Vista (like XP) isn't a terrible thing in itself, it points toward a rather unpalatable future for the platform.

There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused. Windows' arbitrary relevance becomes ever slightly moreso every day.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[humphrm]

More likely it's IT people looking at aged, about-to-die NeXT-on-Intel hardware running critical apps and trying to find a way to mitigate risk. That's how it is in my company.

Yes, you heard me, I said NeXT.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[wass]

There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused.

Not necessarily. I left Windows for Linux a decade ago, but switched from Linux to OS X a few years ago. I am not alone, I know many scientists and even whole science departments switching from Linux (or SunOS) to OS X. It has nothing to do with the presence or lack of technical skills, but IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on. And obviously many other technically-skilled scientists agree.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[UttBuggly]

Absolutely agree with what you say, most especially "...a better OS to get shit done on."

I've used everything; Apple II and III's, every Mac model there is, the Lisa, and NeXT machines from the Steve. I think at every strata of the evolution of Apple, there was a focus on getting shit done. And making the user interface better.

I'm not a fan of Apple or a Microsoft hater. I am most certainly a fan of things that work and work well.

That's why I've started switching the family to Macs. After the first MacBook, for the son in college, I had no takers for Vista, even though they would HAVE to get a new machine to run it. Everyone will replace their current laptop and/or desktop with a Mac as budget permits.

At work, not so rosy, by a long shot. I think it's more a function of overcautious upper IT management than the Mac isn't a viable alternative to Vista. We have about 40,000 PCs and laptops to support, so this does require some serious thought. Do we replace the estimated 25,000 machines that flat will not run Vista and upgrade a fair amount of the remaining 15,000, plus the cost of Vista itself? How much will ancillary impacts from upgrading other services like Remote Management, AV, Windows Update, and so on cost? User training costs? Will it break anything like internally developed applications?

The light at the end of the tunnel is that the numbers ARE scary, so we're doing studies with various Linux distributions and there's some serious thought to bringing Macs in. Linux looks good from the hardware standpoint as virtually all the current PCs in service can run Linux. The Mac looks good from a support overhead standpoint, which is not insignificant with the number of users we have.

I'd be happy with either at work myself. I have an old ThinkPad T-23 (a Celeron CPU) with SLED 10 on it now. It's good.

Still, I have 4 machines at work and I wouldn't mind trading them ALL in for Mac replacements!

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[gwk]

I agree completely, I have been very critical of Macs in the past but I recently switched from OpenBSD on my desktop (switched from linux to that in 2003) and don't know why I didn't switch when OS X came out. I see it at work as well, I work at a CS department and Macs are *very* popular, and some of the other science departments are completely dominated by Macs.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[RiotingPacifist]

The Mac looks good from a support overhead standpoint, which is not insignificant with the number of users we have. what sort of support are you talking, If the system is locked down, its just as easy to support linux. I suppose you have a point if you let everybody set-up their own stuff tho

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[R15I23D05D14Y]

Phase 1) All users on Dell, HP, etc computers, running Windows.
Phase 2) Many as above, many running Apple computers with OSX
Phase 3) Dell, HP, et al, discover linux and use it to compete, as they can do more with it than windows once the MS monopoly dies.

People will buy linux if it is sold. It isn't being sold, really. Dell does a little, without much advertising (and we have seen a fairly sizable pickup since they started) - but if Apple starts gaining enough traction that Windows isn't a de facto choice, the retailers will start to use linux. I think Dell is positioning themselves to do this./p

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on.

"better", easier or cooler?

I think you can achieve pretty much anything you want to on any OSes currently available... Though it might be easier on some.. and it might have cool translucent menu effects on others...

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[sanyacid]

I am a CS student at university. Among other linux distributions, I used Gentoo linux as my primary OS for a few years.

Now I am writing this from OS X Leopard and I totally agree with the parent comment: "IMHO it's just a better OS to get shit done on".

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[kklein]

Yeah, it's the "getting shit done" aspect of the Mac that made me switch at work, first, and now at home, too. I have a few stats programs that are Windows-only, but with Fusion, it's no problem to run them, so there was no longer any reason to suffer under Windows.

I hate that "Hi, I'm a Mac" commercial (maybe we only have it here in Japan--but most of them are just translated from the English) where the PC asks if he can have a cool nickname like "Mac" and the Mac says, "how 'bout 'work?'"

I work on the Mac. I play on Windows. It's totally backwards. OSX is well organized and reliable, and has great network support. This was actually the biggie for me. It worked so much more easily and reliably on the Windows 2003 network at work that I put my work PC away the first day I tried it. I could just find things and log into them. It had a sort of Gnome-like interface (I almost switched to Ubuntu because of the interface, actually). You can map key commands for damn near anything.

It is just very convenient to use.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[flnca]

it's just a better OS to get shit done on. And obviously many other technically-skilled scientists agree. For users, it might be a great OS, but for developers, it's not. There's no easy-to-use documentation browser for developers, like they exist for Windows and GNOME / KDE. The documentation itself is often far better, but finding it can be a real pain. Apple's XCode IDE is a nightmare to use, because the text editor has a single pixel wide text cursor that cannot be customized, and the keyboard layout is non-standard, and cannot be customized either. I've bought a Mac once because I intended to start developing for it, but now I'm running OpenBSD on that box.

What I don't like about MacOS X is, that it is intentionally dumbed down for sake of user-friendliness for the computer-agnostic, but there's often no way to get customization if you do need it.

Using a Mac is expensive, and I simply expect more from it than just a nice-looking user interface.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[alyslinn]

I left Windows for Mac about ten years ago, and haven't looked back. Unfortunately, I work in a government organization (in Canada) that uses only Windows PCs. I've never inquired as to why, but I suspect it has something to do with the 'everyone uses Windows' idea. Additionally, the spatial information service portal that we have to use is only compatible with Windows IE. (Supposedly the system is compatible with IE on the Mac, but they provide no support for it. Also, there's that little quirk of MS not updating that software anymore...) I would love to use Macs at work, but they've purposely made things incompatible.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[ceoyoyo]

Strange, I had the opposite experience. I remember coding in Visual C++ and desperately looking around for a stupid MS documentation CD to find out that the university hadn't renewed their very expensive subscription.

Coding on the Mac? Pop open the browser of your choice, navigate to developer.apple.com/documentation and type in what you'd like to know. Not only are the class references there but they also have conceptual documents and tutorials that are actually helpful.

I agree I don't particularly like the documentation browser built into XCode. So I never use it.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[flnca]

For Windows, there's a free download called "Windows SDK" (or, formerly, "Platform SDK"). It's free and contains a powerful documentation browser (along with the entire documentation) that kicks XCode's behind!

I tried to use the "browser approach" that you describe, but it was maddening to me. I don't want to spend ages scouring dozens of PDF files and digging through hundreds of misorganized web pages. Thanks, but no thanks.

When I want to look up something it has to be available immediately. And that's what Windows documentation browser, for instance, gives me. I simply type in the name of the function, and bam, it's there. Or, in Visual C++ 2008, it can display the documentation while I'm writing the function call.

You can say all you want about Windows, but it's far from being developer unfriendly. On UNIX systems there are some great tools now as well, and they're damn necessary for development. Apple is doing itself no favor with the current XCode version.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[ceoyoyo]

I don't actually see the difference in what you've described from either the web site (type in the function/object name and get the right page) or the XCode browser. If what you've said is true then MS HAS come a long way with their documentation though. Perhaps you're too young to remember when MSDN cost a couple thousand dollars and was awful to try and find anything in.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[flnca]

Well, you're wrong. I've written 32-bit multitasking GUI applications already in 1986, long before Windows 3.1 was out. When I started programming on Windows 3.1 in 1993, I used Visual C++ 1.5, which already had a comprehensive API documentation. The Platform SDK and Windows SDK have always been free downloads, as long as I can remember. Microsoft even had and has a free (or low-cost) shipping service for CDs of those SDKs. The only API that costs money is the IFS Kit (installable file system kit, $1000 per license). The MSDN subscription is only necessary if you want CD/DVD sets of selected product media. BTW, since VC++ 2005, even the compilers are free downloads (Express editions). The ease of use of the Platform/Windows SDK documentation is unparalleled so far. Show me just one system API documentation that is better organized, and I'll jump ship gladly.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[Muros]

There is a slow but undeniable exodus underway. To Ubuntu and Fedora go the more technically focused, to MacOS go the more user-focused. Unfortunately for me, I'm idiot focused, and it means I will be sticking with windows for the foreseeable future. The company I work for has managed to steer most of our customers away from the appalling vista of M$'s current offering, but I'm sure I'm gonna end up supporting it, most of our customers are just too daft to be allowed near anything they don't have on their home PC. Most of them have trouble when I tell them to use the right mouse button, I have had to tell many of them to closely examine the thing they hold in their hands all day before they realise there IS a second button. I thought things were starting to go my way when SCO went down the tubes and we started replacing old SCO (and AIX) servers with Redhat, but then some bright spark in the main software company we work with to provide hardware & system support decided to start using .NET. Personally, I wouldnt let any of our customers within 10 miles of a mac, it would just confuse them too much. That might be a hangup from my introduction to computers, after brief contact with Commodores and 286's, when I found macs the most annoying machines on my college network, and would only use one after first looking for a dumb/X terminal, then a windows 3.x machine. Granted, they look pretty nice these days, and its probably extremely telling that our top MS engineer recently dumped his old laptop for a new mac notebook. But I will only do it myself when I am forced to, not because I don't think Apple make good hardware/software, but because my customers are not ready for them, and I really can't be bothered with any more information overload when I already have to know 6-7 OS's and a myriad of software applications, both common and bespoke, inside out, on top of general hardware and network support.

Re:It's not Vista; it's W7 and beyond

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO after having got the hump with vista and macos, it depends on what version of linux one uses and as far as I can tell, sure, no flavour suits all tastes, there is a flavour for everyone.

Also, the philosophy behind OSS and Linux ensures that one day "oh happy day!" (and a lot further in the future than many OSS/free types believe) OSS software will be the norm even in enterprise and relics like windows and macos will be remembered for what they are, steps in a sometimes painful movement toward OSS and free software for all.

Re:Just goes to show ...

[Anonymous Coward]

"even retards can manage to stick in the correct hole."

So you don't like getting blowjobs, because that's the 'wrong' hole?

Oh, right, slashdot. Nevermind.

OSX in 2008

[Artuir]

This is the year of OSX on the desktop!!!!11

*cough*

Re:OSX in 2008

[RiotingPacifist]

Could the year of desktop linux be the year of OSX + 1, there have been three problems with getting linux adopted
format lock in (e,g everybody runs word), with people switching to OS X are people starting to use OO,or are they using word4mac anyway ?
vendor lock in, but this seams broken now with dell offering linux
User unawarnes, (monkey see windows, monkey do windows), but now as theres diversity, perhaps users will start realising windows may not be the best OS for them.

Is the dream of a 30/30/30 market, just a dream or could the end of MS (Dominance) be near?

Re:OSX in 2008

[node 3]

Could the year of desktop linux be the year of OSX + 1 Probably not, given that every year since at least 2002 (with the release of version 10.2) has been an actual "year of OS X on the desktop".

However, your overall point isn't far off. Once people switch to the Mac en masse (if you consider US consumer market, which is where "the desktop" is most important, this has already begun), they will no longer look at Windows as being a necessity.

The thing that is keeping Linux from being the "year of OS X + 1" is that there's no compelling reason for most people to switch to Linux. OS X beats it on usability and compatibility, and the arena where it excels, which is being free and being very technologically accessible, just isn't that important.

Re:OSX in 2008

[Jorophose]

>usability

Please, "usability"? Do we really have to start making up terms here to say "I don't like using Linux because it's unfamiliar."? And like OSX is very windows-friendly... Single-menubar anyone?

>compatibility

Not at all. OSX works on Apple hardware. And it's only supposed to work on Apple hardware. Linux will work on anything.

Why would I go out, spend hundreds or thousands of dollars upgrading my office to macs, when I can just install Linux on the current hardware? I'm pretty sure my 400$ desktop+LCD from Dell is a lot cheaper than the 599$ headless mac mini or 1200$ iMac.

Re:OSX in 2008

[node 3]

Please, "usability"? Do we really have to start making up terms here to say "I don't like using Linux because it's unfamiliar."? And like OSX is very windows-friendly... Single-menubar anyone? Funny. The term "usability" pre-dates the existence of Linux.

Why would I go out, spend hundreds or thousands of dollars upgrading my office to macs, when I can just install Linux on the current hardware? I'm pretty sure my 400$ desktop+LCD from Dell is a lot cheaper than the 599$ headless mac mini or 1200$ iMac. Sounds like *you* wouldn't, but far more people *are* doing just that instead of switching to Linux, so you can't pretend like the notion is absurd.

There has to be *some* reason people are buying Macs, and usability is most certainly one of them.

I've been programming on a mac for years

[vrillusions]

My "introduction" to macs--aside from school--was at my current job. I am a web developer/it manager. I first thought it was odd everyone used macs but after I got used to it I'm glad. The amount of questions asking about their computer locking up or not being able to print or something is practically nil. When something doesn't work it's usually something more significant than just the windows "shut down and reboot" mantra.

EVERY employee uses a mac. From graphics designers (of course) to the IT department to accounts receivable and billing. From an IT standpoint being able to have a native terminal to ssh to remote servers is very handy. Yes I know of cygwin but terminal on mac is just there. We literally only have two windows machines only because of some software that only works on windows.

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[AHuxley]

In Capitalist West you used a Mac in the past, use a Mac now or are thinking about switching.
In Soviet Russia going to gulag, in gulag or returned from gulag is life story of you.

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[Anonymous Coward]

With Parallels, you can eliminate those last dedicated Windows machines. Set up the VM, install Windows, install pesky apps.

Theres a deal going on where you can get Parallels and a couple of random Mac apps for $65, cheaper than Parallels alone at $80. Too bad I already bought it at the higher price. ;_;

http://mupromo.com/

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[Anonymous Coward]

Die Ad-Cow!

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[RiotingPacifist]

Why would you want to run windows in parrallels?
current situation, you have a dedicated working windows box for some reason cost = 0
your solution get a mac $$$
get parallels $$$
move programs across to the VM

so instead of 1 thing that can fail youve just spent a shitload of money to add 2 points of failure to your system. Smoooth!

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[argent]

Why would you want to run windows in parrallels?

Because you like it better than VMWare Fusion?

Personally, I prefer Fusion, but to each his own. Parallels does have better snapshot capabilities, but I can run the same VM image in Fusion and in other VMWare products.

instead of 1 thing that can fail youve just spent a shitload of money to add 2 points of failure to your system.

Instead of one thing that's got a high probability of failure I've replaced it with one that's got a lower probability of failure, and locked down the high failure rate one into a VM that I can snapshot, revert, and even when it does break I've still got 90% of my stuff outside the broken VM image.

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[RiotingPacifist]

Instead of one thing that's got a high probability of failure I've replaced it with one that's got a lower probability of failure, and locked down the high failure rate one into a VM that I can snapshot, revert, and even when it does break I've still got 90% of my stuff outside the broken VM image. If you have a working windows box dedicated to doing a couple of tasks, its got a very low probability of failure. With a sensible backup system, even if it fails you can recover the data, then restore the system to the previous backup anyway. A sensible backup system covers you against hardware failure too.

And if you insist on adding two points of failure to server windows programs, it makes more sense to add them for free. That way you have the snapshots and are coverd against everything but hardware failure (although you even then you can take the HDD out and stick it in a different PC)

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[argent]

If you have a working windows box dedicated to doing a couple of tasks,

But now you've got two whole computers, on for those tasks, and one for the other things you are doing on the computer. That costs even more.

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[vrillusions]

The reason we couldn't use parallels even if wanted to is because of the resources. Both of these comptuers are for remote downloads of POS terminals. So they both have a couple modems in them. Rest of the hardware is pretty modest. To move those to parallels would require a really beefy computer as you would need the power to run a couple VM's as well as the host OS as well as needing a larger modem bank.

Re:I've been programming on a mac for years

[falconwolf]

your solution get a mac $$$

GP said they already have Macs, "EVERY employee uses a mac."

Falcon

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[nawcom]

If Macs ever get to be the predominant platform or to common, Im switching to Linux. Call me a troll or whatever (Im a Mac user and have been for over a decade, so you other zealots feel free to mode down one of your own), but I dont want the Mac to grow anymore than it already has. Id much rather see OSS software take over the market and let the others be a paid choice. heh, i dunno. you sound like the type of person who only listens to underground music, and as soon as it becomes the hip thing, you switch your music to another underground genre. I'm not saying it's a bad thing at all, I'm a mac and linux programmer myself; i just found your statements interesting.

I don't remember macs in the enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Kirk used those cell phone communicator things.
Ohura had that blue tooth device in here ear.

They did have devices that were touch screen, but they were bigger than an iphone.

Can anyone name one instance of a Mac in the Enterprise?

Re:I don't remember macs in the enterprise

[SL Baur]

Considering that Star Trek classic was filmed before Apple existed, it's not a far stretch to assume that one never appeared on the show. Moving forward one series, I draw your attention to: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708798/
which is clearly analogous to World of Warcraft on a Macintosh.

Re:I don't remember macs in the enterprise

[aedan]

How do you think transparent aluminium was invented?

Yes, on a Macintosh Plus.

"Hello computer!"

Re:I don't remember macs in the enterprise

[amRadioHed]

Damn, I knew someone would beat me to that joke! Well done sir.

The PC market is smaller than I expected

[ill stew dottied ewe]

A troll already pointed this out, but the quote has been mangled: [they] "now [support] 2,500 Macs across the US -- nearly a quarter of all... US PCs." The article says that this is a quarter of all _the company's_ US PCs.

Re:Just goes to show ...

[timmarhy]

rofl. seriously i don't have anything against gays. I was responding in kind to the moron OP, he seems think anything who doesn't use a mac is rightwing? seriously wtf.

It's about time...

[TheNucleon]

They have needed Macs on-board Enterprise for a long time. First there was that blue screen of death when they were head to head with a Romulan vessel. Then there was the malware that kept putting male enhancement spam on the viewscreen. Picard says "Make it so" and they're stuck waiting for Geordi's new "Vista" thing to boot up...

Wait, did that say Macs gaining a bigger role "on" the Enterprise, or "in" the enterprise...

Oh well, never mind.

You're kidding, right?

[Santana]

They've already made the mistake of not allowing open source software on the iPhone (one of the many reasons I don't get one)

Are you being sarcastic? Nowadays it's difficult to say. I have just finished to watch Steve Jobs' keynote about the brand new iPhone SDK, which is a heck of a platform for development, either proprietary or open source, and the App Store that will let you distribute your application to every iPhone on Earth.

I'm not sure what's wrong with those Mac bashers around. You know, just stating to not want to be a "Mac fan" because you like tactile response is stupid for itself. Intel based Macs running UNIX plus open source software and a great set of development tools is anything a geek that respects him/herself wants to get his/her hands on.

And before anybody mods me down, I'm not a Mac fanboy. I've been programming for Windows, Unix and Unix-likes (Linux, OpenBSD) on Intel and SPARC for years and never owned a Mac until recently (two weeks ago aprox.) and I'm amazed. I'm currently writing this message from Safari while whatching my terminals (cloning repositories, building software, the usual stuff.)

Re:You're kidding, right?

[HeroreV]

Pleas read The iPhone SDK and free software: not a match

Considering how defensive you were, despite your ignorance, I would definitely consider you to be an Apple fanboy.

Macs

[AHuxley]

they melt in your lap, not in your rack.
What would Tech Support do all day?
Read macsurfer for a heads up on anything new in
the wild *for real*?

Mac support in the Enterprise?

[moofrank]

The article asserts in a couple of places some very amusing things: 1. Apple SAYS that it integrates cleanly in Active Directory environments. (In our experience, it doesnn't). 2. "That Apple Enterprise support doesn't exist is a popular myth." (We actually paid for Apple Enterprise support and work in a major metropolitan area. We and our VAR could actually never manage to locate Apple Enterprise support. I'm calling myth.) Admittedly, I'm writing this on my Macbook Pro with an Iphone in my pocket. Supporting a handful of macs is easy. Supporting hundreds is a major pain.

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[bartron]

AD works but is is no-where clean. It doesn't support DFS (not the way we set it up anyway). The only thing that comes close is Thursby's AdmitMAC product which does the job but likes to own the computer in the process. To me that's just an invitation for instability and we'd be back where we started.

I love my macs but they are indeed a pain to get working properly in a mixed environment.

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been installing and supporting more and more pure MAC networks.

I must say that their server product is extremely buggy.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6696589&
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1224346
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6698417

This is reference to an Appletalk/OpenDirectory bug that hasn't been fixed in SIX months. It is a showstopper bug for many people, yet there is no fix or workaround.

I also noticed that MS Office on a MAC is extremely buggy.

Apple needs to dedicate more resources to their enterprise products before I can truly recommend them.

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently had to clean up a Mac lab at a University that has a graphics design school. They use all Macs and they could not locate or get the services from Apple that was supposed to be there with their very expensive service contract. I cleaned up forty Macs that were all infected with dozens of worms and viruses. I made them buy a service contract with Norton and made them isolate their Mac network to keep it free of download worms.

The major problem with Macs in the server world is that Macs are not very good at server tasks that regular Unix, Linux or Windows NT classes of servers do automatically you have to add in at extra cost and human effort to keep them running.

Moving to a FreeBSD core did not automatically make the Macs Unix boxes. The majority of the Mac software out there is flawed. Not the third party stuff but the Apple stuff. Safari is a good example here. Last year Apple finally started fixing the over 800 published holes in the Mac's code and last year they pushed out over 283 patches for holes in their own stuff.

For the price people pay for Macs, and you can get three quad cores from HP for the same price as Mac desktop, which starts at $2700 and that's just for a dual core Mac desktop. The HP quad cores start at $999 bucks and by the time you deck them out with a two 1.5 terabyte drives, a high end bluray drive takes us to the price of $1600 which is still less than the next to the lowest end Mac I bought for my daughter to use in her graphics art career. The normal Mac desktop starts at $2700 and is a middle of the road dual core. This is the fundamental reason Apple is so profitable and yet can't seem to penetrate the larger market out there. Apple is dependent on Vendor lock down in the hardware and software and support arenas but their support sucks and their hardware is mediocre and they cost three times as much as a commodity quad core from HP.

The modern work place has kids with college degrees stuck waiting up to seven years to enter their first selected career jobs and they are stuck paying off their student loan on part time jobs. These part time jobs only pay $8.00 an hour and they only get a maximum of 28 hours of work. This makes them 30 something before they have enough income to afford a Mac. The Mac advertising is working quite well but the only kids getting Macs on the way to school are the rich ones and that is another reason that my son in college and his entire fraternity are using Windows boxes. They also use Linux a lot. In fact 60% of them are using Linux because they are too poor to buy Macs or Windows and have used boxes they got from their family. That will not change until they hit their chosen career fields in their thirties.

The ones who don't go to college can't afford Macs, probably ever. So the Mac is not even close to a general purpose computer until it leaves the proprietary hardware world but at that point its another Unix clone. FreeBSD is already free but Ubuntu Linux is not only free but actually works better these days than the Mac or XP. Vista is much better than the Mac for the corporate world and home users and will be included on all of the 1.6 billion computer users that will be buying new computers over the next five to ten years. Vista is very different under the hood. Microsoft moved away from down to the metal C and C++ code and moved to different service servers. You can write an entire Windows front end using nothing but Xaml code, which is an XML variant designed to describe Windows faces and the coding part of the Model View Controller is done by the dot.net engine which is a much reduced set of inner functions that take care of all the code behind parts of Windows now. This is part of the redesign of Windows and why it is so resource hungry. By moving to servers that serve up data and simplify the Windows API they have manged to reduce the coding errors and flaws surface to a bare minimum which is why Vista can achieve much tighter security in the future than has been the

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[Johnny Mnemonic]

I cleaned up forty Macs that were all infected with dozens of worms and viruses.

You're a flat out bald faced liar. "Dozens of worms and viruses" simply don't exist on OS X, and especially not in the wild. Maaybe you're cleaning up old OS 9 installs, but even then it's pretty hard to imagine--and by now that's a 10 year old OS. More likely is that you're a Microsoft shill desperately trying to prop up Vista, and aren't even aware that a whole other world of possibility exists. In this case your ignorance of reality makes you easily identifiable, and your employer should get their money back.

OS X is theoretically susceptible to a virus and worm--no doubt. However, the fact is that none have yet been written. Someday OS X may be targeted and your story will be more believable--but until then your post isn't worth reading past the first line.

Liar liar pants on fire.

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bullshit

Re:Mac support in the Enterprise?

[defected]

Exactly...if the art department uses Macs that's doable...once you get into enterprise and back end apps like Exchange, SCOM, and AD you soon see the limitations of rolling out the Mac company wide. The difference between Entourage 2008 and Outlook 2007 is a good example from the client en. On a superficial level they both do the same thing but if you're in Outlook 10+ hours a day you'll soon notice Entourage is no substitute.

Re:Just goes to show ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure you don't. Lord knows when I want to make a point, I spew hatred, too. You were probably just misunderstood. Like always.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[HeroreV]

Hence the hate for Ubuntu, for allowing normal users to be comfortable with Linux.

The ghost of Vista

[Santana]

I was thinking of buying a laptop some weeks ago but I was reluctant to use Vista. That was the initial thought that led me to buy a MacBook.

I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds.

Re:The ghost of Vista

[SL Baur]

I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds. I use Linux at work and Linux at home. I've been happy with desktop Unix for several decades.

I tried to give my wife a Microsoft Windows box, (Microsoft Windows XP Media Edition), but she hates it because it crashes all the time. She loves the Mac PowerBook though.

I think that's why so-called Mac fanboi-ism is so hated here. Macs are perfect for domestic tranquility. Give your wife a Mac and be happy or since this is Slashdot, give a random woman on the street a Mac and ask her for a date.

Re:The ghost of Vista

[kklein]

That's basically the call I made as well. It's like Linux, but without the sucky parts of Linux.

Re:The ghost of Vista

[iLLucionist]

I couldn't agree more. I've used Linux as desktop for about 5-6 years till I switched to OS X. I would never go back... UNIX under the hood, awesome graphics and usability on the top.

Re:The ghost of Vista

[Kjella]

I use Windows XP at home and OpenBSD at work as desktop OS. I can't stand Linux as a desktop OS. Mac OS X seems like a perfect merge of a great GUI and the power of UNIX, running on solid, proven Intel hardware. With a Mac I have the best of both worlds. What do you have on Windows XP? You have a start menu, a task bar, a syatem tray and alt-tab. On Linux I have a start menu, a task bar, a system tray and alt-tab. Unless you're running something strange like KDE4s new menu system, I don't get the people that have a problem with Linux's GUI and use Windows XP. Now I have a few other gripes, but the UI isn't one of them... Maybe it's not as fancy as OS X but it doesn't stand back to XP at least.

You asked to be corrected...

[thestuckmud]

Don't kid yourself. Linux is potentially as vulnerable as other operating systems. Reports say that rootkitted linux machines serve as botnet controllers. Keeping linux machines patched for security is necessary, too.

Re:You asked to be corrected...

[hey!]

I think the point should be to find some balance between the economic "network" benefits of uniformity and the security benefits of diversity.

One of the important benefits of software freedom is the freedom to deploy applications in different modes. A huge amount of the problem of security is trying to secure endless legions of desktop machines. In an ideal world, there would be fewer critical points to secure. Perhaps users would still have the benefits and costs of having their own laptops and desktops to screw up, but having run a number of my critical tasks in virtual machines, I can say it was a huge benefit to be able to plug an external USB drive into a desktop and keep running when the CPU fan on my laptop failed.

Re:You asked to be corrected...

[AlecLyons]

And rootkits aside, consider a Linux box used in a residential environment, everyone using the same user account, downloading and running whatever they like. What's to stop them downloading and running any sort of malware that now starts every time this user logs in?

Re:You asked to be corrected...

[starfishsystems]

Linux is potentially as vulnerable as other operating systems.

Here you've made one of those foggy claims that sound authoritative but carry essentially zero meaning. Let's put the discussion on a more solid footing.

It's unlikely, under any meaningful measure, that Linux is exactly as vulnerable as any other operating system, and of course it's nonsense to suggest that its vulnerability would change with popularity. Not that you said that, but it happens that many people drag that red herring along right about now, so let's dispense with it too.

On an architectural basis, you could claim that the degree of vulnerability of a given Linux distro will be similar to other Linux distros or other Unix variants, and you could point to what set of design decisions contribute to the relative strength or weakness of these classes of systems in general. That's a very useful and clarifying basis for debate.

Or you could compare a specific point of design or implementation between two different systems. But it's meaningless to just wave your hands and claim that one entire system is or isn't "more secure" than the other, without establishing the terms of reference. For example, a system which allows "default permit" to operations such as software installation, or which fails to separate privilege, is less secure with respect to these design principles than one which enforces privilege separation and "default deny" on operations which might compromise security.

Another approach is to look at incident statistics. Normalized per unit of a given operating system in the field, how do systems rank in terms of actual compromise? To date, Linux ranks below OpenBSD but vastly above Microsoft Windows.

I agree with your point that you can't just sit on your hands and expect any given system to be invulnerable. You have to be vigilant. It doesn't follow that all systems are therefore created equal.

Re:You asked to be corrected...

[thestuckmud]

It's unlikely, under any meaningful measure, that Linux is exactly as vulnerable as any other operating system

My dad was in the navy many years ago and talked about about the effort they spent preventing rust on the ship. They had zero tolerance for rust, saying that a little rust is equivalent to being a little pregnant. So I ask you: Is there really such a thing as a "little" root exploit? The fact that hijacked linux systems are serving up malware and controlling botnets is proof that the probability of infection is unacceptably high for linux. How is a vulnerable linux system less vulnerable than windows? Let's work together to educate mistaken linux users, instead of belittling each other with phrases like "zero meaning". Especially since it is clear to me that we are in agreement regarding the big picture. M'kay?

Re:Just goes to show ...

[dorzak]

Not likely since Rush Limbaugh is a Mac user.

Does this worry anyone else?

[at.drinian]

"Security firm Kapersky Labs has already created a Mac version of its anti-virus software for release should Mac growth continue (and the Mac thus [find] itself prey to more hackers)."

Last I checked, all Windows anti-virus programs did was slow your computer to a crawl while consistently breaking their host machines over time. They're a completely backwards answer to the problem of security. Please don't tell me that enterprise Macs will have to run anti-virus too; isn't there anyone in corporate IT that understands this? It's especially silly considering that OS X tends to have much better privilege separation than (pre-Vista) Windows.

I can't wait for on-access scanning to become standard on Macs, causing everyone to complain about how slow Apples are.

"free software"

[Santana]

You seem to assume that I believe on the "Free software" religion and its prophet RMS. I'm sorry to break it to you, but not every Slashdot reader is a free software loon.

But maybe you got something right, after two weeks with a Mac, I think I've started to love this thing.

Re:"free software"

[Telvin_3d]

Just wait until something breaks. Something minor like a fan. And taking to the nearest Mac approved retailer, handing to the actual tech who will fix it and picking it up the next day. No phone calls to automated systems. No shipping.

Happened to my MacBook. Was completely my turning point from 'this is kind of nice' to 'from my cold, dead hands'.

Re:"free software"

[RiotingPacifist]

actually if youd read the link (i know its hard because your too busy looking at the grovey safari fonts man), its incompatible with GPL2 & GPL3 and may only be usable if you use a BSD shim of unreleased source code. But the truth is apple wont stop free software, its just a bad choice of development kit rules.

Re:"free software"

[kklein]

My MacBook's HDD died about a month ago (there may have been a bit of abuse that triggered it--I don't put my backpack on the passenger seat anymore) and after troubleshooting it, called it in. The tech didn't waste my time with stupid crap; he just asked a couple questions and sent me a box. It got there Friday evening after work.

Sunday morning, before I had even made coffee, it was back with an upgraded HDD, no questions asked.

I missed one day of work with it. I was back at work on Monday, ready to go.

I was an Apple fanboy back in tha day, then I was a mean vilifier of the Mac, and now I have sold all my PCs and have a 100% Mac house.

You don't notice how bad the user experience on Windows (or even worse: Linux) is until you notice that your computer hasn't done anything remotely annoying for a week--and that you never turn it off, just put it to sleep.

Granted, naysayers will point out that it's a proprietary system that you can't just get any old hardware for, but that's actually its strength. MS can't keep up with the driver issue, and Linux developers most certainly can't. But I still can throw any SATA HDD or PATA DVD drive in my Mac Pro, and I just put a fanless cooler on my video card today. I run all my Windows-only stats stuff under Fusion with no noticeable performance hit, and the thing works like a UNIX machine on a network (i.e. correctly and easily).

I am not a fanboy, I don't think. I made an educated decision to buy a Mac, and it has been really nice. Not perfect. Far from it. I can't stand Apple Stores (pretentious, my god, pretentious). But I am really glad I switched.

Re:"free software"

[argent]

Huh. I had the HDD in my Thinkpad go south. I unscrewed one fat screw, pulled out the hard drive sled, slotted a new drive in, and restored everything from backup.

When the HDD in my Macbook died I had a choice of being without my laptop for a week, at least, or go into the Genius Bar at the Apple Store (while I was recovering from the flu) and wait for the Genius to reinstall it, insist that I didn't want the OS installed because I was going to overwrite it with my backup anyway, and drive home.

And that was AFTER the phone call to Applecare and waiting for the Apple Store to call me to say they had the right part in. Had to run my Macbook from an external drive for a week while I was waiting.

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

I wanted to upgrade the disk in my MacBook from the stock 160GB to a new 320GB. I bought the new drive, removed the MacBook battery (using a quarter), removed a few screws and one piece of shielding, slid the old drive out, slid the new drive in, replaced the shielding, replaced the battery. Done. It took me maybe ten minutes, and I wasn't hurrying as it was my first time opening up the machine. If you were down for a week and relied on the "Genius" bar, I have to think that either you were under Apple Care and didn't want to pay for the drive, so the experience was your own damn fault, or you failed to hit Google for a bit of research, so the experience was your own damn fault.

Re:"free software"

[argent]

I have to think that either you were under Apple Care and didn't want to pay for the drive

Well, doh.

Getting a new laptop without a long term warranty or support contract is daft.

If you were down for a week

Where did I say I was down for a week? I used an external drive while I was waiting, rather than risk screwing up my warranty.

With a thinkpad that wouldn't be an issue.

Re:"free software"

[Space cowboy]

So, how does that not apply to the Thinkpad ? Does IBM/Lenovo/whoever-makes-the-damn-thing-these-days pay for arbitrary 3rd-party hard-drives that you plug into your machine ? Do you send them a receipt or something ?

Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ? 'Cos it seems very much that way, except a bit more inconvenient...

Seems to me you're bitching that Apple didn't help you do something that you *didn't* want to do!

Simon.

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

It shouldn't have been an issue with the MacBook. MacBook hard drives are user replaceable. Changing the drive will not void your warranty.

Also, I'm just curious...was the Thinkpad under warranty? If so, did you have to wait for the new drive to be shipped?

Re:"free software"

[argent]

My Macbook Pro hard drive is not trivially user replacable and replacing it would void my warranty. Has there been a design change since the original MBP or does that only apply to Macbooks?

Google says the latter.

Replacing the hard drive to keep a Thinkpad working while waiting for the replacement doesn't void the warranty.

Re:"free software"

[argent]

Or is replacing-the-internal-drive just pretty much the same as plugging-in-an-external-drive ?

Pretty much, except that plugging in an external drive makes a laptop more like a desktop (even if it's firewire powered, unless you decide to get creative with electrical tape), and replacing the hard drive in a Thinkpad T23 isn't much harder than plugging in an external drive. Certainly easier and more convenient than carrying an external drive around for a week.

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

You said, "When the HDD in my Macbook died...". I assumed that meant you had a MacBook.

Re:"free software"

[Phroggy]

When I had to replace the hard drive on my iBook, it took me about two hours, following instructions I had to hunt for online because Apple considers such information to be proprietary. The procedure involved removing forty-eight screws, seven of which are Torx T8 (so I had to buy a Torx screwdriver set before I began). I then had to buy replacement feet from eBay, because some of the screws are hidden under the feet and the feet are designed to break when you remove them (Apple's official procedure is to replace the feet whenever they open the machine).

Obviously, different models may be less complicated than mine, but no Mac laptop has a hard drive that is anywhere near as easy to replace as in most PC laptops.

Re:"free software"

[petermgreen]

The only annoying thing with the macbook hard drive swap was you needed a very small torx screwdriver to get the caddy off the old drive and onto the new drive.

Or did you somehow manage to source a drive that came with the caddy already attached?

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

I already had a small torx set. If I hadn't, you're right, that would have been annoying.

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

Changing the drive in a MacBook requires removing three phillips screws on the RF shielding, and four Torx screws on the caddy. It really is a five minute job if you know what you're doing, ten if you don't.

Re:"free software"

[argent]

Yeh, I got that, I wasn't aware that was a distinction that made any difference in this case. Particularly since it's the premium product that's got the worse user experience.

My point was that (a) Applecare isn't always "all that", and (b) Apple's hardware isn't "all that".

If they could send me a drive I could replace at my leisure, or if they could actually replace the drive at the Apple store without making me wait, I'd have been a lot happier.

Re:"free software"

[bloodmusic]

True. I've never had reason to fault their build quality -- though I understand that others have -- but they do seem to place user serviceability waaaaay down on their list of priorities. The MacBook is a newer physical design than the Pro, so maybe they're changing. Then again, one point doesn't make a trend. Guess we'll have to wait for a MacBook Pro refresh to find out...

Here too...

[adnonsense]

Small company, newly formed IT/development department. Turned out all four of us preferred OS X as our desktop environment, and it didn't take long for the boss guy to convince himself he needed one to (and very happy with it he is). Just found out one of the sales people has come over to the dark^H^H^H^H Jobs side, and the external consultant guy has a MacBook Air (which is a subject of constant ridicule as we are Ethernet-only for reasons of paranoia).

(Personally I need a laptop which runs an internationalized UNIXy environment and plays well with the hardware without me having to spend time fiddling about with the OS , and OS X has saved me a great deal of time in this respect).

Take this!

[Thyrteen]

I first read that as "Maces gaining bigger role in the enterprise". How much better would that have been? I'll leave the remaining humorous remarks to the pirates...

Strong Rumour - Salesforce Switching to Mac

[Anonymous Coward]

If this is true then 4000 users at Salesforce are about to switch to Macs.

http://www.alexcurylo.com/blog/2008/04/23/switcher-salesforcecom/

Re:Strong Rumour - Salesforce Switching to Mac

[Achromatic1978]

Thanks, Alex, but you didn't need to post that anonymously.

Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[bartron]

I'd love to roll out more Mac laptops but the main thing holding it back is complete lack of a first party dock connector for the portables. Not everywhere is the same of course but where I work it's an OH&S problem with loose cables hanging about the place.

I know about bookendz and they might be ok but it's hardly an elegant solution and the aesthetic is so non-Apple. I would jsut like a single connector on the bottom of the Mac that connects to a dock that has all my shit permantly plugged in to it...is that so hard?

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Yeah, it probably is. That connector would mean more wiring/PCB space and other stuff. Perhaps not much, but avoiding these things is the way Apple keeps their hardware simple and elegant and avoids making feature bloated products like many others do. I guess there just aren't enough others like you -- people who want a functional and aesthetic dock -- to make it worthwhile.

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[argent]

There's enough people looking for a dock that there's multiple companies selling kludges that sort of give you some of the functionality of a dock at much greater expense... and selling enough to keep doing it.

And I'd rather Apple tuned down the "simple and elegant" knob a bit. Simplicity and elegance means my Macbook Pro has one of the worst keyboards on a laptop, ever, and I have to go cap-in-hand to the "genius bar" to get a bad hard drive replaced, and the way they cram everything in... when I'm doing anything complex like encoding a movie I have to pull the battery out or it overheats. This isn't "feature bloat" this is "minimum requirements". If it wasn't for the OS I would never spend one dime on an Apple product.

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[Phroggy]

when I'm doing anything complex like encoding a movie I have to pull the battery out or it overheats. I use an app for my iBook called G4FanControl; you may want to look for something similar. It lets me adjust the thresholds for the temperature sensors, so I can make the fan come on at lower temperatures than Apple seems to think should be acceptable. That should solve your overheating problem (at the cost of hearing the fan come on more often).

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

OK, lets add in a dock connector. And while we're at it, how about a type-III PC card slot? A separate compartment for the HDD, battery, memory, upgradeable video card (because that's definitely a popular request here).

The problem is you don't seem to understand the key to good design: Don't bloat-up on features. The reason for this is because each feature added takes something else away. Just adding features without really thinking if you can do without them is how other people like Dell design their large confusing range of crap products.

You should get someone to look at your laptop, BTW, because having to remove the battery to prevent overheating sounds like a defect to me. I've never heard of it being a problem before.

As for the keyboards, I know quite a few people like them, so that can be quite subjective.

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[falconwolf]

I would jsut like a single connector on the bottom of the Mac that connects to a dock that has all my shit permantly plugged in to it...is that so hard?

Same here, I'd like to have just one thing to disconnect and reconnect for my MBP.

Falcon

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[falconwolf]

Simplicity and elegance means my Macbook Pro has one of the worst keyboards on a laptop, ever

The only problem I have with the keyboard on my MBP is that it's further back, er forward, than I'd like, however with an external keyboard that problem goes away.

Falcon

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[argent]

The keys are flat, not bevelled. The keys are not solidly seated... they float, making it feel imprecise. The action is both too soft and too hard, with very little "padding" effect.

The external keyboard I bought appears to have been sourced from the same company as makes teh Thinkpad keyboards. It's excellent. But it does make a poor impression when I have to pull it out at a customer's site or risk aggravating my RSI.

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[argent]

The problem is you don't seem to understand the key to good design: Don't bloat-up on features.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Apple goes too far.

The Macbook pro already has a removable battery and a separate mmory compartment, so I have no idea why you brought them up except perhaps as a stupid debating trick. A user removable hard drive, yes. Upgradable video card? In a laptop? Only if the standard GPU is inadequate, and that's not the case for the Macbook Pro.

The reason for this is because each feature added takes something else away.

Sometimes, sometimes not. Sometimes adding a feature doesn't mean shortchanging anything, anywhere else. Sometimes what it's taking away is itself a problem... making the case larger to provide room for a hard drive door would give them room to put in a better keyboard, and room to improve the cooling.

Same with the Mac Mini. They cut features too far to make it so small.

In fact, the "make it ludicrously small" feature is one they need to back away from.

having to remove the battery to prevent overheating sounds like a defect to me

Overheating is a defect in all the first generation Macbook Pros, one that Apple denies exists. It's also a reason for the battery warping problems that us Macbook Pro Pioneers had to deal with: Apple's willing to replace the battery pack, but they've yet to do anything about the cooling problem.

As for the keyboards... my RSI is not "subjective". :(

Re:Apple, make a freaking laptop dock already.

[argent]

Using SMCFanControl I have the fans set to come on at the lowest possible temperature, and rev up to speed as quickly as possible, and it's not enough. This is a known but unacknowledged problem with the first generations of Macbook Pros.

you know...

[luigi517]

they only work better for the same reason that its hard to drown in the kiddie pool...

No way!

[networkzombie]

When they sell an OSX for any x86 architecture system I'll try it. With the OS tied to the hardware the flexibility is reduced. Giving one vendor too much control in a corporate environment will eventually give them leverage. If Microsoft tried this they would only have 3% of market share and we would all be using Linux.

Richard Stallman need not apply here.

[NDPTAL85]

I know this is dangerous to say on Slashdot and all but here goes.

You are VASTLY overstating the importance of open source on a mobile platform such as the iPhone. Its a friggin $500 phone. You think the masses who are buying it are going to care if they can use open source software on it or not? The big draw of the device is its interface and ease of use. You can release zero cost programs via the AppStore if you want and to the user thats really all that matters. The vast majority of the computing using public can't program to begin with so whether its open source or proprietary is wholly irrelevant.

Re:Richard Stallman need not apply here.

[wootest]

The masses don't care one whit about the technology or licensing behind their apps, but the big deal with iPhone development is that to be able to test anything on a real phone "legitimately", you have to pay $99 for a developer license that's hitherto only available for US developers. For a "friggin $500 phone" (even if the 8 GB model is nowadays $399, so $400), this is *not* a big deal if you're planning on selling software, but a big deal if you're planning on releasing free software.

On no other mobile platform that I know of do you have to pay just to be able to try it out on a real device or just to be able to release freeware, and with the iPhone we're talking, in terms of user interface, the most technically advanced mobile platform. No wonder people are a bit upset that they can't use it. There's no accelerometer and no location awareness in the Simulator.

The "US only developers" thing is obviously to limit the test group to a manageable size until the SDK is really ready. We don't yet know what of the other restrictions are here to stay (I'm betting code signing and the App Store-only distribution are the most ingrained), but I really hope that it's a ruse and that most of the real brain farts will have been removed by WWDC, when the final SDK drops.

Re:Richard Stallman need not apply here.

[NDPTAL85]

Those restrictions (except the US only one) aren't likely to go away. The $99 for a developer license serves as a barrier to "crapware" that lots of developers throw up on various platforms like paint on a canvas in abstract art hoping to catch some customers at random. Those who will pay the $99 fee will be developers who are SERIOUS about creating not just quality software but a great interface for their users. Take a look at all the programs available for the Palm OS or Windows Mobile or Symbian or the various already existing Linux mobile platforms. Most of the software is crap. I know, I used to use a Palm OS smartphone for 5 years, a different one each year.

With Free Software there's a different problem it brings to the table. Its long been said that free software developers program to "scratch their own itch." Man is that ever true. Very few free software programs would win awards for user interfaces or intuitiveness. I'm not worried about Firefox not showing up on the iPhone, they can swing the $99 fee easy. Its crap programs like GIMP or Abiword or Keep that Apple wants to discourage from being ported to the iPhone. Their absence won't be missed by a great many people.

Re:Richard Stallman need not apply here.

[wootest]

There are plenty of beefs with the "crapware barrier" theory, although it sounds like reasoning Apple would apply. For one, the bucks prevent people who don't otherwise want to put out apps from making small, quick apps entirely for themselves, for personal use. Maybe Apple's just going to take their lumps or (inadvertently or not) nudge-nudge, wink-wink developers towards jailbreaking/pwning for those cases.

Furthermore, don't discount open source software (and I mean the open source construction process, not the Free Software licensing model and motive). To take one example, Adium on Mac OS X is one of the best citizens on that platform, away and beyond most commercial apps. You and Apple are right that this takes strong guidance, and per Sturgeon's law the vast majority aren't up to this. But the $99 fee that "they" can swing in the case of Firefox isn't per product or company, it's per *person*.

You're exactly right that it's not the absence of some crappy or unintuitive software that I'm going to miss on the iPhone; it's the presence of crappy or unintuitive software produced by people with money, and absence of potentially great software that could never be produced.

I'm expecting the community to hack this by creating distribution houses - something like software "labels" - that you can go through. But it doesn't solve simple stuff like beta testing without sending everyone your source code and having them download your SDK. I think Apple's greed and/or want for control (recall how old versions of APE triggered non-loading 10.5 installs six months back) has them overlook real problems.

Re:Richard Stallman need not apply here.

[Anonymous Coward]

and so that post was irrelevent to the article.

Actually i've got a macbook and a PC at home running vista 64bit. I've been using macs for 12 years now and really don't have a preference any more between windows and Mac OS. Unless i'm gaming or using software that only comes on the windows platform the OS is irrelevent from an end user perspective.

as a server OSX server had only just come out when I stopped working in an environment of all macs and I have not had a chance to have a good play with it so cannot comment on it.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the dumbest fucking analogy ever. Just blatant idiocy...

It's happening where I work too

[HairyCanary]

First it was us on the Unix Sysadmin team. Then the network guys had a look at what we were doing, and started buying themselves Macs as well. Now management is starting to get into them. With VMware Fusion we can use Outlook, everything else we don't need Windows to do.

Vista has prompted many people to make a decision about what they want from their operating system of choice. With Windows the OS is everything, with OSX it's just the means by which applications are run. The measure of an OS that I find most compelling is how effectively it keeps me from noticing it.

Re:It's happening where I work too

[kklein]

You absolutely nailed it. I decided to get a Mac when I was at the computer store looking at laptops. I looked at a Toshiba with Vista on it. That big circular Start button... That gigantic taskbar (I actually only use the Windows Classic theme in XP), all the shit on one menu, a bunch of crap on the desktop, messages popping out of the damned system tray... All the clutter and noise of Windows XP, plus more, somehow.

Then I looked at a Mac for the first time in years and years and years. "Good lord," I thought, "It's so... clean." Nothing is vying for your attention. Auto-hiding the Dock doesn't cause any problems (unlike auto-hiding the Windows taskbar), you don't have a bunch of helpful messages annoying you all the time, the wireless only tells you when it can't connect, not when it can... Double-clicking a .zip file decompresses it without asking you to hit "Next" a bunch of times...

OSX just stays out of your way and lets you use your damned programs to get things done. It's also almost infinitely configurable, so it works the way you want.

You spend no time thinking about it at all. And that's what makes it great.

Don't Be Pleased

[JamesRose]

Firstly, it's nothing to do with "Oh my God how amazing is my mac" it's more like, "Oh my God just how badly can microsoft constantly screw up". And in my opinion this is a very very very bad trend, we're going from a heavily locked down operating system run by a monopoly, to what is a more (in some ways) locked down system which will become a monopoly, AND this is from the guys who make the ipod, YOU MUST USE OUR ITUNES FOR YOUR IPOD, YOU MUST USE OUR ITUNES FOR OUR SONGS, and the lesser known lying to customers about their internet browser. So they've proved they can't be trsuted to handle the majority of market share. So does no one else worry that, having seen microsoft badly screw up, people are moving to the most locked down untrustworthy alternative they could find?

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[theurge14]

Could you please provide some examples of this 'locked down' characteristic you describe?

As a Mac user I would like to know.

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[JamesRose]

How about not being allowed to use anything but apple hardware, how about them ignoring well documented bugs/security holes. Then of course you have the malware quicktime which, if you have an ipod, or itnues or have ever bought a song from itunes you can almost never get rid of.

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[argent]

I've never had a problem uninstalling Quicktime. It's just a media player and codec encapsulation format. What's the problem you have with it?

Yes, I've bought music from iTunes. All of which I've MIX-BURN-RIPped the DRM out of. Yes, I know there's a theoretical loss of quality, but I can't hear it in overproduced distorted popular music.

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[theurge14]

With this hardware I can run any OS any other Intel PC can in addition to Mac OS X.

Please provide an example of Apple 'ignoring well documented bugs/security holes.'

Quicktime by definition is not malware (software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent). If it annoys you that is merely your personal opinion. I personally find Windows Media Player repulsive due to it having one of the worst UI designs of software of any decade.

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[Anonymous Coward]

Could you please provide some examples of this 'locked down' characteristic you describe?

The hardware, you retarded cunt.

Re:Don't Be Pleased

[theurge14]

That hurts my feelings.

I think I'll go wallow in a pile of old Compaq Presarios to make myself feel better.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[Jerry Smith]

But still with so much software resembling something you could buy from Staples 20 years ago, it kinda takes the "righteousness" out of the whole free software movement. Shoplift something from Staples or Office Max and see if you still have the feeling you are a part of an important "movement".

I'm stunned, really. Do you really not understand the difference between 'shoplifting' and 'receiving a gift'?

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[MBGMorden]

But still with so much software resembling something you could buy from Staples 20 years ago, it kinda takes the "righteousness" out of the whole free software movement. Shoplift something from Staples or Office Max and see if you still have the feeling you are a part of an important "movement". I think you win the Stupidest Analogy of 2008 Award. How can you compare using free software with shoplifting (stealing)? In one case the "owners" are giving you permission to take what you want, in the other you're taking it against their will (and breaking the law).

Personally, as a programmer, I write stuff in my own time because a) it keeps me in practice in languages and application "genres" that I don't get to really work with in my professional career, b) the projects look good as professional samples of my work, and c) most importantly, because I like to do it. It's a special type of weasel that instantly seeks compensation the instant that they believe they've enhanced the life of another person in any way.

Preposterous!

[DigitAl56K]

I've seen nearly every episode of Star Trek and I've yet to spot a single Mac as anything other than an extra!

Is this just a win for "marketing"...

[Anonymous Coward]

or an actual move driven by informed/skilled users?

You might have a point someday

[symbolset]

When there's even one virus/malware/rootkit in the wild that affects Apple or Linux systems, you may have a point. Until then you're just speculating about werewolves and vampires that other people don't believe in. Windows has more than 1 million known malwares, and a well evolved malware ecosystem with buyers, sellers, hosts, financiers and money launderers. osX and Linux do not have any of that because there are no known osX or Linux viruses in the wild.

It's ok to say all systems can be defeated. It's quite another thing to say they are equal. They aren't. osX and Linux are more secure than Windows. Full stop.

Re:You might have a point someday

[flnca]

On BSD (incl. MacOS X) and Linux platforms, developers are fixing security holes all the time.

Because, With open-source software, all you need to do to write an exploit is to take a look at the source code.

Most applications that use a plain text protocol (like a web browser communicating via HTTP, for instance, a mailer using SMTP or POP3) report their version to the server. If the server is malicious or compromised, it can determine what exploit to apply to the client, and apply it automatically during the communication session.

Thinking you're safe because you're using OS XYZ is like leaving the barn door wide open.

Re:You might have a point someday

[falconwolf]

Because, With open-source software, all you need to do to write an exploit is to take a look at the source code.

And thousands if not millions of people have the same access to the code and are able to submit fixes.

Thinking you're safe because you're using OS XYZ is like leaving the barn door wide open.

True, I got in a discussion with someone at a store that sells Apple stuff. He kept saying a Mac will never be infected with a virus or other malware. I said that while OS X , and Linux, is more secure as human endeavors they are not totally secure. And never will be.

Re:You might have a point someday

[Random_Goblin]

When there's even one virus/malware/rootkit in the wild that affects Apple or Linux systems

quick question... why do you think they are called "root" kits, instead of say "administrator" kits?

What comes around, goes around

[calstraycat]

I think to understand the renewed interest in Macs in enterprise requires a look how IT departments got themselves into the sole-sourced software platform pickle to begin with.

The story begins with IBM doing a piss-poor job of protecting their hardware. It seems everyone forgets that IBM had every intention of locking up its hardware just like Apple did with the Mac. But they blew it. Some guys cloned the hardware and the commodity PC was born.

Corporate IT departments, believing that having multiple hardware sources was key keeping down capital expenditures, rejected the Mac because it was sole-sourced. They opted for the commoditized IBM-PC hardware platform. But, as they preached the importance of having a diversity of hardware suppliers, the same IT departments insisted that it was imperative to "standardize" on a single operating system and a single office suite. "Standardize", in this context, is just a different way of saying sole-source.

In other words, the dogma was (and still is, for the most part) that computer hardware must be multi-sourced and software must be single-sourced.

That strategy has bit them in the ass. It turns out sole-sourcing your software platform is just as probamatic and expensive as sole-sourcing your hardware platform. Having put all their eggs in Microsoft's basket in the persuit of minimizing hardware cost, IT departments are now stuck in an ever-deepening hole of increasing and recurring licencing fees to a single vendor. And they are completely powerless because they single-sourced their software platform lost all leverage with their supplier.

Perhaps some IT departments are finally questioning the wisdom of that strategy and are bringing some Macs into the mix.

Apple finally has a viable alternative, mostly because OS X is mature now and they've to x86-compatible hardware. Combine that development with the continuing creep of web-based alternatives to embedded applications and you've finally have an escape route from sole-sourced software platform hell.

A wise CIO, in my view, would take advantage of this opportunity by moving to a more heterogeneous computing environment. Re-introducing platform competition in the corporate computing space is the only way for IT departments to regain pricing leverage with Microsoft. It will cost a little more up front. Mac hardware is more expensive. But, that extra upfront cost will be more than offset by the gains from being able to exert price pressure on Microsoft.

Re:What comes around, goes around

[iamhigh]

A wise CIO, in my view, would take advantage of this opportunity by moving to a more heterogeneous computing environment. Re-introducing platform competition in the corporate computing space is the only way for IT departments to regain pricing leverage with Microsoft. Do you know how much switching from one OS to another costs? What about the sys admin and others that have been with your for 10 years and know only MS? Do you hire new people, fire the old? Do you retrain? What about the end users? What about a project manager to make this transisiton?

There is much more to costs than what the actual product costs. $650 for server 2003 is a drop in the bucket, if that. All the licensing and blah blah is tiny compared to the cost of hiring a Unix/Mac admin that can actually run a decent network of 500 computers.

Re:What comes around, goes around

[calstraycat]

Good grief, computer administration is not frickin' rocket science. If you have sys admins who are incapable of learning to administer more than one operating system, they should be fired for incompetence.

By the way, I did not suggest switching from one OS to another. I advocated a mixed environment.

Don't pretend

[symbolset]

Don't pretend this is the same thing as tens of millions of Windows bots compromised with a single vulnerability. Some poorly administered linux servers got compromised. That's bad, but that's not the same thing as your own windows box allowing a Lithuanian hacker to remotely administer your XP machine while you sleep and feed the username and password he captured from your keyboard log to instruct your bank from your computer to transfer all of your funds to his account. That's a completely different level of exploitability.

I'll buy Kapersky AV for Mac

[symbolset]

I'll buy Kapersky AV for Mac. Really I will. The very day I find werewolf repellent at the local Walgreens I'll be all over it.

Until then, not so much.

Not impressed with Macs

[master_p]

In my department, we recently purchased a Mac for testing our Java apps on it. I've been using various brands of computers for a long time, and I can safely say that Macs are very similar to PCs running either Windows or Linux. The differences are superficial, and the same problems can be found on all three environments; for example, we had some trouble configuring network printer access with Macs and we had to search on the web to find a solution, which is an action path most often taken for the other environments as well.

When we were waiting for the Mac to arrive, I was thinking that "if it's so superior than the others as they say, I'll get one for home"...well, it's not. And the interface is not that good (for example, the lack of MDI can be really confusing; another example: the dock makes me search all the time for the items I want).

Therefore I don't expect Macs ever getting really popular. Unless Apple does something vastly different and superior, The Mac is a Linux/Windows variant at heart, with a little polish on top.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[BShive]

"The Mac is a Linux/Windows variant at heart, with a little polish on top"
More correct would be it's a BSD variant, with polish on top.

If you do give Macs another shot sometime there are multiple ways to do things that aren't so reliant on the Dock. Personally I keep very little in there and turn magnification off.

Why the complaint about MDI? You can make MDI type apps, or are you just missing the ability to tab between individual application windows instead of just applications?

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[wass]

I can't help you out with the MDI thing, but here are two ideas that may help you become more productive with launching the apps you want (ie, less fumbling with the Dock and Finder).

First - check out Quicksilver . It's kind of a dynamic shortcut to your useful applications, files, music, webpages, etc. Many techie OS X gurus can't live without it. There are even youtube tutorials for it.

Second - if you want something akin to Windows-style start menu try this. Open the Applications window in Finder. At the top of the window there's a small icon next to the Applications window title. Drag that icon into the dock, to the right of the separator. With one click you now have instant access to your Applications directory.

However, if that's not good enough, by right-clicking this icon instead it will show you all your Applications in a textual menu form, much like the Windows start button.

If that still isn't good enough, you can make another Useful folder with links to all your commonly-used Applications, then put this Useful folder in the dock.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[Hognoxious]

by right-clicking this icon

LOL! How do you do that with only one button?

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[Megane]

for example, ... MDI can be really confusing

Fixed. (You actually like MDI? I've hated it since Windows 3.x!)

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[jjohnson]

Get a two button mouse--they work identically on Mac as they do on Windows.

Or, hold down the ctrl button while clicking with that one, lonely button.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[Weedlekin]

" the interface is not that good (for example, the lack of MDI can be really confusing; another example: the dock makes me search all the time for the items I want)."

In other words, you expected it to be like Windows but better, and found out that it wasn't Windows at all.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of MDI?

Newsflash: Windows fanboy gets confused when confronted with something different, doesn't understand why it's different, or what the differences will mean to his user experience.

There's no helping someone who doesn't want to be helped. (That's you, fanboy). If you really think it's all window-dressing, maybe you should just go back to playing Half-Life.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[master_p]

Thanks, but it kind of defeats the purpose of the Mac. Isn't the Mac supposed to be the best computing experience out of the box? Having to download add ons and tweak the environment just to get some basic functionality is just another proof that Macs are no better than Windows or Linux.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[master_p]

Yes, I like it very much. When programming, I have at least two word documents open, a dozen web pages pointing to documentation, and a dozen source files. I wouldn't like all those windows to have a separate entry in the task bar.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[Megane]

Wait, you only like MDI because it keeps the task bar from being full of individual documents?

I guess that's a reason, but it just shows a flaw in Microsoft's task bar model. OS X already works the way you want in that Dock items are per application, not per "process", where every document is considered a separate process. (And the Mac has worked that way since System 7.0.)

I don't mind too much when MDI puts the documents in a tabbed area, but I hate MDI because you end up with a tiny area in which to make windows (especially after all the docked toolbar panes), and if your MDI subwindows aren't zoomed to full size, they always end up sticking over the edges of the area. Of course most Windows users react to this by running everything fullscreen. To a Mac user, this just removes one of the benefits of using windows in the first place, that being the ability to see two or more things at the same time.

Re:Not impressed with Macs

[master_p]

You are contradicting yourself. From one side, you are saying that MDI cuts down the useful screen estate, and from the other side you say that you prefer your windows to be not in full screen mode, because it allows you to see two things at once, but that limits the useful screen estate!!!

Yes, I prefer to have my windows maximized, because I usually work at one thing at a time. It's very rare that I need to work at a document while looking at another document all the time, and when I need that, I put the two windows side by side. In either case, my screen is not cluttered with windows as in the case of the Mac.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[VON-MAN]

There _is_ no hate for Ubuntu. There's just somewhat disdain for Ubuntu fanboys, but don't let it get you down. All are wellcome in the community, but please be civil.

Now, this "hate for Ubuntu"-meme that surfaced about a week ago, _that_ I hate.

Why people have to turn "many long time users are not that impressed with Ubuntu" into "many hate Ubuntu", is beyond me. But it is probably just a sign of the linux desktop getting close to critical mass, and the userbase broadening up.

Oh, and you meant to write "new users" not "normal users".

Developers needed, always

[suck_burners_rice]

With Apple's sales having gone up 43% in the previous quarter, this is a good time to write letters to developers who produce useful software that is not currently available as native Mac OS X software. For example, people from two unrelated departments at work have remarked that they would like to change their systems from the Wintel boxes they currently use to iMacs. Such a change would remove a great deal of clutter (since the iMac is an all-in-one architecture), give their office space a facelift (by replacing ugly beige boxes with stylish large-screened iMacs), give them a performance boost (since they are currently using ancient Pentium 3-based systems), and give them a better user experience overall. Most of these same people have Mac computers at home. What's stopping us from being able to make this switch? The very expensive software packages they must use are not available for the Mac nor do they have an acceptable Mac alternative. So these poor users are stuck with an OS they do not like. The point isn't that Macs are great and Windows sucks. The point is that the need for certain software titles continues to force many people who want an alternative to keep using Windows. It must be made clear to developers that the availability of their software on the Mac would fuel sales.

Re:Don't pretend (you too)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't pretend this is the same thing as tens of millions of Windows bots compromised with a single vulnerability. Some poorly administered linux servers got compromised. That's bad, but that's not the same thing as your own windows box allowing a Lithuanian hacker to remotely administer your XP machine while you sleep and feed the username and password he captured from your keyboard log to instruct your bank from your computer to transfer all of your funds to his account. That's a completely different level of exploitability." - by symbolset (646467) on Sunday April 27, @03:59AM (#23212460) Homepage It's EXACTLY the same thing, since you mentioned "poorly administered" - see this:

----

HOW TO SECURE Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003 & even VISTA, & make it "fun" to do, via CIS Tool Guidance:

http://www.tcmagazine.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=2662

----

Because it LITERALLY shows you the level of security that BOTH Linux (AND WINDOWS) have, via their DEFAULT security policies settings, & out of the box/oem stock (this is inclusive of SeLinux bearing distros as well, mind you).

(And, by default, they're BOTH setup pretty poorly for security... until you "security-harden" them).

It's not like I couldn't produce you a fairly sizeable list of hacks/cracks/security vulnerability holes & incidents over the past 2-3 yrs. now for you, should you ask, ok? Just ask.

APK

P.S.=> Right now, as long as Macs, Linux, & all other *NIX distros/versions variants are less used, they DO have the phenomena known as "security-by-obscurity" operating in THEIR FAVOR... & that's about it, because you CAN security-harden a Windows rig & have it as secure as ANY *NIX variant out there, if not moreso, for around 1-2.5 hrs. of your time doing what's in that thread, in addition to using some common-sense, for YEARS to DECADES of secure, stable, & security-hardened uptime... apk

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[HeroreV]

I've seen many comments saying Ubuntu users don't deserve to use Linux because they aren't any better than Windows users. I've seen many comments complaining about Ubuntu users not knowing how their operating system works. I've seen many comments complaining about Ubuntu bringing in people to Linux who know nothing about Linux.

This isn't disdain for fanboys, and it isn't just a preference for a different distro. Some people actually hate Ubuntu and Ubuntu users for spoiling their elitism.

It does seem likely that this may merely be a vocal minority, but it is a real sentiment that I have witnessed multiple times. It's hard to get a sense for what the majority feels.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[VON-MAN]

"I've seen many comments saying Ubuntu users don't deserve to use Linux because they aren't any better than Windows users."

Oh, really? Weird opinion, *nobody* deserves Windows.

"Some people actually hate Ubuntu and Ubuntu users for spoiling their elitism."

And _other_ people make websites on chihuahua breeding, but it is a *big* internet, and I don't let it get to me. Try it.

But seriously, on /. in about every thread you'll find a few trolls that try to spoil stuff for others, I'm sure you also ignore these.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[Lars512]

Perhaps another take is that some of Apple's practices, which work fine with their current market share, would be considered draconian if they were the dominant vendor.

This is a crock

[Gricey]

This just isn't the case. Most enterprises don't care as you can't enforce windows-style user permissions and roles. That's what auditors care about as well as enterprise IT bods.

As a Mac/Linux user (binned my last windows machine a year or two ago), its noticeable things are getting there slowly. You can happily do LDAP/Kerberos on Linux, and its getting there on Mac (although notice that the Kerberos tools are hidden?). You can even authenticate off an AD with your Mac login, but its just not there yet.

Either they need to implement their own AAA framework for users, groups and role-based group policy (and while they're at it, give it a license Linux can use!), or they need to broker a deal with MS and get proper AD integration.

Until this happens, you'll only get these OS in big corporations for people like NOC staff who are allowed to deviate from corporate IT policy.

Don't get me wrong, smaller companies that don't have centrally-managed IT policy can probably get away with it now by just writing policies that staff have to adhere to (ie they dont get root, the IT staff do, etc).

- incubus

Re:Just goes to show ...

[Hognoxious]

No, he thinks anyone who uses a mac is gay. Or he's, like, joking.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[Anonymous Coward]

DNFTT. KTHXBYE.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[betterunixthanunix]

They are already draconian. The only people who don't consider Apple's practices to be tyrannical are Apple fanboys and people who don't know or care about anything beyond whether or not their computers gets them to Facebook/Myspace/whatever.

In reality, though, Apple could never keep a dominant position for long, at least not with their current practices. The word "antitrust" comes to mind...

Re:Macs on the Enterprise

[Dracophile]

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

You should have posted that twice. Just in case, you know.

Fed up with the corporate cantina

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, it isn't food what they're serving. I choose a Big Mac or Whopper any time over this fish... pudding.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[NDPTAL85]

The only stupid one is you, I'm not comparing gifting with shoplifting. What I'm comparing is the loss of revenue that happens in both cases. The developer of the software still has to find some way to earn a living. Selling support services doesn't cut it in most cases. Red Hat and Suse the two biggest open source companies manage to do it and Mozilla manages by getting search engine placement revenue from Google but for everyone else they're living a pipe dream if they're giving away their software and hoping to make it up on services.

But as you say, someone is a weasel for trying to eat.

Apple needs a real desktop not a overpriced mini a

[Joe The Dragon]

Apple needs a real desktop not a overpriced mini and under powered mini that is not that easy to open up or a over the top mac pro. The imacs are ok but the build in screen dose work that well as in Enterprise setups monitors tend to last longer then desktops do also real desktops are a lot easier to open up and replace parts in them.

Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[theolein]

My thoughts exactly, and it doesn't have anything to do with elitism. This will be a long post, so please bare with me.

First, a Disclaimer: I am a sysadmin in a shop that uses mostly Macs, and a few Windows Machines, and I've been using Macs since 1990 and OSX since the first public beta in 2000.

Second, Apple, like anything or anyone else, is as vulnerable to the abuse of a powerful position as, say IBM was in the 70s and 80s, and Microsoft has been up until now. Apple has already started showing signs of that abuse, which I'll now point out.

Third, Apple originally touted OS X as a very open Unix like variant. They had all sorts of technologies that were there to draw developers and Windows users to the platform. Built in Java and C/C++ APIs as first class development language along with Objective-C. As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings) two years ago, and last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.

The net result of this is that if you want to develop a native 64 bit GUI application on OS X, you must use Objective-C. ObjC is a fine language, and now has Garbage collection, amongst other things, but it is very very difficult to port ObjC applications to other platforms. In a way, it's like Microsoft's .Net, except that there's not even an ObjC Mono to counter it.

This means huge costs of major software developers who have, for the most part, been developing in C/C++. Microsoft Office, Adobe CS3, Maxon Cinema 4D? They're all C/C++. There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux (with far less effort and far lower cost than porting to ObjC). Putting some of the money saved into a major marketing push for Linux would help the uptake.

It would also scare the living hell out of Steve Jobs (apart from making him go off on one of his major Ballmer-esque tirades again) and, it would force competition on Apple, which Apple seems to think is now unnecessary due to the major fuck up that is Windows Vista.

Fourth. Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs. That is often very good, as the man has a sense of taste, unlike Steve Ballmer, who doesn't, but, because Steve Jobs is only human, that sometimes results in extremely poor decisions like the OSX 10.5 Leopard Desktop and GUI design. The default galactic image background is very bad for designers who need a neutral background to work on. The fact that Apple made the default Dock in 10.5 a weird faux 3D thing that is very difficult to use due to the changes, making it often very hard to see what applications are running. The new pop-up folders in the Dock are next to useless for most things, and the translucent Menu-bar could have only been a Steve Jobs decision, driven, like the 3D Dock by the perceived need to compete visually with Vista. Apple only offered changes to this when users rebelled in outrage.

Fifth. Apple's server offerings are to a large extent just wrappers around open source technologies. Their Open Directory is just a wrapper around OpenLDAP, SLAP, and a Berkley Database as data store. Their Email server is just Postfix for SMTP and Cyrus for IMAP. The problem is that due to the Apple GUI management bindings, it is next to impossible to customise these software packages. This is somewhat symptomatic of Apple's approach. They make some things very easy, but others very, very hard.

Apple needs competition. Without competition, Apple tends to lose their solid grounding and become a bit more like Microsoft, given to market lock-in and arbitrary decisions that make no sense.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[drinkypoo]

Fourth. Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs. [...] The fact that Apple made the default Dock in 10.5 a weird faux 3D thing that is very difficult to use due to the changes, making it often very hard to see what applications are running.

The Dock is, as always, the most obvious interface fuckup Apple has made, and boy did they ever.

The NeXTStep Dock was brilliant. It's probably been imitated more than anything else but the Windows taskbar (let's face it, everyone wants a start menu now. Apple put more stuff into the Apple menu in OSX, probably due to just that.) Then they totally hosed it for OSX. If your desktop is somewhat full then icons appear behind the dock. You have to either hide it or lasso that icon with some other icons before you can drag it out. It also changes size from the center by default, making your icons a moving target. The Dock is 100% garbage, the implementation is crap, it is nothing but eye-candy and it's bad eye-candy at that.

This is, unfortunately, pretty much the story of the whole OS. OSX is a boondoggle, we would have been MUCH better off with BeOS (seriously folks, the best objection to BeOS is that it isn't "truly" multiuser whatever that means, and who cares on a desktop box anyway?) but we got the cult of Steve Jobs and his amazing transforming NeXTStep instead. Now, it might be true that Apple would be gone without Jobs today, but I will go to my grave protesting Apple's stupidity in adopting the OS of yesteryear instead of moving into the future. They had their chance to advance computing, and instead decided to go with more of the same old shit we'd already seen. There is basically nothing new in OSX; everything cool in it was already present in NeXTStep, which was fairly peppy on a 25MHz 68040. MacOS prior to X, which does a tiny fraction of what NeXTStep does, was never as responsive on a Quadra as NeXTStep was on an '040 turbo slab. BeOS, on the other hand, kicked the shit out of MacOS 9 (for example) on a PPC Macintosh.

For the record, I'm not a BeOS fanboy, I don't run any variant of it and I'm sure not buying specific hardware so that it will run properly. I already went through all that shit with Amiga and already got better. But I maintain that Apple completely blew that decision, from a technical standpoint.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[Wizard Drongo]

I think the Dock thing is subective. A lot of people I talk to hate the Dock.

A lot of people I talk to love the Dock.

I fall into the latter category. I agree with the GP on the Leopard dock being annoying; hell I developed an app t change it from the default 3D to a more sedate and retina-pleasing 2D one.
But I still like it, and consider it one of OS X's nicest GUI features. Hidden, with the icons on "zoom" mean I can have a tiny dock that I never see unless I need it, and then I can see exactly the icons I want, not the other ones that stay tiny and out-of-the-way.

As for the BeOS thing, yeah, you're probably right. If they had bought BeOS, the same gui people would have worked on it to make it more "Apple-ey", which would mean you'd still have Aqua. Maybe they'd even of put a Dock in there, which I think would be awesome (an Aqua-like BeOS).
But it would have been faster for multimedia which is a BIG thing nowadays (iLife anyone?), and the multi-user thing isn't.

But, that ship has passed, and we've got what we've got: Unix.
It's a good OS. Sure, maybe an enhanced version of BeOS would be better, but we can't say that now.

Maybe, in some dark black-ops like basement in Cupertino, Apple are playing with BeOS still, planning to make it in the "next big thing" when (if) Unix starts to show it's age. Who knows...

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[644bd346996]

The Cocoa-Java bridge was dropped because hardly anybody was using it. There's no way it would have been cost effective for Apple to continue to update it.

The "C/C++" apis you were referring to, more commonly known as the Carbon api, is a slightly sanitized version of the Classic Mac OS programming interface. They were old and ugly, and Carbon had to retrofit them with support for things like preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Anybody who considered Carbon as anything but a legacy api was a fool. (Yes, that includes Adobe.)

You don't seem to be aware of CoreFoundation and Objective-C++, which provide C and C++ respectively with access to most of the Cocoa apis. But I get the feeling that you're deliberately ignoring the fact that Apple has added Cocoa bindings for Python and Ruby.

And you definitely should have mentioned GNUStep, a portable environment that is compatible with OpenStep (from which Cocoa is derived) and has included many of the improvements from Cocoa. If you actually want your app to be portable, it is very easy to write it using GNUStep as the lowest common denominator. The resulting app can then be compiled and run on Windows, Linux, and OS X.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[drinkypoo]

Maybe, in some dark black-ops like basement in Cupertino, Apple are playing with BeOS still, planning to make it in the "next big thing" when (if) Unix starts to show it's age. Who knows...

It's not impossible, but BeOS is now owned by someone else, and the Jobsian ego probably means that it's not happening.

If you look at the history of Steve Jobs, he is NOT a planner-for-the-future. NeXT managed to limp along as long as it did on its technical merit and the strength of its sales team, but the company really never displayed enough flexibility to remain successful in its own right and NeXTStep was definitely an also-ran until it became OSX. Jobs does well when he's on the right rails, but he doesn't have much in the way of pathfinding skills. He DOES generate more buzz than all the bees in the world, which is his primary value to Apple.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[TejWC]

I overall agree that Apple needs competition but a few points:

1. There is a open source version of Cocoa called GNUStep. It doesn't have every feature that Cocoa has like Core Image, but as more people move to enterprise Macs, I imagine more people will help the project out. There are ways to combine C++ and Objective C but it requires a person who actually knows that they are doing.
2. The dock can be hidden and shown only when the mouse is over it. If you really hate the reflection on the dock, you can always put the dock to the left or right side which would make it non-reflective. Apple in general has responded well to UI problems that people have complained about. The Stacks' icon fiasco is another example.
3. The Apple sys-admins I have talked to didn't have too much trouble customizing apple software packages. I don't know exactly how they did it. However, they seem to complain more about how "Apple screwed up their filesystem" more than anything else.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[iluvcapra]

As Apple became more comfortable with their position and had less fear of Developers being unwilling to move to the platform, the first dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings)

They had built in the bridge at great cost in the early years, and it was a major part of their developer push. You can imagine their frustration when no one used it; this is the Cocoa bridge, mind you, not the Java platform. People code in Java so they can write once and run anywhere, not so they can code platform-dependent GUI code. Apple thought having a Java bridge might drive people to write software that favored their platform, but Java devs just kept on using Swing and AWT, and generally ignoring the bridge, since it was platform-dependent.

I think the nail in the Java bridge's coffin was that you couldn't do key-value coding in Java, the way Apple implemented it, because you sorta need duck typing to make it work. Objective-C can do this, Java cannot (though the Java people hold this is a good thing.)

last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.

This is a tricky statement, as CoreAudio, the File Management APIs, OpenGL, QuickTime, Core Foundation, Core Services, and, hell, the Kernel API and BSD subsystem are all "C APIs" and a part of the OS X platform, and they are all continuously being refined and extended; though not all of them are 64 bit yet, this doesn't pose much of a limitation on OS X since you can call from 64 bit code into 32 and back "for free." The Carbon API, particularly the UI code, has not been rebuilt for 64 bit and may not ever, but it is not "unsupported" or "deprecated."

Your statement makes it appear that coding in C on OS X is somehow unsupported, or that ObjC is the only Kool-Aid in town, and this is a flagrant canard.

There will be no 64 bit version of Adobe CS4, the next CS iteration, for OS X, Adobe has said. It will literally take them years to port their code base to ObjC. Personally, I wonder why they bother. Given that the Ubuntu Linux desktop is now very smooth, is getting fantastic reviews all around the net on mainstream publications, It would be a perfect time for Adobe and others to port their apps to Linux

They're probably in the same spot MS is, in that even they don't know how their code works any more, with the number of people they've had working on it over the years.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[Wizard Drongo]

That, and his magical ability to bullshit people and have them believe it.

The RDF is real! For at least a day or two, everything Steve says at an expo sounds AMAZING!!!!!!
Then reality re-asserts itself and you're left thinking "hold, so it can't actually run it's own apps then?" or "So, flashy menu-bar aside, what have you guys actually done to Leopard in the last 18 months??!!"

But for that 48 hours, He Is GOD!
I personally think somewhere along the line, there's a Steve-owned shares company that makes a killing on buying then selling Apple stock at just the right time...

'Course, that would be a little ethically dubious (read: totally absolutely pound-me-in-the-ass-prison-time illegal)...

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[Concerned Onlooker]

"There are ways to combine C++ and Objective C but it requires a person who actually knows that they are doing."

Not sure exactly what you mean by this, but if you're referring to using C++ and Objective-C code in the same project using Xcode all you need to do is set "Compile Source As" to Objective-C++ and you can mix the two to your heart's content. I'm doing exactly that on my current project.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[hotfireball]

Apple, like anything or anyone else, is as vulnerable to the abuse of a powerful position Yeah, let me remember their slogan... "World domination. Fast. (Linus Torvalds)" -- that one?...

dropped Java as a first class language (no more Java-Objective-C API bindings) two years ago, and last year dropped the C/C++ API's further development.

And this is very correct decision. It is too silly to have Cocoa thing in Java (read: cross-platform solution). And it is too silly to wait for each Java release more than one year. Now, soon World will use Java 7, while there are still no Java 6 as a release on Macs!

The net result of this is that if you want to develop a native 64 bit GUI application on OS X, you must use Objective-C. ObjC is a fine language, and now has Garbage collection, amongst other things, but it is very very difficult to port ObjC applications to other platforms. In a way, it's like Microsoft's .Net, except that there's not even an ObjC Mono to counter it.

You're contradicting yourself. Either make a cross-platform solution since beginning, or do not bother about that at all. It is as same as to say ".NET is impossible or hardly portable to z/OS or NetBSD", which is totally correct. You need cross-platform solution? So why you bothering with Cocoa and then wasting a time/money to porting them elsewhere?.. Java has Swing UI (excellent, BTW!) and you have Mac look and feel, provided by Apple. Not a Cocoa? Yes, but I do not give a shit.

Apple is almost wholly dependent on the final opinion of Steve Jobs

Yes, like Linux is [mostly] dependent on the final opinion of Linus Torvalds or Windows on M$ heads. What's up? You want a chaos instead?

Apple only offered changes to this when users rebelled in outrage.

So what's the problem? Apple did responded to the users. They also had changed their decision towards iPhone SDK and actually made it, instead pushing everybody towards AJAX webapps for just Safari. Where do you see the problem?

In fact, I do remember how RedHat crippled KDE and other stuff for their distros, pissing off entire community. Did they change their way? No. Where you've been then with your comments at that time?..

And I like translucent menubar and 3D dock (that you can pimp it yourself as much as you want), along with the pop-up folder stack. :-P

Apple's server offerings are to a large extent just wrappers around open source technologies.

Not quite. I'd love if it would be like this. But it is... worse: these are wrappers over a *crippled* open source things... :-( In fact, Apple servers still sucks a lot and really needs to be much better.

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[caution live frogs]

[...] sorta need duck typing [...]

[...] this is a flagrant canard I see what you did there. [Quack.]

Re:Make that two of us, Apple needs competition

[sir fer]

You sir, are the fucking man. If I had mod points I would give them all to you. Perhaps the most thoughtful post of the year.

It is all about userland

[betterunixthanunix]

It is all about the userland. If Mac became more popular, it is likely that MS Office for Macs would become more popular, and we would see many of the same exploits. This is not a "windows or mac" issue, this is a general computer security issue.

Re:Or.......

[garry_k]

Fire torpedoes! I can't sir! Why! The computer will only let me draw them, and color them red! We don't have any software to calculate the trajectory. They tell me it's coming soon when more Starships get Macs. But... by then the Klingons will have a virus to attack our computers.

Biggest Apple problem

[dregs]

Want to know what the biggest apple problem in the enterprise is ?

Just try leasing them, on a 3 year lease, and find out at the end of the lease theirs no replacement machines because apple has run down the channel due to a new product announcement, that is yet to happen.

Happens on a regular basis to us, and then the new machines doesn't support the current release of OS X, so we cant deploy until we fully test in any case, as it only runs 10.5.2 or later, not earlier or some such rubbish.

Apple is light weight and no where near enterprise ready.

Re:Biggest Apple problem

[gujo-odori]

OTOH, I work for a business unit of a very large and well-known Silicon Valley company. Within my department (engineering), almost everyone uses a Mac. The few who don't are mostly using FreeBSD or Linux, with a very small handful using Windows. Company-wide across our parent company, there are 4,000 - 6,000 Mac other Mac users (6K would be 10% of the work force) despite the fact that Mac is not an officially supported platform (and one reason why I don't have a precise count). Some of those Mac users bought the Mac with their own money rather than use Windows or Linux, after they couldn't get approval for the capital expenditure to buy a MacBook Pro.

Leasing is an issue, or would be if it were being done. Right now, AFAIK all Macs are outright purchases. However, different OS versions aren't really an issue. In my business unit (where Macs are officially supported by IT), we have a mix of Tiger and Leopard. Probably more Tiger than Leopard. In the entire company, where Macs do not have general IT support, there is a similar mix of Tiger and Leopard. it doesn't seem to be causing any problems, so my overall take on this is that there is no really compelling need for everyone to be on the same version of OS X. In some environments (maybe yours) that may not be the case, but for most business, a mix of Tiger and Leopard should not be a problem. By the time the successor to Leopard comes out, Tiger machines will most likely all be retired, so the mix will generally be limited to no more than two major versions of OS X. This is probably a lot easier to handle than the mix many Windows IT shops see now, with a mix of XP and Vista, or saw in the past with Win2K and XP, or a version from the Win9x family + a version (or 2) from the NT family.

If Apple is no where near enterprise-ready, that would come as a shock to the ~ten percent of our total work force that is using Mac in the enterprise right now (total work force = about 60K). Some people say that about Linux and FreeBSD too, but a good slice of our total work force (probably smaller than Mac, but numbered in the thousands) are using those in the enterprise as well. Heck, those of us who are using them would be prepared to make the argument that when one considers reliability, usability, and security, Windows is the least enterprise-ready OS of the lot.

Re:Biggest Apple problem

[Ilyon]

Happens on a regular basis to us, and then the new machines doesn't support the current release of OS X, so we cant deploy until we fully test...

This assumes you try to shoehorn the Mac into the Windows paradigm, where six months of testing is required, mainly to wait for the SP1 and SP2 releases.

With an enterprise full of Macs, corporations will discover three things that nullify the issues of replacement machines and extended testing. First, five year old Macs are very functional with the latest MacOS X. Second, MacOS X upgrades are so smooth you don't need the extended testing required of Windows. Third, MacOS X is backward compatible enough that a mixed Tiger/Leopard environment is not a serious issue.

The Mac is more than just a hardware/OS switch from Windows PCs. It will change the way we deploy, maintain, and use computers.

Re:Biggest Apple problem

[dregs]

We test, because OS X is not backwardly compatable enough.

We currently have 1 enterprise product that DOES not work on OSX 10.5, but does on 10.4 fine.

10.5 also broke our centralized authentication process. So if you run unmanaged Macs then yep its all fine, but that is not running an enterprise setup, that's just running a heap of Macs.

Its not the same, and it doesn't scale well
We more than halved our support calls times on Macs when we rolled out a centrally managed and supported managed operating environment,
it would have been more, but apples last minute upgrades, and breaking of backward compatability
now require significant more testing.

We support Linux, Win XP, and OS X, and the linux and PC's are the cheapest to support, and have the best backward compatability.

Just go to http://www.macintouch.com/leopard/compat.html, to see what broke and what only kinda broke, (and its not a small list), we were affected by a number of these issues.

Re:Biggest Apple problem

[Ilyon]

I concede the point regarding Mac issues in the enterprise. Now that I think about it, I do realize that Apple's support for NIS and related services has been annoyingly inconsistent. I suspect this is why Apple is taking only baby steps into the enterprise. Note that enterprise adoption is being pulled by Mac users, not pushed by Apple.

For now, I'll give Apple the benefit of the doubt for being a relative newcomer to the modern enterprise computing market. I expect Apple to quickly mature in enterprise support. One evidence of this is Apple's recent discontinuation of Xserve RAID, along with partnering with an established enterprise storage provider. This should help Apple focus on what it does best.

I also expect Apple to depend on service providers like IBM to serve the largest enterprises. For the smaller businesses, I expect Apple will expand its retail store training offerings.

Keep in mind that Apple's success with iPod, MacOS X, Intel Macs, etc. are based on ten years of steady improvement starting with early efforts to switch to a UNIX based system. Given time (hopefully not 10 years), I expect Apple's enterprise support to make similarly steady improvements.

chiming in

[GregNorc]

I'm an Information Science major, but I have a strong interest in photography and graphic design.

If Adobe ported Photoshop to Linux, I'd switch. Even on my my Mac I use mostly open source software... (Neo Office, Firefox, VLC, etc), but Photoshop and the rest of the creative suite have no equivalent on Linux

Please do not mention the Gimp. I need CMKY for one thing. Many users don't use Photoshop's advanced features, and that's fine, I'm glad there's a product out there for them that doesn't cost them any money.

And on the topic of businesses, Office 2008 for Mac removed VBA support for it. What is a business to use? Neo Office? It's a great tool, but it does have a lot of bugs, mainly when dealing with complex documents. Neo Office currently supports all 2007 VBA and related fun, but it's also prone to frustrating formatting issues and other glitches.

Considering that so many businesses stupidly decided their IDE of choice should be Excel for all their random back office calculations, this could be a big consideration.

Re:chiming in

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at Krita (koffice suite) and Karbon14 (Illustrator replacement). Krita handles CMYK just fine, and the interface is a bit less brutal (but I still love GIMP personally). Also, you might want to look at the 3.0-dev builds of OpenOffice for OSX, they don't need X11 anymore and have a lot more features than the 2.2 branch that NeoOffice is stuck at. As an aside, does anyone else abhor the way apple keeps X11 for OSX locked away on their install dvd, and off of the internet? I have 4 linux boxes and a 20" intel imac in the room with me, and when I was trying to port an X11 app to the mac, I ran into this. My friend that owns the mac in question said it didn't come with an install disk, so we called up apple support. They told us it wasn't a problem, and that an install dvd would be here in 7 days. It's been 4 months, no dvd, and unsurprisingly, a paid upgrade to 10.5.2 came out right after we asked for the dvds that were never shipped, leaving us with the option to either boot off of a custom linux livedvd, or buy a 10.5.2 upgrade dvd just to install X11. In fact, it almost seems like they make it difficult to acquire their version of X11 because most of the widespread mac apps that need it (OO.o, gimp, etc) are in direct competition with their bedbuddies (MS office:mac, Adobe). Blech.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[Kjella]

Guess they'll have to move to *BSD. And if that becomes too mainstream, there's always the HURD. Personally I feel decidedly "out of mainstream" enough on Ubuntu, thank you very much.

Great idea...

[wondershit]

Recently my company bought a Mac server and it is causing nothing but problems. For example you can't use the calendar unless you use the delivered directory service because it can't connect to existing ones. It also has to be the master server and can't be just a replica. Great. It's things like that that are just annoying. I wouldn't want to administrate such a mess. The business hotline is not better: "Well, I don't know anything about the server but do you know you can watch porn on the new iPod?". And I'm not making this up.

Although I'd never use a Mac voluntarily I'm quite open-minded and think everybody should use the system that's suited best for him. Then again there are these Mac friendly decision makers that have to mess it up. "If it's good for me, it's good for you and if it's not good for you then it's at least good for me."

And as a last quote... the poor guy that has to work with this thing: "There are things that work, there are things that work a little bit and then there is this Mac server."

As a side note the server doesn't even look good or shiny or whatnot.

I didn't say any OS came perfectly safe

[symbolset]

You saying that Windows can be secured does not diminish the fact that over a million Windows boxes are compromised right now. No useful system that's connected to the network can be made perfectly secure, but that doesn't mean that some are not better than others.

Again, Linux and osX don't have any viruses in the wild. Zero. None. Not one. Zip. Nada. On these operating systems antivirus is to protect you, the feeble Windows client of the mail server. The Linux malware ecosystem is almost the exclusive purview of nation-states and their clandestine operatives, megacorporations and their industrial spies. Securing your linux box is important, but these people aren't generally interested in common folk.

Windows has hundreds of thousands of viruses in the wild. These viruses support the financial interests of spammers, identity thieves, Nigerian scam artists, mail order fraudsters. Their ecosystem includes money launderers, extortionists, blackmailers thugs and hit men. There are incredible toolchains that take a found vulnerability and turn it into an exploit plugin for distribution by their botnets and compromised websites in mere hours. There are marketplaces where the proceeds of spying on your Windows box and the tools to compromise your windows are bought and sold. The ecosystem also consists of various members on the white hat side including antivirus vendors, penetration experts, firewall vendors, malware blockers and anti-phishing toolbars. Then there's the grey area group who sell with irritating popups products that do absolutely nothing, but give users a false sense of security -- opening them up to exploitation. These industries generates several billions of dollars a year in profits.

No antivirus catches 100%. The virus infrastructure in a thriving stew that's updated minute by minute to stay ahead of the AV companies. For the most part the latest and most successful viruses are used. Once your PC is infected they pretty much can do anything with it they want to including:

• monitor your keyboard and watch your screen
• remotely control your PC
• read all your mail and your personal files
• transfer any file back to their mesh storage, or publish it online
• use your computer to attack other computers
• use your disk to store illicit materials (stolen data, porn including kiddie porn, warez, movies and music)
• use your computer (if it's connected directly to the net) to serve the above data to other people for a fee
• send spam

They can do all of that without your knowledge or consent of course. They are actively doing this to over a million Windows users right now. Are you one of them?

People can choose. The operating systems with no viruses or the ones with hundreds of thousands. It's their choice.

Re:I didn't say any OS came perfectly safe

[flnca]

I didn't dispute that Windows has the majority of viruses. But I've received exploits for Mac and Linux in my inboxes as well. The Linux ones seem to attempt to attack automatic mail systems, since they contain shell script portions. It's outright false to claim that for Linux there are no viruses at all. The German government, for instance, will use custom-tailored (probably even automatically created) trojan viruses to spy on citizens under suspicion of serious crimes, and they're not limiting themselves to Windows. And that's just an example. IT experts everywhere can implement viruses for any operating system. There are BTW virus scanners for Linux already that search for Linux viruses, not just Windows viruses on Linux mail servers. Although the prime target for virus authors is still Windows, other platforms have been targeted for a long time already. I still remember the sendmail exploit craze in the mid-90ies, for instance. How can you write an efficient bot net if you don't target UNIX servers?

Re:Just goes to show ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Douchebag.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[Khaed]

C'mon, you've never run across an elitist Linux snob? I have. This isn't necessarily a mainstream view, but there are a whole lot of loud-mouth "I use Linux and I'm better than everyone!" types out there. And I don't mean /. trolls. I mean people who are serious. Just like there are Mac Fans who act that way, or people without TVs, or (insert just about anything even remotely obscure) fans.

I'm not even all that heavily involved in hanging around Linux people (despite being one) and I see this pretty often. Probably because they stand out.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[MBGMorden]

The only stupid one is you, I'm not comparing gifting with shoplifting. What I'm comparing is the loss of revenue that happens in both cases. Exactly. You've developed your life to a point that you can't do good deeds anymore. You can't simply do something to be nice. Anything that causes joy to others where you don't directly compensate is a "loss of revenue".

Selling support services doesn't cut it in most cases. Red Hat and Suse the two biggest open source companies manage to do it and Mozilla manages by getting search engine placement revenue from Google but for everyone else they're living a pipe dream if they're giving away their software and hoping to make it up on services. Or, there are alternatively many people who make a living doing nothing related to the OSS that they write and provide. There are a lot of people out there who LIKE to program. They like to create things, and they like to see people use the things they've created. They might not even work as developers in their everyday job.

But as you say, someone is a weasel for trying to eat. No, I'm saying that it's greedy to look for compensation for every benefit you endow to anybody anywhere. OSS is a superior development model, paid or unpaid. If someone is already making a living programming for someone else, or really doing anything, it's not going to hurt them to let others have a look at, improve, and trade back the code that this person is quite likely going to be writing anyways. If you don't want to give away your code, you're not required to, but don't knock those that do.

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[NDPTAL85]

There are many ways to do good deeds. Giving away software isn't one of them. Helping the sick, the hungry, the abused, the oppressed... in other words REAL causes. Not invented causes such as the social injustice of proprietary software.

And no open source is NOT a superior development model. It is just one of many. Were it superior we would all be using open source operating systems on our desktops. Last time I checked Redmond had the top spot followed by Cupertino. Those who allow their politics to get in the way of practically bring up the rear with Linux.

Mac hardware is not IT friendly

[Anonymous Coward]

While OSX is a beautiful efficient OS I cringe at supporting Apple hardware. Apple's hardware design, while clean and "pretty," is a support nightmare for hardware techs ... just try swapping a hard drive from a MacBook Pro ⦠and this is the tip of the iceberg! In my opinion, Apple has sacrificed engineering for the sake of design. Maybe I'm just a simple person but I thought we are looking to cut down on support cost post hardware acquisition not increase it. Another issue is OSX overall manageability ⦠Apple does provide a remote desktop support application but it is a mere infant compared to other management suites provided by Microsoft, LANDesk or Altiris. Apple also, for the sake of design does not provide a docking solution for their notebooks, somewhat of an essential component for the user. Apple has decided to be a "Sony" and not an IBM, thus making them hard to gain a foothold in any well structured and managed IT group. In the end, you as an IT manager have to ask yourself, do you want to support consumer grade hardware? How many of us support Sony VAIOâ(TM)s or Alienware notebooks!

They've changed

[symbolset]

How can you write an efficient bot net if you don't target UNIX servers?

They're peer-to-peer now, mostly. Distributed command and control for reliability.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[VON-MAN]

In fact, you and the GP speak of different snobs, his snobs are demeaning to Ubuntu users, and your snobs are demeaning to Windows and Mac users. But forget that.

You do have me wondering what sort of things 'elitist Linux snobs' say ("I compile my own kernel so I'm better than everyone" sounds way too lame). And keep in mind, some linux elitists have been running linux since when it sucked balls, and that isn't that long ago.

Clarification

[theolein]

I know people and companies who used the Java-Cocoa bridge. A friend of mine was developing an online custom PDF report generator for financial companies using it. There were many such uses of the Java-Cocoa bridge, just not much in the way of client side publicly available applications. The problems my friend ran into, long before Apple decided to drop the bridge, was that the Java-Cocoa bridge was very buggy and reported bugs to Apple by companies that had developer agreements with Apple were simply not given any priority. One of the bugs in the J-C bridge was that the a PDF renderer (IIRC) implementation in the bridge had a memory leak. It only became obvious on many hundreds of objects, which was precisely what my friend was using. Apple knew about the bug as far back as 2003, yet never fixed it, right up until they deprecated the API in 2005.

I am aware of CoreFoundation and Objective-C++. Since you mention it you are also aware that it is restricted in what it can do. Porting a large C++ application to ObjC++ is not that simple. You will need to rearchitect the entire GUI code and most of the backend.

I am not ignoring the Python and Ruby bridges, and not the AppleScript implementation either. But they are not suitable for major client side performance dependent native applications.

As for GNUStep, who uses it? Can you point out any major applications that make use of it? The best way to make cross platform applications has been though the Qt and WxWidgets toolkits. They both rely on the Carbon APIs.

Re:Clarification

[644bd346996]

Porting a large C++ application to ObjC++ is not that simple. You will need to rearchitect the entire GUI code and most of the backend. The re-architecting necessary to use ObjC++ with an existing C++ codebase is no more significant than what was necessary to port a Swing or AWT app to use the Java-Cocoa bridge, or to port an app from GTK to QT. But that's irrelevant. The fact is that Apple does provide a C++ interface.

Re:Clarification

[ciggieposeur]

As for GNUStep, who uses it? Can you point out any major applications that make use of it?

I think the point of GNUStep is that applications that use it will run on Linux or Windows, not on Mac since Mac already has its own libraries. One major application that is cross-platform is Emacs.app (http://emacs-app.sourceforge.net/); that's the Emacs I use on OS X. My Debian box lists 96 packages that depend on gnustep, nearly all of them are parts of the GNUStep environment.

I would be OK with developing new applications under GNUStep and then deploying on OS X and Linux if I really liked ObjC. (Generally I'd probably just use Qt since I use C++ more than ObjC.) But the main point is that ObjC is not a platform trap in the same way Java used to be before the JDK was GPL'd.

Clarification number two

[theolein]

If you see my first clarification above, you'll see that I know people who used the Java-Cocoa bridges. The reason that they had problems is that the bridge implementation had many serious bugs, some in the form of memory leaks. Apple was very unresponsive to them even back in that day when the bridge was supposedly going strong.

I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories, but it did sometimes seem as if Apple was not exactly behind the project wholeheartedly.

You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridges. Java has lots of problems, but it is a lot faster than either of those two or Applescript.

I specifically stated in my original post "major GUI applications". That means Carbon. Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is. The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might have more to do with company developer politics than with documentary policies.

Being able to call freely from and to 32 and 64 bit code is useless if you want the extra speedup that 64 bit code gives you or you need the extra memory of the latest features of Cocoa.

I'm sorry, but I stand by my original post.

Re:Clarification number two

[iluvcapra]

If you see my first clarification above, you'll see that I know people who used the Java-Cocoa bridges.

We all do, but it never really took off commercially. At a certain point it wasn't worth the man-hours to keep it working. 20 guys using it write kludgy web service dashboards (and the occasional Cyberduck) weren't enough to keep that fire burning.

You can also not tell me that you can get better performance with the Python or Ruby bridges

It IS slow as hell, but you're changing the subject.

I am sorta waiting to see if someone uses the scripting bridge (by which we're talking about the SB* classes now) and makes a Java bridge with it; the tech is not Ruby-Python only; there's a perl implementation as well as new languages like Nu or F-Script that use it.

Apple have stated that they will not develop it any further and it will not be ported to 64 bit. If that isn't deprecated, then I don't know what is.

My understanding of Deprecated in this context means "not to be used in new code," "end-of-lifed," "we plan that one day these symbols won't link on the platform." They've made no such declaration; by your definition, if an OS vendor ships libX 1.0 and libY 1.0 (an object-oriented version of libX 1.0) in their distribution, libX 1.0 is deprecated. Apple ships CoreAnimation alongside OpenGL; CA has a higher-level interface than OpenGL, so is OpenGL 'deprecated' (the underlying implementation of CA being hidden and thus irrelevant)? Windows uses Unicode strings, does that make WinANSI strings "deprecated?" They're all over the place, embedded in RIFF-container files, conf files, and more getting made every day. W3C has stopped developing XML 1.0 and will not be adding new features, does that mean when XML 2.0 comes out that XML 1.0 will be "deprecated"? That's not how it works, just ask the people that have 15 year old programs still running on Win32. Just because a vendor creates a new library doesn't mean automatically that the old one is no-go.

The fact that it hasn't been officially deprecated might...

Thank you for conceding the fact, but you can keep the modal verb phrase containing your guess.

I don't want to invoke conspiracy theories,

But you're only too happy to insinuate them every time you are confronted with the actual record of the matter :^]

Re:Clarification number two

[theolein]

I honestly don't see the difference. We're arguing about semantics now, which I don't think helps anyone. The fact is that because it is no longer being developed, people will stop using it to develop new applications over time, just like happened with Java. We can argue all we like about the meaning of the word deprecated, but that is what it amounts to.

And that is why I made my post.

Re:Clarification number two

[iluvcapra]

We can argue all we like about the meaning of the word deprecated, but that is what it amounts to.

"Deprecation" is a statement made explicitly by the vendor, stating a form of contract. If a symbol is deprecated, it's assured it will eventually fail. If a symbol isn't deprecated, it's assured it will work until it's deprecated.

Symbols must never pass from good standing to not working. If your code fails to compile one day on a deprecated symbol, it's your responsibility to fix. If it fails to compile one day on a not-deprecated symbol, it's the vendor's responsibility to fix it.

Recession will stop blank check for Windows

[Ilyon]

The effect hasn't become dominant yet, but IT budget cuts in the face of economic recession will accelerate enterprise adoption of Macs.

Until recently, IT departments got a blank check so there was no hard necessity to take cost seriously. Windows skated by on familiarity and prior market dominance.

When the recession finally hits corporations, IT departments will understand the significance of per-client pricing of Windows server vs. the unlimited client pricing of MacOS X server. The accountants will start to notice Mac hardware has a longer useful life and a higher resale value. When the blank check for Windows support stops arriving, corporations will take a hard look at Mac.

Yes, there will be some divas who have built a career's worth of critical analysis software in VBA and insist on keeping their Windows computer. They will be considered a necessary additional cost, and not the baseline support configuration.

Not all companies will switch at once, but those who make the switch will have a competitive advantage. The remaining companies will follow suit, or suffer from higher operating costs. The enterprise transition from Windows to Mac will be quick (surprisingly quick to most).

Many companies will adopt Linux in some capacity, especially if they user server farms that need large-scale computing capacity. However, I expect Macs to be in high demand as a front-end server and desktop system.

When the bottom line depends on companies taking IT costs seriously, Windows will fall rapidly to Mac.

Mac shortfalls are the fault of non-Mac paradigms

[Ilyon]

I've read a few criticisms that the Mac might be easy for the end-user, but it's harder on the system administrator. I don't think this is generally true, but I can see two situations that generate this opinion.

The more obvious is sysadmins who are familiar with Windows and Unix having trouble adapting to the Mac. I had quite a bit of difficulty during my first few months of using a Mac because I'd become accustomed to the complicated ways of doing things on Windows. Once I lost my Windows habits, I was amazed at how much time I wasted on Windows before switching to Mac.

The less obvious condition is when the Mac is forced to adapt to procedures and paradigms designed for Windows or Unix. There are naturally some issues when a Mac tries to authenticate user logins through a Windows server, and otherwise tries to fit itself into a Windows environment.

I expect the situation will be very different once the IT infrastructure is based on Mac. There are many underutilized Mac features, like Netboot and network install. Once these features are implemented in an infrastructure designed for Mac, it will be the Windows and UNIXes that seem like an awkward fit.

They are already draconian.

[falconwolf]

In what way is Apple draconian?

The only people who don't consider Apple's practices to be tyrannical are Apple fanboys and people who don't know or care about anything beyond whether or not their computers gets them to Facebook/Myspace/whatever.

I am not an Apple fanboy. Nor do I use my MacBook Pro to get to either Facebook or Myspace though I do use it for the web. I also will be using it for photography and web development.

Oh, I also have a Linux PC and up until it died used a Windows PC. If the Amiga were alive today I'd probably using it as well.

In reality, though, Apple could never keep a dominant position for long, at least not with their current practices. The word "antitrust" comes to mind...

Antitrust hasn't stopped Microsoft yet, what makes you think it would stop Apple? And how could Apple become a case for antitrust? If I wanted to I could run not only Mac software but Linux and Microsoft software as well, actually I have installed and used Linux, FOSS, and cross platform software. For instance for my office suite I use NeoOffice, the native Mac port of Open Office.

Falcon

ubuntu

[falconwolf]

I've seen many comments saying Ubuntu users don't deserve to use Linux because they aren't any better than Windows users. I've seen many comments complaining about Ubuntu users not knowing how their operating system works. I've seen many comments complaining about Ubuntu bringing in people to Linux who know nothing about Linux.

In other words they're pissed a normal person can use Ubuntu instead of needing to be a sysadmin or guru to use it.

Falcon

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

the dock makes me search all the time for the items I want How easier can program launching GET?

Big f'ing pictures that don't move and have descriptive names when you mouse over them.

Ah, whatever, to each his own.

BTW, you got it ass backwards, Windows is a Mac clone with no polish, and Linux developers intentionally scuff the living hell out of everything they make.

Lack of MIDI... good God man, you don't DESERVE a good UI.

installing malware on OS X

[falconwolf]

Unless the worst viruses in the world are interested in your music collection, stored in your home folder. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for a virus to run on a Linux machine, the user would have to either knowingly execute it, or run a program that executes it. And even then, unless the user does it as root, the virus is almost totally harmless to the system.

But the OS X is the same, unless something is installed as root it's harmless to the system.

Falcon

malware on Linux

[falconwolf]

And rootkits aside, consider a Linux box used in a residential environment, everyone using the same user account, downloading and running whatever they like. What's to stop them downloading and running any sort of malware that now starts every time this user logs in?

That's the fault of the owner though a Linux distro can help. About 20 months ago, almost 2 years, I bought a new PC with Linux preinstalled. When I got it home, connected everything up then booted on that first boot it asked me to setup a root user account. Once I did it asked me to setup a user account, one that couldn't install software or mess with the OS, and suggested I use it for most things.

Falcon

Linux netbots

[falconwolf]

The fact that hijacked linux systems are serving up malware and controlling botnets is proof that the probability of infection is unacceptably high for linux.

Do you have any statistics showing how many botnets control Linux PCs? Or is this just a guess that's there's a bunch? While I don't have statistics, like I asked you for, Tech Republic has an interesting article on how "Linux phishing botnet statistics can be deceptive".

Falcon

Macs in the enterprise

[falconwolf]

OS X will be marginalized in the enterprise

Except, as TFA is all about, Macs are gaining in enterprises.

Mobile users will still have Mac Book Pros, artiste-types will have their cheese graters, but the cubicle critters aren't going to get anything that fancy.

Many of the "cubicle critters" don't really need much more than the set top like Mac Mini. My problem with the Mini is that it's very much planned obsolescence made with a lot of precious and toxic stuff.

Falcon

Enterprise Mac will affect economy and jobs

[Ilyon]

Now that the pundits are finally realizing that Macs are being introduced to the enterprise, let's have some fun and look further into the future, at the things pundits will be announcing a few years from now.

As enterprises increasingly replace Windows with Mac, there will be two effects most pundits haven't thought of yet. First, IT staffs will decrease dramatically because of the lower support burden of Mac. Second, the army of Windows support workers will be out of a job.

For any minimally-skilled person (think high school diploma, GED, associates degree, etc.) the easiest way to get a decent paying job has been training in Windows. Think about your local community college course catalog. If it's anything like mine, the computer technology section is full of Microsoft courses and devoid of Mac and Unix courses. That will change.

The effect on the economy could be interesting. On the one hand, the number of corporate IT jobs will drop. On the other hand, the ease (and lower cost) of MacOS X server will create numerous new IT jobs for smaller businesses who could not handle the financial or technical burden of Windows.

I predict those Windows courses will rapidly disappear from community college course catalogs over the next several years.

Mac prices

[falconwolf]

2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (15") 1.999 mac book pro
2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (14.1) 1.024 insprion 1420
This comparsion isnt as fair as ive got a worse PC, because i was only looking at the dell-linux site, but is the .2ghz and extra inch of screen, worth $970.

Before buying my MacBook Pro I compared it's price to the prices of laptops from a number of Windows OEMs. Of those that I can recall a similarly configured Dell was $200 more and an HP was about the same price as the MBP.

Falcon

price of Macs

[falconwolf]

But for the cost of a mac, you could get a higher spec Dell

Before I got my MacBook Pro I compared it's price to that of some Windows OEMs. A Dell having a similar configuration was $200 more while an HP was the same price.

Falcon

Re:Software mostly equals digital office supplies

[bnenning]

There are many ways to do good deeds. Giving away software isn't one of them.

Really.
$ telnet www.mercycorps.org 80
Trying 207.189.99.69...
HConnected to www.mercycorps.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:58:01 GMT
Server: Apache/2.0.52 (CentOS)

Huh. I had the HDD in my Thinkpad go south.

[falconwolf]

I unscrewed one fat screw, pulled out the hard drive sled, slotted a new drive in, and restored everything from backup.

Did you pay for the new HDD?

And that was AFTER the phone call to Applecare and waiting for the Apple Store to call me to say they had the right part in. Had to run my Macbook from an external drive for a week while I was waiting.

When I ordered my MacBook Pro I ordered some software with it including TechTools Pro. Then when I got it I tried to use the diagnostics by booting up with the disk in the drive, b ut it wouldn't work. So the following day, not knowing I was supposed to make an appointment I went down to an Apple Store. Someone there said they were all booked up for the day but he went online to check for an available slot at another store, there's 4 stores in my area, and found one. He signed me up for it. The genius there took all of 5 minutes to find out the version of TechTools I got wasn't compatible with the new CPU, Apple had updated the CPU a couple of days before I placed my order. While I think Apple should have replaced the old one with a new one at the store, she suggested I call the company and request a new disk, I didn't have a problem with their tech support.

Falcon

switching

[falconwolf]

Like many others, I didn't like where it seemed Microsoft was headed with Product Activation and DRM and decided that long-term, I would attempt to migrate away from Windows.

They were far from the only reason I switched from Windows but two big reasons I did switch, both to Linux and Macs, was because of Activation and all the spyware, WGA/WPA. I got a tower PC with Linux preinstalled, I'd like to set it up as a server, and I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro.

Even if Vista (like XP) isn't a terrible thing in itself

The very first tyme I booted up a PC with XP it froze while booting. The PC was a brand new Dell the college I went to got, they had just replaced a bunch of older PCs.

Falcon

For users, it might be a great OS

[falconwolf]

but for developers, it's not.

Yea, I've recently switched from Windows to OS X and I've spent several hours, without success, searching Apple's developer connection on how to start programming on it. I picked up a book on XCode however I don't see anything about how to use it for Java. I think I'll try JBuilder as I've used it on Windows. However I also want to program in C/C++ as well as Perl, Ruby on Rails, and or other languages for the web.

Falcon

Mac hardware is more expensive.

[falconwolf]

In 2008 Mac prices are comparable to Windows PC prices, and have been for a few years now. Unfortunately what you will not find in Apple's lineup is an inexpensive expandable and upgradeable model.

Falcon

right clicking

[falconwolf]

by right-clicking this icon

LOL! How do you do that with only one button?

Actually Macs have 3 buttons. The "left" click is the normal one. Another one is when you hold the [Apple] key down while clicking, and the third is when you hold the [ctrl] key while clicking. Hold one of these down while clicking makes a context menu popup, a different menu for each key. Or in the case of Firefox, if I [Apple] click on a link it opens up the link in a new tab.

Old Mac mice only had one button but the Mighty Mouse has 2. Or you can use the easier way, use a two or three button mouse. I have a Logitech 2 button scrolling trackball for my Mac.

Falcon

2 button mice

[falconwolf]

Or, hold down the ctrl button while clicking with that one, lonely button.

You can also hold the [Apple] key while clicking. It will give you a different context menu than [ctrl] clicking does. For my reply to you I did that when clicking on the reply button, the reply window opened in a new tab in Firefox.

Falcon

CMYK

[falconwolf]

Please do not mention the Gimp. I need CMKY for one thing.

I think both CinePaint aka Film GIMP, and Krita support CMYK. CinePaint is available for Linux, Macs, and Windows whereas Krita is for Linux. I don't know about Krita but CinePaint also does 32 bits per colour channel.

Falcon

Macs gain a bigger role on the Enterprise?

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't RTFA, but I'd hazard a guess Geordie La Forge is somehow involved.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[oliderid]

And if that becomes too mainstream, there's always the HURD.

HURD is already too mainstream. I would rather use "VOCALIS" . A new OS allowing you to order OS instructions by voice (you just need a colleague to make real parallel programming).

Re:Or.......

[MacColossus]

In the utilities folder there is an excellent application to plot trajectory called "Grapher". It is included with the OS.

Re:I honestly donâ(TM)t want more market shar

[MacColossus]

I am primarily a mac user and admin, but I love ubuntu. I have successfully deployed ubuntu server in my environment. Most recently a moodle server running 7.10 server. I even did it without installing any desktop environment. All CLI baby, except for the graphical install screens during installation. apt-get is good magic. I will admit I installed webmin for my co-workers.

GNUstep

[ChristTrekker]

I would really like to give Étoilé a try, but without many GNUstep apps, it seems kind of pointless. (I really wish there were a single standard for X11 menuing, so that it could be a simple run-time option to switch from shared-menubar to per-window-menubar, and all apps would respect that regardless of toolkit.) It's a chicken-or-egg proposition, though. One can hope that the relative ease with which one can built native apps for both GNUstep and OS X from the same codebase will draw developers, but so far I haven't seen much of that.

MacBook keyboard

[falconwolf]

The keys are flat, not bevelled. The keys are not solidly seated... they float, making it feel imprecise. The action is both too soft and too hard, with very little "padding" effect.

The only problem I have with the keyboard is that I wish it were closer to me. I'd switch the track pad and keyword if I could.

Falcon

Valid correction

[symbolset]

I intended only virus and botnet. Didn't mean to include malware and rootkit.

See this comment by me which predates your comment and where I correct another poster for the same error.

Mea culpa. You're right.