I wrote a letter to the Speakeasy sales people. The only people who can really influence the decision-makers in the company that I work for are the sales reps, and I assume Speakeasy is no different. Here's what he wrote back. Name of the Speakeasy rep has been omitted:
Hello Dan,
I completely understand your concerns, as this is a huge surprise to me as well! While Speakeasy is now owned by Best Buy, it's important to note that we will continue to operate as a stand alone, independant operation with our headquarters in Seattle. We will not be integrating with Best Buy stores, Geek Squad, Magnolia Hi-Fi or any other Best Buy subsidiary.
Because we won't be integrating, there will be no change or interruption to your existing service or level of customer support as all aspects of your service will continue to be managed by Speakeasy.
But not only that-- Apple has to be able to integrate seamlessly with an existing Exchange installation if they want to make a dent in the server room. The only company that would use Apple's idea of a "groupware" server is a company that doesn't already have its data locked away in Exchange, i.e., a new company.
We have Xserves in our server room. They're not bad-- they get the work done, sharing out 7 TB of data. But they're there for one reason: support for HFS metadata. If it weren't for that one fact, we'd probably would not have gone with them. (BTW, Netatalk is great, but it does not cooperate with Samba wrt file locking) Troubleshooting an Xserve is a royal pain in the ass-- you have very little idea what the GUI tools are doing behind your back.
Yuck. I disagree. Maybe it was a good film, but it was nothing like the book. In fact, I'd say it was only tangentally related to the book, which is a masterpiece of sci-fi and psychological horror, and I think, the best example of the genre. The Russian version is waiting for me when I get home (Netflix), so we'll see if I change my mind. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is, to me, the only movie that has accurately captured the essence of a good sci-fi book.
After hearing this and this, I will never go back to metal again. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some finemusicians in the metal genre, but they all sound banal to me compared to Bach. That even applies to some of the newer metal that I consider to be real works of art.
When I really need something energetic, I switch to Vivaldi. Like others posting here, I find really energetic, complex music to be relaxing. For some strange reason, I already need to be relaxed to listen to "relaxing music". YMMV.
Exchange Server is the ONLY reason why our parent corporation stuck with Microsoft through the NT/Active Directory transition. AD is required to run an Exchange Server. It was a lot easier to stick with Exchange than to switch to a competing product (like Notes or GroupWise). I can't even begin to imagine how difficult moving all of those mail stores would be. Now, if there were another implementation of the Exchange protocols, we probably would have seriously considered it.
I'm sick about hearing that Computer Science "has nothing to do with computers". Backus himself serves as a counterexample. His efforts in the field of Computer Science were precisely because he was unsatisfied with the state of computers. FORTRAN was written so that people who needed the power of computers could utilize them directly, without having to resort to the same things that my father did (like actually knowing the circuit layout of the computer's components!). His formal CS work was a direct result of his work with languages and compilers-- another level of abstraction like how FORTRAN was an abstraction of machine language. This is a recurring theme with many of the pioneers of CS-- People like Knuth and his algorithmic work, Dijkstra and structured programming, Codd and RDBMS, and so on-- their drive was inspired by a their negative experience with the status quo and a desire to move the practice in a new direction because their experience showed them a Better Way.
Certainly, CS, like Physics, is a field big enough to encompass both theoreticians and practitioners. My opinion is that the most important people are the ones who understand the dialectic between the two. The idea that people-who-use-computers can't be Computer Scientists is rubbish.
And the manual is available here. I volunteered work for this briefly, and I was under the impression that it was going to be published in print form as well, but I get the impression from the GNU print manuals webpage that they never did get around to actually printing it.
Firewalls have been around long enough where I simply wouldn't accept this nowadays. I put up with proprietary firewalls for years that were purchased before I was hired here. They were purchased because they had long feature lists and snappy GUIs. But in practice, they were garbage. Their state tables were small, so they often dropped connections. Their VPN implementations were buggy (in fact, a 'factory authorized field consultant' from this one particular company said that no one *really* knew how their IPSec stack worked; I know he was saying this to me in order to give me that "I'm on your side, buddy" kind of feeling, but it made me immediately lose faith in their product). Often the GUIs did not display the proper state of the machine. To add insult to injury, our paid support contract did not include 'premium' features such as access to their tech info library, where you would find out what error IDs actually meant.
After one particularly bad episode with the firewall, where we were required to replace a failing hard drive, we started looking for something new. That hard drive was a standard 2.5 inch Hitachi 40 GB-- but they charged us $500 for the "authorized" part so we wouldn't void our warranty. If they're going to charge you $500 for a part that should cost $100, fuck the warranty, man!
After evaluating our options, we settled on OpenBSD's PF. Several linux firewalls were considered as well, but we went with BSD because we were more familiar with it. We've been extremely pleased with our choice. PF gets better and better with each release, it is highly flexible and customizable, and the rule syntax was easy to learn. We have features that would cost us an arm and a leg in their proprietary counterparts (VPN, dynamic rulesets, firewall failover, and so on), and we can build it on commodity hardware. There's a huge community that has given us technical and moral support, and documentation is freely available. These are full computers, too, so if we need to write a custom monitor or report, piece of cake! And the savings in time and money have been enormous.
And this taught us an extremely valuable lesson-- don't be afraid of the learning curve of applications that don't use a GUI. The fact is, sometimes the problem space is complicated, and a text interface often handles that complexity better than a GUI. Sure, there's a higher nmemonic load, but we work with these machine every day, so we got used to it. You'd have to give me a really good argument at this point to get me to switch over.
I know you're kidding, but we actually have a rather sizeable installation here, installed in devices ranging from low-power communications controllers all the way up to dual Opterons with large disk arrays. OpenBSD has slowly replaced most of our Windows Server boxes, because it "just works".
Last remote root vulnerability for Linux. Note that, like the OpenBSD advisory, there are currently no known exploits. The OpenBSD bug was found by OpenBSD's own developers.
Having backpacked the entire east coast of the US (I thru-hiked the AT in 2003), around New England, Washington State, Grand Canyon, Ireland, Germany, and Austria, the best advice I can give is: go as light as possible.
You can get by on two changes of clothes-- really. You can wash your stuff in the sink and let it dry overnight (go with lightweight, synthetic, and fast-drying clothes). I've become brutally minimalist with the things I carry. Depending on the kind of backpacking you're doing (walking through woods vs. traveling as a tourist) you can get by with less (walking through the woods requires more gear). Suffice it to say, a 4000 cubic inch backpack has more than enough room for all the stuff you need to take with you. If you can't fit your stuff in a 4000 in^3 pack, you need to rethink what you're carrying. For wilderness trips up to 4 days, I currently carry a GoLite 2500 in^3 pack, and for longer hauls (or winter trips), I use a Kelty 4000 in^3. The GoLite is a great bag for doing the tourist thing with.
Anyhow, whether you're going as a tourist or walking through the wild, the principle is the same: your happiness is inversely proportional to the weight of your pack. The one luxury I've never been able to live without is a paperback book; preferably something I don't mind rereading (e.g., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). And I know it's a trendy little machine, but I find that my BlackBerry is really growing on me. I took it on a recent backpack through the White Mountains (actually, I forgot to take it out of my bag), and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still worked in the middle of the wilderness. Not that I had any reason to use it;^) I personally go with the disposable film cameras due to weight, but there is definitely a tradeoff given the quality of newer digital cameras; less of a theft risk, though. I would skip the laptop altogether. The risk of theft combined with the limited utility and added weight rules them out in my mind.
Shoot for being able to take your 'luggage' as carry-on. There's nothing like being able to make a beeline for the bus or car rental place when you hop off your plane while everybody else stares at the luggage carousel. Oh, and avoid clothes that have any metal in them, and get yourself a pair of laceless shoes; I really like Salomon's laceless running shoes. You can slip them on and off easy when you get pulled aside for the airport shoe check.
Apparently you've never experienced a glibc update. That, my friend, is a world of hurt akin to needing to reinstall your copy of Windows. The fact is kernel updates, compiler updates that break binary compatibility, and updates to widely-used dynamic libraries are found on all modern platforms, and they all suck equally. Try following -current on OpenBSD or emerging world on Gentoo for your production machines someday and see if you'd rather just wait for stable releases on your critical machines. I'm personally happy that Microsoft hasn't forgotten that we do actually need maintenance for existing software.
This is exactly what I fear in this sort of discussion... Do yourself a favor, go get a topographical map, and measure on it, from both the high and low tide marks, which are usually on the order of a METER apart, a "few centimeters" (that is, a small number, more than 3... say 10). Now, how much land on that topographical map is within your measurement.... go. Try it out. Oh, you'll find that most such maps are measured off in >1 meter increments.... I am not a climate scientist. However I can think of one simple objection to the claim that climate change is "no big deal". That is, agricultural economies are deeply dependent on growing conditions. The US midwest and California contain vast swaths of land used for agriculture, and although I am not an economist, I know that food production is hugely important to the economies in those states. The loss or diminishment of that industry would most certainly be felt in the United States. Even if there were no "net loss" in arable land in the US, how would the mere "shifting" of those regions affect the economy?
So the question is-- why not be cautious? We have the ability and technological means to begin using alternative energy sources. I dispute the idea that using other sources of power would be "damaging" to the economy-- somebody has to produce the tools used to capture that energy, no? If you factor in non-climate-related reasons for alternative energy like how energy independence would help mitigate foreign threats (e.g., Putin's new totalitarian push), I see no reason not to at least move forward in this direction.
The assertion that a previous poster had that tundra was "useless" is absurd. Global ecology is complicated, and we've learned repeatedly that "useless" environments-- like the Oklahoma grasslands and the wetlands on the East Coast of the US-- were in fact, very important. The destruction of these and other habitats was what made us environmentally-conscious in the first place. How many times do we need to repeat that lesson before we finally recognize that the Earth is an interconnected system? Better be safe than sorry. This isn't fearmongering-- it is being a responsible citizen and steward of our very unique home.
That really wasn't the point of the original post. The original poster complained, in so many words, that OS X was isolationist and did everything its own way. That's wrong. Whenever possible, OS X does things how other modern *NIXs do things. Aside from Quartz, Cocoa, and Carbon, most everything in OS X is built off open technologies. OpenGL, LDAP, CUPS, NFS, SSH, etc are all part of the core platform. One minor complaint I have about the MacOS is the use of preferences files and system configuration data. The system and applications use.plist files to store their configuration data. This was fine and easy to make the switch mentally from my BSD experience, since.plist files are just XML. But starting in 10.4, Apple starting shipping the system with binary.plist files. There's a system utility to convert between ASCII and binary, but I find it to be irritating now and then.
Another complaint that I don't consider to be minor is Apple's directory information store. Sure, BSD's/etc/passwd and/etc/group files are probably a little outdated. They certainly aren't as powerful as NetInfo or OpenDirectory. But they are also far simpler. It would have been nice to be able to choose between one and the other, and although I do understand that Apple's authentication framework does let me use those files with the proper plugin, that kinda defeats the "simple" part I mentioned before.
Other than that, you're right-- Apple did go to great lengths to stay compatible with the rest of the UNIX world.
And both Linux and Windows can read-write HFS+. However, Windows won't install on ext2 or UFS, Linux won't install on NTFS, UFS, or HFS+, so why is it a surprise that OS X won't install on NTFS or ext3? The original poster asked "why does OS X use its own disk format", and the answer is: "almost every OS uses its own, preferred disk format". There are exceptions, and Linux is particularly flexible in this regard, but even on Linux there is a de-facto standard that is the most well-supported. There's also a need to use HFS+ in the Mac OS: metadata. The current Mac OS is still backward-compatible with files going all the way back to the original Macintosh system software. For me, being able to preserve that data without special encoding has been very, very useful, since I do still have a fair amount of (still useful) legacy software. No other filesystem that I know of can handle HFS+ metadata.
The problem is the completely uncritical coverage of miraculous claims, and the glaring technical errors that horribly distort the science. Is it common for journalists/editors to run a draft of their article past an actual scientist in the field? If not, why doesn't this happen? Pride? Deadlines? Journalism guidelines? Because there are no repercussions for being wrong. The only people who care are the small number of scientists who know the difference. Your average casual science reader mentions a "breakthrough" to his wife over his Sunday morning bacon and toast who replies "What will they think of next?" Science reporting is essentially for shits and giggles, since most experts get their "news" through conference talks, mailing lists, or peer-reviewed journals. Science reporting is good filler and it sells papers.
Contrast this with political reporting, where printing false or misleading statements can, at the very least, put you in trouble with your paper's management, and at the worst can put you in front of a grand jury. Note that journalists are much more careful with their facts in this case.
You're right about Exchange being a major impediment to Apple's penetration into the corporate market. But the thing is-- an Exchange installation is difficult to install and maintain, but even more difficult to remove. And the bigger that installation is, the harder it is to switch to something else. I oversee a small chunk (~250 users) of a large Exchange installation (~5k users). The only way you could get me to switch (and believe me, I really want to) is if the new application were 1) reliable, 2) fundamentally better, and 3) able to integrate fully with Exchange. And by fully integrate, I mean stuff like, can the big cheese in my company see the calendar of the big cheese in our sister company? Because my users wouldn't give two shits about what platform we're on if I couldn't deliver that kind of functionality (the functionality they already have).
Another big downside to Apple hardware and support-- it is not designed for your typical IT support shop. IBM (er, Lenovo) laptops, for instance, are user-servicable. Apple's are "not". They really want you to go through an Apple channel for warranty repair. All of IBM's laptops have quickly removable drives to make imaging and repair fast. All parts are replaceable by your in-house staff with the right contract. Apple insists on doing repairs at their facilities, or for more money, on-site service. At the rate that stuff breaks where I work, those kinds of machines simply would not be acceptable.
Oh, and the docking stations. None of Apple's machines can "dock". That doesn't fly with the PHBs.
Don't get me wrong. I've been an Apple user since my first Macintosh SE, and I still use my Mac-zilla (extremely hacked Sawtooth G4) every day at home. But Apple needs to make some big changes to be ready for the enterprise. Apple is very good at providing "cool" gear; they make you want their product. They've never, to my knowledge, provided what people need.
Slashdot Mirror
I can confirm that your image completely freezes a MacOS X 10.4.8 machine running Camino (Version 2006061318 (1.0.2)). Ow.
'Nuff said.
Er, yeah. It's a classic. New to sci-fi, are you?
I completely understand your concerns, as this is a huge surprise to me as well! While Speakeasy is now owned by Best Buy, it's important to note that we will continue to operate as a stand alone, independant operation with our headquarters in Seattle. We will not be integrating with Best Buy stores, Geek Squad, Magnolia Hi-Fi or any other Best Buy subsidiary.
Because we won't be integrating, there will be no change or interruption to your existing service or level of customer support as all aspects of your service will continue to be managed by Speakeasy.
Best regards,
**** *******
But not only that-- Apple has to be able to integrate seamlessly with an existing Exchange installation if they want to make a dent in the server room. The only company that would use Apple's idea of a "groupware" server is a company that doesn't already have its data locked away in Exchange, i.e., a new company.
We have Xserves in our server room. They're not bad-- they get the work done, sharing out 7 TB of data. But they're there for one reason: support for HFS metadata. If it weren't for that one fact, we'd probably would not have gone with them. (BTW, Netatalk is great, but it does not cooperate with Samba wrt file locking) Troubleshooting an Xserve is a royal pain in the ass-- you have very little idea what the GUI tools are doing behind your back.
Yuck. I disagree. Maybe it was a good film, but it was nothing like the book. In fact, I'd say it was only tangentally related to the book, which is a masterpiece of sci-fi and psychological horror, and I think, the best example of the genre. The Russian version is waiting for me when I get home (Netflix), so we'll see if I change my mind. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is, to me, the only movie that has accurately captured the essence of a good sci-fi book.
Yes, but you can squeeze it to get the second one.
Congratulations on having the first informative post in this entire thread. Thanks for the input!
After hearing this and this, I will never go back to metal again. Don't get me wrong, there are certainly some fine musicians in the metal genre, but they all sound banal to me compared to Bach. That even applies to some of the newer metal that I consider to be real works of art.
When I really need something energetic, I switch to Vivaldi. Like others posting here, I find really energetic, complex music to be relaxing. For some strange reason, I already need to be relaxed to listen to "relaxing music". YMMV.
Redundant penis? Is that like a penis array? A Redundant Array of Inexpensive Penises? Wait... that doesn't sound right...
... that the printer isn't dumping out pre-printed pages?
Exchange Server is the ONLY reason why our parent corporation stuck with Microsoft through the NT/Active Directory transition. AD is required to run an Exchange Server. It was a lot easier to stick with Exchange than to switch to a competing product (like Notes or GroupWise). I can't even begin to imagine how difficult moving all of those mail stores would be. Now, if there were another implementation of the Exchange protocols, we probably would have seriously considered it.
I'm sick about hearing that Computer Science "has nothing to do with computers". Backus himself serves as a counterexample. His efforts in the field of Computer Science were precisely because he was unsatisfied with the state of computers. FORTRAN was written so that people who needed the power of computers could utilize them directly, without having to resort to the same things that my father did (like actually knowing the circuit layout of the computer's components!). His formal CS work was a direct result of his work with languages and compilers-- another level of abstraction like how FORTRAN was an abstraction of machine language. This is a recurring theme with many of the pioneers of CS-- People like Knuth and his algorithmic work, Dijkstra and structured programming, Codd and RDBMS, and so on-- their drive was inspired by a their negative experience with the status quo and a desire to move the practice in a new direction because their experience showed them a Better Way.
Certainly, CS, like Physics, is a field big enough to encompass both theoreticians and practitioners. My opinion is that the most important people are the ones who understand the dialectic between the two. The idea that people-who-use-computers can't be Computer Scientists is rubbish.
And the manual is available here. I volunteered work for this briefly, and I was under the impression that it was going to be published in print form as well, but I get the impression from the GNU print manuals webpage that they never did get around to actually printing it.
Firewalls have been around long enough where I simply wouldn't accept this nowadays. I put up with proprietary firewalls for years that were purchased before I was hired here. They were purchased because they had long feature lists and snappy GUIs. But in practice, they were garbage. Their state tables were small, so they often dropped connections. Their VPN implementations were buggy (in fact, a 'factory authorized field consultant' from this one particular company said that no one *really* knew how their IPSec stack worked; I know he was saying this to me in order to give me that "I'm on your side, buddy" kind of feeling, but it made me immediately lose faith in their product). Often the GUIs did not display the proper state of the machine. To add insult to injury, our paid support contract did not include 'premium' features such as access to their tech info library, where you would find out what error IDs actually meant.
After one particularly bad episode with the firewall, where we were required to replace a failing hard drive, we started looking for something new. That hard drive was a standard 2.5 inch Hitachi 40 GB-- but they charged us $500 for the "authorized" part so we wouldn't void our warranty. If they're going to charge you $500 for a part that should cost $100, fuck the warranty, man!
After evaluating our options, we settled on OpenBSD's PF. Several linux firewalls were considered as well, but we went with BSD because we were more familiar with it. We've been extremely pleased with our choice. PF gets better and better with each release, it is highly flexible and customizable, and the rule syntax was easy to learn. We have features that would cost us an arm and a leg in their proprietary counterparts (VPN, dynamic rulesets, firewall failover, and so on), and we can build it on commodity hardware. There's a huge community that has given us technical and moral support, and documentation is freely available. These are full computers, too, so if we need to write a custom monitor or report, piece of cake! And the savings in time and money have been enormous.
And this taught us an extremely valuable lesson-- don't be afraid of the learning curve of applications that don't use a GUI. The fact is, sometimes the problem space is complicated, and a text interface often handles that complexity better than a GUI. Sure, there's a higher nmemonic load, but we work with these machine every day, so we got used to it. You'd have to give me a really good argument at this point to get me to switch over.
I know you're kidding, but we actually have a rather sizeable installation here, installed in devices ranging from low-power communications controllers all the way up to dual Opterons with large disk arrays. OpenBSD has slowly replaced most of our Windows Server boxes, because it "just works".
We should call it the "B Ark". LEMON?!
Last remote root vulnerability for Linux. Note that, like the OpenBSD advisory, there are currently no known exploits. The OpenBSD bug was found by OpenBSD's own developers.
Having backpacked the entire east coast of the US (I thru-hiked the AT in 2003), around New England, Washington State, Grand Canyon, Ireland, Germany, and Austria, the best advice I can give is: go as light as possible.
;^) I personally go with the disposable film cameras due to weight, but there is definitely a tradeoff given the quality of newer digital cameras; less of a theft risk, though. I would skip the laptop altogether. The risk of theft combined with the limited utility and added weight rules them out in my mind.
You can get by on two changes of clothes-- really. You can wash your stuff in the sink and let it dry overnight (go with lightweight, synthetic, and fast-drying clothes). I've become brutally minimalist with the things I carry. Depending on the kind of backpacking you're doing (walking through woods vs. traveling as a tourist) you can get by with less (walking through the woods requires more gear). Suffice it to say, a 4000 cubic inch backpack has more than enough room for all the stuff you need to take with you. If you can't fit your stuff in a 4000 in^3 pack, you need to rethink what you're carrying. For wilderness trips up to 4 days, I currently carry a GoLite 2500 in^3 pack, and for longer hauls (or winter trips), I use a Kelty 4000 in^3. The GoLite is a great bag for doing the tourist thing with.
Anyhow, whether you're going as a tourist or walking through the wild, the principle is the same: your happiness is inversely proportional to the weight of your pack. The one luxury I've never been able to live without is a paperback book; preferably something I don't mind rereading (e.g., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). And I know it's a trendy little machine, but I find that my BlackBerry is really growing on me. I took it on a recent backpack through the White Mountains (actually, I forgot to take it out of my bag), and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still worked in the middle of the wilderness. Not that I had any reason to use it
Shoot for being able to take your 'luggage' as carry-on. There's nothing like being able to make a beeline for the bus or car rental place when you hop off your plane while everybody else stares at the luggage carousel. Oh, and avoid clothes that have any metal in them, and get yourself a pair of laceless shoes; I really like Salomon's laceless running shoes. You can slip them on and off easy when you get pulled aside for the airport shoe check.
Apparently you've never experienced a glibc update. That, my friend, is a world of hurt akin to needing to reinstall your copy of Windows. The fact is kernel updates, compiler updates that break binary compatibility, and updates to widely-used dynamic libraries are found on all modern platforms, and they all suck equally. Try following -current on OpenBSD or emerging world on Gentoo for your production machines someday and see if you'd rather just wait for stable releases on your critical machines. I'm personally happy that Microsoft hasn't forgotten that we do actually need maintenance for existing software.
So the question is-- why not be cautious? We have the ability and technological means to begin using alternative energy sources. I dispute the idea that using other sources of power would be "damaging" to the economy-- somebody has to produce the tools used to capture that energy, no? If you factor in non-climate-related reasons for alternative energy like how energy independence would help mitigate foreign threats (e.g., Putin's new totalitarian push), I see no reason not to at least move forward in this direction.
The assertion that a previous poster had that tundra was "useless" is absurd. Global ecology is complicated, and we've learned repeatedly that "useless" environments-- like the Oklahoma grasslands and the wetlands on the East Coast of the US-- were in fact, very important. The destruction of these and other habitats was what made us environmentally-conscious in the first place. How many times do we need to repeat that lesson before we finally recognize that the Earth is an interconnected system? Better be safe than sorry. This isn't fearmongering-- it is being a responsible citizen and steward of our very unique home.
Another complaint that I don't consider to be minor is Apple's directory information store. Sure, BSD's
Minor point: only FreeBSD uses UFS. Other BSDs use variants of FFS.
Contrast this with political reporting, where printing false or misleading statements can, at the very least, put you in trouble with your paper's management, and at the worst can put you in front of a grand jury. Note that journalists are much more careful with their facts in this case.
You're right about Exchange being a major impediment to Apple's penetration into the corporate market. But the thing is-- an Exchange installation is difficult to install and maintain, but even more difficult to remove. And the bigger that installation is, the harder it is to switch to something else. I oversee a small chunk (~250 users) of a large Exchange installation (~5k users). The only way you could get me to switch (and believe me, I really want to) is if the new application were 1) reliable, 2) fundamentally better, and 3) able to integrate fully with Exchange. And by fully integrate, I mean stuff like, can the big cheese in my company see the calendar of the big cheese in our sister company? Because my users wouldn't give two shits about what platform we're on if I couldn't deliver that kind of functionality (the functionality they already have).
Another big downside to Apple hardware and support-- it is not designed for your typical IT support shop. IBM (er, Lenovo) laptops, for instance, are user-servicable. Apple's are "not". They really want you to go through an Apple channel for warranty repair. All of IBM's laptops have quickly removable drives to make imaging and repair fast. All parts are replaceable by your in-house staff with the right contract. Apple insists on doing repairs at their facilities, or for more money, on-site service. At the rate that stuff breaks where I work, those kinds of machines simply would not be acceptable.
Oh, and the docking stations. None of Apple's machines can "dock". That doesn't fly with the PHBs.
Don't get me wrong. I've been an Apple user since my first Macintosh SE, and I still use my Mac-zilla (extremely hacked Sawtooth G4) every day at home. But Apple needs to make some big changes to be ready for the enterprise. Apple is very good at providing "cool" gear; they make you want their product. They've never, to my knowledge, provided what people need.