And the average joe doesn't have hours and hours of specialized high speed driving courses either. Next up, how many times do you see the police checking their laptop while moving. I always see them checking it while pulled over or on the side of the road.
Also, sometimes when cops seemingly are breaking the law doing 60 in a 40, its because many times they are called to haul bloody from one hospital or location to another if ambulances are on other calls and other critical items like that.
Now there are some just Asshole cops out there that think a badge gives them the athourity to do as they please. Especially local yokals.
For hosting small or static sites, the Cobalts were my first choice because of their ease of use. There was no investment in Cpanel, it was built in. When you needed to update, a couple quick clicks in the admin panel and it downloaded the latest patches and installed them.
I know a number of small local ISP's that used them for the same reason and many are dumping them dirt cheap and we are purchasing what we can afford, keeping some for parts, and coloing others, and using some for in house application development.
At least when Sun's products at EOL they release the code, unlike some other companies who's idea it is, sorry WIn..I mean Product X is now no longer supported: please spend more money to upgrade now!
And it makes refrence that British Intel thought it would be likely that the US would invade, not that they were planning a direct attack. Its kind of a misleading headline.
For home use, I would agree with you, but its businesses that are really looking at this technology. Why? They don't need a staff to take care of the telephones and network, you can do everything via your Network staff. Important factor for your medium and large businesses that could stand to save some money using VoIP.
For now, my small consulting company is sticking with good ole land lines and cell service. I am not one to always go out on the cutting edge of technology as I've tended to get cut in the past.
I love coffee. I typicall work 3 - 4 hours aday in a local coffee shop. It got to the point that if I had more than 3 cups in a day I'd start to get jittery and my heart would race. I usually buy the "bottomless cup" for 2 bucks and get a loaded cup to start the day, then switch usually I will have one more cup of cafinated coffee and back to decafe.
We created a website for local up and comming artists can place their work online for galleries to look at. We also own a publishing division that allows these artists to sell images on calandars, posters, postcards, etc. and we sell advertising spaces for local galleries and art supplies stores.
Also, it ligitimatized our technology consulting division in the eyes of many in the area.
Granted our site costs pennies a month to run since we piggy back it off our existing servers and we write it off as a marketing expense.
And one of the big reasons is that marketeers can't call me. When I don't see a number I know, I usually send to voice mail. Granted the other reason why I am cell only is that I am never in one place long enough. I traditionally work from the local coffee house mainly that has $2 all you can drink coffee and free Wifi HSI. I typically spend from 8am till 1PM in the office, then I am gone for the afternoon either meeting with clients, to the library to read up on this week in technology or down to the coffee shop to write up reports and such.
This is old news, but proves what one of my philosphy professors once said, "Don't listen to Enviromentalist, most don't know what they hell they are saying". And he was a pretty liberal professor at that.
I mean its been pointed out that 22k dead in 20 years is pretty low compared to how many die a day of other causes. Wind represents one of the cleaner forms of enegery we have. These people are saying this wind farm should be torn down. What, my question, should we replace it with? I always hear bitching from these groups, yet very few solutions. Personally I think they should shut it down and build a nuclear reactor next to it just to spite the idiots that propagated this report.
The whole NIMBY additude is stupid. We need to do something about adding more power to our grids. Suggest a nuclear plant, there could be a melt down, coal or gas, oh that causes too much acid rain, Wind, those windmills are large, noisy, and are unsightly to look at, solar, it would cost too much, etc. etc.
personally I would like to see the tree-huggers in a giant hampster cage with a wheel they could run on to generate power...
Maybe in Hebrew, but I use my mac in Germany all the time. In fact I have a button on the top bar where I can switch my keyboard layout from US English to german with a click of my mouse.
When I was in germany studying two years ago, I was the only person with with a Mac. Almost everyone at the Fachhochschule had dual boot Windows/Linux machines. Even the college had Linux tech labs.
I was the only one with a Mac. The comp-sci students used to laugh until I booted up Win 98SE via virtual PC. Then they would boot up Linux and I would just open Terminal and remark, "Ah Linux, the Unix-clone. Meet OSX/Darwin...based on FreeBSD Unix. That's right it real Unix, not Unix-like. Top galking and move along". Well maybe not in that way, but it turned a few heads when I could run basically everything they could and more all on one machine.
Also, they liked the placement of my Airport card, nothing hanging out, nicely tucked away under the keyboard. Kudo's to Apple for nice design work.
The 12" powerbook is on my rewards list from my company next year. I have an 18 month old iBook that I purchased during college. My business partner has one of the 12" powerbooks and its great with the superdrive et. al.
I am doing quite a bit of flying between our HQ and clients in Germany and Europe. Sometimes I've been known to steal his notebook for the trip. While I like the larger 14" iBook I have for daily use, when travelling, the 12.1 is lighter and fits on those tray tables quite well.
I keep seeing more and more business travellers with iBooks and powerbooks all the time and they all say two things: better battery life, and damn good laptop. Why hasn't everyone copied Apple's notebook designs?
Maybe so, but Apple being a niche player is something to be said. I mean in the video production business, sure one can buy an avid system and it will do more that a Mac and FCP, but its also about $200k vs. $15k for a fully loaded G5 and software.
Also, Apple puts out a quality product. I know a lot of people that's been having more trouble with the latest dell models in the past year then before. It is nothing for my consulting business to go in and help a small mom and pop shop recover from a windows melt down caused by a virus or just good old windows. We do this at least 3 times a month. Granted, if they had purchased a second harddrive and had the computer make daily back ups for a week's worth of data, things would be much less painful for them. In the past 6 months we've been called once to someone with a mac and it was a 5 year old blueberry tower and the HDD gave out.
In our daily operations, we have about 95% Mac on the desktop, a couple Linux boxes, and FreeBSD on the servers. Knock on wood, but we haven't had one of our macs crash yet. A couple lock up, yes, but then you just turn off and restart. My iBook's locked up 5 times in 18 months. Considering I only reboot for updates, that's not too bad. And 3 of those 5 times I was running an OS9 app in classic and the other 2 was I had just about everything open on my system and decided to open one more picture in Photoshop. Its enough that I have over a dozen clients seriously considering macintoshes for their next office computers. I have also overseen two offices switch to Linux as well.
In the MP3 market, Apple has a chance to reach mass market appeal, especially with this iPod Jr. My business partner owns one of the first iPods and loves it. The only complaint I have heard has been the price, and if they offered a cheaper version, I would even consider it. I am like a lot of people, I have a lot more things on my want list than an iPod for $300.
Unless your looking to power an SMP system...safest or not OpenBSD is still lagging in many areas and why I continue to goto FreeBSD for everything but firewalls
My business partner got XM in his new CTS and we often times have meeting with clients in Arkansas and Oklahoma where your choices are gospel or country over the radio. Now we can actually get a choice to listen too. I will definately be getting it in my next car, but that will be in a few years.
Well said. The first thing many of the OSS community still thinking of Dot Communism and everything is "free" need to learn two things:
Econ 101: There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Opensource is about having the ablity to modify works and have free speech. Its not about free as in no monatary costs.
Take Blender, a lot of people cried foul when they "ransomed" the source code for 100k Euros. Well it took about 6 months and they did it. Why? They have a great tool that showed great promise in the world of 3D Animation which has software that typicall ranges in the $1000's USD per copy.
I know this comment is going to get me trolled, but I am going to say it anyway: This anti-everything crowd in the OSS impeeds the adoption of technologies like Linux because they give OSS a really BAD NAME!
as a customer convenice. And it works. I often work from the coffee house and the long I stay, often times I buy more than just the bottomless cup for $2. Now they do have the ports needed for Kazzaa and other services blocked by an openBSD firewall, set-up via me.
They tried offering service for $3 - $5 an hour and didn't have many takers. It doubt they made any money because they had two used laptops one could rent before wifi gained speed.
Recently, a few more coffee houses have opened around them and they found that offering free WiFI keeps regulars like me comming back and spending money on coffee.
Most small businesses I advise still run Office 2000. They had now need to upgrade and now OpenOffice has advanced enough to fill what most businesses need: wordprocessing and spreadsheet. And half the people I sit in front of its presentation program think its Powerpoint.
I just put it on my dad's computer and the biggest complaint I've heard is that its slow on that first load. That's true, but most will put up with the 30 seconds it takes for the first load to save $500 per machine.
Its not the hardware its the software
on
G5 vs Opteron, Finally
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I guess I've worked in the video production industry too long, but most of the people I have been working with are switching to Macs or upgrading to G5's not because of hardware, but software and the total package.
Answer this question: will final cut pro run on an x86 based machine?
To me, and most Mac users, gaming is irrelvant. Most people that use Macs are in a profession such as desktop publishing, video production, or graphic arts. Sure they may play a game or two, but their machine is used for work.
I do a little bit of everything with my G3 700Mhz 14.1" iBook, but mostly its MS Office, Mail, Safari, and Quark that I use. Along with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop when need be.
Our office is 95% Mac and 5% FreeBSD, which we run on Althon white boxes, and we have beat out competition because of productivty. We are not spending loads of time with viruses and patching security issues on a weekly basis. Our machines rarely lock up, none have crashed (knock on wood), and that helps with the bottom line.
Does it help in video rendering to have the extra speed and power of the 64-bit G5? Yeah, the faster a project is rendered, the quicker we move on to the next. But for everyday business use, our older G4 500's, 867's, and Dual 1.25gz will serve us for years to come and even though Apples cost more up front, we know we have saved time and money by using macs for our desktops.
Well I have some Karma to burn tonight. I don't mind that its the 2.4 KERNAL even though 2.6 is ready. Why? We never put anything on our production server that hasn't been out for at least 6 months with exception of security upgrades.
Second off, If this were M$ testing 2k3 and publishing the paper, everyone here would be crying foul. But because its, "Linux" it must be 100% unbais and true.
I've been using Linux for 8 years now including under high stress enviroments, 3d graphics rendering mainly, and from experiance I have see very good things from Linux. We have had software glitches before, but the core software maybe has caused 3 - 5% of our downtime. Over 70% of our downtime involves human error and about 25% of failures are due to hardware giving out.
Still what my customers are wanting to see isn't benchmarks as "So easy Grandma could use it" in Linux. While the people in the datacenters want to know how well Linux will bear under a load, most end-users and SMB's don't need to worry about it, they just need something easy to use that works.
A sweater from a highend store, old navy vest (kinda reminds me of the one from Back to the Future Micheal J. Fox wore), Landsend pullover, an emergancy roadside kit for my new car, and a set of tools from Home Depot, check for whatever else I want/need. Although, its funny because my Birthday is exactly a month from Christmas eve. So if I didn't get it today, I will in 30 days.
Actually, that tool set is nice and exactly what I needed.
For my Dad: pre-paid Cell Phone with an extra 120 minutes, Reinstalled Windows 98 after a melt down and set him up with Mozilla and OpenOffice.
He wanted a Cell phone to have since he's retired and travels a lot now, but doesn't need a monthly plan. So it will work out well for him.
I have done a lot of work for video production people and placing video clips online and QT is our number one choice. Why? We can encode something in MPEG-4 and it will play on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm Pilot, etc. Not to mention Quicktime Pro is the best $30 we ever spent because its the swiss army knife of conversion.
I live in an area which there were no independant "technology consultants". All of the other "consultants" sold a good or service of some kind and their definition of a "consultant" is really just a sales person that is there to try and sell your business equipement or services that they may or may not need. Generally "Consultant" is the new word for "Technology Salesman".
That's why I formed my company. We act like CIO's for small businesses, say under 25 employees typically, so that when they deal with networking company x, or software sales company y, they have someone on their side to deal on our client's behalf. People that need expert advice when it comes time, but not on an everyday basis.
We preform security audits which has led to people getting fired, but that was because of performance. Often we sit down and make suggestions on firewall settings or equipment they might want to purchase, but we don't sell the equipment or sell to manage it. We usually will place in our report that if a policy needs to be developed or changed we can help sit down with their people and write that policy, but that is as far as our "additional" services go. Still, that is really just paying us for more time consulting than anything.
I've checked out books before that had versions of FreeBSD and other OSS apps. The problem is that many of these books were either missing their interactive content, aka someone forgot to return/lost the CD-ROM. The other problem was often times this software was a year if not more out of date.
Someone recommended a burning on demand. Not a bad idea if someone is willing to keep the people there upto date with new images couple months and train people how to burn the CD's. Its sad to see that many don't know the difference between, say, buring a music CD and an ISO.
Security was everything at one of the places I worked. We had a special lead incased steel room with computer monitors and armed gaurds to get in and out with at least three different methods of Identity conformation. Those units in that room were not networked and media could go in, but not out. When it was time for something to go, the nice distructo matic guys came in, busted the monitors, all the hardware and ran magnates over everything just to make sure. Granted that was a DoD contractor and much of the work in those rooms were even above my security clearance. That's about as secure as you can get, and yes some of the computers ran windows.
As far as that goes, no operating system is 100% secure. The only way its secure is if its off. If you require a password to log on, its vunerable. If to nothing else, someone else on the inside figuring out that password. 80% of all the breaches we see are inside jobs. Either disgruntaled employee, sys admins don't remove passwords of terminated or former employees, or a hacker goes calls on the phone saying, "I'm joe from department x or branch y, and I forgot my password".
Even now, we have an internal network of 3 computers linked to a server that manages our accounting data. None of those boxes are connected to the Internet. That only leaves the possiblity of a breach from within or a unit being stolen physically from our office.
We do a lot of IT consulting and expaning into security, and the one question we always have to ask ourselves and clients, "Okay, nothing is going to be 100% secure, where do you draw the line?" Granted, most of our clients have 20 or fewer employees and aren't doing a lot that needs governmental levels of security. Usually Zone Alarm Pro and Norton is about the best defense these people are going to get for the money. Some larger companies elect on having a dedicated hardware firewall installed or an *BSD box configured as a firewall too.
Now on the desk of an average employee sets either a PowerMac G4 of various speeds, an iMac, iBook (yeah, I'm the President and I have an iBook), or a powerbook all running OS X.2 with my business partner's Powerbook the only 10.3 at the moment. We don't worry about the worm of the week on our machines.
At the end of the day, the way in which Windows is built and the intergration of IE, MP, etc. there is only so much you can do, and saying "Switch to Linux" often isn't the answer as well, at least to our small business clients. And I will defend that position with one word: Quickbooks. At least with Macintosh, they can have their Office, QuickBooks, Email, and Internet with a system they can understand, and provides more security than windows out of the box. Perfect, no, practical, yes.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, sometimes when cops seemingly are breaking the law doing 60 in a 40, its because many times they are called to haul bloody from one hospital or location to another if ambulances are on other calls and other critical items like that.
Now there are some just Asshole cops out there that think a badge gives them the athourity to do as they please. Especially local yokals.
I know a number of small local ISP's that used them for the same reason and many are dumping them dirt cheap and we are purchasing what we can afford, keeping some for parts, and coloing others, and using some for in house application development.
At least when Sun's products at EOL they release the code, unlike some other companies who's idea it is, sorry WIn..I mean Product X is now no longer supported: please spend more money to upgrade now!
And it makes refrence that British Intel thought it would be likely that the US would invade, not that they were planning a direct attack. Its kind of a misleading headline.
For now, my small consulting company is sticking with good ole land lines and cell service. I am not one to always go out on the cutting edge of technology as I've tended to get cut in the past.
Also, it ligitimatized our technology consulting division in the eyes of many in the area.
Granted our site costs pennies a month to run since we piggy back it off our existing servers and we write it off as a marketing expense.
And one of the big reasons is that marketeers can't call me. When I don't see a number I know, I usually send to voice mail. Granted the other reason why I am cell only is that I am never in one place long enough. I traditionally work from the local coffee house mainly that has $2 all you can drink coffee and free Wifi HSI. I typically spend from 8am till 1PM in the office, then I am gone for the afternoon either meeting with clients, to the library to read up on this week in technology or down to the coffee shop to write up reports and such.
I mean its been pointed out that 22k dead in 20 years is pretty low compared to how many die a day of other causes. Wind represents one of the cleaner forms of enegery we have. These people are saying this wind farm should be torn down. What, my question, should we replace it with? I always hear bitching from these groups, yet very few solutions. Personally I think they should shut it down and build a nuclear reactor next to it just to spite the idiots that propagated this report.
The whole NIMBY additude is stupid. We need to do something about adding more power to our grids. Suggest a nuclear plant, there could be a melt down, coal or gas, oh that causes too much acid rain, Wind, those windmills are large, noisy, and are unsightly to look at, solar, it would cost too much, etc. etc.
personally I would like to see the tree-huggers in a giant hampster cage with a wheel they could run on to generate power...
When I was in germany studying two years ago, I was the only person with with a Mac. Almost everyone at the Fachhochschule had dual boot Windows/Linux machines. Even the college had Linux tech labs.
I was the only one with a Mac. The comp-sci students used to laugh until I booted up Win 98SE via virtual PC. Then they would boot up Linux and I would just open Terminal and remark, "Ah Linux, the Unix-clone. Meet OSX/Darwin...based on FreeBSD Unix. That's right it real Unix, not Unix-like. Top galking and move along". Well maybe not in that way, but it turned a few heads when I could run basically everything they could and more all on one machine.
Also, they liked the placement of my Airport card, nothing hanging out, nicely tucked away under the keyboard. Kudo's to Apple for nice design work.
I am doing quite a bit of flying between our HQ and clients in Germany and Europe. Sometimes I've been known to steal his notebook for the trip. While I like the larger 14" iBook I have for daily use, when travelling, the 12.1 is lighter and fits on those tray tables quite well.
I keep seeing more and more business travellers with iBooks and powerbooks all the time and they all say two things: better battery life, and damn good laptop. Why hasn't everyone copied Apple's notebook designs?
Also, Apple puts out a quality product. I know a lot of people that's been having more trouble with the latest dell models in the past year then before. It is nothing for my consulting business to go in and help a small mom and pop shop recover from a windows melt down caused by a virus or just good old windows. We do this at least 3 times a month. Granted, if they had purchased a second harddrive and had the computer make daily back ups for a week's worth of data, things would be much less painful for them. In the past 6 months we've been called once to someone with a mac and it was a 5 year old blueberry tower and the HDD gave out.
In our daily operations, we have about 95% Mac on the desktop, a couple Linux boxes, and FreeBSD on the servers. Knock on wood, but we haven't had one of our macs crash yet. A couple lock up, yes, but then you just turn off and restart. My iBook's locked up 5 times in 18 months. Considering I only reboot for updates, that's not too bad. And 3 of those 5 times I was running an OS9 app in classic and the other 2 was I had just about everything open on my system and decided to open one more picture in Photoshop. Its enough that I have over a dozen clients seriously considering macintoshes for their next office computers. I have also overseen two offices switch to Linux as well.
In the MP3 market, Apple has a chance to reach mass market appeal, especially with this iPod Jr. My business partner owns one of the first iPods and loves it. The only complaint I have heard has been the price, and if they offered a cheaper version, I would even consider it. I am like a lot of people, I have a lot more things on my want list than an iPod for $300.
Unless your looking to power an SMP system...safest or not OpenBSD is still lagging in many areas and why I continue to goto FreeBSD for everything but firewalls
We already have a KHTML based native browser, its called Safari created by Apple. Personally, I like Safari and see no reason to get Konqueror.
My business partner got XM in his new CTS and we often times have meeting with clients in Arkansas and Oklahoma where your choices are gospel or country over the radio. Now we can actually get a choice to listen too. I will definately be getting it in my next car, but that will be in a few years.
Econ 101: There is no such thing as a free lunch!
Opensource is about having the ablity to modify works and have free speech. Its not about free as in no monatary costs.
Take Blender, a lot of people cried foul when they "ransomed" the source code for 100k Euros. Well it took about 6 months and they did it. Why? They have a great tool that showed great promise in the world of 3D Animation which has software that typicall ranges in the $1000's USD per copy.
I know this comment is going to get me trolled, but I am going to say it anyway: This anti-everything crowd in the OSS impeeds the adoption of technologies like Linux because they give OSS a really BAD NAME!
They tried offering service for $3 - $5 an hour and didn't have many takers. It doubt they made any money because they had two used laptops one could rent before wifi gained speed.
Recently, a few more coffee houses have opened around them and they found that offering free WiFI keeps regulars like me comming back and spending money on coffee.
I just put it on my dad's computer and the biggest complaint I've heard is that its slow on that first load. That's true, but most will put up with the 30 seconds it takes for the first load to save $500 per machine.
Answer this question: will final cut pro run on an x86 based machine?
To me, and most Mac users, gaming is irrelvant. Most people that use Macs are in a profession such as desktop publishing, video production, or graphic arts. Sure they may play a game or two, but their machine is used for work.
I do a little bit of everything with my G3 700Mhz 14.1" iBook, but mostly its MS Office, Mail, Safari, and Quark that I use. Along with Final Cut Pro and Photoshop when need be.
Our office is 95% Mac and 5% FreeBSD, which we run on Althon white boxes, and we have beat out competition because of productivty. We are not spending loads of time with viruses and patching security issues on a weekly basis. Our machines rarely lock up, none have crashed (knock on wood), and that helps with the bottom line.
Does it help in video rendering to have the extra speed and power of the 64-bit G5? Yeah, the faster a project is rendered, the quicker we move on to the next. But for everyday business use, our older G4 500's, 867's, and Dual 1.25gz will serve us for years to come and even though Apples cost more up front, we know we have saved time and money by using macs for our desktops.
Second off, If this were M$ testing 2k3 and publishing the paper, everyone here would be crying foul. But because its, "Linux" it must be 100% unbais and true.
I've been using Linux for 8 years now including under high stress enviroments, 3d graphics rendering mainly, and from experiance I have see very good things from Linux. We have had software glitches before, but the core software maybe has caused 3 - 5% of our downtime. Over 70% of our downtime involves human error and about 25% of failures are due to hardware giving out.
Still what my customers are wanting to see isn't benchmarks as "So easy Grandma could use it" in Linux. While the people in the datacenters want to know how well Linux will bear under a load, most end-users and SMB's don't need to worry about it, they just need something easy to use that works.
...that explains cowboyneal
Actually, that tool set is nice and exactly what I needed.
For my Dad: pre-paid Cell Phone with an extra 120 minutes, Reinstalled Windows 98 after a melt down and set him up with Mozilla and OpenOffice.
He wanted a Cell phone to have since he's retired and travels a lot now, but doesn't need a monthly plan. So it will work out well for him.
I have done a lot of work for video production people and placing video clips online and QT is our number one choice. Why? We can encode something in MPEG-4 and it will play on Windows, Mac, Linux, Palm Pilot, etc. Not to mention Quicktime Pro is the best $30 we ever spent because its the swiss army knife of conversion.
That's why I formed my company. We act like CIO's for small businesses, say under 25 employees typically, so that when they deal with networking company x, or software sales company y, they have someone on their side to deal on our client's behalf. People that need expert advice when it comes time, but not on an everyday basis.
We preform security audits which has led to people getting fired, but that was because of performance. Often we sit down and make suggestions on firewall settings or equipment they might want to purchase, but we don't sell the equipment or sell to manage it. We usually will place in our report that if a policy needs to be developed or changed we can help sit down with their people and write that policy, but that is as far as our "additional" services go. Still, that is really just paying us for more time consulting than anything.
Someone recommended a burning on demand. Not a bad idea if someone is willing to keep the people there upto date with new images couple months and train people how to burn the CD's. Its sad to see that many don't know the difference between, say, buring a music CD and an ISO.
As far as that goes, no operating system is 100% secure. The only way its secure is if its off. If you require a password to log on, its vunerable. If to nothing else, someone else on the inside figuring out that password. 80% of all the breaches we see are inside jobs. Either disgruntaled employee, sys admins don't remove passwords of terminated or former employees, or a hacker goes calls on the phone saying, "I'm joe from department x or branch y, and I forgot my password".
Even now, we have an internal network of 3 computers linked to a server that manages our accounting data. None of those boxes are connected to the Internet. That only leaves the possiblity of a breach from within or a unit being stolen physically from our office.
We do a lot of IT consulting and expaning into security, and the one question we always have to ask ourselves and clients, "Okay, nothing is going to be 100% secure, where do you draw the line?" Granted, most of our clients have 20 or fewer employees and aren't doing a lot that needs governmental levels of security. Usually Zone Alarm Pro and Norton is about the best defense these people are going to get for the money. Some larger companies elect on having a dedicated hardware firewall installed or an *BSD box configured as a firewall too.
Now on the desk of an average employee sets either a PowerMac G4 of various speeds, an iMac, iBook (yeah, I'm the President and I have an iBook), or a powerbook all running OS X.2 with my business partner's Powerbook the only 10.3 at the moment. We don't worry about the worm of the week on our machines.
At the end of the day, the way in which Windows is built and the intergration of IE, MP, etc. there is only so much you can do, and saying "Switch to Linux" often isn't the answer as well, at least to our small business clients. And I will defend that position with one word: Quickbooks. At least with Macintosh, they can have their Office, QuickBooks, Email, and Internet with a system they can understand, and provides more security than windows out of the box. Perfect, no, practical, yes.