Dude,
Did you find the massive heap of PDF's on the Server install disk? They are large, large documents chock-full of good stuff. Everything you need to know to get started with NetInfo, filesharing, netboot, workgroup manager, etc.
Did you know you can look through the discussions on Apple's website to find all kinds of information, nicely organized by topic, to see what else other people are doing to solve problems? Lots of good stuff.
I think you are not giving the provided documentation on the install disk enough credit, nor using the other resources provided by Apple, in short.
Now, you raise a good point about third-party resources. It would be nice if there were more books on the bookshelf in regards to OS X Server, but there are a couple now and more on the way.
The real point is, if IT Admins were to realistically evaluate the offerings of Windows vs. Mac as a primary business platform or integrating one into the other in a heterogenous environment, many more networks would have OS X present.
If IT admins had to justify excluding macs or better yet, making further investments into Windows licensing, every year in their annual budget (or performance review!), many more networks would have OS X present.
I believe every large exploit that is announced or better yet, utilized to damage networks, will drive more customers to OS X.
Here's hoping.
I think this post is borderline trolling, but I can't be sure. In case it isn't, I wanted to pipe in with some counter-points.
One, the FBI does use Mac OS X. The article referenced by the GP is at http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/sfonline/colu mnists-item.pl?id=215. It is anecdotal, but unsurprisingly, the FBI doesn't seem to publish an official document detailing which OS's they operate and in what numbers.
Two, it doesn't matter how many el-cheapo Intel boxes you can get at Fry's from the bargain bin: what matters is how many can an institutional buyer like the Air Force get. Yeah, I think they can get a pretty good price on Macintoshes by agreeing to buy truckloads of them.
Three, the initial cost is far from the largest factor in the lifetime cost of a PC to the military. Focusing on purchase cost of a commodity good is really a case of diminishing returns. TCO is the place you want to focus.
Four, to get that large a price-differential on initial cost, you must be comparing bargain bin boxes with a Mac, or a 'typical' Dell box with the absolute highest-end Mac workstation possible. If you go apples-to-apples, feature-to-feature, you find that the price differntial between a Mac suitable for general purpose computing (iMac) and an Intel-based box from a major vendor like Dell or HP to be very small, under %10, plus/minus %15. Yeah, sometimes the Mac is cheaper.
Five, that security dig at the end of your post really sets the troll-tone for the whole message. Market share isn't installed base, please go do some research on that point. It is one of the most commonly misconstrued pieces of data that appears in technical columns. Security isn't synonymous with a lack of viruses, either, it goes well beyond that.
Lastly, cost, security and viruses are all tangential to the main question: which platform is going to actually perform with the necessary functionality, with the necessary uptime and meeting all other requirements? It may not be Mac OS X, but I really doubt its going to be Windows.
You know, I'm reading your message again, and now I'm sure: IHBT. You aren't advocating anything in your post and don't have any references to back up anything you do say. You assure us that Max (sic) would have their fair share of viruses if they had a larger market share, by which I must assume you mean installed base, but without any evidence to support the assurance. Has there been even a proof-of-concept virus for OS X? Not root kits, and not some kind of honor system virus ('Please email this shell script to all your friends and ask them to run it as root. Thank you!'), but an actual auto-execute and auto-propogate virus?
No.
Could it happen? You betcha, but the fact that it hasn't after this many years tells me that it is far from easy.
I'll assure you of this: so long as Windows is so easy to target with viruses that kids in VB classes do it for class projects, there won't be a virus issue on Mac OS X or Linux. Why would there be, when there is such a susceptible population of machines available? Even when Windows installed base drops to 30%, it will still have the majority of viruses. Why? Because its just too damn easy.
Stick that in your troll-pipe and smoke it.
Two of the coolest things about PGP in a corporate environment are split keys and signing everything to a designated key. You can set it up such that everything gets encrypted to a master key, which you split. That way, when someone has locked something up and their key is no longer available, the superfriends can get together and re-unite the master key to unlock whatever. Nobody actually has to write down anything to keep from getting locked out.
Forgotten passwords you handle by having a designated revoker to kill your old key, then make a new one. Right?
the 'Ticket Guarantee' was one of the worst cases of corporate welfare you will ever find. Absolutely amazing.
In short version, it was this: If the Chargers didn't sell out the stadium, the city would buy all the unsold tickets. There was no requirement on the Chargers to promote ticket sales, lower prices or anything that a normal for-profit enterprise might do when having trouble moving their product.
The end result was that the taxpayers of San Diego, all 7 million of us, paid a subsidy to make sure that the Chargers fans in the area could watch the game on TV.
I'm please to report that after several years gorging at the public feedtrough, the Chargers have been cut off and the ticket guarantee is now a political 'third rail' issue: nobody wants to take any ownership of the deal or be associated with it in anyway.
The Chargers organization is now causing a ruckus with the local politicos to try to get a new stadium built and some other concessions, or they'll move to LA.
Here's why you are getting modded flamebait: Promoting the Dashboard == Konfabulator ripoff myth, using the phrase 'remain silent on security issues' and calling 10.3 an 'update' when it was clearly marketed and correctly described as an 'upgrade'.
Also, admonish doesn't mean what you think it means. For instance, I'm admonishing you now: "Bad troll! Down!".
Okay, you aren't exactly trolling, but this was a flame-worthy post.
For a user who wants to 'talk objectively', you sure use some funny phrases.
Halfbaked,
Usually your posts are more on-point than this.
The questions was 'What operating system does Dell produce and what contributions have they made to the open source community?
Got any answers on those questions?
I've got to chime in on this. I'm a former employee of a local reseller in San Diego.
Would I want to be a customer at that reseller? Not really. Location is a warehouse in an industrial park, entrance is hidden on the side, merchandise is not super-well-organized, prices are not displayed on anything and all the customers, apparently, phone each other and come in at the same time. So the effect is that the sales staff is either completely bored out of their gourd or totally overwhelmed. Each of them wants to give their full attention to their customer, which is good, but if you aren't the customer in front of them, you don't get any attention.
Additionally, they consistently fail to deliver on promises. Some of this is due to cash flow issues (c'mon, they're a small business). Some due to Apple filling orders TO THEIR OWN STORES before shipping constrained product to resellers. That's just rotten, but it happens with every new product. Sometimes due to the personnel involved: these people are Mac fanatics first, sales and service second. Their heart is in the right place, but the professionalism can be lacking.
Lest you think I'm just dishing on an old employer, I'll say this about that. I didn't really do a lot to bring up the level of professionalism, myself. And I really liked the people I worked with, all were decent folk. I wish them well, but man, the cards are really stacked against them and not getting better.
Here's the deal: without these front-line risk-takers throughout the 90's, I don't think Apple would be here today. Seriously. To have Apple fail to figure out how to work with resellers after all these years is inexecusable, to have Apple kill off this channel of sales is really, really awful. Yeah, it's business, but it just seems like corporate has to take more responsibility for the success of their resellers and they have to understand that they are burning a bridge they've been using for years if they do kill off resellers.
Wish I had an answer, all I have is some experience.
WTF? Aren't A-10's operated by the Army? They seem to be armed and fixed-wing. What's this 'not allowed' language? The Navy has planes, the Army has boats, the Air Force has trucks and the Marine Corps has one of everything.
Back to the original point, though, supersonic 'bombs' aren't too likely under any insignia, lest they start dropping them off of spaceshipone. Artillery shells or rockets, sure. Really big bullets, you bet. Not gravity bombs.
Yeah, that's 'current' not 'currant', first off. My OS X web-surfing app can spellcheck my posts to slashdot, can your linux box do that? Then why didn't you?
And I also have some problems with your assertion that Mac OS X servers crashed daily. I'm not reading that anywhere else, do you have anything to back it up? I mean, seriously, our servers here are limited in uptime by the anal-retentive nature of my supervisor and the release of software updates, no crashing. Ever.
How many of your sysadmins have been to Apple-certified training classes? How many OS X books do they have in their department? I smell the smell of Windows administrators being asked to buy Apple servers because the graphics folks insisted on it, not because the IT department understood what problem they were solving.
who am I kidding, this is just another AC troll. Shouldn't have wasted my time.
You need to update your experiences. Alt-Tab has been available since 10.2, and improved in 10.3 (Panther). Additionally, you would find that Panther runs faster on the iBook you sold than did the OS with which it shipped. By 'faster', I mean usably fast, and all applications are faster as well.
Point 1 is still totally valid and a source of irritation for me. Apple ships more Unix workstations per year than does Sun, but Sun and Apple don't seem to be on the same page when it comes to the JDK.
Point 3, see above regarding speed. The Thinkpads are totally usable, but the battery life is really sad next to an Apple portable. Also, Windows XP is no speed demon in my experience on a T222. Windows draw slowly sometimes, trying to alt-tab to another application is erratically unresponsive, launching multiple applications at one time bogs the machine to a standstill, and every Windows Update requires a reboot. Total productive time in a Windows environment is significantly less, for me, than the same gross time spent on an Apple portable.
I wish there was a benchmark for 'how much work did you get done in 8 hours' as opposed to 'how many calculations per second can this hardware/software perform', because the first benchmark is the one that matters to me, and Mac OS X would own it.
I think DVB must be a fairly small-scale activity for computer users. You certainly don't see these cards sitting around in the average computer retailer space, and I hadn't heard of it before your post (joke/yeah, typical of slashdot readership, I assume if I haven't heard of it, it isn't true/doesn't exist/doesn't matter/joke) Also, 2 of the solutions mentioned by the other poster include time-shifting capabilities, I do believe. With El Gato, I believe you can record an hour of (analog) TV down to 700 MB in MPEG format. With the built-in burner on your mac, it becomes quiet simple to burn a collection of your favorite shows, recorded automatically for you.
Point 2: As a Mac user, I don't want Apple to spend time developing a specialized piece of hardware to do DVB for the few hobbyists that are interested and snub the extant offerings mentioned here. Third-parties can do that if they like, it certainly is easy enough to develop on the Mac. Apple (or any other manufacturer) has done all they need to do by producing good, free development tools, plentiful documentation and standards-compliant hardware.
Point 3: The question of ratio of support staff to workstations is always a funny one. My wife's company is typical I think of many Windows-based workplaces. Their ratio is somewhere between 100 and 150 to one. Sounds great, right? Well, their level of support is quite bad. For most problems, the users are self-supporting. The 'support' staff is mostly used for administration of services and carting hardware around. The people in her department, like all the other departments with which she interacts, all solve their own problems. Not because they want to or know how to, but because they put in a trouble ticket, attempt to solve the problem continuously and eventually persevere. Tech support will (1-3 days later) call to see if the trouble ticket is still valid, the user says, "No, I sorta fixed it this morning" and that is that. Not what I call sparkling support, but certainly typical of what I've seen in Windows-based offices. Odd, considering the dollar value of the time of her coworkers. Odder still, she is under the impression that the IT support is outsourced through IBM, and I think she might be right. Who knew they did that, and who knew they were bad at it?
Point 4: What the heck is 'wads of cash'? I know you gave a price for your motherboard in the earlier post, but seriously, what did the whole system (including OS) cost you to get home and assemble? (Total USD and hours spent, please) I'm not seeing 'wads of cash' as a differential when I price comparable commercially-available Windows computers compared to G4's or G5's. If you found a way to beat that, please enlighten with detailed specs and how the performance has been (subjectivity okay, just don't stoop to the level of using benchmarks).
The benefit of a Mac will become clear if you are forced to use one for about 4 weeks. That's how long it will take to unlearn some Windows habits and begin to appreciate the fact that Mac OS X and the hardware on which it rides do not fight you as you try to get your work done. The longer you use it after that, the harder it will be to go back to Windows.
I recommend you borrow one from someone, a faster G3 or newer with Jaguar on it. Do some programming, do some websurfing and word-processing, check out how very well, how beautifully, Mac OS X Mail.app filters out spam. You may not end up buying one, but you will understand the appeal.
cperciva said:
"...if SCO loses, it will send a strong message to the world: 'Stay away from anything GPL, or you'll find your proprietary code taken away from you.'"
I think you are making a very, very big assumption here that SCO may have facts on their side. The prevailing assumption on/., and my own opinion, is that they have no legal legs to stand on. They have acted excessively squirrelly throughout this thing and seem to be making up strategy as they go. I can't believe their motivation is what they say it is.
Remember, this isn't about IP, it's about an (alleged) contract violation by IBM, right? It isn't about GPL or LGPL or any other license scheme, it is about a contract between IBM and SCO.
I think the strong message being sent to the world is, 'Don't partner with SCO'.
You have implied a valid concern regarding companies perceptions of open source licensing, in that many companies PHB's seem to assume that using or modifying for their own use an OSS requires releasing their code back to the world. Obviously this isn't true, but there is a lot of confusion in this area that all OSS advocates need to address any chance they get. I certainly don't understand all the nuances of GPL vs. LGPL vs. BSD vs. RPL vs. MIT , etc... and I don't meet that many people that do.
Mods, the parent post is a troll.
Please note the following Mac myths being propogated:
1) Difficult to develop on a Mac
2) Mac's are expensive
There is also some ignorance of the Human Interface Guidelines available from Apple, which do not require you to "use Macs for a year or two until you start to wrap your brain around how users expect the system to work." No, you certainly don't have to use a Mac for a couple of years. Read the guidelines, use the (free) development tools available from Apple which guide you towards the guidelines by their very nature, you will be able to successfully program on the mac in no time. Check out Hydra (http://hydra.globalse.org/index.html), written in about 8 weeks and totally rocks. I use it for collaborative programming on scripts. Find a Mac and check out this software, it will blow you away. Written in 8 weeks.
Whoops, rambling,, lost the thread here.
Oh, yeah, TROLL!
Point One: ECC only helps with one bit of data damage on the chip, any more than that, you get no help. Considering the extra expense, engineering and slightly degraded performance involved with ECC, Apple made the right decision to go with standard DDR SDRAM.
Point Two: The PSU in the xServe is engineered to carry the typical working load of the server. In fact, the most the server can draw is ?105% of PSU capacity and typically runs at 70%-80%. Compare this with most Intel-based 1U servers, you'll find most of them run at 100% of the PSU rated capacity as a typical load, and can peak at 125%. That extra load really, really shortens PSU lifespan and drives up heat production tremendously. I think the failure rate on the solo PSU on the XServe is going to be low enough to tolerate, and I have the ability to monitor the XServe power supplies (12v and 5v) remotely using the tools built-in to Mac OS X Server if I'm nervous.
Correction: Apple has announced no intention of abandoning the iBook, nor should they anytime soon. It still has a little life left in it. And what do you consider ' -very- soon', the iBook has been around for years?!? Is that flamebait, or do you actually not know that the iBook has been very successful for the last 3 years?
Slashdot Mirror
Dude,
Did you find the massive heap of PDF's on the Server install disk? They are large, large documents chock-full of good stuff. Everything you need to know to get started with NetInfo, filesharing, netboot, workgroup manager, etc.
Did you know you can look through the discussions on Apple's website to find all kinds of information, nicely organized by topic, to see what else other people are doing to solve problems? Lots of good stuff.
I think you are not giving the provided documentation on the install disk enough credit, nor using the other resources provided by Apple, in short.
Now, you raise a good point about third-party resources. It would be nice if there were more books on the bookshelf in regards to OS X Server, but there are a couple now and more on the way.
The real point is, if IT Admins were to realistically evaluate the offerings of Windows vs. Mac as a primary business platform or integrating one into the other in a heterogenous environment, many more networks would have OS X present.
If IT admins had to justify excluding macs or better yet, making further investments into Windows licensing, every year in their annual budget (or performance review!), many more networks would have OS X present.
I believe every large exploit that is announced or better yet, utilized to damage networks, will drive more customers to OS X.
Here's hoping.
I think this post is borderline trolling, but I can't be sure. In case it isn't, I wanted to pipe in with some counter-points.u mnists-item.pl?id=215. It is anecdotal, but unsurprisingly, the FBI doesn't seem to publish an official document detailing which OS's they operate and in what numbers.
One, the FBI does use Mac OS X. The article referenced by the GP is at http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/sfonline/col
Two, it doesn't matter how many el-cheapo Intel boxes you can get at Fry's from the bargain bin: what matters is how many can an institutional buyer like the Air Force get. Yeah, I think they can get a pretty good price on Macintoshes by agreeing to buy truckloads of them.
Three, the initial cost is far from the largest factor in the lifetime cost of a PC to the military. Focusing on purchase cost of a commodity good is really a case of diminishing returns. TCO is the place you want to focus.
Four, to get that large a price-differential on initial cost, you must be comparing bargain bin boxes with a Mac, or a 'typical' Dell box with the absolute highest-end Mac workstation possible. If you go apples-to-apples, feature-to-feature, you find that the price differntial between a Mac suitable for general purpose computing (iMac) and an Intel-based box from a major vendor like Dell or HP to be very small, under %10, plus/minus %15. Yeah, sometimes the Mac is cheaper.
Five, that security dig at the end of your post really sets the troll-tone for the whole message. Market share isn't installed base, please go do some research on that point. It is one of the most commonly misconstrued pieces of data that appears in technical columns. Security isn't synonymous with a lack of viruses, either, it goes well beyond that.
Lastly, cost, security and viruses are all tangential to the main question: which platform is going to actually perform with the necessary functionality, with the necessary uptime and meeting all other requirements? It may not be Mac OS X, but I really doubt its going to be Windows.
You know, I'm reading your message again, and now I'm sure: IHBT. You aren't advocating anything in your post and don't have any references to back up anything you do say. You assure us that Max (sic) would have their fair share of viruses if they had a larger market share, by which I must assume you mean installed base, but without any evidence to support the assurance. Has there been even a proof-of-concept virus for OS X? Not root kits, and not some kind of honor system virus ('Please email this shell script to all your friends and ask them to run it as root. Thank you!'), but an actual auto-execute and auto-propogate virus?
No.
Could it happen? You betcha, but the fact that it hasn't after this many years tells me that it is far from easy.
I'll assure you of this: so long as Windows is so easy to target with viruses that kids in VB classes do it for class projects, there won't be a virus issue on Mac OS X or Linux. Why would there be, when there is such a susceptible population of machines available? Even when Windows installed base drops to 30%, it will still have the majority of viruses. Why? Because its just too damn easy.
Stick that in your troll-pipe and smoke it.
Two of the coolest things about PGP in a corporate environment are split keys and signing everything to a designated key. You can set it up such that everything gets encrypted to a master key, which you split.
That way, when someone has locked something up and their key is no longer available, the superfriends can get together and re-unite the master key to unlock whatever. Nobody actually has to write down anything to keep from getting locked out.
Forgotten passwords you handle by having a designated revoker to kill your old key, then make a new one. Right?
the 'Ticket Guarantee' was one of the worst cases of corporate welfare you will ever find. Absolutely amazing.
In short version, it was this: If the Chargers didn't sell out the stadium, the city would buy all the unsold tickets. There was no requirement on the Chargers to promote ticket sales, lower prices or anything that a normal for-profit enterprise might do when having trouble moving their product.
The end result was that the taxpayers of San Diego, all 7 million of us, paid a subsidy to make sure that the Chargers fans in the area could watch the game on TV.
I'm please to report that after several years gorging at the public feedtrough, the Chargers have been cut off and the ticket guarantee is now a political 'third rail' issue: nobody wants to take any ownership of the deal or be associated with it in anyway.
The Chargers organization is now causing a ruckus with the local politicos to try to get a new stadium built and some other concessions, or they'll move to LA.
I say, 'good luck, hope you like smog!'.
Here's why you are getting modded flamebait: Promoting the Dashboard == Konfabulator ripoff myth, using the phrase 'remain silent on security issues' and calling 10.3 an 'update' when it was clearly marketed and correctly described as an 'upgrade'.
Also, admonish doesn't mean what you think it means. For instance, I'm admonishing you now: "Bad troll! Down!".
Okay, you aren't exactly trolling, but this was a flame-worthy post.
For a user who wants to 'talk objectively', you sure use some funny phrases.
Halfbaked, Usually your posts are more on-point than this.
The questions was 'What operating system does Dell produce and what contributions have they made to the open source community?
Got any answers on those questions?
I've got to chime in on this. I'm a former employee of a local reseller in San Diego.
Would I want to be a customer at that reseller? Not really. Location is a warehouse in an industrial park, entrance is hidden on the side, merchandise is not super-well-organized, prices are not displayed on anything and all the customers, apparently, phone each other and come in at the same time. So the effect is that the sales staff is either completely bored out of their gourd or totally overwhelmed. Each of them wants to give their full attention to their customer, which is good, but if you aren't the customer in front of them, you don't get any attention.
Additionally, they consistently fail to deliver on promises. Some of this is due to cash flow issues (c'mon, they're a small business). Some due to Apple filling orders TO THEIR OWN STORES before shipping constrained product to resellers. That's just rotten, but it happens with every new product. Sometimes due to the personnel involved: these people are Mac fanatics first, sales and service second. Their heart is in the right place, but the professionalism can be lacking.
Lest you think I'm just dishing on an old employer, I'll say this about that. I didn't really do a lot to bring up the level of professionalism, myself. And I really liked the people I worked with, all were decent folk. I wish them well, but man, the cards are really stacked against them and not getting better.
Here's the deal: without these front-line risk-takers throughout the 90's, I don't think Apple would be here today. Seriously.
To have Apple fail to figure out how to work with resellers after all these years is inexecusable, to have Apple kill off this channel of sales is really, really awful. Yeah, it's business, but it just seems like corporate has to take more responsibility for the success of their resellers and they have to understand that they are burning a bridge they've been using for years if they do kill off resellers.
Wish I had an answer, all I have is some experience.
WTF? Aren't A-10's operated by the Army? They seem to be armed and fixed-wing. What's this 'not allowed' language? The Navy has planes, the Army has boats, the Air Force has trucks and the Marine Corps has one of everything.
Back to the original point, though, supersonic 'bombs' aren't too likely under any insignia, lest they start dropping them off of spaceshipone. Artillery shells or rockets, sure. Really big bullets, you bet. Not gravity bombs.
And I also have some problems with your assertion that Mac OS X servers crashed daily. I'm not reading that anywhere else, do you have anything to back it up? I mean, seriously, our servers here are limited in uptime by the anal-retentive nature of my supervisor and the release of software updates, no crashing. Ever.
How many of your sysadmins have been to Apple-certified training classes? How many OS X books do they have in their department? I smell the smell of Windows administrators being asked to buy Apple servers because the graphics folks insisted on it, not because the IT department understood what problem they were solving.
who am I kidding, this is just another AC troll. Shouldn't have wasted my time.
Try section 216 MODIFICATION OF AUTHORITIES RELATING TO USE OF PEN REGISTERS AND TRAP AND TRACE DEVICES.
I think that is the relevant section, but of course, IANAL.
You need to update your experiences. Alt-Tab has been available since 10.2, and improved in 10.3 (Panther). Additionally, you would find that Panther runs faster on the iBook you sold than did the OS with which it shipped. By 'faster', I mean usably fast, and all applications are faster as well. Point 1 is still totally valid and a source of irritation for me. Apple ships more Unix workstations per year than does Sun, but Sun and Apple don't seem to be on the same page when it comes to the JDK. Point 3, see above regarding speed. The Thinkpads are totally usable, but the battery life is really sad next to an Apple portable. Also, Windows XP is no speed demon in my experience on a T222. Windows draw slowly sometimes, trying to alt-tab to another application is erratically unresponsive, launching multiple applications at one time bogs the machine to a standstill, and every Windows Update requires a reboot. Total productive time in a Windows environment is significantly less, for me, than the same gross time spent on an Apple portable. I wish there was a benchmark for 'how much work did you get done in 8 hours' as opposed to 'how many calculations per second can this hardware/software perform', because the first benchmark is the one that matters to me, and Mac OS X would own it.
I think DVB must be a fairly small-scale activity for computer users. You certainly don't see these cards sitting around in the average computer retailer space, and I hadn't heard of it before your post (joke/yeah, typical of slashdot readership, I assume if I haven't heard of it, it isn't true/doesn't exist/doesn't matter /joke)
Also, 2 of the solutions mentioned by the other poster include time-shifting capabilities, I do believe. With El Gato, I believe you can record an hour of (analog) TV down to 700 MB in MPEG format. With the built-in burner on your mac, it becomes quiet simple to burn a collection of your favorite shows, recorded automatically for you.
Point 2: As a Mac user, I don't want Apple to spend time developing a specialized piece of hardware to do DVB for the few hobbyists that are interested and snub the extant offerings mentioned here. Third-parties can do that if they like, it certainly is easy enough to develop on the Mac. Apple (or any other manufacturer) has done all they need to do by producing good, free development tools, plentiful documentation and standards-compliant hardware.
Point 3: The question of ratio of support staff to workstations is always a funny one. My wife's company is typical I think of many Windows-based workplaces. Their ratio is somewhere between 100 and 150 to one. Sounds great, right? Well, their level of support is quite bad. For most problems, the users are self-supporting. The 'support' staff is mostly used for administration of services and carting hardware around. The people in her department, like all the other departments with which she interacts, all solve their own problems. Not because they want to or know how to, but because they put in a trouble ticket, attempt to solve the problem continuously and eventually persevere. Tech support will (1-3 days later) call to see if the trouble ticket is still valid, the user says, "No, I sorta fixed it this morning" and that is that.
Not what I call sparkling support, but certainly typical of what I've seen in Windows-based offices. Odd, considering the dollar value of the time of her coworkers. Odder still, she is under the impression that the IT support is outsourced through IBM, and I think she might be right. Who knew they did that, and who knew they were bad at it?
Point 4: What the heck is 'wads of cash'? I know you gave a price for your motherboard in the earlier post, but seriously, what did the whole system (including OS) cost you to get home and assemble? (Total USD and hours spent, please) I'm not seeing 'wads of cash' as a differential when I price comparable commercially-available Windows computers compared to G4's or G5's. If you found a way to beat that, please enlighten with detailed specs and how the performance has been (subjectivity okay, just don't stoop to the level of using benchmarks).
The benefit of a Mac will become clear if you are forced to use one for about 4 weeks. That's how long it will take to unlearn some Windows habits and begin to appreciate the fact that Mac OS X and the hardware on which it rides do not fight you as you try to get your work done. The longer you use it after that, the harder it will be to go back to Windows.
I recommend you borrow one from someone, a faster G3 or newer with Jaguar on it. Do some programming, do some websurfing and word-processing, check out how very well, how beautifully, Mac OS X Mail.app filters out spam. You may not end up buying one, but you will understand the appeal.
cperciva said: "...if SCO loses, it will send a strong message to the world: 'Stay away from anything GPL, or you'll find your proprietary code taken away from you.'" I think you are making a very, very big assumption here that SCO may have facts on their side. The prevailing assumption on /., and my own opinion, is that they have no legal legs to stand on. They have acted excessively squirrelly throughout this thing and seem to be making up strategy as they go. I can't believe their motivation is what they say it is.
Remember, this isn't about IP, it's about an (alleged) contract violation by IBM, right? It isn't about GPL or LGPL or any other license scheme, it is about a contract between IBM and SCO.
I think the strong message being sent to the world is, 'Don't partner with SCO'.
You have implied a valid concern regarding companies perceptions of open source licensing, in that many companies PHB's seem to assume that using or modifying for their own use an OSS requires releasing their code back to the world. Obviously this isn't true, but there is a lot of confusion in this area that all OSS advocates need to address any chance they get. I certainly don't understand all the nuances of GPL vs. LGPL vs. BSD vs. RPL vs. MIT , etc... and I don't meet that many people that do.
Mods, the parent post is a troll. Please note the following Mac myths being propogated: 1) Difficult to develop on a Mac 2) Mac's are expensive There is also some ignorance of the Human Interface Guidelines available from Apple, which do not require you to "use Macs for a year or two until you start to wrap your brain around how users expect the system to work." No, you certainly don't have to use a Mac for a couple of years. Read the guidelines, use the (free) development tools available from Apple which guide you towards the guidelines by their very nature, you will be able to successfully program on the mac in no time. Check out Hydra (http://hydra.globalse.org/index.html), written in about 8 weeks and totally rocks. I use it for collaborative programming on scripts. Find a Mac and check out this software, it will blow you away. Written in 8 weeks. Whoops, rambling,, lost the thread here. Oh, yeah, TROLL!
Two points and a correction.
Point One: ECC only helps with one bit of data damage on the chip, any more than that, you get no help. Considering the extra expense, engineering and slightly degraded performance involved with ECC, Apple made the right decision to go with standard DDR SDRAM.
Point Two: The PSU in the xServe is engineered to carry the typical working load of the server. In fact, the most the server can draw is ?105% of PSU capacity and typically runs at 70%-80%. Compare this with most Intel-based 1U servers, you'll find most of them run at 100% of the PSU rated capacity as a typical load, and can peak at 125%. That extra load really, really shortens PSU lifespan and drives up heat production tremendously. I think the failure rate on the solo PSU on the XServe is going to be low enough to tolerate, and I have the ability to monitor the XServe power supplies (12v and 5v) remotely using the tools built-in to Mac OS X Server if I'm nervous.
Correction: Apple has announced no intention of abandoning the iBook, nor should they anytime soon. It still has a little life left in it. And what do you consider ' -very- soon', the iBook has been around for years?!? Is that flamebait, or do you actually not know that the iBook has been very successful for the last 3 years?