Mad as hell, switching to Mac

Networkworld ^ | 05/23/05 | Winn Schwartau

[Panerai]

This is my first column written on a Mac - ever. Maybe I should have done it a long time ago, but I never said I was smart, just obstinate. I was a PC bigot.

But now, I've had it. I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore.

In the coming weeks I'm going to keep a diary of an experiment my company began at 6 p.m. April 29, 2005 - an experiment predicated on the hypothesis that the WinTel platform represents the greatest violation of the basic tenets of information security and has become a national economic security risk. I do not say this lightly, and I have never been a Microsoft basher, either. I never criticize a company without a fair bit of explanation, justification and supportive evidence.

I have come to the belief that there is a much easier, more secure way to use computers. After having spent several years focusing my security work on Ma, Pa and the Corporate Clueless, I also have come to the conclusion that if I'm having such security problems, heaven help the 98% of humanity who merely want a computer for e-mail and multimedia.

Even though I'm a security guy going on 22 years now, my day-to-day work is pretty much like everyone else's. I live on laptops and use my desktops at home and the office for geeking and experimenting. My two day-to-day laptops (two, for 24/7 backup) are my business machines. I don't need them to do a whole lot - except work reliably, which is why I am fed up with WinTel.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Preach it brother.

[Swordmaker]

Mac switcher pingeroonie.

If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.

[papertyger]

I have, however, had problems getting a PC to work with my Macs. For that matter, I've had difficulty getting a PC to work with other PCs in a network. Job security for the IT guys, I guess.

I had lots of fun integrating my mother-in-law's pc into our airport network.

First, I couldn't get the wireless access point to actually use the network it was detecting. Then when I did get it to work it was slooooo as smoke off %##%$%. Never could figure out what was bridging the gap; xp or the wap software. Using both (i think) it got acceptable speed, but then I had to reinitate the connection every time she went on line, and I still not sure how I did it.

Final solution; I bought an express hub and plugged the pc's ethernet cable into it. Configured the whole thing remotely from my mac and it's run like a scalded dog ever since.

[avg_freeper]

The days of people buying PCs to play games are quickly coming to an end. Microsoft knows that which is why they got into the console market. That their next box will be a Power PC running games developed on a mac is just further proof.

And as the games go away so will the fast paced 3d card market subside and the ever increasing need for faster PC processors become less important. The whole personal computer market will slow down as the smaller game console market gets bigger and the hardware differences between linux, MS Windows, and macOS will seem less important.

People who still build their computer tweaking it for speed will soon be as scarce as those who were still building their own radios from kits in the 60s and 70s.

[N3WBI3]

Appletalk was aweful but thats gone now, osx is as network and user friendly (if not more) than windows. I use both quite a bit...

[N3WBI3]

I hear you, I avoide windows because of all the money bill gives planned parenthood, and the UN 'population control' effort..

[Psycho_Bunny]

Even though I'm a security guy going on 22 years now, my day-to-day work is pretty much like everyone else's.

Winn sounds incompetent.  Based on what I've read by him, I wouldn't give him a second interview for any technology position.

[N3WBI3]

bear in mind Mac is now UNIX. TCP/IP was built into UNIX years ago and its support of that protocol is light years better than MS (though 2003 does a good deal to catch up..

[Psycho_Bunny]

No, he's right.  Multiple Apples don't play nice on enterprise PC networks.

But I've never blamed that on Apple; I believe it's Microsoft's fault.  Apple OSs are rooted in one of the ultimate networking systems: Unix.  There's only two reasons why Apples can't be easily popped into a MS Domain:  either MS is not sharing enough info with Apple about the structure of the MS protocols, or they are intentionally screwing up the protocols enough to mess with the Apples.

For instance, I've always wondered why the X400 protocol didn't come standard with the first versions of Entourage:  I mean, come on - Entourage "is" Outlook for a Apple and Outlook is optimized to X400 to Exchange - so why didn't MS design Entourage to behave like Outlook from the start?  They had to know it was going to be deployed in Exchange domains.

I'm not a conspiraziod so I don't believe there's a concerted effort at MS to sabotage Apples but I can envision one or two programmers at MS being petty enough to throw a cog in the networking code.

In any event, I've found it bizarre how difficult it is to get Apples - which tend to be well designed - to work well in enterprise PC networks that have been equally well engineered.

 

[Bulwark]

I'm sure they are out of the box. The issue I had was with a Mac PC that was set up and working until it had a connectivity problem. When I was called and had to work on it I had no idea where anything was, and the OS itself didn't have any self explanatory way to find anything related to the network, or even a shell.

You must not have been on an OSX box. It has a terminal available.. and it's unix under the hood. That's one of the reasons I switched over... the power of unix but with the apple UI.