Posted on 11/29/2006 2:54:07 AM PST by Swordmaker
A celebrity CIO reviews the desktop operating system contenders in search of the next-generation office computer
Introduction
John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) Next April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web.
But as a health-care administrator, he's not solely interested in testing the cutting-edge, Orwellian technologies that make headlines. The PCs inside the hospital have to work too. So when Halamka's laptop running Windows XP interrupted several presentations with inopportune antivirus and application updates, he decided his next big initiative would be to determine which desktop operating system—Windows XP, Apple's OS X or Linux—is the most secure, most reliable and easiest to use in a corporate environment.
For three months, Halamka ditched his Windows laptop. He replaced it first with a MacBook running OS X. Then he spent a month using a Lenovo ThinkPad X41 running a dual-boot configuration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation and Red Hat Fedora Core. Finally, he took up a Dell D420 subnotebook running Microsoft's Windows XP. After evaluating all three to determine which worked best for him, he plans to begin testing his preferred setup with users, most of whose desktops currently run Windows.
Halamka judged the three operating systems according to a variety of criteria including their performance, user interfaces and enterprise management capabilities, such as the ability to configure applications, easily organize file systems, and establish granular security control. We followed Halamka's progress, and now we have his conclusions. We've also ask three other experts to take a look at Halamka's findings and add their own insights.
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This is an excerpt, read more at Window vs. Linux vs. OS X
no duh, I can't even Use OSX on my PC if I bought it from Newegg... (IF i bought the OSX license and did Apples work for them to make it work on a PC it would still be illegal because jobs wants to protect his "hardware company" so he says)
or at least, thats what most people believe the reason is.
I would like my example.
So this "mega guru" can't get ahold of a copy?
really? look
Graphire4 (CTE), Mac OS 8 or 9 isn't even listed on the driver page....
It will probably be two years before Vista starts to reach an appreciable percentage of the enterprise market. Many IT departments are already questioning the economics and benefits of upgrading to Vista.
So... more of your red herring. Wacom tablets have nothing to do with the topics discussed in the article.
you were just calling me ignorant, and I just pointed to the facts.
Vista will OUTPACE XP IN ADOPTION RATES...
You are ignorant about Macs. You don't know what drivers were available from Wacom six or more years ago that are no longer available. What's available today has nothing to do with what was available when OS 8 or 9 was a current OS. Pointing out your "facts" is just continuing your red herring.
Here's my own red herring: Does that wacom USB tablet run on Windows95? Why not?
Don't bother to answer... it is irrelevant to the discussion and I already know the answer. Windows95 doesn't support USB.
What is relevant is that USB tablets will have basic functionality on the older Macs that ran OS 9 because a basic tablet driver was included in the operating system and OS 9 had built in support for USB.
I will say that neither older Macs or OS X Macs will support a Parallel Port or Serial Port PC Wacom tablet.
It might, because XP was released when its predecessor was not obsolete unlike Vista which is replacing a 6yo operating system. But on the same end I know my office has no intention of upgrading for *at least* two years. We have far too much going on to worry about Vista and when MS drags their feet on letting antivirus companies have the access they needed to get products out for it.
A few years ago I bought a wacom tablet, pen and mouse for my daughter for Christmas. I was running Redhat on my desktop and decided to try it out. Plugged it into the usb, and I was about to look at /var/log/messages to see if I could figure out how to make it work. Suddenly, the mouse started moving around the screen. Seems my daughter was playing with the pointer. It was working with =no= intervention. Pretty cool IMO.
productivity and ease of configuration be damned.
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If you had to configure 200 or 2000 or 20,000 varied computers on your in-house network to Linux, training the users, and then handling the incompatibility problems that will inevitably arise, you would not say that.
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I realize linux except at the server end of things is still a toy. The thread was all Microsoft vs Apple. I had hoped to get a few hard core Linux folks to start ranting. I run microsoft in my business but like to play with the knoppix live disk when I have the chance.
The beta program has been closed for quite some time and I seriously doubt that a CIO has registered an MSDN subscription (I'm actually trying to install Vista on a VM right now).
However, I will admit this: if he were willing to go to enough trouble, he probably could have gotten a copy, but do you really expect him to know if and where to look? Most people assume that if the software isn't out yet, you can't get it yet.
Vista is obsolete too.
you may think so but it is the latest and greatest out of redmond.
To bad it took four or so years to get to Redmond from
Cupertino
You're right... where ARE all the Linux people?
On the other hand, I was in Kaiser Permanente today... and all of their PCs are running Windows 2000... six years post XP.
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