Yet another collection of random links and rantings of a greying unix geek with a photography bent. Pass the Guinness and Grecian Formula.
Oh, this guy has hit it on the nose, with what’s wrong in all those “x of the future” where x is home, business, etc. Concept environments that just plain won’t work.
Two words to bring away from that rant. Dirt. Ergonomics.
No path for you!
So what’s the real story here?
Uncontrollable frost heaves or erosion?
Political conflict between city and stampede over the path going through the grounds?
… somewhat indirectly but still intriguing. Get out your tinfoil hat, put it on, and tune into this flash presentation.
To grow expertise, the answer is for IT departments adopting Mac OS X to search for UNIX and Linux professionals when they can’t find Mac specialists. In fact, Kirkpatrick recommends, you can easily hire a UNIX expert who has never touched a Mac, and they’ll take to it without any problem.
And finding qualified people was certainly a primary issue for Kirkpatrick, who has been converting his company from Windows to Macs to the point that the company is now about 85 percent Mac, where it was once 90 percent Windows.
“Our technical challenges aren’t caused by the operating system or incompatibilities but rather by IT people who don’t know the opposite platform,” Kirkpatrick says. Yet good Mac OS X technologists are rare, and often, he claims, “Windows guys don’t want to learn OS X.”
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/050208-macs-in-the-enterprise-how.html
IT departments in businesses are getting pressure from the bottom (new hires coming in after being mac users in college) and the top (executives who use macs at home and want to do so at the office). Some details as to why this is happening and what challenges IT departments face are in the above article link.
At my current employer I am using my personal 15″ MacBook Pro. No way I would use anything else. I started about 2.5 years ago and only used the supplied hp notebook for about 2 weeks until I had everything necessary for that job running on the 12″ PowerBook I had at that time.
Since then there have been a couple of new hires that migrated to running hackintosh leopard builds on their newer hp notebooks. We’re pretty small with no formal IT department though, and so long as you can do your job you are welcome to run whatever os you feel fit on the supplied notebooks, or to supply your own notebook.
Places with entrenched legacy windows based IT departments are feeling the pain, apparently.
“Windows guys come at things as ‘everything is broken,’” a Calvinist view in which the tech assumes that everything is doomed. That attitude produces issues particularly around deployment, and also creates well-meaning but inaccurate support solutions.
For example, Jeffries explained, the “Windows guys” will blow away plists rather than check system and application permissions, because they think a system fix requires a direct attack on the Windows registry
Better get on with hiring *nix people to replace your inflexible *doze people, eh?