Completely OT: Laptops

Mirror drive door machines are very noisy. Mine was a Quicksilver, still loud compared to the G5. G5 is almost silent - it's drowned out by the PSU for my mixing desk.

Yeah, cheaper that way. Of course, it won't run Shake. At least, not with Windows. With the Mac, not only was Shake cheaper, but my eMac and PowerBook become renderslaves free.

Richard

They all come with 1 year RTB warranty.

Yeah Plus VAT but free delivery, I bought 6 of them 3 weeks ago with a 17" flat screen dell branded, I got the invoice on my desk to sign off.

Small hdd = 80GB I think that's a good size for the price

But dell have recently removed the Dimension 2600 range, which they were shifting cheap, hence why the new pricing is different, they no longer offer celeron systems iirc,

(with inescapeable predictability)

I wish I had a renderslave... ooh, the things I'd do to her.

So on and so forth.

Yeah it's a mirror drive machine - the musicians are always looking in it. Mixing desk PSUs should be silent though - you using a FOH desk for recording? I've got two 01Vs which are fanless and a selection of small things, as well as two A&H GLs I use for live (one here, one in the Gambia) all fanless.

I got a deal on a small proliant ML110, diskless, threw in a bunch of SATA drives, DVD RW and a gig of RAM, added an ACS Pro suite (1394 / External AV box / Premiere / Encore / Audition) and a pair of second hand Reveals. Couple of TFT monitors and a 15" TV. Two Canon XM2s, some odds and ends (redeyes, manfrottos, batteries etc) and whole lot came to less than five grand. Ultra cheap and our first piece of work hit broadcast last week - makes me smile - this could be the beginning of my exit from the PC industry if I get lucky on a regular basis.

Need to add another gig of RAM really and the 400 gig of storage is down to

100 gig free with my current projects (mostly music and training vids)

I've sold 2 ML110 servers in the last 12 months. One had a sata raid controller go bung and the client lost everything. The other one had a drive pre-fail after a week and HP came out and swapped it. Run it in Raid

5 just in case. I was surprised because the HP/Compaq servers are normally bloody brilliant.

Fraser

I've had a lot of drive failures in the last 12 months, all Maxtor. Two within one month of install as supplied by HP. Which is why I'm ordering all servers that are getting SATA as diskless just now and stacking them with Seagates. Not had any SCSI failures though, or Seagates.

Not lost any data though as all the ones I sell on are at least mirrored and and monitored remotely, the ML110 I got for myself is running mirrored 80s to boot from and a striped pair of 200s for temp storage - for now. It'll get a 3ware and a stack of seagates when it's paid for itself (or a bigger project comes in and I need more temp space...)

Unit itself seems very stable, but again I normally buy my servers basic...

You can get a replacement fan grille which is supposed to reduce the noise - I've never actually heard one of these Macs though, I avoided them!

Behringer MX8000A - 24/48 channel Mackie *cough*ripoff*cough* clone.

Not bad. I spent £2.5K on my setup, but list price would be nearer £13K

- and that's wth one JVC camera, nothing good at all. G5, 2.5Gb RAM,

320Gb SATA + 300FW800 + 160Gb FW400 plus the music stuff mentioned before, plus Shake 3.5, Final Cut Pro HD, DVD Studio Pro, Logic Platinum/Pro (6.4.3, been using it since Space Designer was £499!), 20" plus 15" displays.

Planning on adding a proper video board, but can't decide between the Kona2 or the... damn.. Aurora? Can't quite get the right mix of I/O with them.

Richard

I only use Macs in a corporate environment - I have a G4 on my desk. Now I'm no particular Mac expert, and my only involvement in using it is for integration with Active Directory, and deploying Win32 apps via Citrix WI. My main interest with Macs has been Panther onwards and LDAP v3 "authentication", and in more latter times using AdmitMac.

Now whilst I've spent recent years dealing with Intel and Windows environments, I originally worked with mainframes, then UNIX high end (as a systems programmer).

And for the things I do with them, I find Macs less stable and more problematic that either Windows 2k Professional, or Windows XP Professional. As I said, I don't really use them as a desktop. Other people build them (corporate build), and presumably there's no dodgy hardware.

Likely as a networked machine, running DTP or imaging they are just dandy, but try and integrate them and they are less stable, and more prone to locking in an unusable fashion - IME.

Which is some propreitary Windows 'standard', is it not?

Eargh.

Tiger is much improved in this regard apparently. I wouldn't know since I only network to one PC, using SMB, and it works - when the PC is configured properly. If you don't define a share on the PC, then surprisingly, it doesn't work.

That's probably because you're working with Microsoft technology for Enterprise, something which I generally find abhorrent anyway for no reason other than "It doesn't work well, and it doesn't play nice with other platforms".

Well, if the intended use of the girlfriend's laptop is to connect to some propreitary Enterprise system and run Win32 apps on a remote server via a web interface, then it probably won't be much use to them. If, however, she wanted to use email, word processing, imaging, internet applications on a robust portable machine which won't get viruses, spyware or become a random drone machine spewing 419s in the background, which wakes from sleep reliably, offers 4hr battery life, excellent WiFi and generally better quality than comparably priced Windows machines (aside from the relatively low-res screen - some people must have magnifying glasses to use their computers the resolutiions they 'demand'), then the iBook is a damn good system.

Macs play very nice with other Unix systems, and I generally feel that what should be underneath enterprise and network technologies should be Unix, not Windows in any shape or form. For most users, Macs will also play nice with Windows.

Richard

Or as I call it "Shitrix".

Fraser

Whilst it's true that Active Directory is proprietary as a product, it is _accessed_ using standards based protocols (LDAP v2 or v3, and Kerberos, plus DNS for location purposes). That's all standard, RFC defined protocols.

I haven't tried the same approach connecting to another LDAP provider (say iPlanet) - but then they all _tend_ to be proprietary, or if they're not, why would you bother integrating with them (and by that, I mean why would you bother using them for anything serious).

I don't have stability problems integrating Linux for authentication in just the same manner. Nor any other UNIX platform.

Why?

Corporates have standards. And there are corporate issues with some of the native apps on Mac. And in fairness, the Citrix / app deployment side of it tends to be of least issue. Although there were some JVM issues a while back, which were Mac side issues.

I'm not so much bothered with file / share access, per se. Most of that is done (for Macs) to NFS filesystems on UNIX nodes. As part of the authentication, though, the Mac picks up an attribute from AD that it uses as a common uid within UNIX platforms for NFS filesystem access.

It's more to do with authentication, and one repository for user credentials, plus hopefully standards based authentication. Whilst the latter versions of Mac OS have improved with this regard, AdmitMac does make that a bit easier, better, plus fully supports DFS for Windows filesharing (with big corporate filesystems, numerous MSCS filesharing implementations, using something like DFS or Veritas filesystem is really the only way of building up one common, big filesystem, underpinned by enterprise, resilient filesystem support).

1. Corporates tend towards the big software vendors with gravitas. They won't be discouraged because a minority of client machines may not integrate that fully.
2. As a generalism, I have no issues with alient platforms accessing Active Directory - that actual side of things seems fine, and I integrate with mid-tier UNIX web apps that use J2EE to talk LDAP and discover role-based information from AD.
3. Problems that seem to occur on the Mac, tend to be with it's directory services daemon

people were talking generally about the various merits and stability of the various platforms - the discussion seemed to have lost all pertinence to the needs of the OP, or his girlfriend

Which may be the case.

But if the OP is the one having to maintain it, and they are most familiar with Intel / Windows platforms, which is most likely to be the best fit for them?

Why do advocates always want to convert others, even if not on merit - it's almost like religion.

Agreed.

They are UNIX fundamentally themselves.

However, I find greater stability in Linux, in the enterprise, than Mac OS, and "proper" ;-) UNIX even higher in the stability stakes than Linux.

1. Most enterprises do use UNIX for high end processing, database and data-warehousing. But Windows and Windows infrastructure is also part of the enterprise and network infrastructure. To refute or fight against that is futile.
2. The vast majority of corporates use Windows as both desktop, mid-tier (not exclusively) and increasingly for messaging, authentication, and network services.
3. Anybody who works in corporate enterprise environments, rapidly learns not to get too attached to platforms, OSs or technology: it changes, and you will get expected to make it all work together. Corporates don't tend to form their corporate standards on the feelings of it's techies. They do so for firm business reasons.

For most users (by that I assume you mean just the home / workgroup type requirements), Windows will play nice with Windows, too (just to be equitable), and so will Linux.

Harsh - why would you do that?

I've been deploying Citrix since early '98, and for what they do, it's damn fine.

Yeah, I get some techies have issues getting printing problems sorted out, but that's hardly an indictment of Citrix's technology.

The platform that requires the least maintenance, possibly?

In some ways I agree, but for the opposite reason. Most people will buy a Windows box just because everyone else does, then gets tied into the religion of Microsoft against all the evidence that Apple may well be the better solution for them. This is usually due to ignorance of what Apple & OSX have to offer - does that remind you of any religious parallels?

Had problems with it at a clients. Changed them over to terminal services and the job was done.

Fraser

Don't get me wrong - I see you're thinking. But it's likely going to be what the OP can best look after. It's almost certain he'll have to do something, even if it's only helping his girlfriend with some functionality.

Which for a lot of people (ignoring the sheep-like accusation for a moment) has it's merits.

Which may be true, but pure merit isn't always the sole factor. Compatibility and interoperability may be factors, as usability and supportability.

If it's pure merit, function rather than form, then why not Linux, too?

I couldn't possibly comment ;-)

I'm agnostic to them all, really. I spent the most _enjoyable_ part of my career as a UNIX systems programmer, and I still use vi (vile) to edit / view text files on Windows machines ;-) I only contributed to this thread due to comments about stability.

Sometimes, though, the best overall choice for somebody in this situation, may stick in the craw of others.

Eh?

Do you mean the IMA infrastructure was causing some problems, or merely the server client interaction? Because Citrix just piggy-backs the TS part of the Windows kernel now (OK, it uses an alternate listener / protocol, but at the OS level it's the same).

It was mainly slow, user unfriendly and had probs with odbc links to a SQL database.

Fraser

whack a 3com wifi card in with retractable antenna and you're laughing for the price.