Monday, June 28, 2004

Apple's Tiger in your tank

Apple today announced Tiger their next generation OS and it is pretty interesting. There are all kinds of goodness in Tiger though it will be a long wait for it (first half 2005 according to MacCentral) but that is okay gives me time to save up.

Tiger Server has a set of great features for a SOHO business. Beyond mail serving and spam control, there is a blog server and iChat server and a cool sounding setup assistant to get you up and running right away. If you are starting a small business and need a server I would say this is the way to go unless you want to pay more for computer support.

This seems way easier to handle then all the work I had to do when I was doing netadmin work at BYU. These stories sure make me wonder why we inflict such pain on ourselves. At school I spent years doing troubleshooting and it was just terrible. I got tired of troubleshooting computers. I noticed however that the Macs generally did just fine, except about once a month and that usually was due to the server not letting the Macs onto the network anymore. This gave us about two days warning before the server would die for no apparent reason, but that was useful we could schedule a reboot and have everything run fine for another month.

I have Windows and Macs at home and have used Windows at work for all kinds of things. And I have got to say I have lost more productivity due to Windows then to even interruptions by spam. I recorded about how many minutes I lost to the computer for a week and it seemed like a typical week, and I was loosing about half an hour a day to waiting for the computer. It did not help that I had to reboot the computer about once a day, which took up the most time. I only have to reboot the Macs about once every two weeks, though I shut them down more often of late due to afternoon thunderstorms. I wouldn't say that Macs are perfect but they are so much better then Windows it just feels that way.

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