ZDNews editor David Coursey concludes his series of articles describing his switch to the Mac platform. Read his editorial at ZDNews.
How a Windows Guy Learned to Love the Mac
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
As a Java developer, I have reasons against switching to Mac. One of them is that my IDE, Eclipse, is not ported and java 1.4 is not available. Also, games and ability to pirate software instead of buying it, keeps me with win32.
Hell yeah, give me a Ti Powerbook to use on my wireless network, while your at it since there’s no need to worry about those silly pieces of paper with dead presidents heads on them, throw in an iPod, half a grand for that Dave Network Utility and Office vX and my “mac is way better than a pc” !
For us that do have to worry about money and go with the iBook or iMac, it’s not such a better ride than a pc. My sister has a new imac and some other accessories for $1700 and it is a totally different machine than my friends Ti Powerbook or my $800 AMD system.
That article should have said “my expensive Ti book with all the fixins and accessories is better than a pc”. That I believe. In the end he sums it up with “But with the improvements I know are coming for Office and suspect are coming for OS X, I can live with its limitations.”
even though he mentioned that he also tried the Ti Powerbook, David Coursey’s main mac computer was the new iMac.
Its not so much about what’s better or worse from his point of view, but that its totally enjoyable, and also preferred for multimedia editing.
As both a mac and pc user myself (hardcore PC and newbie mac) I am quite on par with David’s findings so far…
CIFS support is built in OSX, you do not need to buy Dave. Make sure your subnet machines are either referenced by a dns or defined in your netinfo database, then hit apple-k on a finder window and type cifs://target_computer_name.
As for exporting mount points to win machines, samba is free and already distributed as a control panel for OSX.
Of course, you can also dish out hundreds of buck for software you do not need if it pleases you.
The CIFS support built into OSX is OK but it still appears to be a broken version of Samba.
Take printing for example. Without bying Dave you can’t print to an SMB printer queue. This is just crippled as the printer system must somewhere in the process get to the point of having a raw binary file to write to the printer and this should be able to be captured at this point and sent across the network via SMB.
Particulary for large Postscript based department printers this wouyld be really simple due to the level of PDF / Postrcritp support that is built into Mac OSX.
I know all this works under _real_ Samba.
>>Take printing for example. Without bying Dave you can’t print to an SMB printer queue.<<
Wrong… make sure your ip address resolution is set correctly (host verses raw ip address). I had the same problem originally and I thought it was my print daemon… come to find out that the raw ip address resolution for the network printer was set wrong for the host name, so I found the raw address and used that instead…. no problems since. This particular network of printers that we use is being run by Linux using SMB, and that is the main reason my friends using WinXP can’t seem to print to the SMB printers at the moment, unless somebody has a fix for this? If you do I’ll pass it along to them, they have been complaining about this for awhile now 🙁
I’m considering a purchase of a Mac primarily for its BSD OS base. I’ve been using linux as a toy OS for about 4 years now and as my only OS for the last 2 months and I find it to be limiting when it comes to real work. As a server it’s great, but for much past that, it becomes a hack to get anything done. Mac would remedy this. Mac has the Office-type applications along with some of the best Java support on any platform (Java runs faster on a Mac than a Sparc).
I will remain primarily a PC user and I will probably continue to use windows for games, but a Mac would be a nice alt. OS that would still allow me to work normally if I needed to. And there is definitely something to be said for the appearance of them. There’s something cool about someone walking in and saying, “Oh, you have a Mac.” and my being able to reply, “Oh, yeah, that’s my router.”