Calling in a Mac geek to work on Windows machines is like going to a steak house and ordering sea-kitten.

Love the analogy! That rocks.

I run a MAC at home. Why? Simple. They are elegant and are engineered on the RISC platform. PC’s run on the CISC platform and you are stuck with Microsoft’s crap.

That’s not true any more. They are no longer running on Motorola chipsets. They are also now just GUI’s running on Linux.

Everything that made a Mac, a Mac has died off. No more SCSI, no more RISC, no more MAC OS… it’s just a PC Clone running a Mac shell anymore.

The world still runs on Windows, it may suck, but it’s got the market share.

Y’know, ’cause he’s . . . hip. Right? In touch . . . right? Unlike that old fart John McCain, who was attacked because he doesn’t know how to use a computer!

Sarcasm over. I want to puke.

That said, corporations across the country use Exchange (and Notes, for that matter) for the shared calendars. If you don’t know how to manage Exchange, then hire those who do, and believe them when they tell you to spend money on hardware and third-party products to keep it stable and secure.

6-year old software sounds like Exchange Server 2003. It would have been beyond stupid to put in Exchange 2008 last year, before the third-party market to support it matured, and while bugs were still being found. Far better to leave the new administration a functioning system and let them do the upgrade when ready.

It’s one thing to always use the latest and greatest software when you only have one computer. When you’re supporting hundreds of computers, you take your sweet time doing upgrades, usually waiting for a service pack or two to be released.

Bottom line: bunch of whiners.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about in that statement. None. Do your homework on each of those systems and then lets talk.

The whitehouse and Bush administration has been plagued with problems since they switched from Domino to Exchange. Lots of email was lost in the process. My guess is that the whitehouse got a sweetheart deal on the microsoft software after Bush took office and the ongoing monopoly/antitrust investigation of Microsoft in the 90’s went away with Janet Reno and the Clinton administration.

Now we have supposedly “tech saavy” in-duh-viduals in the whitehouse and they get tripped up with corporate email systems…. you elect a n00b with ZERO real world experience and this is what happens.

maineconservative on January 27, 2009 at 1:24 PM

OK, you are certainly welcome to your opinion that Domino is the greatest thing since sliced butter. But I’ve got a slightly different opinion, having admin’d both, plus sendmail/imap, Novell GroupWise, Eudora, and Quickmail to boot, in my years, both as edge and internal servers. Like GroupWise, Domino ran like a slug, DB2 (the backend database) frequently crashed, and the “archival capability” wasn’t much more than a database export in a proprietary format. That’s why the Bush Administration had such trouble importing (not that Exchange was easy to import into) and wound up with that stupid calendar and log stuff. It’s exactly the kind of stovepipe that the Clinton people became known for — right up there with writing your CGI scripts in Lisp (which they did).

That Bush’s guys lost e-mails is less due to Exchange than to their attempts to save bucks by reusing old backup tapes, not realizing that some of the data on those tapes was unique.

Obama’s crew inherited something for which good admins are a dime a dozen, and still managed to screw it up.

Far better than either of them is sendmail/IMAP — you can configure an archiving milter on the backend to dump your mail records to either Postgresql or MySQL databases, and those have well known backup tools which emit the archive in ASCII, as well as available tools to search the archives and emit matching emails in .eml format. Hell, if you want to go whole-hog, you can even use Oracle, and then you can grow the database forever just by adding clusters via clsetup. The rig is fully Sarbanes-Oxley compliant, for whatever that’s worth. I have my users’ email archived by year, with each user’s data in a separate table, and the whole thing both on tape and on a RAID6 device.

Maybe Domino has improved since the ’90′s when I used it, but I’m not taking chances. My feelings don’t extend to all IBM/Lotus products — I use WordPro, preferring it over any version of Word I’ve ever tried. Hell, they even had to pry my cold dead fingers from my OS/2 keyboard.

Now you can rebut my statements by telling me the secrets that made Domino the sliced butter substitute. I’m all ears.

This is so ridiculous. These morons sound like the typical cube dweller who can’t remember his password and then blames “computers” for being so complicated.

One of the IT guys at one of my previous jobs used to describe this phenomenon as there being “a short somewhere between the keyboard and the chair.”

I work in new media and I’m primarily a Mac user. In defense of Macs, the operating system *IS* as stable as advertised and — until yesterday anyway — virtually impervious to viruses, spyware, etc. They’re also really cool to look at. ;) However, any design professional worth their salt is capable of working easily on either platform. Perhaps in the highest echelons of the field, in the most elite of interactive agencies, no one ever touches a PC but for those of us bread and butter designers out here, we HAVE to know both. For the simple reason that you never know what kind of work environment you’re going to end up in. Plenty of in-house design groups — like at the White House perhaps? — work on PCs. If you don’t know how to use one, then you’re only shortchanging yourself. When you use a machine that only makes up about 10% of the market share, you can hardly expect the rest of the world to bend to your petty artistic whims. Even Apple knows this: That’s why they developed the Bootcamp software, so you can run Windows on your Mac. I wonder of the techie wunderkinds in the Obama White House have even heard of it.

I run a mail system for a major federal agency. I can tell you what happend. The morons sent out a press release that crushed the mail system. O has a very chatty public affairs staff and they were probrably sending out a large press release and failed to do what every tech savy company does and use a remailer service to handle the surge.

I guess they will only make that mistake once. It just shows how inexperienced thier staff is. I am scared….They are now running my country. I hope they do better with the CIA.

triumphus on January 27, 2009 at 8:41 PM

We had an engineer get in hot water a few years ago. He kept doing mass mailings of large files. Easy to click send… to all!

Took out the garbage for ya!

The Race Card on January 27, 2009 at 12:49 PM

Definitely not garbage — at least not after I’ve put in my own custom php mods. You log in using your e-mail address and when you send e-mail it doesn’t say what internal machine generated the e-mail.

Why, do you know a better webmail package? If you do, tell me the name and I’ll give it a try.

I’d put my conservative and free-market credentials against the most right-wing here. Doesn’t mean I need to continue to support a big-business bully like M$oft. I’m using Linux for my own PC and have been doing so for the past year and a half. It has some sharp edges, but it also offers a lot of freedoms that aren’t available in the locked-in world of Windows.

Perhaps Obama should have had his transition team actually work on the most common transition issues during his transition preperations?

(I have no patience for those pretentious fools that buy Macs… the least useful computers you can buy.)

I guess they will only make that mistake once. It just shows how inexperienced thier staff is. I am scared….They are now running my country. I hope they do better with the CIA.

So, what did they do during all that transition time?
Just measure the drapes?
Check out the rug in the Oval office?

right wing chicky on January 27, 2009 at 5:31 PM

Didn’t you see the nifty seal, and all the press conferences? They were too busy to make sure the tech details were taken care of.

Besides, Booosh should have bought and installed their preferred hardware/software before he left office.
/sarc

It was auto-responded with:

“PLEEZ EXCUSE HOUR EMAIL SNAFU. ZIMBABWE TEK SUPPURT ISS OHN IT.”

“There is not a sense of urgency in this administration to get this done”

“You get a sense that will has been lacking in the last several months.”

Create a National Infrastructure Protection Plan: Develop an effective critical infrastructure protection and resiliency plan for the nation and work with the private sector to ensure that targets are protected against all hazards.

Except email.