I've run IT at two different multi-hundred million dollar companies (IT director 15+ years and help desk before that). I want Mac users to know that using a Mac, if you aren't very tech savvy, can have a dramatically negative impact on your career.
When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that.
Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT.
I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh.
Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.
This would ring slightly true to me if it was say 20-30 years ago, but Apple are in many ways the IBM of end user business machines now and vast numbers of corporate drones have MacBooks - the rough edges are long ago sanded off.
An IT team that treats Mac users this way today is just a bad IT team.
Disagree. Explaining that they can't fix Apple's Samba implementation isn't "treating Mac users this way" such as to be called a "bad IT team." Or the rest of the laundry list of bugs in the post. How do you recommend an IT team should handle Apple's inability to function for basic business file sharing so that the user's boss doesn't think less of the end user or the IT team?
They are being friendly, and objective. Their job is to fix problems so that employees can be productive. It's not to lie for them, or to them. It's Apple's marketing team who has that job. You'll notice they don't do much in the way of advertising to IT directors and business decision makers. Their focus is college kids, specifically graphic designers and iOS app developers. It's definitely not businesses.
IBM? These are software issues. IBM doesn't make desktop operating systems for end users. Do you mean Microsoft? Apple never was and still isn't the Microsoft of business OS. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
Of course I mean IBM - my point is the sheer volume of hardware Apple have sold to enterprise markets in the last 10 years. If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case. IDC and others have Apple's marketshare in US enterprise markets at 23-25 percent as long ago as 2021 - using a Mac has long ceased to be an unusual or troublesome choice in business environments and I would be extremely unimpressed by any IT staff making these arguments today.
If familiar with Apple's history, the IBM example was deliberately chosen. Once upon a time one would have seen an army of IBM desktops in the enterprise, much like the MacBook today...
IBM is not a good comparison, as I mentioned, because we're talking about Apple's OS software being bad for its users' careers. I don't think that's ever been the case for IBM or Microsoft. Anyway, the hardware is irrelevant.
> If things were as close to as bad as you describe this simply wouldn't be the case.
Selling stuff means you have good marketing, not good products. Microsoft isn't better than Apple because they sell more software, right?
So, I don't follow your logic on that point at all. I have 20% of my current employee base running Mac OS. Why would that imply that they are a good career choice for the end user to make in a desktop OS? It implies they are the 1 in 5 who will be left out of the discussion and then complain that their computer wasn't working.
That 20% accounts for much more than their fair share of help desk interactions. And their boss still sighs when they come up in conversation. Why would you advise anyone to shoot themselves in the foot like that?
And more importantly, how dare you judge my IT department (friendly joking tone here)? But seriously, do you have a solution to make Apple's Samba implementation work?
That's kind of a critical component for business if you're going to say that Apple is so good for business like IBM/Microsoft. Wouldn't you say?
Given one can only run Apple's software on their own machines, whether we talk about OS sales or hardware sales, we are talking about the same thing. Are you really prepared to argue 25 percent of the corporate computer market userbase are sabotaging their careers? I'd argue thats absurd, personally.
I'm not responding to the Samba critique because millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs, every day, just fine. Would I like Apple's Samba implementation to be better? Sure.
There are many studies that prove the opposite of your point, including one from IBM, and find the modern Mac significantly cheaper to support than Windows machines in business environments with less helpdesk tickets to boot:
Also this IBM article predates Apple's abandonment of AFP. That's a huge kick in the argument. At this time, Apple worked for file sharing, at least. It had many other problems for businesses at the time, though. But less so for medium ones, more for big ones. So I'm still surprised to read that from IBM.
I don't go by any of this stuff, though. It's all marketing. I have my own data and experience to work with. And I've given some hard to debate examples where it's a problem for one's career, and it's not one their IT department, or whomever I'm talking to here can help them with.
The depracation of AFP (first announced in 2013) has no real impact on subsequent studies. Here's a more recent one from Cisco with a 130k Mac deployment:
They had deprecated, but still supported it for several OS versions afterwards.
Big deployment in that article. I would guess we can find similar size deployments from Microsoft to the contrary. Again, it's all marketing. I wouldn't make decisions based on that. You should be looking at your data as an organization and making decisions based on the entirety of your infrastructure.
And the same goes for individual employees. If you work in a company where most people are on Macs, where you're not the odd duck with problems, maybe it's a smarter move for you.
But most people aren't at those companies. And for those people, being the odd duck with problems that can't get to the file share, or the guy with slower access to files than the coworkers you're competing with, might be the difference between "That guy always nails it. What's his name?" and "Omg, this dude always has problems sharing files. Just go up and present it for him. This is embarrassing. In front of clients? Next time John should present."
Trust me, you would rather be John in that situation. And as a non-technical user, you're likely going to find yourself in made for Windows presentation situations more often. There are simply more of them.
Mac OS X Server is discontinued. Mac is just not for business, and Apple agrees, it seems. Unless of course your business is entirely cloud operated. That might be okay if your company is so big that you get Apple products and theirs or someone's cloud offerings for nearly free. But it's not practical for most companies of any size. Especially when you consider the delays caused by opening large files over the internet.
Non-technical Apple users think Mac is better for graphics. That's Apple's marketing. We're talking about large files.
I don't think it's absurd. I've watched as they get skipped over for the graphics guy that uses Windows, can share files in meetings, and quickly interacts with their coworkers. And, honestly, why would you promote the guy that can't do that? I can't disagree with it. We should be promoting pragmatic thinkers that get stuff done, not people that intentionally choose machines with problems or make other such bad choices in life and in business.
Again, tell me about Samba. How do you call a machine with major problems interacting with a business network, a business computer?
(Should I answer that question? You blame the IT team, and say it's a business computer based on the sales data. It's all very illogical.)
>millions of people share files at work between virtually any OS and Macs
Right. Using cloud solutions. That's not practical in many applications, especially where medium and large businesses are concerned. You're going to make them download large files from the cloud every time they want to open them while their Windows counterparts are streaming those same files over a 10G fiber drop to the server?
Which one makes more sense here? One of these users is getting promoted. It's not the guy working the slowest, usually.
Anyway, the request to make Samba work comes from the users. I didn't go looking for a problem to solve, right? I prefer it when my phone doesn't ring, my pay being fixed and all.
Hypothetically. None of what you said is testable, and there is no evidence that models today are any better than before except at matching historic data.
Compare with another topic like, say, evolution. Here outcomes are testable and verifiable because we can observe the theory at work by watching micro-ecosystems, or small animals with fast reproductive cycles.
Meteorology is short term accurate based on a linear regression of data points from historical data. Deviation like "warming" or "cooling" are relative descriptions of how closely aligned one theory is to the line, and how far back the specific model goes along with the number and quality of relevant factors you want to look at.
No matter which model you go with, you're proving the accuracy of a math function at matching historical data, and then hoping that it will match the future. And as we know, none of them match the future very accurately, which tells us there's something wrong with the theory.
This is only slightly better than day trading in the stock market. And much like the stock market, everyone thinks they know better than everyone else but statistically, most fund managers and professional stock callers underperform the market. They earn by selling you on the idea that they have the next model that finally DOES make accurate predictions. They tell you that they know that because this new model matches the historical data more accurately. No shit. Because there's more data now in a growing set of data. So the most recently calculated linear regression is the most accurate.
But we don't know how it works. That's the key here. More data, doesn't mean the theory is better. More accuracy in making predictions about the future, on the other hand, is a strong indicator, and maybe the only indicator, that something is worth believing in. That is to say, it's more likely to be true.
Making overzealous claims about how much we know is not science, it's ignorance. Let's help interest people in science by being cautious about what we claim to know for sure. At least don't claim to know the next 200 years, until we can at least make accurate predictions beyond the next few days.
I majored in biochem with a lot of extra classes I took for fun on environmental chemistry. You?
It would be very easy for an energy company to make hundreds of thousands of donations through "private supporters" to Greenpeace so as to cause problems for their competitors without liability, including defamation, and violent protests. They could be profiting by encouraging angry kids to go ruin their lives, and there would be no consequences for the executives behind it all. In fact, if this were actually happening, then in this story they would have just gotten back half of their marketing budget, which they can recycle for another violent campaign against this or any other competing energy company. And college kids around the world would help to supplement that marketing budget by donating to what they think is an environmental cause.
Mossad is trafficking children to billionaires for blackmail material, and it's just led directly to a war on Iran because the president of the US is in CSAM.
No conspiracy is too cynical. If you can think of it, they can think of it.
The Harvard educated doctor, magna cum laude, with a long history of fighting for a better America for all Americans.
The Jewish lady who was smeared as a Russian agent because she was at a diplomatic dinner that Putin also attended.
The woman who challenged election results in 2016, only for the response to be to make it harder to question election results (and that certainly never blew-back on all of us).
The lady who was then put under Senate investigation for two years over the so-called collusion with Russia which turned up precisely zero evidence.
Who put up the single best fight against two entrenched pro-genocide parties of anyone else in America's 350 million people.
The 2024 candidate with the highest vote to campaign funds ratio of any candidate by a factor of about ten despite having a tiny fraction of the election coverage.
What exactly are you saying the comparison is here? That Americans tend to cheer for the villains and boo the heroes just because the media tells them to?
This is funny. I didn't know who Jill Stein is, so I asked an LLM about how she is relevant. Instead of explaining how she might be involved in evil conspiracies, it thinks that Jill Stein is relevant because, "like a charged college kid," she was apparently at this Greenpeace protest! Hilarious.
I regularly can't remember who that one person is in that one movie either. I think part of being bad with names is that you don't actually care. That may offend some people, but hopefully less so if they consider that I think my name is just as unimportant as the next guy's.
>We should focus our efforts on truly open platforms.
De-Googled Android was/is a truly open platform. Same result. You're pointing out maintenance issues.
How many developers do we have to maintain this or any other platform without pay? That problem applies to a de-Googled fork of Android, or a complete bottom up build of a new platform.
The benefit of using an Android fork is the labor savings on what's already built.
Maintenance is not going away just because we build a new OS.
"with opposition mainly coming from some centrist and far-right MEPs"
Word salad. Are we supposed to deduce that it's only pushed by leftists? Why does journalism today require reading between the lines? Just tell us what's happening.
Misleading headline. They are moving specifically to restrict high risk countries like China, Syria, North Korea, etc. Not all foreign countries, as the headline threatens.
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
> Sources at NIST contacted by ScienceInsider say they have yet to see any written versions of the proposed rules, which have been conveyed in meetings.
And:
> Many researchers from these countries—particularly China—have been informed that their lab access will be reviewed by 31 March, and terminated if they have been at NIST for more than 3 years or pose “too high a risk”
So, the high-risk limitation is actual, and affected researchers were already notified by NIST. While no low-risk limitations are mentioned by or attributable to NIST. That part appears to be hearsay and speculation confidently jammed into the headline.
I find that to be misleading. Bob should be ashamed of himself. I hope he can do better. It took me a single paragraph to more clearly reword the article, and I'm not a professional writer.
It’s all foreign guest researchers by the end of September, high risk countries by the end of March. Your first quote doesn’t imply the NIST sources for this article don’t have firsthand knowledge that this is coming, it’s just that it appears the lab management is avoiding putting things in writing
> Researchers from lower risk countries have been told they could lose access beginning in either September or December if at that point they have been at the lab more than 2 years or, under a waiver, 3 years.
The word "could" seems to conflict with "It's all foreign guest researchers by end of September."
If you think that's what he meant, then it's clear that Bob has made things incredibly ambiguous since we disagree. Do you think he might have written the article, and especially the headline, in such a way as to make it more clickable?
I don’t know why the author of the article wrote “could”, but I personally work closely with some non-high-risk-country NIST foreign guest researchers. It’s been filtered down verbally through the management chain that the end of this September is the re-review deadline, and it’s not been stated as a hypothetical.
Interesting. I'm using go htmx adminlte. Never once has Claude recommended or tried to use tailwind. I sometimes have to remind it to use less JS and use htmx instead but otherwise feels pretty coherent.
I recommend starting projects by first creating a way of doing (architect) and then letting Claude work. It's pretty good at pretending to be you if you give it a good sample of how you do things.
Note: this applies to Opus 4.6. I have not had a useful experience in other models for actual dev work.
I'm not sure if it's accurate, but according to the summary on Wikipedia at least, the law "provides mechanisms for the companies or the courts to reject or challenge these if they believe the request violates the privacy rights of the foreign country the data is stored in."[0]
If that's accurate, your country's privacy laws would supersede US law. That said, as things are going, it's unlikely that they do.
Everyone in the American IT world has been trying to leave Microsoft and Google for decades. In that case, the problem isn't IT push, it's that users refuse to learn new software. I can guess it's the same in Europe.
It's maybe harder in Europe, because you also have fragmentation. For example, Californians are fine using software from New York. Same, same. But Germany prefers to use German software, so far. This makes it even harder, I would guess, for EU developers to establish a thriving standard.
That's not exactly true, it seems. Forecasts become less accurate the further out you go, unlike coin flips.
Weather forecasts are generally accurate about 90% of the time for a five-day forecast and around 80% for a seven-day forecast. Forecasts beyond ten days are only correct about half the time.
When yours is the only computer in the meeting that can't load the graphics network share, and you're the graphics expert, your boss will be calling IT and sternly asking why. He/she will learn that the MacOS has known issues with basic file sharing in business networks, among other annoying problems that you keep contacting about, and that Apple will never fix. Your boss will discover that IT recommended that you use a Windows machine, and provided you with viable workflows that meet or exceed all of the needs for your work responsibilities. And that other users don't have these issues when following their guidance. But, you opted for a Mac despite all of that.
Your boss will sigh. They will carry that sigh into how they perceive you. They will bring up how annoying your situation is every time they talk with IT.
I've heard this exact conversation or many other similar conversations 100s of times in my career. I've heard your boss sigh.
Do yourself a favor. If you aren't very technical, don't damage your career over something stupid like which OS you're using. It's the wrong hill to die on.
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